Mayfair

When the door of the booth closed, I found myself in pitch darkness. After a moment, I reached to open the door again, thinking the booth had malfunctioned, but the door didn't seem to be there anymore. It also seemed like the seat of the booth had vanished, along with the floor. In fact, the entire booth had vanished, and I was floating in black nothingness.

Well, finding Mayfair was turning out to be as weird as the rest of the crap that had been going on lately.

I floated awhile before an image began appearing, the kind of afterimage that is imprinted on your eyes after staring at a bright light, but quickly became realistic and lifelike. What appeared was the design that I had seen on Tub'la's book and tattooed on the angel, made of what appeared to be a multicolored diamond of a size that dwarfed me. The colors in the design began to shift and strobe, faster and faster, making my eyes water, until they finally resolved into a picture of Jack and I, sitting in a private room in Grindlebone's bar. I felt a jarring sense of being in two places at once, as I felt like I was both in the scene and watching it from somewhere behind my head.

From my divided perspective I watched my life of the past few weeks run again, from the moment before Tub'la and his men made their entrance to the room at Grin's. The dream of the angel, committing a kidnapping for Jubjub, and the meeting with Vard flashed past. Then came my abduction by and escape from the nightmare creature, which led to my strange arrival on the deck of Sachiko's ship, the Void Dog. Cobo Landing, the Blind Lady, being taken in by the Sig Nomad, my trek across the primordial desert; all of these happened again, and I felt each sensation associated with each experience. Awe, terror, desperation, safety, pain, comfort, thirst; each came back as I lived through the appropriate scene.

Finally, my life came again to the small information booth on the quiet street corner, and again I stepped inside. And darkness enveloped me, again.

Another period of nothingness passed, until finally more images began to appear.

I saw myself as a youngster. Living on the streets of a dingy city, I would snatch purses and wallets for money. I saw myself threading my way through dense traffic, a constable in close pursuit. I dodged and weaved my way across the street, then dove through a tiny hole at the base of a wall. Before the constable could make his way over the wall, I'd sped across the lot behind, kicked open a wooden door that lead out into an alley, and slid through a small window at the base of the building. I'd already skinned the money from the wallet and dropped it in a furnace by the time the constable's feet pounded by the window and out to the alley. Sit tight five minutes, then saunter casual-like somewhere to buy food.

But I could see that this time, I'd cut my left hand good and long on the wall as I rolled through it. And over the next months, I watched the infection spread and kill the hand slowly. Felt it, too, in the hand I didn't have anymore. It hurt, and slowed the younger version of me down enough that I finally got nicked. Time in the Gaol for theft, time in a government home for not having parents, time with doctors getting my dead hand cut off. Time fighting in the yard, finding out how to poke out eyes with my stump, how to hit the solar plexus right on. Then, one day it all went away, except for a flash here and there, nothing I could make sense of, except that the crimson metal hand that replaced my real one would flash by now and again. Then nothingness.

A huge image of the hand appeared, turning in the darkness. I felt a cold interest from the void around me, and I knew that whatever had studied me was studying the hand just as closely.

The angel design reappeared alongside the hand, and images of the angel and the book locket superimposed themselves behind it. Vard the demon swirled into view next to the angel.

As I thought the word 'angel', a sense of wrongness came from the void. An image of mind destroying beauty and light flashed in front of me, a feeling of purity and power came along with it, which made me cry out in shock and pain. The image was too much for any tiny being like myself to bear.

That was an angel.

What I'd seen in my dream was... angelic. That got a feeling of rightness from whatever it was that was surrounding me. It wasn't pure enough to be an angel. And Vard wasn't a demon, he was demonic. Neither one was more than a pale shadow of what the presented themselves as.

After the feeling I'd gotten from the picture of a true angel, I took a moment to feel grateful that whatever was running this show hadn't felt the need to display a true demon.

More images, with accompanying understanding, came to me. The angelic and the demonic didn't want me, really, they wanted... my hand? Yes, something about my prosthetic was what had attracted them. Tub'la and the nightmare creature, too, they had wanted to remove the hand from me. But the void around me, which seemed to know so much, couldn't say why the hand was important. It hadn't been able to unlock the blank period in my memory, which covered the time when I had come into possession of the hand.

As enlightening as this all had been, I had been getting more and more aggravated by the high-handed manner in which I'd been treated since entering the booth. I didn't like having someone, something, rummaging around in my memories. So I closed two of my eyes, and opened the third.

I wasn't in darkness anymore. I was surrounded by coruscating light. The booth, and whatever space I was now in, they were both extrusions of a higher dimensional being. This was Mayfair. It wasn't a person, moving by hidden pathways from world to world, but something above us; not a super-being, but a supra-being. Mayfair was holding me like a man would hold an insect, except that Mayfair could see inside of me, and into my mind.

With my Eye open, Mayfair's messages were crystal clear. It couldn't tell me why the hand was so important, but something in it held the key to something that a lot of people wanted. The hand couldn't be taken from me, or the hand's intelligence would rebel against the taker. But if I gave it up freely, it would be of some use in discovering whatever it was it held the key to. Some who were searching for the hand wouldn't care about that, and would kill me and take the hand just to keep others from gaining access to it. Mayfair had managed to divine one thing from my fractured memory: the name of a place where the hand might have originated.

Seeing the totality of Mayfair was more disconcerting than the rerun of my memories, so I closed my Eye and returned to the blessed darkness.