Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

A lost engagement ring. “Engagement” being action and power, as well as passion and commitment.

He wants to ditch this monkey on his back, this entire magical, mystical motorcycle ride.

And he does. The motorcycle lies on its side, smoking tires spinning. He bends over to brush a long, lusterless lock of hair back from the pale face on the ground … and recoils.

The face is a map of decaying fungus, iridescent with rot.

He is up and running. Down a dark, deserted road, naturally.

Not so naturally. He’s running toward something, a black pyramid topped by a rearing stallion etched in flaring neon light.

It’s her! The real nightmare. The steed the fairy-tale knight urged up the glass mountain again and again, as he failed to surmount it again and again. To win the princess.

He understands that dreams are often the outpourings of subconscious punsters, like the literal nightmare. He’s got a split mind, both creator and hapless creature of himself, of his banged-up mind.

Then he’s running through a place he knows, the neon-sign graveyard in Las Vegas, faded in the sterile sunlight, larger than life, clownish. All bones and no flesh … flash.

As if turning on his dismissal, the world goes from sun soaked to black velvet painting. There is noise, music, as loud and raucous as the blazing neon images clashing all around him.

He is plunging down a dark rabbit hole, swinging out over an abyss. Instead of crashing down into the blur of life and motion and light below, he swings into an angular zigzag of a tunnel, running again, bouncing off the reflective black walls.

Then … it all opens up again into light, the warm glow of lamps against the darkness, and the whole cast is onstage, in costume, posed for a vignette fit for an Addams family portrait.

He can finally stop running, trying to escape, because he knows and can name each face.

This is where he was led and to where he has to return.

He assumes a confident persona, donning his own costume.

Flames flicker against the soot-blackened walls of a fireplace, but their red and yellow tongues are too regular to be real, and they flash a spark of gas-fed electric blue. Yet their false heat warms the room’s cherrywood paneling and highlights tufted leather couches and Empire satin-and-gilt chairs.

“Czarina Catherina predicted you’d never come back to us, but Carmen always knew you would,” a portly man in white tie and tails says as pompously as the White Rabbit, speaking from his position of power standing alongside the fireplace.

From his tone, Carmen is the handsome Spanish woman in her thirties lounging on one of the black horsehair-upholstered chairs. Her clothes and coloring are a study in black, white, and crimson. The name pricks Max.

Max bows to her acknowledgment, then turns to the other woman present.

This is the usual “medium,” a woman in her fifties or sixties, blowsy and exotic in her own commanding way, wearing a gold lamé turban and caftan, with a name as fussy as she is. Czarina Catherina.

She speaks in a surprisingly deep yet quivery voice. “Carmen said you weren’t dead.”

“You commune with the spirit world,” he answers. “What do they say?”

“Imposter,” Czarina Catherina charges, her voice thick with accusation. “Max Kinsella fled the Neon Nightmare the night the Phantom Mage fell to his death at that very club. Why would a murderer return to the scene of the crime?”

Before he can answer, she adds, “Besides, you don’t at all resemble the Mystifying Max.”

He turns to where she is staring and finds his entry door has become a floor-length mirror.

Dreams will do that: go out of their way to seal off any logical means of escape.

He sees four people behind him, the two women and the formally attired man he suddenly knows for a stage magician who’d worked years ago as Cosimo Sparks. The second man is tall and dark-haired and so familiar-looking. It is Max Kinsella, looking as intense and secretive as the poster for his stage show. His long-retired stage show.

So who is the star of this dream, the man facing him in the mirror?

Max feels a strangling spasm of disbelief.

Sean stands there instead … as he’d never lived to be: tall, broad, and husky, the curly red hair now auburn and spiky with some trendy gel, grinning like a death’s head come back to life.

While Max stands gaping, Carmen slinks up behind him to curl crimson-taloned hands over his shoulders.

“Don’t go so soon,” she croons in an Irish accent. “We’re just starting. Do you like my engagement ring, darling?”

He stares at the huge fiery opal framed in diamonds. He’d given someone a ring like that, but it had been smaller, finer, more tasteful. Exquisite.

“It’s synthetic!” he protests. “It’s not real.”

Next his dream self would be shouting, You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

With that thought, he meets Sean’s hazel eyes in the mirror and watches them darken into expanding pupils, a pair of emotional black holes to suck his sadly split selves into their own heart of darkness.

Silent Partner