Mage the Awakening - Legacies the ...

Mage the Awakening - Legacies the Sublime, new World of Darkness, Mage - The Awakening

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The Hanged Woman
Louisa-Jane. Oh, Louisa-Jane. What have you done to
yourself, Louisa-Jane?
There it is again, running through her head like a
mantra. Lucy suppresses it, takes a deep breath and
surveys the wreckage of her home. Every picture, every
ornament, the TV, the stereo, all smashed, the white
stone walls daubed with obscenities, the word
bitch
dominating the end of the lounge in huge, red spray-
painted letters. Lucy leans against the doorframe, her
stomach like a ist in an icepack.
Picking her way across the broken glass and the
slashed, smashed, overturned furniture, she maneuvers
into a position where she can see into the sound room.
The mixing desk has been eviscerated. Its electrical
guts are strewn across the room, the decks torn apart.
Five boxes of twelve-inches overturned, their contents
smashed into black shards. Lucy crouches down, picks
up a few fragments of vinyl, reads the bits of white
label still left, one, two, three, four. “Fuck,” she says.
Irreplaceable.
Lucy lets them clatter to the loor, runs her hand
over the stubble on the top of her head. She feels a
hangover coming on. It’s 8:55 a.m.
• • •
You should have been there last night. Lucy Sulphate
plays the Party in the Park! An hour-long support set
in the open air, three thousand people dancing under
the Swansea sky, three thousand pairs of hands raised
to the air, three thousand bodies addicted to bass — a
magic time.
Ten minutes into the set, Lucy looked up, and saw a
lone igure among the dancers, an older man, not moving,
not dancing, staring right at her, mouthing words lost
in the thump-thump-thump of the bass, reaching out
with the weight of his malice into the revelers (
children,
they are hardly more than children!
) around him.
Lucy put a hand to her mouth, bit at her thumb. The
key changed, every disc becoming an incantation. The
sparks began to play across Lucy’s scalp again. The
droplets of sweat on her head evaporated, one by one,
in little cracks of ozone.
This is my home ground,
she
thought.
You’re not doing this again.
Something shifted
in the world.
The old man stumbled, jostled from behind. He faltered.
A shove in the back. An elbow in the face. Blood run-
ning from his nose, he began to lose conidence, tried to
change tack, tried something blatant, lailed out, capsized.
The energy in his hands sputtered, went out. Lucy, her
tears popping into steam, pushed a bit more, added a
note of dissonance into the mix. Someone kicked the old
man’s legs out from under him. He went down, and no
one saw him go, no one felt him under their feet. Lucy
did not allow the crowd to care. Lucy reached out her
senses. She felt him die. She went cold inside.
• • •
The kitchen’s trashed, too, but Lucy inds the plastic
kettle in one piece. One of her mugs is intact, and — a
miracle — whoever trashed the lat didn’t bother with
the contents of the fridge, contented themselves with
ripping the cupboards off the walls. Milk, then, and
water, a salvaged teabag, and, ive minutes later, Lucy
has a cup of tea. She cradles the warm mug in her hands,
leans against the work surface and stares at the kettle’s
cord. It’s got about six feet of lex on it. She inishes the
tea, puts the mug down, investigates the cord, discon-
nects it from the kettle, snaps the cord in her hands a
couple of times, shakes her head, puts it down.
Then she sees the object sitting on the threshold
between the kitchen and the lounge. She steps over a
heap of broken plates and cups, picks it up: it’s just
a Kirby grip.
• • •
They met at a club, of course. Sharon and Mal brought
a friend, a girl. She had cheekbones like knives and
hair as black as her eyes, straight, clipped back, shining
like black porcelain. The girl stared at Lucy and smiled
in an odd way. When Lucy danced, the girl joined her,
danced close to her, hips brushing against hips. Later,
they all headed back to Lucy’s for chill-out drinks.
As they walked along the esplanade, the girl stayed
close beside Lucy, talked to her, reached out and held
Lucy’s hand in cold, graceful ingers. Lucy let the girl
hold it, wondering instead at the strange luttering in
her stomach.
The irst time they kissed was a week later, and after
they parted lips, Lucy said, “I’m not gay.” The girl
withdrew her hand from Lucy’s cheek, smiled, raised
an eyebrow. “Who are you telling?” she said. They had
sex for the irst time that night, urgent, terrifying,
new. Each time they made love, the girl left before
sunrise. Lucy wondered if the girl had powers of her
own, suspected that the girl had cast some spell on her.
Each time, each morning after, Lucy checked, in every
way she knew: nothing.
They began to argue. Lucy challenged the girl, asked
for a little trust, asked where she went for weeks on
end, confronted her with the rumors. The girl told Lucy
nothing, made her own demands.
A month later, at night, by a bench in the park, it
ended. Ultimatums were made. “Please, don’t,” said
Lucy. “If you love me, you won’t ask me this.”
“If you loved me,” said the girl, “you wouldn’t need
to be asked.” No compromise.
The girl claimed betrayal, disappointment. Lucy
begged her not to inish it like this; the girl turned cold,
colder than Swansea Bay in high November, screamed
the word
bitch
into the sky. She got up, turned her back
on Lucy, walked away.
“Hello, Mum,” Louisa-Jane said. Her mother ushered
in, hurriedly, looking up and down the street before
closing the door.
Sitting on her parents’ upholstery, Louisa-Jane
began to feel faintly ridiculous. The shaved head, the
Union Jack T-shirt, the Japanese sunglasses, the fake
fur coat — they might not be so out of place in Miss
Moneypenny’s. Here, besieged by the loral curtains
and the soft furnishings and the china teacups, here
Lucy felt ridiculous, naked and overdressed at the
same time.
Louisa-Jane’s father said nothing at all beyond the
irst hello, recoiled from a kiss on the cheek, made no
eye contact. Louisa-Jane sat on her parents’ sofa with
tea and cakes and exchanged the few pleasantries she
could bear, tried to explain to Mr. and Mrs. Simms
what it was she had achieved these last three years.
Residencies in Cardiff and Bristol, a track on a Ministry
of Sound CD, a couple of remixes with a respectable
showing on the club charts, some modeling. (And the
rest? The magic? The room in the silver tower? The
angels and the devils and the faeries and the witches?
The sparks in her hair? No. Louisa-Jane had learned
that lesson in the hospital).
Mr. Simms kept his silence. Mrs. Simms, politely hor-
riied, said, “Have you thought about what you’re going
to do about a career?” Louisa-Jane did not answer.
By the end of the visit, Mr. Simms had solidiied,
sat perfectly still, gazing at the street outside, did not
acknowledge when Louisa-Jane said she’d go now, got
up and picked up her coat. She was shown the door by
her mother. Becoming Lucy again, she walked down the
path without looking back, knowing that her mother
was not watching her, was looking up and down the
street for fear of seeing someone she knew.
• • •
Lucy clears away the smashed remains of her life
enough to stabilize the ladder, returns to the kitchen,
retrieves the lex from the kettle, ties one end into a
noose as best she can. She climbs, ties the loose end
of the cable to the ring on the ceiling, slips the noose
around her neck, tightens it a bit, hesitates, nearly gets
back down again. She kicks away the ladder.
Her hands go to the noose; her legs begin to tread at
air. Suddenly she thinks,
No, wait, hang on —
• • •
Lucy’s eyes snap open. She is naked, sweating, stand-
ing on the balls of her feet, breathing hard, breathing
rhythmically in time with the crowd of naked, painted,
shaven-headed people around her, breathing in time
• • •
It’s a ground loor studio lat now, but, three hun-
dred years ago, it was a forge. As is the way of things,
certain features remain, now quaint selling points
for interested buyers of heritage residencies, such as
a number of wrought-iron hooks and loops that still
stick out of the ceiling.
Lucy stands in the doorway, still holding the hairclip,
looks up and notices one of those thick metal rings on the
ceiling. She drops the clip, turns and heads out through
the back door, which hangs half-divorced from its hinges.
She retrieves the stepladder from the shed.
• • •
Just for one day, ignoring the advice of her friends,
Lucy became Louisa-Jane again. A beautiful day.
Louisa-Jane looked around at the front garden, un-
changed since she was a girl, felt the lowers and the
privet hedge and the old street welcoming her back. A
sign. She smiled, rang the doorbell. The door opened.
“Louisa-Jane. Oh, Louisa-Jane. What have you done to
yourself, Louisa-Jane?” was Mrs. Simms’ only greeting.
Louisa-Jane reached forward to embrace her mother,
felt her go rigid in her arms, politely wriggle away.
with a battering bass, pounding drums. A chorus of
pipes begins to screech over the rhythm, and, forgetting
who she is, she dances, joins with the people around
her as they sacriice themselves to the beat, whirling,
coiling, coupling through their eyes.
Fire blazes across the sky. Lucy regains herself, stops
dancing, mouth an “o”.
Panicking, she turns, tries to force her way through
the mesh of people, to ind a way off the plain. Hands
grab her, lift her up, bear her over waves of hands and
mouths and eyes. She struggles. A hand slips, and she
falls into the mass of people, head irst. She drowns.
She screams.
• • •
Lucy, clothed, breathless, opens her eyes. People still
dance all around her, but this is different. A party.
The music has the same beat, but now the anthem is
electronic, the bass vast, warm, synthetic. The loor is
circular, glass all around, high above a vast city of stars
– London? LA? New York? Paris? — that stretches
out below for miles.
The loor lurches, slightly; outside, ire rains from
the sky. Lucy goes to the glass window, watches the city
below, consumed in heavenly ire. The hall is untouched.
The music surrounds this place, sustains it. Lucy looks
for the unseen. The music surrounds this place: when
the bass line meets the ire, there’s a cloud of steam,
and then nothing.
Lucy turns to the center of the hall. She sees herself
on the decks, maybe twenty years older, in the middle
of it all, controlling it all. The sparks play across the
older head more brightly than Lucy has ever seen.
The DJ of the apocalypse catches Lucy’s eye, scratches
a disc, adds another track to the mix, and Lucy is drawn
to the loor, can do nothing but dance. She forgets
everything; she is no one, nowhere. There is only the
beat. She closes her eyes.
• • •
Lucy opens her eyes to silence, to a suburban hall-
way not unlike her parents’. A woman, blonde-haired,
sensibly dressed, has her back to Lucy. The woman
crouches over a boy of six or seven, straightening his
school uniform. A gentle-looking man in a suit pulls on
an overcoat. The woman kisses the boy on the cheek,
kisses the man; the man takes the boy’s hand. They go
out the front door. Outside, it’s a beautiful day. The
woman watches as the man helps the boy into a new
Volvo and drives off. She closes the door, turns back
into the house. Now Lucy can see her face: it’s Louisa-
Jane, a little older, but the Louisa-Jane she had always
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