Heads turned as she walked through the door—conversations stopped mid-sentence, glasses halted halfway in their journeys to mouths, the record in the jukebox scratched to a halt—all in the space of a moment, as the heart of every man and woman in the establishment simultaneously skipped a beat in awe.
Her dress was a flowing dream of blood and flame, her hair a storm of darkest midnight.
She glided with inhuman grace through the crowded room, knots of people parting for her in her maddening approach to the bar.
“A drink, milady?” Andrew O’Donnell cocked a smile at her and raised a glass. No lesser man could have managed as much, and even Andrew, with a confidence cultivated over decades, almost stumbled in his delivery.
She gazed at him appraisingly, her eyes of storm-wracked sea looking through his façade to the innermost depths of his soul before she chuckled, a rolling thunder that he could feel deep within his abdomen. She licked her lips, “A drink would be lovely.”
“Whisky?”
A pearly-white, shark-like grin showed itself through the crimson of her lips. “Sure. I love a good spirit.”
Andrew gestured to the bartender—unnecessarily, given the way he was rooted to the spot. “Two shots of your finest.”
The bartender sprang to life, startled from his reverie. With practiced, almost reflexive movements, glasses were filled and placed on the bar. Andrew raised his drink. “To beauty?”
The woman smiled again. “Very well. To beauty.”
Taking a swig from his glass, Andrew studied the creature across from him. She had curves in all the wrong places—impossible forms that would make a geometer blush. There was an undulating quality about her, even while she was seemingly still. Her legs were like something from an Escher fever dream, as negative space became leg and vice versa. Horns curled upon her head like a crown or writhing mass of serpents. Her skin was bone white. Or was it raven black? Her hair was deep sea green. But hadn’t it just been blood red? She was, in short, like no woman he had seen before.
But there was something about her that seemed strangely familiar. Perhaps it was simply the familiarity of a beautiful woman, the aching reminder of the incompleteness of man, an Adamic yearning for one’s lost rib or a Platonic yearning for one’s severed half. Andrew raised a hand. “Care to dance?” The woman took it, and as the pair found themselves on the dancefloor, the jukebox shuddered to life once again.
It was an eerie song, raw and powerful, with shrieking violins, piercing flutes, a sinuous bassoon, and a driving, relentless beat. It was a song that Andrew had never heard before, but which he knew by note, echoes of something, something—but it was gone. As Andrew danced with the woman—and oh how she danced, spinning, whirling, writhing, her hair a luxurious, flowing set of drapes parting to reveal the changing scene, then closing again at the end of the act, the woman sometimes meeting his eyes from across the dancefloor with frightening intensity, sometimes so close that he could almost breathe her in—as Andrew danced with this woman, striving with all the energy in his feeble mortal frame to match her grace, her poise, her passion, he felt something coming up from somewhere deep within him, heard a voice whispering almost-comprehensible words just beyond his hearing, so that when the woman moved from the dancefloor to the exit then paused, throwing a glance of her eight segmented eyes over her shoulder in a way that was as much challenge as invitation, Andrew found his feet, without any conscious input from his brain, carrying him across the establishment to follow her out into the night.
The street outside was quiet. A streetlight flickered overhead. The street itself, usually busy even at this time of night, was completely empty, though parked cars lined either side. And directly in front of the entrance to the bar was a carriage.
It was a thing of steel and shadow, and it dwarfed the cars around it. Strange faces leered at him out of the hubcaps, and the wheels were wreathed in Saint Elmo’s fire. Harnessed to the front of the carriage were a pair of skeletal beasts, colossal megafauna from some ancient prehistoric age, with great fires beating within their ribcages and smaller flames flickering in their eye sockets as they turned to look at Andrew in curiosity. The woman smiled at him, and with a gesture of her taloned hand, the door to the carriage swung gracefully open. The woman floated into the carriage and then, extending a tentacle, helped Andrew in.
Andrew sat across from the woman, a part of him still in awe. What was he doing here? How was it that he was sitting in a skeleton-drawn carriage with a being of such breathtaking, awe-inspiring beauty? As he tried to piece together the events that brought him to this point, he saw a smile twitch at the lady’s lips.
“So, Andrew, do you know who I am?”
Andrew shook his head. Had he told her his name? “I don’t believe I do, my lady.”
The woman chuckled. “You will.” She turned her head to a window, gestured to it. Andrew looked out to see the city whipping past, cars motionless in their lanes warping to allow the carriage through. The city fell from sight, to be replaced with a landscape Andrew had never seen during his waking life. To the left, black earth, run through with cracks of glowing red stretched away to steel-blue mountains rising against a sky full of strange stars. To the right, cliffs, and then a vast green ocean swelling and crashing under a storm-wracked sky. The carriage turned to the right going up a winding road with dark, forbidding trees arching overhead before pulling to a stop in front of a large house. The doors opened and Andrew got out, helping the lady to the ground. She smiled as she put her hand in his.
“Come,” she said. And Andrew followed her.
They did not go into the house, but instead went down a path to a cliff overlooking the ocean. The woman gestured, and Andrew looked out across a silent sea to the moon, hanging blood-red in the sky. The air was still, and a smell of a sort of sulfurous petrichor hung in the air. There was a crack of thunder, and suddenly, Andrew knew where he was. He turned to the woman standing beside him. “Madi?” he asked.
The woman smiled widely, fangs visible in the moonlight, as Andrew drew his arms around her. He looked into her feline eyes, then brought her to him, planting a kiss on her pedipalps. “I knew you would remember,” she said.
And he did remember. Long nights as a child filled with what he first took to be nightmares. Otherworldly planes of existence. And a strange, ever-changing young girl whose name was Madixcthertakni, though in his youth, he could only call her Madi. He remembered her comforting him in his sleep after his traumatic move at the age of ten. And he remembered the last night, when she had told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, that her father, the king of the depths, would not allow it. But he also remembered her promise that she would find him one day. And she had, all these years later.
The pair walked back to the house. Madi gestured to the front door. “Stay a while?”
Andrew smiled. He would stay. And as he said so, looking deep into impossible eyes that held within them both the dark of the night and the spark of the fires of dawn, he felt himself falling into madness.
A madness indistinguishable from love.