The Dark Side of the Sky E-Book

Francesco Dimitri

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 478

Beschreibung

A page-turning literary fantasy filled with terror and wonder, set in a sun-baked Southern Italy, for fans of The Girls by Emma Cline, The Magus by John Fowles and The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. It's been labelled a doomsday cult, but the Bastion might be humanity's last hope. Amidst all the lies and chaos, come hear their true story, in their own words. On the rural coast of Puglia, Italy, Becca and Ric run the Bastion, offering solace and a home for lost souls. Each year they welcome new members to join the Open Feast, where they teach them to release their burdens and create a better world, in a journey of self-discovery and spiritual teachings. But the Bastion has secrets. The Bastion has a destiny. Deep in the Inner Pinewood, a place of real magic and beauty, they are all that stands against the dark forces that would tear the sky wide open. And what of those who call Becca and Ric liars? Cult leaders and con artists? What of those who tried to leave the Bastion? As it becomes increasingly difficult to tell truth from fiction, who can you trust to save us all?

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1 Our Feast

2 Our Revelations

3 Our Roots

4 Our Nature, Unfolding

5 Our Stand

6 Them

7 Us

8 Her

Author’s Note

Toasts

About the Author

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SKY

Also by Francesco Dimitri and available from Titan Books

THE BOOK OF HIDDEN THINGS

NEVER THE WIND

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The Dark Side of the Sky

Print edition ISBN: 9781803362786

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803363721

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: May 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Francesco Dimitri 2024

Francesco Dimitri asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Cosmology is a literary art.

Northrop Frye

1

OUR FEAST

THE BASTION

At dusk, we made a circle around the body.

Lila started on her drum, each beat a thunder in tune with our hearts. Charlie shook a tambourine with a clatter of fresh rain. Sam, an attention-seeker until his last breath, rose his head to the sky and howled. We’ll never forget how Sam would howl; someone always howled back. We joined in, clapping our hands, beating our chests, humming. It was a cure for the gloom. We stomped our feet, we laughed, we swayed, we sung, Lila now drumming fast, Zoey and Mikka drumming with her. We were a family, we had each other’s backs. We had to keep that in mind. We were a little tense – it was the first time we would taste human flesh.

The sky was orange, the land red and green, the winter grass soft underfoot. Our world was almost perfect. Yes, cracks were appearing, spreading fast, but we were young, each in our own way. Heartbreakingly beautiful. We were so young as to believe that we could just ignore the badness and the badness would go away.

Rebecca raised her arms, and the music wound down. When she beamed her full presence at you, you realised that you had been living in black and white, while she was tawny, blue and chestnut. She would paint you in bright colours too, if you listened to her. Everybody listened, friend or foe. You could love her or hate her, as some of us came to do, but you could not ignore her. A journalist recently published a long-winded piece arguing that Becca’s personal charm was a fabrication of lawyers and media outlets. The hack had never met her in person.

‘This is a great day,’ she said, ‘and nothing great was ever easy.’

Her eyes were bloodshot, her lovely cheeks pale, her voice unsteady.

‘And I…’ she stopped. Our heartbeat stopped. We had never seen her falter, not once.

‘Nothing great is ever easy,’ she repeated, in a lower voice. ‘We are gathered here tonight because of death, the greatest mystery, and the hardest one. It is a mystery we have already met. What is death?’ she asked.

‘A blank slate,’ we answered immediately, as we should.

‘What is death?’ she asked again, in a louder voice.

And we answered: ‘An opportunity.’

‘What is death?’ she asked for the third time, not quite shouting.

‘A gift!’ we shouted back.

That pleased her. ‘And the truth of that gift is change. Imagine how dreadful it would be to be stuck in this one form for ever,’ she said, touching her own face, and we thought that her face was lovely, not dreadful at all. ‘To know only one body, only one sex, one race, one set of circumstances. If we didn’t die, if the eyes we have now were open for ever, we would only see what they see, only that, and nothing more. We might be born rich and smart and gorgeous. We might have it good. But any river, no matter how pure, becomes a swamp when it stops flowing. Death is what keeps our river flowing.’

She paused, and we had time to think her words through. They told us nothing we didn’t know, and yet, with Ric’s body lying naked in the centre of our circle, they seemed to hint at some deeper truth.

The silence stretched to unsettling lengths. A sparrow landed on Ric’s forehead to rest there a moment, then flew away. We listened to the wind and the birds, we breathed in the clean air. We wished Becca would start talking again.

On cue, she said, ‘We may weep because Ric left us. I have spent the last day crying, and I am going to cry tomorrow, and for days to come. I am barely…’ She stopped. ‘I am barely able to get ahold of myself as it is. We may weep if we need; we may voice the pain we feel. Give sorrow words, Shakespeare said. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.’

The mark of great thinkers: they are not afraid to use the words of others to put across their own message.

‘But we should know why we mourn. Nothing sad happened to Ric. Something sad happened to us: we lost a dear friend, a guide. I will be missing him every day I have left to live. He will not be with me by the fireplace tonight. He will not touch the nape of my neck the way he used to do, he will not…’ She paused again, and swallowed back her tears.

We were crying with her. We saw an Oddball hovering above us, a crow with a rat’s head and the tiny hands of a mouse.

‘So yes,’ she said, after composing herself. ‘We may cry, but we must know we cry for ourselves, rather than for him. There is no reason to cry for him.’

She brought a hand to her belt, where she had her working knife. She unsheathed it. We held our breath while she walked to the body.

‘Jesus of Nazareth asked his disciples to eat of his body and drink of his blood, in token. It is not our custom to do things in token. What would Ric say?’

‘Be real,’ Lila answered. ‘Be real to the end.’

‘And hell, are we real.’

We stood in silence while the birds sung and there was a gentle scraping of metal against flesh. Becca chewed, and swallowed. Someone offered her a sip of water.

‘Come, my friends,’ she said.

We took our knives and swarmed on Ric.

Had he not died, we would be looking at a different story. A triumph, perhaps.

CHARLIE

It wasn’t like now, when you can google the Bastion and see the pinewood, that spectacular beach, almost all of our faces. When Bertrand and I started looking into it, there were no photographs. What pics you could see on their Insta were attractive, but vague: thick myrtle on dunes, tattooed hands playing a theremin, a silhouette of a man (or perhaps it was a woman, you couldn’t tell) skinny-dipping into moonlit dark waters. What did Becca and Ric look like? What kind of folks did they attract? Some people would wonder; only a fraction of them, as it happens, would be curious enough to investigate online; and only a fraction of those would go and see for themselves. Becca and Ric taught us, ‘Fate is nature unfolding.’

ZOEY

Yeah, filling my application, I massaged the truth where the truth was sore, starting with my name and job. I could not disclose I was Zoey Lee, CEO of Soul Journey. We were perhaps not the biggest Mind, Body and Spirit festival in the world, but the best-known for sure. I’m not bragging; it is what it is. From Reiki to witchcraft to astrology, we covered the whole spectrum of woo-woo, with glitz.

Everybody in the industry knew SoulJo and everybody knew me and my partner (my business partner, that is), Janis Mackenzie. I thought the application was a gimmick to make people feel special while gathering info. I know better now, but at that time I’d have bet good money that the Bastion accepted everybody solvent, and that disclosing my identity would be the only surefire way to get rejected.

I wrote, Zoey Pagano.

CHARLIE

Bertrand and I sent our application on a blustery night. I remember every moment of it as if it isn’t a memory, but something that is happening now. A part of me is still in Saint-Malo with Bertrand, checking the Open Feast’s website on my phone. We are both naked under a rough woollen blanket, lying on a piece of cardboard as wind and rain rage against what passes for our window. But it is a memory after all. I am a different person now. I am in a different place.

I said something along the lines of: ‘The glass could give up at any time.’

‘It could.’

‘It’s wonderful.’

He kissed me and I curled up against him. Being happy is not like riding a bike; you can forget how to do it. Not so long before, Bertrand and I had lost faith we would ever remember, but here we were, against all odds.

ZOEY

‘Are you using your real first name?’ Janis asked.

She was sitting by my side on the perfectly round, perfectly white, Saarinen tulip table in my living room. We used to work like that, side by side.

‘I need something I’ll answer to instinctively. I’m not sure what to write down as my job though.’

‘HR? It’s generic enough.’

‘They might check LinkedIn.’

‘Good point. Landlady then? No social networks needed.’

‘I just rent what I inherited. A quiet job, off the radar. Brilliant.’

To be clear, I’d not inherited a thing. What I had, I had fought tooth and nail for, starting with my apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. I loved it: I close my eyes and it is there, in all its swankiness. The living room was painted light green, with a window opening onto a leafy street. In a corner was an Arco floor lamp, with an Eames chair under its round metal shade. Framed on a wall was a Leonora Carrington limited print, the one with the woman in a white cloak and a halo of flames, or hair, around her head. On another wall was the promo poster of the first Soul Journey Festival that Janis and I produced: a white background, and at the centre, a black spiral, hand-drawn, from which different religious symbols (a crucifix, a rune, a pentacle, a half-moon with a star…) hung like small charms from a bracelet. It was an amateur’s work that Janis made with input from me. The budget for that first festival had been non-existent, and we made do. The DIY aesthetic was key to our early success; now we had a hired agency making sure that the aesthetic kept a DIY feel.

CHARLIE

Bertrand and I had married (it was a small ceremony with only a handful of friends) on 19 January 2020. Yes – 2020, the year the Earth stood still. The winter wedding was Bertrand’s idea. January sucks, he proclaimed, and we would set it right. From then on, January wouldn’t be the unforgiving month of frost and fasting, it would be the month of our anniversary, a party time to shake off the winter blues. Bertrand could come across like a giant, over-eager puppy, but he was a thoughtful man.

What he wasn’t – and me neither – is a seer. He could not know that in a matter of weeks the winter blues would be the last of our problems. The pandemic swept France along with the rest of the world, finding us completely unprepared, along with the rest of the world. Bertrand was a session saxophonist, I was a junior doctor, which meant that while his income dropped to zero from one day to the next, I found myself working all day, every day. Married life felt like war – until I got sick.

The public doesn’t fully realise yet what a meat-grinder the pandemic was for people working in hospitals: we were called ‘front-line’ as if it were a metaphor, but it wasn’t. We were in the trenches, keeping our heads low and praying enemy fire wouldn’t hit us. The day I saw the two lines on my test was the day I had learnt a colleague of mine, the same age as me, with no pre-existing conditions, had passed. I saw those two lines and my body went cold with fear. I remember thinking, I’m going to lose everything, oh my God, I’m going to lose everything. The numbers were on my side; most people my age and with no conditions got out lightly, but fear hears no reason, and I felt I was done for.

Well – I was on my feet in four days, with nothing more than a little cough. Meanwhile though I’d passed the bug to Bertrand, and it wasn’t so easy for him. He spent two weeks in bed, and when he managed to kick that bastard illness out, it took his wind in revenge. Bertrand couldn’t blow as much as three notes before getting short of breath. It was heart-rending to hear what muffled, pitiful wheezes he managed to produce, like an old lion whose vocal cords had been cut by some sadistic poacher.

I’m ashamed to say I was happy to go back to work. I knew I should have been by my husband’s side, but I just couldn’t see him so dejected. I became angry so as not to feel guilty – somebody had to bring money home, right? Bertrand sensed I was running away, but he couldn’t say much, because it was true that we had rent to pay. It was a bad time, which left us exhausted, penniless, all too ready to snap at each other.

‘It’s a miracle we stayed together,’ Bertrand would say later, with a large grin, when he was in an especially good mood. Which happened a lot, after we got to the other end of it. With patience, his wind came back, the world started to spin again. Not only did we stay together, but we rebuilt our relationship, our whole life, from scratch, and a fine life it was at that. We were right to be proud, both of us.

ZOEY

‘Look, they’re asking for a personal essay.’

Janis touched her loop earrings. ‘Only two hundred words.’ She read the question aloud. ‘Describe your biggest fear: what keeps you awake at night? What is it that makes you feel desperate, and helpless?’ She paused. ‘These guys are intense.’

‘Say it. They’re nuts.’

‘Some call us that too.’

‘Yeah, no, it’s different.’

‘So, tell me, Zoey, my friend, who’s your bogeyman?’

‘Like hell I’m going to tell the competition.’

I started writing some bullshit on spiders, then I deleted it. On the off chance the Bastion folks actually read the application, I thought, they’d want some juice. Strangers, I wrote. I went on about how little understood I was, how mistrustful of new people, and ended with a flourish about finding succour in books. The shy-bookish-girl act is an evergreen; three-quarters of the Soul Journey audience fancied themselves romantic introverts, to justify their being narcissist assholes. Stories are my escape hatch, I wrote. Doors onto better worlds. That crap on stories being doors never failed to make a workshop audience nod thoughtfully. Trust a cliché and it will take you places.

Janis said I was a monster, laughing.

CHARLIE

A blast of rain rattled the window like a convict beating on his cell’s bars.

‘First thing we get is a new window,’ Bertrand said.

‘We can afford a good one straight away – if we get on a diet of crackers and tap water for two months.’

He laughed, called me one of our private names, and kissed me on the tip of my nose. We were penniless again by that point, but in a completely different way. As of that day, we owned a home, a one-bedroom flat in a nice part of town. IKEA furniture (including a bed) was coming soon. We had a mortgage and the means to repay it. There was little left at the end of the month, but there was something. We were not flush, but who was, after the plague? We were okay. We had seen through the bad times and now we had every intention of enjoying the good ones, on a budget.

Hence the Open Feast – a friend of Bertrand’s swore it was a cheap holiday. The organisers were a group called The Bastion: they had an Insta, a sparsely populated Mastodon account, and a lean website (when I say lean, I don’t mean it was elegant and minimalist, I mean that it looked like it had been cobbled together in a couple of hours, as an afterthought). Hard as we looked, we could not find any mention of prices.

ZOEY

‘You call me a monster?’ I said to Janis. ‘Look at the next question: Tell us about something you always desired and never quite achieved. Blah blah blah. See what they’re doing?’

‘Gathering data.’

‘To mindfuck their clients.’

‘You don’t have to go.’

‘You were supposed to go,’ I said, pretending to be annoyed, while actually being annoyed. ‘But you had to get knocked up.’ I rested my open palm on the bump of her belly, not because I particularly wanted to, but because I knew Janis liked it. She was stubbornly deluded I was happy about her pregnancy.

‘It was a miracle.’

After three years of attempts, nobody believed a baby would happen. It was a miracle for sure, but I couldn’t say of which kind. Janis had told me (even before telling her husband) and I had not taken it well. Until that moment I still fantasised I had a chance with her, and I still believe I did. I only had to find the guts to tell her how I felt, and she would have left that useless man she had fished on Tinder. She could have had a relationship with him and me both, for all I cared. I’d have been fine with that, as long as she kept the two of us on separate rails. But I hadn’t found the guts, and my friend, my sister, the woman I loved, had a baby on the go with an hombre so shallow that even his dog couldn’t remember his smell.

Ideally, it would have been Janis going to the Open Feast. She had something – an intuition, a sensibility – which I lacked. Janis was the one with the hunches about which performers to book and which stalls to approve. My talent was making hunches into spreadsheets.

Janis said, ‘We can take a rain check and see what happens next year.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, we need to go.’

There was an undeniable mystique about Becca and Ric, and in our industry mystique kept the till ringing. The Open Feast was an extra-niche event for now, one of those microscopic European productions all glam and no cash, an adorable kitten. But they do grow into tigers fast. Janis and I couldn’t be the only big players pondering the Feast. Since the pandemic, everybody had been a bad choice away from sinking. Folks were on edge.

CHARLIE

Take it back, the website read. Take it back. Your joy, your spark, your love, your lust, your rightful anger. It used to burn so bright, but then life happened. Time happened. You wanted to take the world by storm, until the storm took you, and left you shaken and broken. You were the tallest tree in the forest, the first to be hit by lightning. You learned to compromise. You learned to leave behind the fancifulideas of your youth and be a functional adult. But something was lost in the process. You cannot name what it is, but you can feel that it’s not yours anymore. We cannot give it back to you, but we can help you find it. Each of us is the hero in our own story. At the Bastion, each of us is also the sidekick in other people’s. Together we are going to learn again the most important lesson there is: how to be fully alive.

‘Half inspiring, half scary,’ I commented.

The site didn’t say where the Open Feast was held, only when – every year, it kicked off on 22 June and closed on the 25th, the day after the Feast of San Giovanni, an important night in Italian folklore, as I would learn. Bertrand’s friend refused to reveal the location. ‘I just can’t tell you.’

‘Why?’ Bertrand asked.

‘I promise, it’s great.’

‘How so? What happens there?’

‘What it says on the website – you come alive again.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Go find out for yourself. What I can tell you is, these guys are a community, a small one. The Bastion, they call themselves. They throw this festival, the Open Feast, every summer. It’s an underground thing, self-produced, all over the place but fun. Think early days Burning Man, that kind of vibe. Comfier, though. Not in the desert.’

‘What kind of music is there?’

‘It’s not based around music. There’s a lot of it, but it’s more of a spiritual thing.’

‘I don’t get on well with preachy folks.’

‘There’s no preaching at the Open Feast, there’s living.’

‘You don’t make it sound any less bonkers.’

‘Kooks throw the best parties. God, I had a good time.’

‘And you say it’s cheap.’

‘They’ve got a peculiar business model.’

‘Peculiar how?’

‘Can’t tell you that either. Believe me, you’ll be able to afford it, if you pass the application.’

And that, I think, caught our curiosity more than anything else Bertrand’s friend said. What kind of festival asks for an application?

ZOEY

‘Okay, this is downright creepy: they ask about my sexual awakening.’ I read: ‘It doesn’t have to be the first time you had sex, although it might be. What do you say? When did I awake to the joy of boning?’

‘Hot cousin?’

‘Yeah, hot cousin. Let’s keep it simple.’

‘Girl cousin, though.’

‘Sex with a girl cousin it is,’ I said, tapping away on my keyboard.

I answered the same questions as everybody else, about my fears, dreams, body, life. We all fibbed, but we were clearly visible behind the lies we told. As Becca and Ric taught, every lie grows out of a seed of truth.

A big deal has been made of those questions. The last one in particular has been bandied about as proof that we were (among other sins) a money-grabbing operation. The Bastion asked applicants for twelve months’ worth of bank statements, and a ballpark figure of their net worth. It should be obvious, but I’m going to spell it out: the point was to charge the rich more and the poor less. If you find that awful, the problem is you.

I did what I needed to and sent the statement, blanking out my name. I wrote I was doing it for privacy reasons and hoped they would fall for it.

Thank you for being in touch, the confirmation email read. You will be notified in due course regarding the status of your application. If we offer you a place, you will have two hours to secure it. A hundred and twenty minutes, which we start counting when we click on send. If you do not answer in time, the offer will expire, and you won’t be able to apply for future events. No exceptions will be made.

I set an alarm to go off every ninety minutes, day and night, to check my email. I never stopped giving the others a hard time for that. I hated it then, though I can see the wisdom of it now. Every year the Bastion had to insist to stragglers that nothing, absolutely nothing, would convince them to accept their delayed reply; not a work deadline, not a stomach bug, not a dead grandmother. Either you answered in time, or you were out, now and for ever. You see, this was not a rule, it was a tool.

The Bastion had to sift the wheat from the chaff.

CHARLIE

Bertrand and I slept in turns, which added to the hype. It was one of those silly things you do when you’re twenty and that you remember for the rest of your life. We were already having fun.

One night he burst into the bedroom shouting, ‘I’m in! I’m in!’

I stirred, yawned, dragged myself up. ‘What time is it?’

‘Two-thirty.’

‘They’re insane.’

‘Insane is what we’re looking for. Our last insane holiday before parenthood-induced sobriety.’

‘Let’s see if I’m in too.’

Bertrand jumped in bed. ‘Either we both go or none of us does.’

‘I won’t drag you down into rejects hell.’

‘Check your mail!’

He could barely keep himself from bouncing while I grabbed my phone, tapped on it, tapped again, swiped down.

‘Well?’ he said.

I raised my open hand. ‘High-five, B.’

He high-fived me, hugged me, laughed. ‘I knew it! I knew it! Hurry up, we’ve got,’ he checked his watch, ‘eighty-three minutes to secure a place.’

‘How do we do that? We just say yes?’

‘We need to pay.’

‘Deposit?’

‘The whole fee in one go. Fear not, my love, it’s totally reasonable.’

I skimmed the email to get to the price, and yes, it was reasonable, for an all-inclusive holiday. Just within our means. It felt like a miracle. ‘What’s this about an NDA?’

‘They’re asking to sign and send the NDA they attached. Our place won’t be confirmed until they receive it.’

‘Did you read it through?’

‘It’s strict. We cannot talk about what happens at the festival, we cannot talk about the location, we cannot even talk about signing an NDA.’

‘If we do, then what?’

‘If we do and they catch us, we’re in for more cash than our house is worth.’

That made me laugh. ‘What happens in Vegas, eh?’

‘Do you want to send the payment? I’ve got to pop to the loo one sec. I got too excited.’

I was already tapping on my phone. I transferred the money, signed and sent the NDA. One last wild hurrah before starting a family with the best man in the world, in the home we owned together. In the wilderness time of the pandemic, I’d forgotten how sweet life could be.

‘Hurry up,’ I called. ‘You’ve got to sign your NDA too.’

Bertrand flushed. He returned to the bedroom with a hand on his temple. ‘Do we have any paracetamol left?’

At those words, a stab of terror (pure, ancestral) hit me. I knew, beyond reason, beyond sense, I knew that this was not a headache. It was much more; it was an apocalypse, the end of our unfairly brief happiness, and of all possible futures. You know what I mean? I knew, the way I had known that catching the bug would have ruined my life. Only it didn’t, I told myself. This is your mind being mean to you.

And while I told myself that, Bertrand was opening his eyes wide, in surprise or in pain, and his legs were giving way, and when I reached out to him, he was crashing to the floor, banging his head, his precious head full of thoughts, on the hard corner of the bed. Blood on the sheet, blood on the frame, but that didn’t kill him.

It was a brain aneurysm. Brain aneurysm: those two words still fill me with a quiet rage. He was dead before he hit the ground.

THE BASTION

We all came to the Bastion through the same magic gate, which opened wherever we happened to be and took us to a secret spot in Southern Italy. Stepping through the gate was not really a choice, like it is not a choice for planets to orbit their star, or for birds to feed their chicks – it was our nature, unfolding.

We came by plane, by train, by car, by bike. We hitched. We were hungry to be there. We brought with us guitars, books, tambourines, condoms. We brought the two things we had been asked to bring – a gift for a stranger, and our most prized possession. We had been given a set of coordinates, a time, and a number to call if we were late or lost. We put the coordinates into our phones, and followed them to an abandoned car park not far from Brindisi Airport, a tiny international airport in Puglia, the heel of Italy. It was a famously beautiful corner of the world, but you wouldn’t say that from the car park, a concrete wasteland behind an abandoned petrol station, the sign faded, the pump red with rust. It was indistinguishable from any other car park anywhere else. Ric said that all car parks are one and the same, and with the right magic you could enter from Italy and exit into Norway.

We were a splash of bright colour spilling over dull concrete, with our tattoos, our battered backpacks, our piercings, torn jeans, Glastonbury t-shirts, dreadlocks and drums. We all spoke English, more or less.

We tried talking to Charlotte, but she barely answered, and slipped out of the conversation at the first chance.

CHARLIE

I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be with Bertrand. What the hell was I doing in sunshine while he rotted in darkness? I wished I could lie with him wherever he was now, wrap my arms around him, close my eyes, and rest.

Seven months had passed since he’d died, and I was not one step closer to accepting it. It’s not that I wished to die too, not exactly. But I did not care to live, and I’d seen enough pain in my line of work to know that one thing easily tips into the other. I went to the Open Feast because I knew that I needed to get out of the flat for which Bertrand and I had had so many plans. I needed to get out of Saint-Malo, of France. Of myself. I needed enough noise around me to bury the screams in my head.

But what’s a good idea on paper isn’t always such in the real world, and I was not coping with being in that parking lot with hyped-up strangers. At some point a guy approached me, with a drunk cheer and a beer can, and I snapped. The thought of spending four days at a party was too much. I just wanted to call a cab and leave before it was too awkward to explain. I ignored the drunk and headed to the lot’s exit, rummaging in my bag for my phone, but when I looked up again, the vans were coming.

ZOEY

It was the usual crowd. A wide range of ages, but mostly from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. A lot of body art, a lot of drums, some guitars, yoga mats and a pervasive scent of marijuana. It felt like home, really.

CHARLIE

The vans were old and dusty and sturdy. Everybody stopped in their tracks and dropped their conversations while the vans entered the car park and pulled over. The drivers opened their doors: that was my first sight of Lila. And God, did I hate her on the spot. This young woman came out of one of the vans, in dungarees and a white t-shirt, with a shaved head and big eyes. She reminded me of Bertrand. She had the same expression he had half of the time, mindlessly happy, as if good news was just around the corner. Life had not come at her yet. She was like fresh milk, and what happens to fresh milk in the sun?

She brought her hands to the sides of her mouth to make a megaphone, and shouted, ‘Ladies and gents, your ride is here. My name’s Lila.’

This cunt, I thought. Doesn’t she know that good luck never lasts? That the world is red in tooth and claw? I thought (I’m not proud of it) that the sooner she learnt, the better. This thought went as abruptly as it came and left me reeling with guilt. So now I wasn’t only feeling out of place, I was also feeling bad about myself. While Bertrand rotted in darkness.

‘Before we go,’ Lila said, ‘I’ve got to ask you something.’ She left an ominous pause. ‘I’ll need your phones. Tablets too, smartwatches if you’ve got those. Basically, anything you may use to communicate with the big blue world while you’re with us.’

I looked from the phone in my hand to the young woman in front of a van.

‘We’ve got the privilege of your presence for such a short time,’ Lila said with that smile of hers that you couldn’t help but trust. ‘We’re not going to share you while you’re with us.’

A woman asked, in an American accent, ‘What if I need to make an emergency call?’ (Yes, it was Zoey.)

‘What do you think? You come and collect your phone. Obviously, something so important means that you must go. No stress, we’re going to immediately take you to the airport or wherever you need to be.’

ZOEY

Basically, no phones allowed, and the only way to get them back was to leave the Open Feast.

CHARLIE

Lila went on, ‘Also, your families can make their emergency calls to the number we gave you. An emergency call means, obviously, emergency, and once again, we’re going to take you where you need to be. Any questions?’

There wasn’t a peep.

‘Okay then. This is your last chance to call your mates and tell them the crazy hippies are kidnapping you.’

A few laughs, some uneasy. Some people were tapping on their phones. I weighed mine in my hand: four days and change without a phone, four days and change cut off from the debris of the life I’d lost. I couldn’t think of anything better. What would Bertrand say? Go. Live a little.

I dropped the phone in Lila’s burlap sack.

‘By the way,’ Lila said, when we were done. ‘Just in case you happen to have a spare stashed in your fleshy cavities, there’s nothing I can do other than beg you, please, please, leave it there! Don’t check your email, don’t text, just… don’t. You’ll thank me later. Four days off TikTok won’t kill you. Okay? Okay. Come on now, let’s have some fun.’

Giving up my phone made me feel untethered, which was not a bad thing, because the stuff I had been tethered to was dragging me down. I was not counting on having fun at the Open Feast. But finding respite, maybe.

LILA

Charlie gave off pain like a radio frequency. People who hurt so much are easy targets for all sorts of bastards; she was lucky she was with us. I wish I could have hugged her, but we had procedures in place.

I didn’t have a doubt she was one of us.

THE BASTION

Oh, what a glorious ride that was! The road left ugliness behind, winding between unkept fields overflowing with flowers and birds, then shaded olive groves and a maze of vineyards. We embraced our guitars, we sang David Bowie, joints made the rounds. ‘This is the typical landscape of Salento,’ someone commented, an exquisitely useless thing to say, considering that we all had googled it beforehand.

Another one cried, ‘The sea!’ It was ahead of us, in the distance, a shade of blue barely darker than the sky. We reached the Litoranea Salentina, a coastal road winding past dunes, between the beach on one side and open fields on the other. We passed by ancient towers facing the sea. We saw a sign, Portodimare, and drove through a village of people in flip-flops and trunks; we kept going, out of the village, into wilderness again.

The vans turned left, off the tarmac and onto a dust track, then turned again between brambles and flowers. Kestrels chased us, flying over plains which stretched farther than our imagination.

We started a call-and-response. Deep into the country, it went. Deep into the country we go. Away from it all, away from it all we go. Away with hidden things we go. The sunlight was unapologetic like a good tongue kiss.

We got to a tall wall enclosing a pinewood. We entered through a wrought-iron gate, and drove under the fresh shade of the pines. We noticed the hammocks hung between trees, and the white canvas shelters, and then, out of the pines, out of the heat shimmer, Villa Abbracciavento appeared.

The vans pulled over, and a quiet sank in. It was like plunging underwater after jumping from a rock on a hot day – that sudden silence, and coolness. We needed a moment to recoup. We listened to the rattle of crickets and the intense chattering of birds we would come to know like family. The breeze on our face reminded us what was so great about being alive. We inhaled wild chamomile, rosemary, seawater, and something else, something animal, not unpleasant but unfamiliar.

Villa Abbracciavento was a diva of a bygone era who had been living high and was spending her sunset years the same way as she had spent the others: on her own terms. It was graceful and indolent, all white archways, rounded angles and honey-coloured tuff. The paint was peeling, the tuff worn away, weeds creeping in the space between the patio’s terracotta tiles, bright flowers growing in the cracks in columns and walls, and Villa Abbracciavento, magnificently, didn’t give a damn.

ZOEY

I was famished. I threw myself on the refreshments set on the porch: cool white wine, meaty green olives, and taralli, crunchy rings of oven-baked dough with fennel seeds, which left a liquorice aftertaste in my mouth.

A massive pig with a friendly muzzle made its way on the porch. Some jumped. ‘Don’t worry, he’s harmless,’ the shaved woman with crazy eyes said. ‘Cleaner than most people too. He’s called Napoleon. Feed him and he’ll be your friend for life, as in he’ll follow you everywhere begging for more. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.’

A guy wisely noticed, ‘Napoleon, like the pig in Animal Farm,’ to show off that he could read.

The girl showed us the compost toilets and the showers – wooden buckets hanging from a hook, with a shower head stuck in their bottom. Bamboo screens lent some privacy. The water came from artesian wells, heating was solar-powered. We had to raise our heads and squint to discern the solar panels, hooked on the top of trees.

The girl told us to leave our luggage under one of the canvas shelters, or inside the Villa if we preferred. Nobody would touch our stuff, not even Napoleon.

‘And you’re sure of that,’ I said.

‘If you aren’t, how’re you going to survive the next four days?’ was the answer.

We could crash for the night wherever we wanted: on one of the cots under the shelters, on one of the hammocks, on the beach. Inside the villa too, on the ground floor. The one area off-limits was the upper floor. That was staff only.

At the back of the property, a flimsy wire fence with a little gate marked the boundary. Beyond the fence was the beach. Pinewood gave onto sand dunes thick with juniper, which gradually became fine sand, and then the ocean. We were given a key to the gate, but frankly we could get out from one of the many gaps in the fence.

‘The beach alone is worth the price,’ someone said.

Depending on what you paid, I thought.

We were told to take it easy until dinner and the opening ritual. A few were expecting a goat slain upon an altar or something. Me, I’d have put my money on folk music.

LILA

That was our last Open Feast. When Charlie and Zoey joined us, we became complete, and we could finally get to work.

There were six Opens in total. Only six! It feels like there were six hundred. If I woke up tomorrow to Becca asking me this or that question about the organisation of the next Open, I would shrug and answer. But no – there were only six and there won’t be another. I was there for all of them – ever since the first one.

Each of us came to the Bastion for our own reasons, personal reasons. Zoey came for business (and to show her friend Janis that she, too, could have a life); Charlie was desperate to keep her head above water; Mikka was a curious drifter; the Nameless was stuck; Sam had been dumped by his girlfriend of nine years; Imogen came, like me, from an abusive family (only rich); so on and so forth. None of us could imagine what was in store – the magic, the friendship, the glory. None of us could imagine what the Bastion was for.

When I found them, I was nineteen and already out of options. I’d never moved from my dive of an industrial town in the Po Valley, in Northern Italy. The best I can describe it is a growth of blocks of flats like pimples around the cancer of factories. The townsfolk stooped in the damp shadow of the lights of Milan, always grasping for those lights, rarely reaching them. My life had been smouldering in the tiny gap left between the cement and heavy skies. I didn’t know what I wanted, but you must be mad to want that.

On its first year, the Open Feast was smaller and scruffier than it would become. Becca, Ric, Mikka, the Nameless and the others were still working out the kinks. The hot water didn’t work half of the time, meals were always late, that sort of thing. None of that mattered in the least. For me, that year was all about Galen.

My poor Galen! We met as soon as we arrived. We dropped our backpacks under the same shelter, and he introduced himself in that creamy Greek accent of his. ‘I’m Galen.’

I mumbled, ‘Lila,’ and scuttled off before he had time to put in another word. He was so handsome that just looking at him was inappropriate. He had long dark curls, a strong nose, full lips, muscles that moved like a dance team. Way out of my league.

Most people were heading to the beach, so I went for a walk in the pinewood. I was getting anxious; everyone was cooler, brighter, more awesome than me. Look at that girl’s pink hair! Look at those two, already flirting! Look at that man, bare-chested with those dragon-shaped nipple rings! Look at the tats, look at the shirts! Look at that one, playing with Napoleon! I approached groups and then walked past, opened my mouth and then closed it again. I had found my crowd, but even there I didn’t fit, so I sat under a pine, my back against the trunk, and lit a roll-up. I was aiming for the indolent pose of someone taking a breather between one spot of good time and the next.

‘Lila, right?’ It was the man who had been driving the van I arrived in.

‘That’s me.’ I straightened up. ‘And you are…?’

‘Ric.’

‘The Ric.’

‘The Ric,’ he agreed, almost laughing, as if his name were a private joke we shared. He switched to Italian. ‘Good times?’

‘Plenty.’

‘That’s good to hear. Me, I take a while to be comfortable around new people.’

‘Yeah, it’s like that for some,’ I said, with the implication that it was not so for me, never for me.

‘Then again, new people are the raw material of old friends.’ Ric took a hand to his head. ‘Love the hair.’

‘Oh, I’ve kept it shaved since I was little.’

But really I had shaved it halfway through my long journey there.

Why did you lie? the others asked me later.

I pretended I already was the person I wanted to become, I answered.

‘Good stuff,’ Ric said. ‘Listen, on our way here, I noticed you’ve got a drum with you. I busted mine this morning – stepped on it. I know, I know. I get clumsy when I’m nervous, and this is the first time we’re doing this.’

‘You mean the Feast?’

‘Our gang has organised smaller events before, but nothing bigger than a weekend workshop with a bunch of people. Nothing on this scale. Butterflies in the stomach and all that. Anyway. We were supposed to get some drumming tonight, which is not going to happen without, well, without a drum.’

‘You can borrow mine.’

‘No, I was going to ask – would you drum for us?’

‘I’m not very good.’

‘You can’t be worse than me. We don’t need anything fancy, just a beat around the fire.’

I didn’t want to say yes – the thought of drumming in front of all those people was terrifying – but, like always, I was unable to say no.

THE BASTION

We should have gotten rid of the Nameless earlier, before the first Open Feast started. He was always riling us up, the shit-eating fly in the ointment. He was our biggest mistake – not only Becca’s, though as usual she blamed herself, but of all those who had already found their way to the Bastion by then. We’d rather not think about him at all.

Though Lila said it didn’t show on the side of our guests, the first Open felt like a disaster on the production side. It was four days of back-to-back emergencies. We had accounting troubles, solar panels malfunctioning, too little food on the second day and too much on the third. None of us had any experience in producing large-scale events (though the scale was not that large – we had around fifty guests that year). The only one who had some skill was Mikka, with his experience as a roadie, and the only one who kept a cool head all the time was Napoleon – he was just content to grub around and make new friends, a life teacher for us all. Even Becca raised her voice once or twice.

Mikka had a specific anxiety, that somebody would go for a night swim while drunk or high, and drown. He couldn’t shake off the certainty that it would happen, and would destroy us even before we got started. The media would make mincemeat of us, plus, we hadn’t taken any insurance (couldn’t afford it), and we would be financially ruined. Not to mention that a person would be dead.

But nobody died and nothing terrible happened. In hindsight, the festival was far more successful than it had any right to be, with an inexperienced crew gathering more than fifty strangers in a pinewood by the beach for four days of self-discovery, drugs, sex and magic. Fate was unfolding, and without the Nameless, we would have enjoyed ourselves more.

But the Nameless was with us. When we weren’t dousing a fire, we were arguing with him. It started on the afternoon of the first day. The Nameless was in our private kitchen, on the upper floor of Villa Abbracciavento, for a quick coffee break with Ric and Sam. Ric was excited. ‘At least two potentials,’ he said. ‘Lila, the Northern girl, and that Greek, Galen.’

Sam whistled. ‘That bloke is like honey on toast.’

‘We like them young, don’t we?’ the Nameless said.

Ric gulped his coffee. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I can see Lila, but Galen? Are we sure?’

‘Not yet, but it’s for Becca to say.’

‘That guy rubs me the wrong way.’

‘Did you even talk to him?’

‘I don’t know, it’s the way he walks around, as if he’s expecting people to throw themselves at his feet.’

Sam said, ‘I’m guessing that’s what he’s used to.’

‘You can’t wait to do him.’

Ric sighed. ‘What’s your problem? Still sour for the website?’

We’d had a major row over the Open Feast website. The Nameless wanted to make it look sleek, while everybody else preferred to keep it simple. He said that a clumsy site wouldn’t attract the right kind of people. Becca and Ric had to gently remind him that we did not need to attract any kind of people, we only had to keep the door open and see who came through.

The Nameless shrugged. ‘Nobody listened to me then, and nobody is listening to me now.’

‘For fuck’s sake, mate, we have a bunch of strangers to take care of, two potential new members of the family, and you’re whining you don’t get enough attention?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

Ric rinsed his cup. ‘We don’t have time for this. I need to get work done, and you too if I’m right.’

Sam wrapped an arm around the Nameless. ‘Stop giving yourself a hard time,’ he said, in his most companiable tone, ‘and let’s go have some fun.’

Ric was fond of quoting a verse of T. S. Eliot: ‘In my beginning is my end.’ He said it had stayed with him since he found it as a boy, while he was looking for words to impress a girl. His attachment to that line was a prophecy.

CHARLIE

The day was tough. I resented the buzz of activity, the aliveness of everybody there. I would hear a new accent or notice a tattoo and I’d formulate in my head a comment to share with Bertrand, and once I got as far as opening my mouth before remembering that Bertrand was not there. I managed to avoid talking to people, mostly, but it required a huge effort.

ZOEY

We sat down for dinner. Sturdy tables were set under pines strung with warm fairy lights. Storm lanterns, giving off the scent of good-quality oil, hung from ropes and low branches, making humans, trees and owls into a thousand shadows. The wine? Better than what you’d normally get in NY. The eggplant and tomato pasta? Best I ever had. Nothing was lavish, but the Bastion hadn’t skimped on anything. This is what troubled me: if these guys turned a profit, it must be slim, so the business had to be elsewhere. But where? The Bastion had a plan, and competitors with a plan were my least favourite thing. More than once my hand went to my bag, instinctively, to grab my phone and text Janis, but I didn’t have it. I wished she was there with me, and not home with a baby screaming in her ears.

After the affogato, a dessert of gelato drowned in coffee, a man rung a bell and stood up. Even Napoleon, who had been shamelessly begging for food scraps from the tables, turned to him. I scratched the pig’s head. He was my favourite fellow, so far.

‘Let me start with a thank-you,’ he said. ‘You came all the way here, trusting us with your time and money. We’re going to do our best not to disappoint. I’m Ric.’

This unassuming man here, in denim and khaki shirt, was the famous Ric.

‘We are a beautiful bunch, here at the Bastion. When you put beautiful people in a beautiful setting, lots of things can happen, and I’m telling you, most of those will happen.’ He smiled at our hoots and whistles. He carried himself with easy-going authority. He was one of those men with a large smile and strong hands: he didn’t look like one who enjoyed violence, but neither did he look like one who would squirm from it. His nose was crooked in the way that noses get crooked in fights. All in all, not someone you wanted to mess with.

‘Good things, I mean. As for the bad ones, we only have one rule, but on that rule we are dead serious. The Golden Rule, have you heard of it? We didn’t make it up and we didn’t name it. No, in one version or another, it’s there in every spiritual tradition ever known to humankind. In the Bible you’ll find it worded this way: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In other words – don’t be a dick. Be respectful of other people, treat them as you want to be treated. I see a lot of nodding heads, but let me stress, the rule means that we shall endeavour not to offend and also not to be easily offended. You might not like everything you see, and I promise, you won’t like everyone you meet. I’ll go further and say that you might find some of the goings-on actively distasteful. Such is life – deal with it. If anything makes you uncomfortable, it means, by definition, that it’s taking you out of your comfort zone – which is good. You came here to be alive, right? It’s hard work, being alive.’

Ric didn’t leave space for questions. ‘At early stages,’ he explained to us later, ‘so-called questions are underhand bickering.’

What he did was flash his reassuring smile and say, ‘I’ll leave you to coffee now. Ritual team, with me please. Everybody else, when you hear the drum, chase it.’

The beat grabbed us by our happy full bellies and dragged us through trees and bushes, between two lines of garden torches, to a starlit glade. I felt the bonfire on my skin even before seeing it. It was taller than all of us. To get to it, we had to pass between two fire jugglers, both bare-chested. The woman on the right was drawing spirals of fire with her poi chains. She slithered in the air, snapping up, sliding down, like a serpent. The man on the left jumped and twirled, making interlocking circles by spinning his staff.

The drummer was Lila, the young woman with the shaved head and big eyes. Someone pronounced her name in the voice of one who’s bragging they know a celeb. I thought she looked cool, self-assured. She looked like someone who takes no shit. She reminded me of Janis, in many ways.

The drumming faded, the fire jugglers slowed to a halt. We shut up and listened to the cracking of the fire, the chirping of crickets, the waves coming ashore, and a breeze blowing through twigs and leaves.

With the breeze came a woman.

LILA

I was excited to be in with the in crowd. Never happened to me before, and it went a long way towards soothing my social anxiety. As long as I was drumming, I had something to do, something to be, and I didn’t have to feel like a failure for being unable to start a conversation. I sat by the fire and drummed with nineteen years of repressed energy until Ric gestured me to stop.

Becca appeared out of the trees from the direction of the beach, advancing with the gait of a queen or a cat or a priestess. She was simply dressed (a skirt down to her feet, a denim top, bangles). Her chestnut hair was long, left untied, which lent her a wild edge. She was enchanting. She stopped by Ric’s side.

A guy coughed – I later learned he was the Nameless. He had a knack for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Ric shot at him a brief, cold look, then said, ‘Ladies and gents, give it up for Becca!’

We clapped hands and shouted, and when our voices died out, she asked, ‘How was dinner?’ in the Italian accent that would be such a large part of the way media depicted her worldwide.

I was beside myself and I could have answered, but Galen beat me to it. ‘Great!’ he shouted.

‘Good. That’s good. I’m not going to ask if you liked the wine, ’cause you drank all of it.’

I laughed along with everybody else.

‘Don’t worry, I was kidding; even you didn’t manage to dry up our reserves. Anyway. It’s been a long day, so I’ll keep it short. I just wanted to say hi, really. We are going to do a lot of partying together in the coming days, and a lot of work. We’ll get to know each other. If you’ve ever felt you want to hit the reset button on your life – to have a chance to start over and do things better – this is the chance. Here at the Bastion we wipe the slate clean. It’s going to be fun. Make no mistake, though.’ She turned her eyes on us, and each of us felt seen. ‘You will get out of your time here only as much as you put in.’

‘We put in quite a lot of dough!’ someone said, guffawing.

‘And if dough could buy wisdom, darling, you’d be a sage,’ Becca answered, and we all laughed, the joker included. ‘But no,’ she went on, ‘money is not the tool to seek for what you’re after. The spark you’ve lost – you cannot just buy it back. You will have to renounce all that you are in order to become all that you can be.’

What does it mean? I thought. Is this when they take a virgin to the altar? Is this when they ask me to sign a pact in blood,or…

‘But before that, you need to find out who you are, and who you can be. Starting now. Don’t make those faces,’ she laughed. ‘The first step is easy and all of them are fun. I want you to think about why you’re here. What do you want from your stay with us? Step to the bonfire, and say aloud what it is that you expect from the Feast – what it is that you desire. Be real. Nothing is too small, nothing is too big. Nothing is off-limits.’ Becca turned to me and said, ‘Lila, will you go first?’

I was amazed that Ric had taken the time to tell Becca my name, and that Becca had remembered it. I panicked. I didn’t know what I was going to say. But once again, I could not refuse, so I walked to the fire, very conscious of the many eyes weighing me down like a backpack full of bricks. I came too close and the flames burnt the tip of my eyelashes. I stepped back. A word came to me, as if written in fire against a dark sky.

‘Louder,’ Ric said, in good spirit. ‘We can’t hear you!’

‘Purpose,’ I said. ‘I wish to find some purpose.’

Everybody cheered and clapped. Later someone told me they were in awe of me. I lacked purpose! The badass drummer was as troubled as everybody else; that gave others the courage to speak up. Me, inspiring somebody else? Most definitely a miracle.

I returned to my place, took my drum in one hand and the stick in the other, and started back up, with more energy than before. The world felt electric.