The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension by Rhys Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

must always increase in intensity. The movement she had joined based its principles on understanding and opposing the mechanics of paranoia. When the university was closed down she was less surprised and worried than I. Her organisation had not been discovered by the authorities, it was just an example of logical repression.
    But disappearances increased and I wondered how long it would be before bodies were strung up on lampposts as examples. Moona wanted to hold meetings in our apartment. I did not oppose her wishes but she must have felt ashamed by the expression on my face for she never mentioned the idea again. I later learned from a few cryptic remarks she made that they had found an abandoned warehouse in which to conduct their plotting. I stopped reading the newspapers when the kiosk was boarded up. The actions of the government had always been mysterious, now they became utter secrets and only a violation of some new unknown law allowed a citizen to understand what brutal changes had taken place.
    Moona stopped undressing in front of me, but one evening when she was leaning over the balcony I noted that she had acquired a small tattoo at the base of her spine. Her organisation had invented a symbolism for itself. They were flirting more boldly with danger but it was clear they had struck a few successful blows against the regime. Nothing was reported but there was a tangible expectancy in the air. The government responded with increasingly extreme measures. Now people were not permitted to congregate in groups of more than two. The city became a place of fake romanticism, the streets and parks dotted with couples seeking solitude.
    “Isolation is the problem,” Moona said to me.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “The root cause of paranoia. You can only be suspicious of others if you perceive them to be outside yourself, separate units rather than part of the same system. This is the key to our rebellion. My movement seeks to instill in people the feeling we are all connected, all part of one organism. In fact our most fundamental principle is that the planet can be regarded holistically as a living being, not merely an inanimate rock on which individuals struggle against each other. We are cells in a vast body. Once this mode of thinking becomes truly established, paranoia must wither away. It cannot flourish in an environment where there is no isolation, no more loneliness.”
    I now understood why her tattoo was that of a blue world surrounded by a sunburst. Colonel Bones was looking inward and forcing society to lose its sanity: the secret opposition had chosen to look outward as a balance and a cure. I realised that Moona was inviting me to join her cause but I still could not find the courage or perhaps the belief. She was dismayed but my contribution would have been superfluous. The government was doomed anyway. In the following month the police seemed to lose the will to enforce the rules. Armoured cars lay abandoned in the roads. How Moona had helped to accomplish this was beyond my conjecture and I could not motivate myself to ask her.
    The radio had been silent for many weeks but we kept it turned on and tuned to the official news channel. This had been shut down on some bizarre whim of the regime, which apparently could no longer even trust its own propaganda. The foreign music stations we avoided because the unthinking joviality of freedom excited too much envy in us. However, in the early hours of one morning, the set crackled into life. Moona had just returned from a meeting, alert despite her fatigue, and we listened together. For a few minutes we were connected again, but we had moved too far apart to reclaim our previous infatuation and mutual respect.
    The voice that came over the airwaves belonged to Colonel Bones. Desperation had driven him out of his reclusion. His voice was very strained and old as he talked about enemies and traitors and admitted the government was close to collapse. In