Las Vegas, 2009

Sprawled on a bed in a hotel room, typically cheap and stale with smoke, lay Madison. The curtains were drawn. The lights from passing cars slid across the ceiling, the chipping walls. She awoke. Sleeping Beauty.

She found that around her were the strangest of discoveries. A white rabbit was hopping around near the dresser, mirror and chair. A tophat lay upturned on this dresser. As she looked down at her legs she saw they were stockinged in fishnets with ribbons along the side of the calves and thigh. A revealing corset of black satin. Her arms covered to the elbow in gloves of similar make to the one piece. She got to her feet feeling her face, her neck, her stomach, the back of her head, as if to confirm the reality of her skin, her hair.

Yes. She was here, wherever here was.


Eyes widened. She began for the door, to work this all out, when in flooded a host of people. A small woman in her late fifties with purple hair who began to tug Madison back to the chair by the dresser. A man who held down Madison's shoulders while he pulled a three quarter suit jacket over her shoulders. A woman who was opening a purse filled with powders and brushes and began to hastily paint Madison's lips in a dark and cruel shade of red. Too shocked to move, Madison looked around herself. Then there was a hand forcing her to look straight ahead, as another woman, with dyed blonde hair and oversized glasses began to comb and spray Madison's curls, began to rope the lengths up into a severe ponytail which eventually was looped into a bun. Another woman was using one of those brushes on Madison's cheek bones. Another adjusting the top of the one piece, tugging it down a bit.

"Hey!", the rain dancer frowned, but was ignored.


Before she knew it, she was beging dragged down a red carpeted hallway with crimson walls and gold door horror until they reached an elevator where a glowing button was pushed and the unwilling assistant and her entourage piled inside as the doors opened and the bright light dawned across their faces.


Madison glanced sidelong into the mirror of the elevator, surprised at how much they had done her up, she'd never seen herself so, almost like a different person. Powdered white face. They had even coloured in her eyebrows with what she imagined was charcoal, so that she looked like a silent film starlet. Fake eyelashes. It was...

And then she began to look at those around her in that lift. Her stomach turning as gravity pulled. These were all strangers. Where was she! Who were they!


Then the lift doors opened and she was being escorted by a dozen hands and bodies through a curtained hall where her stiletto's began to click. She gazed down at what looked like black ice below, that reflected the dim lights above them all in smudges. Then it was she could hear the sounds of a crowd. Chattering, laughter, the percussion of wineglasses. Her heart began to race. Jackrabbit in the jail of her ribs. A woman's voice whispering in her ear, "He's waiting for you Madison, you have kept us all waiting..."


And then the black world of the curtains parted and there before her spread a stage. A black box. And a man in a black suit, tall, with long ginger hair. She gasped. A hand shoved her forward so that she was walking very quickly across the stage on its momentum. Applause began. The Magician gestured to her. But she... could not see his face. Just the hair and the dark clothing. But no face. It was all... warped.

"Come along, Madison", he said softly, like a swan gliding across a dark lake. He drew her over and gently lay her across the black box. The crowd's murmurs and excitement began to fade into a polite and suspenseful silence.


The Magician smiled, or what looked like a smile in that strange warped grayness that hovered above her behind long ginger hair. He made a few gestures, gesticulating to the crowd, indicating what he was about to do. He lifted his hand above her and her back arced, unbidden, she smiled and her head tipped back. He lowered his hand and she lay straight once again. Then once more, he raised his hand, as though from his lifelines fell invisible strings, and he began to coax her up, until she was sitting. His other hand brought around, and in time her hand followed, shadowdancing his, to wave at the crowd. Hand of the Magician's to come around and sweep along her lower lip. Urge a smile with those phantom webs attached to his fingertips.

Suddenly, he clicked once and her eyes closed. He lowered her back down gently. Her body limp. Her features placid.



And then, the tall ginger haired Magician who looked so very familiar, why, next he pulled out a saw.

The bus lurched over the oncoming hill, steepening up into a dawn washed incline, when the sound of a coin fallen from someone's pocket struck her awake. The aftershock of the sound like the feeling you get at the end of one of those suspensful dreams where you feel like you're falling, or when you stare at the night sky too long. Didn't they call that vertigo?

As Madi opened her eyes she felt upside down for a moment, like a passenger of a ship wreck turning through the motions of a somersaulting wave for the shore. She held her breath and buried her face into the backpack that sat on her knees until the vision cleared, like it all wasn't really happening. Another jerk of the bus as it cleared a wet street into a crescent and she fell back against her seat, sank down and let out a gust of a breath. Everyone else on board looked to be asleep except for her and the driver and the occasional fit early morning walker. She sighed, sudden, in that sleepy way, and looked off to the end of her seat with its freezing backing that touched her cheek as she swayed to peek over at the floor, where the coin lay flat.

Heads.

She could still hear it spinning a spiral in her head. That rapid sound of swirling silver. The metal fury of a chance. Where will it fall? What will it decide? There was the remembering of a silly line in an old movie that came to mind as she stared in a blur down at the dollar. Do you feel lucky, Punk? Well, do ya?


Sixteen year old Madison didn't feel much of anything other than tired as hell as the sun began to stretch its golden arms through the fogged up panes of the bus and touch her face like cat's whiskers of warmth. She smiled a bit and squinted out the windows, rubbing the dew away with the side of her fist in a squeak. She had no idea where she was. There were some unnatural sights outside. She was fairly sure they just passed a satyr smoking with a horned woman.

Something was tickling underneath all the tiredness and the last vestiges of weirdness the vertigo had left with her, not to mention the mounting doubts she had about walking into that circus show going on outside. Where was she going again? This didn't look like no vacation.


Madi stared at the street through the morning haze. There went that feeling again. A flock of sparrows racing up her spine.

As the bus pulled into its lot the coin followed gravity suite, and began a slow slide down the middle aisle in a scrape.


Oh, that's right. That's what the word was. De ja vu.

When you get hungry enough, you find yourself speaking Spanish pretty well.


Warning bells tolled. And they didn't stop all her way home, the tang of bile still fresh in her cold mouth as she padded along shakily. Felt like she had had her gut ripped out and sewn back together. It was stinging and aching. Perhaps a visit to the Riverview for herself would work about now, but she didn't have insurance or money so the idea was defenestrated as quickly as it had come in.

Clumsy with the chains she eventually got herself into the thunder house and climbed all the rungs back to the loft where she dumped her bag and all but collapsed along the length of it, her face blanched and the skin under her eyes puffy with pale violet and pink from her half an hour of agony in an alley, some secret-keeping corner of West End, as she threw up Artsblood's potent and pointed offering.


She couldn't ignore this anymore. The fact she had been unable to hold down her food for a few days at all was one thing, but now Arts' words called back as she lay slack in a cool sweat.


"Pennies over the eyes. And last meals. Something to direct that pretty mind to?"



She was lying if she said she didn't want to know who Magenta Grail was. And what that had to do with her stomach punching itself up.

The sound of the roof and its clatter-tempest was, in this state, the proverbial nail down the chalk board of DEATH. She might have laughed at herself if the sensation were not so intense. She groaned and rolled over, and again, and again, before passing out in delirium and exhaustion and pain. If she hadn't have been so starving she would never have accepted that tray of goodies. Beware Those Bearing Gifts. But that cake was screaming her name. Madi, Madi, eaaaat me.


And oh boy, did she regret it.

Coincidence

After a few days in the old factory, Madi felt intrepid and inspired and decided to, in the glare of the day, give the large space a proper look over for any secrets that lay waiting, anything of use to herself to be added to her backpack and to secure a few doors with a few more chains. She took a wander along the perimeters first, running a hand along the faded blue paint listening for hollows. There were a few jacks and busted pipes she stepped over. There was a large U-shaped ramp inside but it was covered with a sheet and there was little else around it to tell her what the warehouse had been used for, exactly, in its hey day. As she turned away from the gigantic sheet she gave a start as a loud crack tore through her ears, painfully, and she jumped down, hands over her head and freezing in place. Something had given away under her sandshoe. After a few forever-long feeling moments, she got the nerve again to stand and walked over in the badly lit corner to see what she had stumbled over.


What lay there, now busted, was a gun. With a long but elegant nose and an ivory grip. It was of the design her father preferred, that he kept outside while taking his last smoke of the night on the coffee table; a revolver. She reached out and lifted it. It was scolding hot from the explosion, and while the barrel was now more black than silver, it was otherwise okay. She turned it over in her hands delicately as it was so hot, rather taken with it.


It was added to her bag not long after, with a sense of attachment. It felt so right in her hold. Like something long lost.

The hardest part is getting to the bottom of the story.

There are no pages here.

There are smiles. There is skin. There are shadows. But there are no written words for her pale fingertip to trail across, like paths she could walk by daylight, lit by the ink of a road..

She stepped off the map...


In a land faraway, soot streaked her face as she tilted it to the sky. A sky unseen because smoke streaked the air, became a object, a sense, a tactile thing more than breathed and coughed. It was the landscape. And she ran and she ran, and she hid in the broken down building that harboured the last of the people. But the last were dead, except for her, and the great wars had hidden them in walls. So she had only her smile and her skin and her shadow. She was shipwrecked in the desert.


One day, a young woman takes a drive from a cliffside to park her cadillac beside the dumpster at the back of a diner. She gets out and thinks nothing of her history, of her future, only of the great weight of sleep. A sleep that is not death, nor consciousness. It is a place unto itself. She pops the hood of her boot and gets in. Time exchanges.


One day a young girl gets off a bus and collapses. She is kidnapped by time, stown away on winds she never rode in all her years flying with it, like a witch on horseback, and she was given a second chance.


When the clock stops, time comes alive.



No End, nor Beginning.

Siltt, 95 miles from Nowhere

"So you want your pain?"

"I want my life!"

Kalais regarded the young girl steadily as she kneaded her hands along her own stomach, across the billowing cerulean of the silk blouse. "You want your pain, you are willing to be widow, to be kidnapped, to be stabbed by the man you come to love? The future is in your hands. Hands that are, of now, sweet and pure. They will become corrupt."

"I want my life!" The young girl began to weep, salt water running silvery trails down her pale, baby-doll face.

"You had a chance to start over and you give it up because you--"

Young Madi shoved Kalais back, watched the Errant stumble.

"You stole my life! I told you that I would give you what you want, but stealing my experience does not help. I don't want to start over. I want to be ME!"


Kalais' face darkened as if with thunderclouds unseen and she clicked her fingers. "It is done, girl. You will deal with us gods no more."


The sky went black.