Something pulling at the varicose vein on the back of her leg. Insistent, like an animal tugging at its blooded prey. She determines to disallow it. To refuse such a foul interruption ... this, and all, interruptions! Our Lady is not dream-guiding to surrender power and control. She would have her majesty.

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Our Lady conjures an all-white room. For she, white-ness symbolises an all-residing condition of purity, and hence is true to chance and rich of potentiality. As well, white is the no-colour colour; it is achromatic, hue-less, and therefore indicatively regal. Accordingly, she savours lording it, even in the pronouncing of its name. Not so much speaking as breathing it, with the aspiration of the 'h' exaggerated - ‘Hw-ite’ exhaled, through her semi-pouted, open lips. 

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She enters her projected Hw-ite room, mindful that her actions, like her inclinations, always beget questions. Her own as well as those of others. 

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She ponders. Quickly decides. Verily, a regal Lady must ever be bold. She would play both ‘Knave’ and ‘Dame’ to pretend her own questions, and forthwith, to buck them: 

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“So why only white?” she has Knave insolently ask.

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Dame huffs and sneers. "Begone your 'Why?'! I've brave deeds to laud here, not your callow puzzling to resolve! I have availed myself of this supernal chamber. Guided myself towards it. Willed myself to enter. Now I will dream my whats and ways through it. This I shall, without explanation, as I feel moved or caused to!”

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“Do call it ‘Place Magique’ then?” follows Knave. 

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“A feeble terming, wretch,” Dame retorts. “Naming it so cannot ‘splain such a place of becoming, nor yet secure a key to its opening. You are here at my beckoning only, and merely for my verbal jousting. You have no other claim of comprehend. This chamber’s powers are gleaned only by and for myself – for I am she who dreams it. I, only, can describe and conject the balms and ambitions I need and desire for my wake state. I am Dame. I would have it so. And ‘so’ to cleanse and soothe me, not mesmerise me with some paltry magique! 

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“Do then say it ‘Transports’ thee, Dame?” Knave ventures. 

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"Nay ... though I grant, 'Transforms' might be near it." 

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“Say ‘Purifies’ then?” 

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"I might concede such ... given a true Hw-ite, purged of "Red".

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“Oh, thou hast ‘Red’ still included then, Dame!” Knave mocks. “Be that for some hungry lust that lingers in thee?”  

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"Red, but to purge, not to sate, lewd and fool Knave! To allow … or, let’s say ‘To effect’, my anointing. I would concede, by more pious mouths than thine, this could be said."

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Our Lady gladdens herself for defending her dream-shaping thus, as ‘Dame’. But her Knave reacts unexpectedly, repulsing at her mention of piety. She sees it first only as a grimace crossing the face he quickly turns away, but when he turns slowly back to look at her his visage is feigned as grin, yet focused on her with animal-like menace. It paralyses our Lady in fear. 

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She curses her recklessness in casting Knave with an excess of godless impiety and a surfeit of mischief. In her excess confidence she has foolishly dream-born a character able to draw on the malevolent potencies normally imputed to the legendary Trickster. This entity is now in her Hw-ite dream room with the power to overwhelm her Dame character’s life-force. Worse still, even to shape-shift and incarnate himself on her own corporeal flesh and life-blood! 

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The emboldened Knave begins to gather himself in a dark and ghostly form above her.

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Our Lady makes Dame look away and cower, but Knave transmutes into a ghoul and immediately drags her dream form to the centre of the room. He rips at the back of her skirt, exposes her leg wound then strikes at it. He drags his animalian talons above and below the severed hole in the calf  … bites at the raw flesh wound, repeatedly, ravenously ... slavers in the blood. 

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Dame screams a striking pain unbearable ... yet too, a pleasure-pain, screamed profanely exquisite! 

"Feast, ghoul,” she cries. “I cannot deny thee! Why would I so? I dreamt the Knave that became thee! Yes, stay, please, yes!" But her pleads then turn to wails. "No, you crave too much! I must beg for relief. Please desist; stop, ghoul, and begone!" 

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Dame gasps as wet crimson still spurts from her leg. Her blood splatters the Hw-ite room’s walls with bright streaks and dark rings. Some coagulates in mid-air to form gory patterns before her eyes. The room shakes and spins, seemingly un-held around her. She lets herself be carried with it and for a moment intuits this will lead her to be free. She looks expectantly for escape but gauges only endless walls to the room. There is no parting ceiling, nor shifting floor! 

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Unexpected assaults on her ears, then ... shrieks and howls, coming from the ghoul. He is hurtling this way and that about the room, his curved claws finding no hold on its blood-smeared, edgeless surfaces. 

Dame senses a suddenly emboldened injection of Our Lady’s dream-force behind her. With new anima she stare-shapes a high, narrow window and lets the centrifugal force of the Hw-ite room blow its leaded panes out. She has the screaming, half-crazed ghoul sucked through the opening too. Then, mustering her heightened dream power she thought-forms an arched doorway leading out to a drawbridge. At her bidding, the Hw-ite room’s spinning slows. She counts on three ... and dream-leaps across it ...

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... To soft words in her ear: 

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"Highness, your Highness, you can wake up now."  

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A sharp smell in her nostrils ... the salt of hartshorn. 

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Her eyes open. 

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The physician, peering at her ... passing a container of leeches behind him ... to his assistant.

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"Where am I?"

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"The bridal room, m'lady. Your Lordship insisted on it. You were taken by the fever, but you've been bled. You will soon feel the better for it, we pray."

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"Where ... what about ... the ghoul? … banished … Dame and I sent him to …!" She strains to raise her head to look for the window.

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The physician gently eases her back against her pillows."A ghoul? Nay, m'lady, I fear you have suffered a momentary mesmer. No such godless phantasm has found opportune to trouble the blessed amongst us here. Nor assuredly to lay any malcontent on your own pure soul. Please believe us and take your rest now." 

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He smiles at her, nods his respect, and steps away from her bed - at which the back of his medical assistant comes into her line of view. A tall man, clearly of muscular shape, with long and wavy black hair spread across broad shoulders, he is leaning over a side table notching together the straps of his master’s medical case. This done, he remains still for a moment – holding his bent over posture as though he knows someone’s eyes are upon him. Then he rises, turns, and looks directly at Our Lady. His black velvet cloak draws apart as he does so, revealing a crimson coloured waistcoat. This draws Our Lady’s attention, as do the matching crimson gloves he has half-tucked under his waistband – unusual, she thinks, not only for their colour, but also for what appears to be their particularly long fingers. 

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Our Lady becomes aware that she and the assistant are consciously eye-ing one another intently. He is clearly oblivious to his impertinence. She is unusually silent and questions herself for holding his stare and not upbraiding him. Though her un-regal behaviour disturbs her, she gives leave to herself on the grounds that it is but her curiosity...

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She assumes her complexion must be pallid and wonders, with some concern, if her expression appears fearful and is, so, attractive to her observer? The physician’s assistant is a user of lip rouge, she notes, and one of those who follow the fashion of having their teeth sharpened. She finds his ardent stare lecherous and lupine. 

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On impulse, Our Lady feels at her leg to be sure there is no animal.   

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John Rathbone Taylor lives in Sheffield, England and is convener of a co-operative writers’ group called ‘Many a Tale’. He says he turned to the “serious mischief” of writing stories only after retiring from work in 2012. Composing fiction helped him “mentally shred” all the weighty plans and reports he had been obliged to write as a director in local government! 

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Most of John’s writings explore the nonsensically comedic, yet philosophically deadly serious style known as the ‘absurd’, but he is more driven by story and character than genre. He has been published in print by Running Wild Press (novella), Huddersfield University Press (short story) and Dreamscape Press (flash fiction) and has a number of short stories and flash pieces published variously online by: Bewildering Stories, Fewerthan500, Literary Orphans and Matter Press.

 

Bienvenue au Danse, John.

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