Odd Couple #2

The rain was drying up, its last few drops squeezing themselves away from the skeletal cloud which had held them.

“I’ve been wondering when you’d notice me,” the Ghost of Bugsy said to Zem. He smiled to find himself face-to-face, finally, with this personage who crackled at his edges, whose borders were only roughly reliable, who was there, not see-through, not wavering, but who seemed less than solid. “I’m surprised it took you this long,” he grinned.

Zem took the Ghost in, considering his natty shoes, his hat, his slim dark suit in between. His smile. They were neck and neck in the smile sweepstakes. The Ghost’s pearly-whites were sharklike, promising more rows behind, multiple line-ups of teeth, each one more serrated, sharper than the one before. “I can’t use you,” Zem muttered.

The Ghost laughed out loud. “No, you can’t! Is that what you were looking for? Another slave to do your bidding? Sorry, Charlie, not this guy.”

Zem looked him up and down again. “What are you?” he asked.

The Ghost spread his pinstriped arms wide. “I am Mr. Las Vegas, chum,” he said. “You should have checked with me before you put the deposit down on this place. I think people have been selling you things they didn’t own.” His teeth glinted as the light along the Strip brightened. The chasers and neon sprang up, eager to fill the space, no longer weighed down by the heavy torrent.

Zem rolled his eyes, spraying what little rain was left in all directions. The Ghost ducked, good-naturedly.

“I don’t need you,” Zem said. “Be prepared to sink back down into the earth as people forget you.”

The Ghost chuckled. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he winked.

“I am unstoppable,” Zem said. He might have been commenting on the time, pointing out with a yawn that the rain was letting up and there still might be time to hit a show, or go out for a late dinner. “I command nature, itself.”

The Ghost winked again. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this town doesn’t care much about nature,” he said. It was a joshing confidence, an open secret shared with a rube before the big swindle was pulled. He almost leaned over to elbow Zem in the ribs.

Zem did not deign to step back to avoid him. “Nevertheless. I have business,” he concluded. “Go your way. Do what you want. This city is mine, now, and I’m going to do–” for one moment, his look grew cloudy, as he focused on something invisible, “wonderful things with it.” He narrowed his gaze, fastened his black eye-absences back on the Ghost. “I think that’s all we have to talk about,” he said.

The Ghost quirked his lips in a show of consideration. He shrugged. “I guess so,” he agreed. “Good luck with what you’re looking for,” he added.

Zem laughed at that, out loud and booming. The trees nearby flinched, and a wind picked up to eject the last few raindrops. “I don’t need luck,” he laughed. “There’s no luck in Vegas anyway. You should know that. Better than anybody.”

Bugsy shrugged again, and turned to go. “It’s all a game, buddy,” he said. “And even if the house wins, we show the customers a good time first.”

“The house still wins. Even the customers know that.”

Again, that same shrug. “Then why are you here?” Bugsy asked. He took one step away. “See ya,” he called, and strolled back down the Strip. He started whistling.

“Because I’m the new house,” Zem yelled at him. He imagined crushing this obnoxious interloper. He pictured himself rising up, then swooping down, a cross between Leda’s swan lover and something darker, nastier, made more of talons than feathers. He felt the shapes of whirlwind, of storm flit through his mind and fingers. He’d love to throttle that self-satisfied throat—

He looked again. The Ghost was gone.

No hero there. Zem turned, restless, and let himself dissolve, sink back into the other world that underlay the physical. He sent his senses out.

In the old days, heroes had been easy. Zem cast his senses out through the city. Just one foolhardy soul, he thought. He caught a glimmer. Ah.

And then, as he flowed toward it, tasting it, another thought struck him.

Or two.

His grin caused ripples in the aether like the heated air shimmying out from a go-go dancer’s bared body. Heroes and monsters, both, he thought.

He flowed in a new direction, rushed in an unhurried way. He leapt blocks, miles, and reached his goal in the flick of a wink, in less time that it took for the Big Bad Wolf’s drool to descend from his snout onto Little Red Riding Hood’s forehead. He’d round up his forces one by one, mold them to fit his needs, array them for the final battle.

Everything I need, already waiting, he marveled.

It was good, so good, he reflected, to be a god.

NEXT POST: LITTLE RED SMOKING HOOD AND HER FAIRY GOD-DRAG-QUEEN (Friday 1/29)

Rachel Goes Uptown

Upper Manhattan lay like a stage set just waiting for its big production. An avant garde version of The Nutcracker, perhaps, or something else fantastical and Russian. The snow lay on the ground and along the bare branches and in the gutters as if it had been sifted there. The dark branches on each tree were illuminated; shadows and curves that had been invisible before were shown to their best advantage. God, in his office of Most Holy Decorator, had come down and made Manhattan over.

Rachel stood at the edge of a baseball field in the northernmost reaches of the island of Manhattan and looked across the diamond to the mysterious foothills and forest at the edge of her vision. Between the fog and the dark, those hills were playing peek-a-boo, coyly slipping a leg out and then covering it up again, hinting of deep dark mysteries and pleasures that they wouldn’t show her.

She took a deep drag on her cigarette. The New York winter had taught her a new set of skills: how to smoke while wearing mittens. She could now pop a cigarette out of its pack, light it up, and manipulate it in and out of her mouth without ever exposing any more than her lips to the cold.

“’Orrible Honoré would be proud,” she muttered, and the thought of sharing anything with her former boss disquieted her so much she pulled the burning stick out and stamped it into the ground. Her heavy snow boots, slick with slush and flat as an elephant’s hoof, which Testy claimed were better suited to hiking across Siberia than strolling up and down Broadway, squashed the cigarette all the way into the mud beneath the snow.

“This is the most uptown you can get and not fall in the river,” Testy had told her. “This is where New York got started. Right over there is a the tree where those Indians sold the whole place for thirty shekels, or whatever it was.”

“I think that’s another story.”

And then they'd gone back downtown, and Rachel had never been up this far north again. But tonight, when Belle had repeated Testy’s message, she’d remembered this scene as if it had happened yesterday, for some reason, and now she stood here and looked out over the ball fields with the mist running the bases and the apartment buildings silent to her left and right, and she’d felt certain, somehow, that Testy was up here.

Somewhere. It was a big park.

What in God’s name was the drag queen doing wandering around a dark and abandoned wilderness in the middle of a wet and foggy night? Or any night?

“Although all the rapists and murderers are probably Downtown in their nice, warm apartments,” she said to herself. What self-respecting criminal would stay out on a night like this?

Rachel gave a heavy sigh, pulled out her pack of cigarettes again, successfully performed her mitten trick without lighting her face on fire, and struck out across the field and into the dark.

NEXT POST: ODD COUPLE #2 (Monday 1/25)

Odd Couple #1

“Sphinx!”

Sphinx had watched Bugsy approach. It had been impressive, an act worthy of the top spot in any of the big shows, if only it could have been fit on a stage. He’d walked through the Strip traffic, cutting diagonally across the eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks, and buses. Somehow, he’d never been hit, or run through, or whatever would have happened if he and a vehicle had arrived at the same spot of pavement at the same moment. He'd moved through an unpredictable string of clear spaces that danced around the busy lanes, Fred Astaire tripping lightly through a succession of spotlights on a shiny black floor. He reached Sphinx and stepped up onto the sidewalk, where the pedestrians just happened, like the cars, not to need to be precisely where he was at that second.

“Impressive,” the monolith murmured.

“What?” he preened, then continued. “I need to talk to you.”

“Speak,” Sphinx invited.

“Where is Venus?”

“Venus?”

The ghost sighed heavily, showily. “Yes, Venus. I know she comes to you. I know she trusts you. I can’t believe I’m the first person to ask. Where is she?

“You are not a person at all,” Sphinx corrected. “As far as I understand you, you are an embodied legend, a marketing device made manifest.”

“More manifest every day. Where is she? What do you know?”

His tone wasn’t strident, but it was insistent.

Clearly the ghost wasn't going away without an answer. “She came to me,” Sphinx started slowly.

“Yes? When she disappeared from that show?”

Sphinx did the thing he did to indicate nodding. “Yes. She was upset. This Zem—”

Bugsy snorted. “Cheap s.o.b.”

Sphinx paused. He wasn’t sure what Bugsy’s relationship to the newly resident god was. “Zem,” he repeated slowly, “had upset her. He had plans for her that... didn’t please her.”

“I know all this,” Bugsy waved a hand in annoyance. “I want to know where she is now.”

“She is in hiding.”

“Do you know where?”

Sphinx paused. If he’d had the equipment, he might have licked his lips. “I do,” he said slowly. He couldn’t lie. It would displease the Moon.

“Where is she?”

Sphinx looked at his visitor. The ghost, the image, the Legend of Bugsy. Bugsy himself, not Benjamin but Bugsy, the name and idea his original, human progenitor had despised. “I will not tell you,” Sphinx responded. Bugsy made a fist, grimaced, raised it and brought it down upon the railing surrounding his marsh. A few tall grasses seemed to bend as if with wind. A tourist or two stepped farther from him.

“Why not?”

“She so wishes it,” Sphinx took refuge in formality.

Venus had not, specifically, asked Sphinx to keep her whereabouts secret from this Bugsy character. But she’d said she needed sanctuary, solitude, Sphinx’s protection. Surely, that included absolute secrecy? Sphinx watched inexpressably as Bugsy grappled with his answer.

“How soon will she come back?” he asked finally.

“That is up to her. But—” Sphinx relented, “I think it will be soon. Or, not long, perhaps.”

“Soon or not long. That’s your answer?”

“That is an answer. An acceptable response to your question,” he said.

“It’s not acceptable to me.”

“Still,” Sphinx said, as if they were having a quiet philosophical discussion, “it is acceptable. It is as close to my meaning as I can come, I believe.”

Bugsy looked down at the sidewalk, stared in disgust at its cracked and bleached face between his natty shoes. “You are infuriating, Statue.”

“That is not my purpose,” Sphinx allowed, “But it may be my refuge, for now. And hers. Let her have her refuge, Las Vegas Legend. We beings which are halfway between real and unreal must stick together.”

“...if Zem is going to go down in flames, you mean.”

“Whether he is or not. We must agree, or at the very least not oppose each other. There are few of us, and the world is large and varied.”

“And most of it is pointing right here right now.”

Sphinx would have bobbed his head, half a nod, half a bow. “This does seem to be so.”

“You’ll let me know when she’s ready.”

It was not really a question. It was also not — quite — a command.

“As she requests,” he more or less agreed.

“That’ll do, I guess.”

And then a gold-tone limo declaring Totally! Nude!! Showgirls!!! glided by, and the ghost or legend of Bugsy Siegel, with one last look over his shoulder at Sphinx, grabbed onto the flickering, shadowy light it put out and caught a ride around a corner out of sight.

“Thank you, Sphinx,” the goddess sighed.

“Certainly. Although I thought you liked him. You said he was charming.”

“He is. But I can’t be seen now.”

Sphinx, regarding the usual midnight crowd of admirers and camera snappers, observed drily, “That’s obvious. How long do you mean to keep things that way?”

“Till the end comes. Till Zem has to fight.”

Sphinx pondered that. He wished that he could look into Venus’ eyes.

But she was on his back and he stared forever out across the Strip.

“What will the end be?” he queried.

“I wish I knew,” Venus sighed, and Sphinx heard her retreating, stepping back toward the monumental hind-quarters where she would withdraw and stay silent for hours or days on end, vanished and waiting.

Sphinx wished, not for the first or last time, that she’d wait to disappear till they were both finished with the conversation. Venus, he ruminated, had misapprehended the question, and so he was left in the dark in the middle of a mass of complications and goings-on of which he understood practically nothing. His own goddess, whom it might have seemed logical to ask for guidance, was new this week, and therefore utterly unavailable. And even if she had been full, and lying bloated in the sky for Sphinx to see, she was notoriously unhelpful about answering questions.

Maybe that was the hallmark of divinity, Sphinx thought.

NEXT POST: RACHEL HEADS UPTOWN (Friday 1/22)

Zem Zips

Zem zipped, exultant, through Las Vegas. He laughed out loud as he went, driving off the rain and making it scatter.

It would be hard to say just how he traveled. He felt as light as he had ten months earlier when he walked through McCarren International Airport, arriving in town after all the millennia alone and in darkness.

But this time, he wasn’t walking.

He wasn’t flying, either, as he’d done in the jet coming here, or as a bird more times than he could count in earlier years (Leda, for one, had never again looked a swan straight in the eye again,.) And he wasn’t riding in a cab driven by a talkative driver, or past all the hordes of tourists on the Strip in Magnolia’s hot and sticky limo.

He was... going. He swung among the elements. He burst through the rain as if it were a bead curtain, and left it swinging and tangling its strands into knots as he passed. He crushed a path in the desert air, soaking up the sluicing rain as greedily as a sponge left over from whichever aeon had seen this desert valley filled with an inland sea. The dark made way for him, and the jiggling neon and chaser light waves broke apart to go around. The night bowed submissively out of his way and he laughed at it, reveling in his own aggression.

He laughed.

This was worthy existence. Human beings had no clue.

A hero. He’d come out here to find a hero, someone gullible enough to jump at the chance to serve him, but also strong and able enough to be useful. It wasn’t just about finding Venus, as he’d screamed at Magnolia. That was only the beginning.

Champions had been so easy, in the old days. They practically lined up, begged for opportunities to risk their lives. You couldn’t help but have an army of heroes attending you, if you were a god in ancient times. But now... He sighed. A tiny crackle of light escaped and shot like a spent ember across the sidewalk into an ornamental fountain and sizzled there. The water from the fountain splashed and played with itself, too stupid to know it wasn’t the main attraction while this storm was on.

Zem turned, and raindrops sprayed away from him. They bounced off him, leaping out in all directions. Obedient minions, raindrops. He smiled. He prepared to go again. But which way? Where should he begin the hunt—

He paused. He squinted, more or less. He saw, far down the Strip to the south, another figure sluicing rain. Not a human. A ghostly shape, only given substance by the water sheeting through the air. An absence, so to speak, within the elements.

He stared harder. He might as well give the figure a try. Who knew what he might find, on the one rainy night of the year in Las Vegas, as the Age of Humanity wound down? History was in the making. Maybe this meeting would be historic.

He went with increasing speed.

NEXT POST: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS #1 (Monday 1/18)

Miss Honoré Alone

Miss Honoré sat at her desk in the dark depths of the Extravaganza! Theater all day and night. She left only rarely to make a circuit of the dressing rooms, passing disconsolately by Venus’ door, and looking for signs that anything had changed, that there was any hope of the goddess’ return.

The magic was gone. Extrav! was dead. Who wanted to see a show with no Divine Beauty lighting up center stage? And why bother going through the motions, dancing, sweating, if you didn’t get to back up the undisputed Most Beautiful Woman In the World anymore? Honoré stayed at her desk, and smoked uncounted cigarettes, and spoke not a word as Gina mousily came and went, and then disappeared and stopped coming in altogether.

“Mother.”

She couldn't ignore that.

“Magnolia,” she acknowledged.

“Are you just going to sit here in the dark, waiting for her forever? I don’t think she’ll come back.”

“Why should you care?” Honoré released smoke that climbed lazily from her lips through the air in the afterglow of its wanton intercourse with her lungs. “That Zem of yours got what he wanted. Nice threat, making her a whore for all the world. He really must hate her.”

Magnolia shrugged. It was a move that almost awoke Honoré’s interest. It had a lilt, it had panache. But then she just released another puff of smoke like a derisive snort. “I guess you’re not really in charge anymore, are you? That god, he’s the one who snaps his fingers, and you jump.” She stubbed her cigarette out and reached for another.

Her offspring frowned at her. She almost scowled, but she was too pretty to pull it off. “How did you — what do you mean, ‘god’?” she demanded.

Miss Honoré actually laughed. The smoke trickled out in all directions, laughing along with her as it ran away. “Oh, Magnolia,” she clucked, “I know everything. Don’t you understand that? And he’s pulling your strings every second.”

“Like you and all those old crime bosses, huh, Mother? Like mother, like daughter. Right, Honoré?”

Honoré snorted, smokelessly this time, then watched sharply as Magnolia moved across the office to sit in Gina’s chair. Magnolia crossed her legs fastidiously, smoothed her skirt, and looked up.

“He’s changed you, hasn’t he?” Honoré said. She watched Magnolia’s fingers, twiddling with the hem of her skirt. She took in her hair, her lips, her breasts and body. All of her was lusher, richer than ever before, and all of her was... deeper. More tangled. Less perfect and arranged. Not so... constructed as she’d always been. “He’s made you a woman, hasn’t he?” Honoré asked. She paused in her smoking, the cigarette burning close by her cheek as she inspected her daughter.

“He treats me well,” Magnolia said. She looked down, stroked her hands one over the other, and looked up again. “And if he’s driven your Venus away, good riddance,” she added.

“Fuck you,” Honoré spat. “And get out. Go and rule the world with him. Be his slave. Till he gets tired of you and lets you whither. I’m sure that’ll be a laugh.”

Magnolia stood up. She ran her palms down her sides lightly. She might have been adjusting, smoothing her clothes, but they were already perfect. She touched her own body, faintly, and smiled. Then she focused on her mother again. “Fine. I’ll be happy to leave you in your hole, here, Honoré. Venus isn’t coming back. And you’ll shrivel up and die here, all alone, if you wait.” She walked to the door, making her exit. “Maybe that’s appropriate,” she said over her shoulder. “God knows this has been entirely your choice, all this—” she gestured vaguely out the door where the warren of dressing rooms and wardrobe work spaces and storage warehouses lay, and up at the ceiling where, two levels up, the stage hulked dark and empty, “instead of anyone to care for you, a family, the real life you could have had.”

“You have no idea what I could have had,” Honoré told her.

Magnolia gave a trill of laughter. It was one of the best tricks her new vocal chords could play. She walked out. “But I know what you haven’t got, old woman,” she said.

Behind her, in the dim, shadowed, smoke-yellowed, deep end of the pool that was her office, Miss Honoré Jerques didn’t speak. She just inhaled.

NEXT POST: ZEM ZIPS (Friday 1/15)

Sleeping Beauty Awakens

Rachel woke up to a sound of pounding and Belle's voice reeding its way through the splinters of her bedroom door to sneak into her ear and poke at her eardrum.

“Rachel! Are you dead in there? Should I call the paramedics? Do you want eggplant parmesan?”

She was sprawled across her bed, still fully dressed. Her homecoming had included a long flight swinging between storm clouds across the eastern United States while the sweaty businessman next to her had tried to pick her up, two hours waiting for her luggage before someone told her it had flown to Hawaii, and then thirty minutes outside waiting in the taxi line with the rain blowing sideways and soaking her head to toe.

Forty-five minutes later, after being treated to a cab driver yelling non-stop in an unknown tongue into his cell phone while weaving through the heavy traffic, looking at Rachel only once to demand, “Where you going? Miss? Miss?” as they crossed the Triboro Bridge, she'd dragged her suitcase upstairs to find Belle shouting at Wheel of Fortune, the cats glaring as if they’d never met her and would rather keep it that way, and Testy nowhere to be found. The tousled bed and oblivion had looked like the best offer she'd had in a long time.

But: "Rachel? Rachel!"

She shook her head to clear it, which she’d always thought was something people only did in movies. Even when she was fully conscious, a conversation with Belle could make her feel more than slightly surreal, so she wanted to be prepared. She got up and opened the door.

“I’m okay, Belle. I’m not hungry. What’s up?”

“Thank god—I thought the cats were going to have to perform CPR,” the aged Rockette told her. Rachel always marveled at the sight of Belle standing up. Not just because she so rarely did it, but also because she was only about four and a half feet tall. Either she’d shrunk or Rockettes had been a lot shorter in the old days, Rachel concluded. “La Testina’s in demand,” she continued, turning to shuffle back toward the living room. “Mrs. Carter called. Something about rhinestones, and an opera emergency. Ha! I know her type!” she announced, one hand on the living room doorway frame. “La Testina called a little while ago, while you were sleeping. Said to tell you she was going — wait, let me think of it… ‘into the land of mystery, the virgin wonderland’, if you wanted to join her. Said you’re invited. I don’t know what that means, miss,” Belle announced, raising an eyebrow and clearly prepping for her exit line, “But if that girl knows from ‘virgin’, I’m a Ziegfeld dancer without a costume. Which I guess I am. Ha!” She disappeared into the living room, but her voice carried back in her wake. “I’m ordering Italian, what’ll you have? Or else Mexican, on second thought. That new place on 103rd has great gazpacho!” A couple cats hurried past Rachel, apparently eager for cold soup to chill their tails this winter.

“No… thanks.”

Rachel had to think to remember what the virgin wonderland might be. And if she remembered correctly, it was hardly a place anyone, even Testy, would want to go in the middle of the night. She went back into the bedroom looking for one of the entertainment guides that littered the city like porn ads did Vegas. Had some club called Virgin Wonderland opened? Or was Testy really, truly trying to lure her into an unpeopled wilderness?

The drag queen was going to get an earful, in any case, if Rachel managed to find her tonight.

NEXT POST: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE GOATS? (Monday 1/11)

A Recap

All right, let’s do a little recap, shall we? It’s a new year, and the many threads or our topless tale are well tangled by now. We could probably all use a little clarity before heading down the final leg of our journey and tying them up into a neat and, no doubt, emotionally satisfying package on the level of, say, Doctor Zhivago or Pride and Prejudice or whatever other brilliant, deathless classic you’d like to mention.

Yes, that’s right, kids. We are approaching the home stretch. The final push. The last climb into the stunning climax. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not just a spotlight or a reflection off a showgirl’s sequins. The end is approaching.

But before you get too sad, let me assure you there’s a lot of ground to cover. And it’s fun ground. Good ground. Up and down and sideways ground, with some unexpected turns included.
So let’s see. Where do we stand now?

Well, our bad guy, Zem, once known as Zeus when he was the Ruler of Olympus and King of the Gods but now reduced to, more or less, just another shady Vegas sheister, has blown into town with a plan to make it over. His number one henchwoman-slash-high priestess, the blousy mayor of Vegas, Magnolia Conner, is running the show for him, directing its developments and orchestrating the new Desert Mecca they’re creating. She is now, because he owed her one, immortal. And just for fun she’s also a genetic woman after decades of being one only by virtue of some complex surgery and ongoing drugs. Who knew? Magnolia’s a little freaked by this turn of events, but she’s also enjoying the perky ass that comes with the deal.

The actual plan, just in case you weren’t paying attention or got confused along the way, is to turn all of Vegas into one gigantic deconstructed temple to Zem, with individual pilgrimage sites or sacrificial altars or other holy service outlets scattered among every casino in town. Visitors will come in droves, once it’s all ready and running, seeking healing or blessing or a million trillion dollars or a tip on next week’s stock prices or whatever else their greedy little brains come up with. And Zem will give them these things, if he’s feeling generous and once they’ve completed a long and arduous series of challenges.

On the other hand, those Olympian gods were never known for generosity. They were much better known for tricksterism. This should not be surprising, given that they arose out of an early civilization’s desire to understand just exactly why the natural world was so unpredictable and why life could sometimes be — not to put too fine a point on it — so shitty. So the ruler of that particularly capricious tribe is hardly your best source for reasoned judgment or mercy or a fair shake, is he? But people love a free handout, even if they know that 999 times out of 1000 the free hand is going to get burned or bitten or chopped off at the wrist rather than rewarded.

Heavy sigh. People are stupid, aren’t they?

But that’s what’s going on in Vegas, with a little sub-story about Venus, the Goddess of Love, the old thorn in Zem’s side from their Ancient Greek days. She’s been around Vegas for decades, and has tried a couple ways of driving Zem out, to no avail. Most recently, she was a showgirl — and who, I ask you, would be better suited to parading around mostly naked than the immortal Goddess of Love? Really. — but that ended (badly) when Zem and Magnolia tried to draft her as the centerpiece of a new love slave/sex shop site they’d planned. Oh well. The show she briefly starred in, Extravaganza!, is now dark and its manager, the infamous Miss Honorė Jerques (secretly Magnolia’s mother, but mostly just a world-class, iron-plated bitch) is skulking around its dark hallways chain-smoking. Sad. But pretty funny, if you ask me. More about Honorė as the story winds up.

And then, off in New York, there’s Extravaganza!’s other semi-famous showgirl, Rachel Ferguson, who allowed herself to be carried off by her one-time dresser, the simply fabulous Testy Lesbiana, drag queen extraordinaire and overall wise woman of the tale. Testy has been handed a commission by Venus (helped along by the ersatz guardian angel of Las Vegas, the ghost of Bugsy Siegel) to track down an old friend of hers, an unknown character whom the goddess believes may be the only one around able to stop Zem. Hm… is this another god, ready to surface? One of those heroes of old who do daring deeds and slay six monsters before breakfast? A new action movie actor? We don’t know yet, but all signs point to finding out soon.

There’s also been a fairy tale, but that may be completely beside the point.

And now… here we go! Fasten your seat belts, brew your coffee, and enjoy!

NEXT POST: THE BEGINNING OF THE END (Friday 1/8)

The Seer Blinks

The phone kept ringing, but Lilith had stopped answering. Ever since she and Cheryl had read the cards together, she’d been researching. The jagged puzzle pieces that had been scraping the corners of her brain all year, teasing her, had fallen into place, and the picture they made was horrifying.

There was an aetheric catastrophe coming, an otherworldly eruption; a great rumbling, spiritual juggernaut that would flatten the world as she knew it, rip its heart out and eat it for breakfast. The earthquake that would set it off — which was, even at this moment, warming up and vibrating, ready to crack open the faults and spread its destruction — was Zem, right here in Vegas.

Now, her days were filled with scouring the Internet and local libraries. There was more to learn in the arcane world, as it turned out, than even she had ever imagined. After the first few weeks, she thought she could have earned a Phd. in Supernatural Studies. After a few more, she thought she could have established a whole university.

She’d learned that, whereas Wicca had carved a nice, well-organized placed for itself on the web, druidism was nearly absent. Egyptian magic existed only in rumors. Spell databases were often mistaken for recipe files by search engines. She once spent an hour researching a two-page list of individual ingredients she’d never heard of, before she re-read the introduction and discovered she had a chocolate-kiwi mousse recipe in front of her, not a spell for calling a familiar.

The real motherlode turned out to be medieval European magic. Between the seven million midwives desperate to save their lore before they got burned at the stake, Hildegard of Bingen and all her mystical, monastic sisters, and the multi-million dollar industry of housewife witchcraft that had sprung up in the U.S. and abroad since the Sixties, there was more raw data than she could ever use or even read thoroughly. It was all free and, in fact, pressed eagerly upon her by practitioners from Maine to Baja, every one of them thrilled at the prospect of someone finding their little collection of spells and traditions useful at last.

She spent a day and a half investigating the Books of Revelation and Daniel, in case Zem turned out to be the Christian Anti-Christ. But there were no Horsemen in evidence, and the world was not experiencing more than its normal quotient of earthquakes or wars. The only dreams and visions seemed to be hers. So she checked the Bible off her list of sources.

A short treatise on supposed millennial prophecies by Nostradamus caught her attention for another morning. One verse spoke of “ancient power rising up to wreak havoc”. But when she tracked down the original text, it turned out to have farming, not world conquest, on its mind. As far as Lilith could tell, the old French monk had been seeing part of the Potato Famine, or possibly something to do with pesticides. Perhaps Nostradamus endorsed organic gardening, but as for Zem and Vegas, he was useless.

She’d begun dreaming almost immediately after that last reading. Her vision of Gwendolyn’s death in the harem, and of Tim’s and Bobby’s fates turned out to be only the preview, the teaser, the coming attractions trailer for the big visionary release to follow. It premiered on the backs of her eyelids, night after night, a truly independent film festival that refused to give her any rest.

She saw strange building projects. The construction itself wasn’t untoward — hotels in Vegas were always building something. But this city-wide project was like nothing that had come before.

She saw hordes of new visitors, all looking hopeless. Parents carried hollow-eyed children from hotel to hotel. The lame and infirm struggled. The rich and famous came to hear oracles, and received secrets that allowed them to manipulate the world’s economy. She saw whole nations disappearing off the map, their gross national products mere pin money for unscrupulous investors with a useful tip from one week in the future.

She saw doctors jumping out of buildings, hospitals shut. Drugs or treatments for any complaint more lasting than a headache disappeared from pharmacies the world over. Why bother with a doctor who might or might not have a cure when there was real healing in Nevada? Why bother researching anything when all the answers lay in Las Vegas? That the answers, or the healing, or any help whatsoever would be kept purposely inconstant didn’t matter. Healing was so much better than the long-term half-hope modern medicine could provide, any odds were worth it.

Whatever one’s needs were, they were free to be had in Southern Nevada. Someone would hit the jackpot. Why not throw everything away, and take your shot in Las Vegas? What good were life and love and hope when compared with one chance in a million, if that chance were for a sure thing?

The world gained certainty, in the visions that Lilith lived through. It had no need for further progress.

Lilith tossed and turned, and didn't sleep well.

NEXT POST: WHERE ARE WE? (Monday 1/4)