Inkorporated by Damon B

Tin Te. These are the two syllables that had been haunting Damien ever since he began searching for his missing brother, Luke, a year ago; two syllables that are etched in Chinese characters in the corner of the tattoo covering his brother’s back in a Dali-esque vision: an alpine landscape but where the angles seem somehow wrong and the lines waver, where the mundane rock features appear to be leering faces when you look askance and where the colouring subtly changes with his breathing; two syllables that are perhaps the artist’s name, though no-one in any tattoo studio from the St. Pauli strip in Hamburg to the wharves of Shanghai or the Camden Markets of London claims to have heard of him. Or her. He had also tried mainstream art galleries and a university library to no avail. Nor had that bible of the internet, Wikipedia, helped him in this case.

The pressures of reality, hunger and a roof, meant that his searching was intermittent, all the while hoping that the police too might have some good news on more mundane leads, like CCTV footage, fingerprinting of his brothers’ apartment and car, newspaper notices and the like. After a year of being one police constable’s telephone stalker, he had given in on that front in a cynical distrust that anyone beyond him gave a toss, or even saw his brother as more than a statistic.

What led him to following the “body art” lead was that half a year after Luke’s disappearance he was reading a copy of Big Issue and the “missing person’s notice” showed both a picture of a stranger’s face and their back, which displayed body art amazingly similar to that of his brother’s. After several phone calls to the police and odd hours between bar shifts spent looking through newspaper articles, he discovered that at least a half dozen people with similarly striking tattoo work had disappeared in the last two years. When he suggested this lead though, the constable muttered something like “Jesus-fucking-Christ, a tattoo cult you’re trying to tell me . . .”  He could tell that the constable had written off his brother as drugs in a back alley, and a body dumped in a hopper somewhere. However, he was determined now, and managed to obtain photos of the body art of two of the other victims: each had this same mysterious set of Chinese characters, Tin Te, inscribed in the bottom left. And so his search through dozens of studios began, though that had hit a wall of silence until now.

It was in one of those periods of odd-jobbing behind a bar at a rock and arts festival that his next lead came, to the background of a Stratocaster solo, so that he was at first barely certain that he’d really caught those long sought syllables.

“You going to Tin Te after this gig, mate?” the words came from the other side of the bar while Damien was bent out of sight pushing cases of Kronenburg into a fridge, an accented continental voice, maybe Polish but definitely not fresh off the boat, and strangling the word “mate” like anyone who’s not an Aussie and just learns it from watching Neighbours does.

“No chance. Barely got a leave pass from the missus to come out here. Think I’ll be suffocated in my sleep if I leave her with the kids an hour longer than officially allotted,” came the reply in a light Scottish brogue.

“Pussy whipped,” laughed the first voice, slapping the other guy soundly on the back.

He was in two minds, whether to stand up and ask them about this place and if they knew his brother, or to just observe them, maybe wait for something more to slip out. But their conversation turned to the cabaret act that had just come on stage in an aggressive assertion of corsetry and powdered skin.

“Now that’s some pussy I could definitely handle getting a spanking from,” continued the first voice, breaking into a wolf-whistle.

“I’m right with you on that fellas,” Damien joined in, “Can I grab you something to drink?  Pint of London Pride or Fosters?”

“Two J.D.’s thanks. Straight,” replied the Scot.

As he poured this into the plastic tumblers he observed them: both were slim but toned, in black rock singlets, Megadeth on the Scot with shoulder length black hair, and on the blonde Pole’s t-shirt was a man ablaze on a bike. He felt sure that he had accidentally poured them a free double as he saw their tats though. Not that he was some puritan shocked by a naked lady or piercings, and his searches through the dozens of studios had certainly given him an eye-opening education in the varieties of self harm that people call art. The tats though, were unmistakably by the same artist as those on his brother, with those angles that are somehow wrong, like looking at that Escher of an eternal waterfall, and wondering how it keeps flowing up yet cascading down. He could only see their arms and shoulders but it was like they’d had a national park grafted on as a second skin, sheer mountain landscapes, but strangely elusive lines where they should be solid and unshifting, and faces leering out at you when you thought it was just a cliff face a moment ago: probably the same artist—definitely the same school of art or sensei.

They didn’t have any of the clichéd little hearts or angels, or trendy oriental symbols that half their bearers wouldn’t have a clue about, and surely no slag tags or tramp stamps inked onto their lower backs to profane this art. This was living art, an alpine landscape with the rock monster of the Neverending Story lurking, breathing, ready to emerge. He’d heard from his brother that some body-art was so highly appreciated that people were being asked to pose for art classes at universities, as well as having copies displayed in galleries.

Damien passed the plastic tumblers across, and he was pulling the change out of the till as he asked, “So I heard you’re going to Tin Te then. Is it worth going to?”

The strangers both changed posture, looking more wary, their heads now turned directly towards him, eyes wandering over his body, either to weigh him up if things got physical, or to check whether he had his own markings, like some teenage rite of acceptance to the tribe.

“I think you heard wrong,” said the Pole, as both their hands drew back from their drinks.

“My brother used to talk about it . . .” but Damien’s voice trailed off as they stared at him, no hint of warmth or invitation to continue, “Look, he’s gone missing and I’m just trying . . .” he tried in desperation, but they turned silently and strode from the bar to the nearest exit.

In seconds they would be gone. The one link. After a years’ fruitless searching.  He turned the key to lock the till and race after them, but by the time he pushed his way through the shadows of the cabaret viewers and looked outside they had blended into the rest of the festival throng.

He returned wearily to the bar, depressed at the failure, but partly excited and energised for fresh searching now that he knew IT existed and that Tin Te was a place of some sort, some after-party venue. Their elusiveness was odd though. A cabaret bar or fetish club was hardly reason for that reaction, nor even an opium den, of which he worked in one for a couple of shifts each week catering to the stressed banking execs of the Canary Wharf crowd of London. That was certainly more of an eye-opener than any Dita Von Teese act.

There were another two hours to go until the end of his shift, comprising eight more cabaret performances and probably two hundred or more “art connoisseurs”, buck’s nights, teenagers who have just hit 18, and of course married men to be served drinks to saviour in their discrete shadows, each wishing that the act will go on and on and that maybe the star will come out afterwards for a quiet one for the road and think that they’re the man of their dreams. But of course the teens and stag-doers head off on the prowl, and the married men end up slipping their wedding bands back on as they leave the tent and think resignedly about the lonely journey home.

It was as he was cleaning up and the last stragglers stumbled out that he had his next strange experience. He was collecting the coasters and wiping the bar down when he found a business card underneath one of the coasters on a table near the stage, simple white cardboard with hand-written text on it:

TIN TE

THINK U R READY?

w3.tintedrealities.com

He looked around, wondering whether the two from earlier were watching him but the pavilion was empty in the meantime, so he pocketed the card.

* * *

Three AM found Damien finally stumbling off a night-bus and into his group-share apartment in Ealing in the west of London. He had almost missed his stop with exhaustion, but now that he was eagerly leaning over the computer his second wind had definitely kicked in. He got Firefox on the screen and the URL blurred from his fingertips.

Only to find a blank grey screen but for two frustrating white fields labelled username and password. Damn. Bloody typical. He slammed his hand down on the table, then called “sorry” softly to the apartment, remembering that he wasn’t alone here.

He went to the kitchen and pulled the Jägermeister from the freezer and knocked back two shots in quick succession trying to think what he could do next. Surely if the card was left for him they must have expected that he could crack this. He looked at the card again, turning it over and over, looking for any small print, holding it up to the kitchen light to see if there were any water marks. Then he remembered the old lemon juice invisible ink trick and pulled out a candle in desperation, though this achieved nothing more than curling the edge of the card. As a final measure he even tried peeling back the edges of the card, but it proved to be simple double-ply card, with no hidden mysteries.

Walking back to the lounge, he sat back trying to puzzle out what he could do. It was obviously a private web-site, and given that he had no experience with hacking he was going to have to find some “legit” way in. Chuckling, he decided to try the oldest trick and just hit enter to see if this was a bluff. But an error message appeared—

User name or password incorrect.

IP address will be recorded and traced after 3 incorrect attempts.

OK

“Crap,” he muttered as he hit OK and it took him back to the login page. Two attempts left then - actually just one unless he was really confident. But could they even do that, he wondered—trace someone to a street address?  He had never been confident that that sort of shit from the movies was for real; but then again it could be. What would they do to him then?  And who are “they”?  In the midnight hours a person’s mind thinks a lot more along X-files and Mulder possibilities than during daylight’s reign. After all, he thought, Luke went missing . . .

Luke.

His tattoo.

Of course, he must have been a member. He felt a thrill of nervous anticipation trill through his body like entering the driving school car as a teenager to get his licence, knowing that he was on the edge of this new adult world but hadn’t quite grasped it yet. So that left the question of his password.

Internet Explorer.

Version 7.0

The autofill feature for passwords, and the bane of internet cafes. His brother had visited him here in the past . . . maybe, just maybe, this could work.

He switched browser to IE and typed his brother’s name in, just first and surname, leaving out the poncy “Doncaster” that Luke had been blessed with as a middle name from some horse race win of their folks while their mother was pregnant with him. He pressed tab, hoping . . .

And it autofilled the password field with seven or eight little asterisks!  The grey screen faded away to reveal a screen with thousands of different coloured pixels, though no text or pictures. He looked at the back of the PC and monitor to make sure that he hadn’t kicked out a cable in his excitement, but everything looked to be in order.

He went back to the sofa and knocked back another finger of Jägermeister, choking as it had now reached that warm level where the cardamom and cloves get that harsh edge.

* * *

At some stage weariness had kicked in and he had fallen asleep in an ungainly sprawl with one leg kicked over the edge of the sofa, Jäger bottle cradled in his lap. When he awoke it was to find the lounge bathed in sunlight and one of his flatmates, a Belorussian called Grigor, staring at the pixelated computer screen saying, “this is vicard” which took his sleep befuddled mind a moment to translate to be “wicked”.

“Dobre-dyen” Damien called in an appalling attempt at a Russian hello.

“Hey Damien, welcome back to the world of the living.”

“What time is it?  I feel wrecked.”

“Only 1:30. Sunday - in case that helps.”

“Very funny.”

“I love this site you’ve found.”

“You’re joking right,” Damien replied, “Have you been smoking something again?”

“You’re a funny man yourself. These pixels form one of those 3D magic eye puzzles. You know the ones where you go all cross-eyed holding it a foot away from your face to see a picture of a dolphin or kangaroo. Only this is better. The Pixels keep changing and alternating the background image slightly . . . it’s moving and evolving. Vicard!”

“So what is it that you’re seeing?” he asked, relying on Grigor since he had always been useless at even the static puzzles.

“Well, I’ve been watching for half an hour now. It started off as a medieval village—wooden walls, thatched roofs—though I’m guessing smoke from the chimneys was getting too complex even for this,” he chuckled, and then continued, “It slowly zoomed in to one hut . . .”

“A medieval village?” Damien interrupted, deflated again, this wild goose-chase of non-existent and partial leads driving him back from the brief flame of hope to depression.

“Well there were modern cars parked at the entrance, so it can’t be too ancient. But it’s a great recreation. And in this hut, they’re tattooing people, and doing it really old school . . . needles sterilised in a fire, inks on a wooden pallet . . .”

“Bull shit. That’s way hardcore,” now Damien’s attention was riveted again. There must be a clue here somewhere, “Was there a name on the hut?”

“Nothing I saw. But there’s one of those huge German beer steins on a bench next to some hot chick. She’s lying down topless on her side getting tattooed down her rib-cage. Damn she’s fine,” he whistled, “This is like seeing strip poker on an old 286 back in the eighties as a kid in Minsk.”

“Thanks for the imagery I really didn’t need,” Damien commented wryly, “don’t suppose the stein says anything on it?”

“The details not that great, but hang on a moment, there’s a name, and the first letters spell K-A-L-T-E-N- then it blurs. And now that I think about it, the village had something like that on a sign at the main gates.”

“Hmmm, sounds Germanic. S’pose I could wiki ‘Kalten’ in Germany, Sweden, Austria, maybe the Netherlands, and see if anything comes up.”

“Well, give me a few minutes alone with the fraulein.”

“Believe me, I don’t want to know about you and das Fraulein, Grigor mate. I’m going to have a shower and when I’m back in ten I’ll kick you off the machine.”

“Sure, whatever,” his eyes were focused on the screen as Damien walked out.

* * *

About two months later in mid-July Damien was walking through the gates of the village of Kaltenberg. It was about 20 kilometres west of Munich, in Bavaria, southern Germany, and Grigor had joined him, deciding that the search was also a good excuse for a pilgrimage to the beer Mecca that is Bavaria.

This was the best lead that they had found—once a year, for four weeks, the world’s largest medieval festival takes place, with people living in thatched huts, wearing armour and hosiery, wielding swords and bows, watching jesters and jousting tournaments, drinking tankards of dark brew, cooking on fires and eating without cutlery. As close to living life like peasants and knights of the middle ages as you are likely to encounter anywhere in the 21st century world. And somewhere in this bazaar he was hoping to find the elusive Tin Te.

They had no more rooms in the inn, but they had been offered a bargain to sleep on the hay in the stable, where they encountered a half dozen Aussie & Kiwi backpackers, who seem to pop up in every random corner of the world. They dumped their packs and headed straight out. Grigor was staring around like a school boy, especially whenever any armour-clad woman passed them, while Damien walked around without noticing the distractions, trying to read the German signs and peering in each store and tent and even behind the fur hangings draped in the doorways of some of the larger sleeping berths that they passed. Even in his intent state he was impressed by the attention to detail that everyone had put in, down to rude sleeping cots, hand grinding of wheat, and washing racks. No hidden laptops and Wi-Fi that he could see.

They had headed back uphill from the jousting arena and had come across a stage with two jesters telling a story and juggling, an older man and a woman in one of those low-cut bar wench dresses that you always see on Oktoberfest ads. Grigor’s attention had gone even though he could barely understand a word of German, let alone the local Bayrisch dialect. Hugh Grant has a masturbating Welsh-man as his Notting Hill flatmate, and I have a Belo-russian, thought Damien.

He left Grigor there and continued the search alone, and it wasn’t long before he finally struck gold. He had spotted a wooden sign over the doorway to what looked at first glance to be a blacksmith’s hut from the intense fire that he could see through the doorway and from the sound of metal being vigorously forced into submission. The sign read something like “Feuer, Flamme und Tinte” in black charcoal script.

This could be it. He felt some nerves now for the first time at what might be inside, and at what he hoped to find. His eyes took a minute to adjust to the gloom and shadows inside, while he mumbled out a “Hallo” in greeting. The smith, a solidly built, grey bearded man in a leather jerkin and slacks kept banging away at a horseshoe he was holding with tongs, not acknowledging Damien.

The floor was bare earth and the walls were fairly barren apart from his tools, though to one side near the door was a stand displaying the obligatory variety of metal wares for sale such as candelabras, horseshoes and kids toys. To the rear of the cottage was a doorway with a fur hanging tied to one side and he could just make out two silhouettes in the glow of a brazier, one person seemingly lying on their side, and the other bending over and prodding them with some object like a paint brush, long hair shielding the artist’s face from sight.

“Ich bin soweit,” called the artist from the other room.

“Ich bin gleich dabei,” came the rough reply from the old smith. He laid a couple more strokes on a horseshoe, then dunked it in a pale of water for a half minute before hanging it on a wooden peg. He then dunked both his hands into the coals of the fire—admittedly the furthest edge of the pit from the molten flames—and scooped out a handful of ashes. He walked into the back room and smeared them straight onto the back of the individual who was now lying flat and restrained in place. There was a muffled scream, while the smith and the artist forcefully held the prone body in place for a full minute before the smith brushed the coals off.

Damien just stood there stunned as they helped the ‘victim’ walk into the main room, one of the person’s arms wrapped around each of their shoulders. He was a young man, going on 30 with a bit of a beer gut happening, and as they passed Damien saw his back. He had expected to see red welts and burns from the coal, but apart from some ash smudging, his whole back had been tattooed, every centimetre from tail to collar bone in an amazing replica of his internal bones and organs, as though his skin had been ripped clean off and he’d stepped out of a medical text book. The lines had that same fluid uncertainty as the other Tin Te works, making the organs appear to move with his breathing, and disguising the outlines and eyes of some secreted observer. The man flinched as the smith dunked a rag in the water pail and wiped down his back to clean away the remaining charcoal smudges. A cup of water was also drawn from the pail which the man greedily slurped down. The smith then pulled back a hide on the wall to reveal a mirror to show the young man his new addition. This was certainly a different technique to what they showed on the box on Miami Ink, Damien realised.

While the man was admiring the work on his back, the artist pulled back his dark hair and revealed his face for the first time since Damien had arrived.

It was the Scotsman that he’d seen two months earlier.

He smiled coolly, “So you followed the trail. Welcome.”

“So is this where my brother went when I thought he was heading off to Munich for a booze-up in a beer-hall?”

“The only way to the truth is to join us,” he replied evasively.

“You mean get myself inked—some random tat—and you’ll tell me about my brother?”

“Some random tat?” he laughed coldly, “Good thing my blacksmith friend there doesn’t understand English.”  Meanwhile the young man turned from the mirror, beaming though still shaking, shook hands with the smith and the Scotsman and walked out into the afternoon sun.

“So are you in?  Don’t waste my time—either you get your top off and I start on the outlines, or you leave the tent . . .”

“Hang on. Don’t you have samples or scrapbooks for me to choose something from?  Skull and crossbones, anchor, you know, that kind of thing?”

“No.”

“So I don’t choose?  I just lie down quietly . . .”

“Well, I’ll be impressed if you’re quiet the whole time.”

“And the charcoal—is that really necessary?”  Damien couldn’t believe that the words were coming out of his mouth, that he was agreeing to this, especially with what he’d just seen the tail end of. God knows—or Satan more like it—he thought, how long that fella had been lying there getting inked. But if this was the way to know about his brother he’d do it.

“Well we can spare the charcoal, and choose to go with blood poisoning or gangrene if that’s your preference.”

“Isn’t there another way?”

“I see your point - it’s not exactly a medieval European technique, not really in fitting with your whole Kaltenberg experience.”

“Well, that’s not quite what I . . .”

“The charcoal purification is actually a little something that I picked up from some native aboriginals that are still living in the central deserts of Australia. And we’re going with it. So lie down or leave.”

Having never had a tattoo or piercing, or even surgery in a hospital for that matter, the scarily anaesthetic-free hours ahead of him were making him feel really sick in his gut. He wanted to ask other questions, like how big, how long, and so on, but thought that he was already sounding like a wimpy teenager instead of a 30 year old man. This was it, time to decide, he realised with the feeling of someone trying to inch their way into the ocean and having a large wave grab his balls in its frigid grasp; he could walk into the next room and maybe find out the truth from a man he didn’t trust, or walk away from possibly the only introduction to his brother’s life and circle.

He was shaking as his fingers began unbuttoning his shirt.

* * *

The body has an amazing ability to forget pain and trauma, whether it be child birth, a car accident, a stabbing, or in this case fourteen hours straight of tattooing with three artists working simultaneously, stroke after stroke piercing him, often over the same spot to hone in for some extra detail, his body flinching uncontrollably as he came to know the more sensitive pores of his body. At several stages the smith would walk in, shoving a leather thong between his teeth and physically holding him in an iron grip as they worked on a more delicate region, while at other times the smith’s distant hammering blows at the forge were something external for him to focus on.

There were also calmer intervals where it was just like a continuous rasping, scratching, clawing on his skin, but then one or the other of the three shadow-shrouded artists would cut that little bit deeper, or move along a nerve line and his body would be reawakened: no chance of dozing as the night wound interminably through to dawn. But dawn only brought a slight reprieve as the three artists filed out, presumably for breakfast and to stretch, though they left the smith mutely watching, hammer idle in his hands for a change, but eyes telling Damien that moving or leaving was definitely not an option. He made his toilet in a bucket the smith indicated in a corner.

By this stage there wasn’t a spot on his back that hadn’t been worked on at some point, and after the small break they continued, and his senses immediately reignited. It was only with daylight seeping through that he could see what they were working with from the corners of his eyes. He already knew that it wasn’t anything electric, and what they were holding appeared more like long quilled fountain pens with razor pointed nibs that would be dipped continuously in various ink pots suspended on a board above him, then brought down to scythe through the layers of his epidermis. Sometimes, he thought, it’s better not to know.

Damien only knew that the end was finally there when they all put aside their quills, placed the thong between his teeth and held him in place. His mind was just screaming “oh my God” over and over as the smith came closer with his cupped hands. His body tried to buck and squirm but they held him tightly and suddenly the smith’s hands were on him for the most painful minute of his life as the hot ashes were massaged into the thousands of lacerations from the nights’ work. Imagine cutting yourself and pouring vinegar or the juice of an onion on it; and then being somehow able to ignite the juice and doing this on a hundred different parts of your body, with some sadistic bastard holding you in place so that you can’t even move, squirm or lessen it in any way.

His legs wouldn’t function at all when their grip disappeared, his body just shaking with shock.

The Scot just smiled coolly as Damien was draped between the other two artists, his eyes saying, “I love working with newcomers.”

As the water dripped down his back in soothing waves he slowly recovered and slurped down a cup of water, which eased the dryness in his throat and he managed to force out some words at last, “So what happened to my brother? Where is he?”

“All in good time, Damien, all in good time,” the Scot replied, knowing his name from somewhere, even though he was sure that he hadn’t worn a name tag in the bar all those months ago. Had he screamed it out at some point, he wondered.

“No. I want to bloody well know now. I’ve just gone through that ordeal . . .”

“Don’t you want to see what you’re wearing now, what you’re going to wear for the rest of your life?”

“Honestly, I don’t give a toss right now.”

“Just look. It might answer your questions.”

“Okay, okay. Whatever.”

They let him go as the smith unveiled the mirror, and Damien walked unsteadily over, turning his head to look over his shoulder.

He saw his brother’s face staring back at him.

Even in the shadows of the hut they seemed to have captured the details like the mole on his cheek, the favoured parting of his hair, and a wry half-smile on his lips. Holy crap, he cursed, how the hell did they do that?  The backdrop to his face was of an old warehouse of wooden rafters and cartons of nappies, shampoo bottles, flour and other random supermarket goods: that was the warehouse where he’d worked as the stock manager. And in the bottom left was the Tin Te signature.

“I think you’ll be wanting to visit this address in London,” the Scot said, handing Damien another plain business card with hand writing on it.

“What the hell is this, another game?  I want to know what happened to him,” Damien reached out to grab the Scot’s shoulder, but just as his hand was about to touch him his other arm was wrenched behind his back and he was brought to his knees by the smith.

“Take my word for it, you will find your answers there Damien. And now you have your entrance ticket to Tin Te,” he took a last approving look at the work on Damien’s back, not mocking, but actually a look of pride, an artist satisfied with his work. Then he walked out of the tent.

“Let go of me, you prick,” Damien struggled against the smith’s hold and he was effortlessly pulled to his feet. Damien pushed his way out of the tent, the morning sunlight stinging his eyes as he stumbled along in a half trance, the smith’s laughter echoing behind him.

* * *

London. Two days later.

Grigor had reluctantly followed, having been happily sleeping off a hangover in the Kaltenberg stable as Damien stumbled in. He quickly sobered up when he saw Damien’s inflamed back and the face of Luke looking down at him. With a hasty stop by a bar to leave his details for a certain bar wench they were quickly on their way back to Munich and then London.

They had agreed to suss out the address together by daylight, and Damien had given him a copy of the details in case anything went wrong, since his trust in this secret “artistic society” was pretty non-existent and he really didn’t know what to expect. What had his brother gotten himself into?  He needed to at least see him and know that he was there willingly, not stoned to his eyeballs in some sort of drugged bondage that Damien was dreading deep down.

The address was near Southwark tube station, just to the south-west of London Bridge. They were heading along The Cut towards Waterloo station, at the easterly end before the theatres and cafes emerge. There an alleyway peeled away from the main drag, heading straight to the train track which is raised on a causeway about a storey above the road, with buildings and warehouses occupying some of the archways under the tracks, while other arches appeared dark and rubble-strewn. The overall impression was of a tramp’s partially toothed smile. And no doubt a few tramps and rats were companions in the dark arches on rainy London nights.

The building they were interested in was at first glance very ordinary looking, in that it comprised a large wall of red corrugated iron fitted to occupy an entire arch, with a small doorway that was observed by at least two security cameras that they could see, and some random graffiti tags spray-painted on the wall. There was no-one around on the street, and no window or guard, just an intercom panel next to the door. Apart from that what struck them was that there was neither a company name nor other official marking anywhere to be seen, no fluorescent ‘open’ sign, nor even a Chubb Security sticker.

Originally this was intended to just be a reconnaissance mission, especially as the ‘invitation’ has said 11 PM on it. But Damien didn’t care, he was going to try now, mid-afternoon, the sunlight making him feel bolder.

“You remember what I said Grigor, you don’t hear from me in three hours, then things ain’t lookin’ good and it’s time to get the cops.”

“Sure. I’m here for you,” he tried to smile confidently as he slapped Damien on the shoulder, “Though are you sure you don’t want company going in there?”

“No. You’re my backup mate. I owe you one—actually two beers—since I also nicked you away from your Bavarian beer wench.”

“Damn right you do,” they laughed as Grigor started walking back up the alley towards The Cut, while Damien hurried to the entrance before he crapped himself with fear or found an excuse to talk longer and put this off.

He was unarmed. He had considered taking a knife or gun, but figured he’d probably be more likely to hurt himself as he didn’t exactly get involved in gang scraps very often, and secondly they’d be likely to be more than a little ‘offended’ if they found him packing a piece. Walking to the door, he felt basically naked.

And in about two minutes he was going to be literally naked.

He raised his hand to knock, but before his knuckles could descend a voice emerged from the intercom panel, “Yes?”

“I’m here for Tin Te,” Damien replied.

“Take off your shirt.”

“Excuse me. Out here on the street?”

The intercom remained silent. He tried pushing on the entryway, but it didn’t budge.

“Okay, okay,” he unbuttoned his shirt and turned so that the cameras got a good view of his back, as he was pretty confident it wasn’t his face or chest that they were keen to see. It was a good thing that it was a quiet street, otherwise he’d definitely be attracting attention—London normally only goes topless crazy when the mercury hits the “fantasy” heights of twenty degrees Celsius, and today was typical London in the drizzly teens.

The door opened without further comment from the speaker until he was inside and the door had locked behind him. He found himself in a short dark corridor with a portal at the end from which some yellowish light bled.

“Stop. Undress and then carry your clothes to the room.”

“Are you having a laugh?”

But there was no reply. He guessed that they didn’t have much of a sense of humour when you turned up early. He stripped to his y-fronts and padded to the room. It was a small square room with a wooden staircase descending into darkness, and on the right hand wall was an old style dumb waiter that restaurants with subterranean kitchens often use. It was the only obvious place for his clothes so he placed them in there, and it immediately shuttered closed and he heard it descend. Well that’s it then, he thought, just my briefs left; fucking great.

There weren’t any further instructions so he started to descend the stairs, feeling very odd being nearly naked in a strange warehouse, cold sweat breaking out under his arms and slicking down his sides. As he walked, the lights came on automatically ahead of him and he saw that the staircase descended for at least another twenty metres, and once he reached this it went forward on a flat landing for another five metres, a lot cooler now with stone walls on either side instead of chipboard. The rumble of trains overhead had also disappeared.

He padded to the door ahead, and opened it to find himself in what looked like a night-club cloak room, a counter on one side with rows of coat hangers hanging behind it, some with cloaks already on them. A smiling broad-shouldered matron was standing there topless and inked completely in what looked like tendrils of an oily green-black creeper vine.

She eyed him over, “Well I’d offer to take your cloak love, but I think you can keep that layer,” and she started laughing. Obviously this was a joke that they liked playing on newcomers. Damien walked towards the main doors, behind which he could hear some violins playing. Surprisingly cultured, he thought, though he guessed that that was more of that stereotyping that Luke hated in him and probably why he had never introduced him to this side of his life.

Through the doorway he passed into a brightly lit room that at first blinded him after the dim stairwell. As his eyes adjusted he got the impression that he had been teleported to an alternative art gallery cum Madame Tussauds. The room was vast after the claustrophobic corridors, and the walls were whitewashed and displayed framed full-sized nudes in full colour and also sepia, as well as pale hides or papyrus that been stretched between ebony poles, all with mind-twisting artworks of the Tin Te school. The centre of the room featured a series of waxworks in life size; unlike Madame Tussauds none were famous personalities or z-list celebs, but they did each bear distinctive body art over their naked forms.

“As you can see,” a familiar-sounding east European voice spoke from behind him, “We like to spend our time on our art.”

He turned to face a man whose face was a mirror of the blonde pole from his first encounter at the festival, except that this man was fully suited, wore glasses, and bore a slightly thinner physique. Perhaps he was the accountant of the family, Damien mused.

“I’m afraid you’ve arrived a bit too early for most of the regulars,” he continued, “or the entertainment for that matter.”  He looked amusedly at Damien standing in his y-fronts like a horny buck’s night escapee.

“Look, I’m here to see my brother. Let’s cut the small talk and the grand tour.”

“You’ve come to the right place then. Follow me.”

They walked mostly in silence, and Damien took a closer look at some of the canvases that they passed. They weren’t square sheets like when you see oils in art galleries, but more ragged edged like an animal hide, with round eyelets along the edge through which fine threading was drawn to lash the canvas to the ebony border. In some cases, he noticed the backdrops were almost translucent, while in others it had a lightly bronzed or tanned shading.

At the far end of this gallery was an archway to another cavern. This was similar to the first room, and continuing to the far end we reached yet another archway and beyond this a wide corridor with glass fronted cabins set up like the Amsterdam red light quarter’s show windows. Most were curtained off though in one a man and woman were entwined in some impossibly flexible looking karma sutra tangle of limbs.

“I call this the jig-saw room . . .” said the Pole, “it’s always fascinating to see how the ink patterns on two or more people blend together.”

“Whatever,” Damien replied gruffly, continuing to walk. There was definitely a reason, he thought, that his brother had never initiated him to this world. They walked into another broad gallery.

“So now we’re in the Hall of the Unknown, where we showcase some of the more recent members of the brotherhood.”

“Look, I said that we can skip the frigging tour.”

“We have. He’s in this very room.”

“I’m really getting fed up with the games.”

“This, Damien, is no game,” he replied, “He’s at the end pedestal. I’ll give you both a moment to yourselves.”

“Hey Luke!  Are you here mate?  It’s Damien.”  He ran the thirty-odd metres across the gallery, and came to a stop at the last pedestal, an angry feeling in his gut as he looked at a statue of his brother. The detail was uncanny; they really had a great sculptor at work here chiselling the cheek structure, the tanning, the scar near his collar bone where he had ripped out a tick, and even the painting of the body art on his back. This was certainly no classical Greek sculpture-work.

“What kind of bullshit are you playing at now,” Damien shouted back at the Pole who was some ten metres away with his back to him, talking to three or four black cowled individuals, “I didn’t come here to see some perverted wax creation you’ve made of my brother. You’re bloody sick in the head fella.”

The Pole walked slowly his way with the black figures following in his wake, “Oh we’re sicker than you realise. Believe me when I tell you that is your brother Luke, or Lucien as we knew him until he turned his back on Tin Te.”

Disbelievingly, Damien reached out a trembling hand to touch the statue’s face and the parted hair. The hair felt real, the skin was cold and clammy, giving a little around the cheeks so definitely not waxwork.

“You’ll find the same with the framed works. They’re not reproduced on cowhide, I can assure you. Some of our clients prefer a traditional mounted work, while others prefer the original corpus. We do our best to offer a flexible service.”

“You’re sick,” Damien choked, fighting the bile in his throat, his body shaking with utter fear as he looked around at the corner in which he was trapped. There was one closed doorway leading off this chamber, behind his brother’s statue. Behind his brother. It was inconceivable to him; even rapists were motivated by normal human impulses in comparison to this.

“Artistically inspired. And I think we might have a taker for your brother at the next auction, especially as we can now offer a dual package,” he looked at his watch. “It will be tight, but I’m thinking we graft your back into one of our ebony casings, hang it in the background showing the face, and then have the original corpus in the spotlight in the foreground.”

“Okay, you’ve had your fun now. That’s taking it way too far.”  Damien’s eyes were darting around but the only weapon he could think of was to break one of the frames and wield an edge as a makeshift staff.

“Oh, this is no joke,”  the Pole had moved close enough now that Damien could smell the eucalypt Fisherman’s Friend that he was sucking. The others started to fan out in a semi-circle and move closer to him. Damien kicked out and caught the Pole in the balls and sprinted for the door at the back of the room as the Pole doubled-over. The door was locked and he couldn’t get it to budge. They were coming from the right hand side of the room and he raced to the nearest wall-hanging on the left hand side. He tried pulling it down but it wouldn’t move. Two of the black cowled shapes were nearly on him now, and the other two were coming in from either side to block any escape. Instead he grabbed the lower edge of the frame with both hands and pushed upwards and it released from the hooks on which it was suspended. He bent down, almost on his knees at the base of the wall, and used his arms to heave the mounting over his head and then let it drop on the two cowled forms closest to him. But it wasn’t a particularly heavy frame, and apart from some curses, the black figures pushed the broken carapace aside and pinned him to the wall.

“Listen,” Damien pleaded, “If I’m not out of here in an hour my friend is going to the cops.” He felt a warm stream streaking down his inner thighs now. “If you let me go, I’ll forget I’ve seen anything and move on with my life.” 

“You mean that geeky Russian pal of yours—Gregory was it?—we picked him up straight after you entered.”

Damien felt the prick of a needle near the base of his spine and they stepped back as a tranquilizer raced through him and shut-down his inner wiring. “Bastards . . .” he slurred as he stumbled forward, moments before he completely lost control of his legs and collapsed. His vision was rapidly blurring, and he could just make them out as shadowy forms standing out of reach. He tried reaching for the frame again, but his arms barely responded and his hands refused to grip. He pawed ineffectively at the smooth floor and the ‘canvas’ of skin that he had dislodged in the struggle. His last sensation was of his body slumping into the lukewarm puddle of his own piss and being forcibly turned onto his back. As they dragged him away his eyes looked one final time upon the tattooed back of his embalmed brother.