Mage the Awakening - Legacies the Sublime.pdf - Mage - The Awakening - RPG

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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