It started at a casino, and the location was not lost on me. Someone was taking a gamble. My family was with me which was the first clue something was wrong. My daughter is still a minor, and would not be allowed on the floor of the gambling hall. As fast as I noted the discrepancy, the dream rearranged itself and suddenly only my parents accompanied me. The buffet receipt only counted for three adults. Only three shirts were offered as loyalty gifts. (I refused mine.) As we left the floor, the doorman only spoke three farewells, as if he forgot he had spoken four welcomes.
But I remembered. I said nothing.
The casino’s loyalty cards carried points, but to access those free spins on the slot machines, I would have to purchase the first spin with my own money. This is not out of the norm, as this is the norm for all the casinos I’ve seen in California and Nevada lately. Usually, the minimum amount required is one dollar. And the dollar itself doesn’t need to be spent, just inserted into the machine. All spins use up the free play credits, and then the player is given the option to continue spending their own money or to cash out what they put in plus free play winnings, if any. So to the player, it’s a no-risk gamble. Whatever money you put in, you get back. If you want. No commitment.
I stared at the loyalty card. I couldn’t refuse it, it was the key to the rooms upstairs. I looked around at other players. They were all plugged in to their machines of choice. The card was attached to a long spring lanyard. All the players hooked their lanyards to their belts or purses to keep from accidentally walking off without it. As I looked around, the lanyards looked less like tethering and more like umbilicals. But who was feeding off who?
“Here. Like this!” My mother snatched the card from my hand and went to insert it into a machine. As she did, the lanyard dangled useless from the card. I had not attached it to myself. “What the hell is this! You’re supposed to attach it to you! What if you walk off and leave it!”
I took the card back from her. “You’re assuming I’m going to gamble in the first place. Which I’m not. I didn’t come here to gamble. Or did you forget why you brought me along?” I removed the lanyard from the card and threw it away. I had not realized how warm the card was until I did that, as it suddenly cooled to room temperature afterward.
“Well, it wasn’t to mope around!”
“I’m not moping. I’m observing. Or does that go against your desires?” I was purposefully trying to egg her into telling me why she brought me here. She blinked dumbly at me. I realized she did not know why she brought me here, and was waiting for me to say something. Anything. A prompt that she could ad-lib her response off of.
How do you con a person? You start by finding out their expectations and using that as bridle and bit. Want them to turn away from a thing? Present that thing as anathema to their expectations. Want them to trust you? Present yourself as a step to their expectations, but not the goal. Leave them with the illusion of control, and they will follow you left and right.
I did not proceed with the usual sniping banter I would have with my mother. That script is too easy, too predictable. Uttered so much, it’s mentally numbing and I wind up thinking about London.
She scrunched her face. “I just want you to have fun!”
I smiled. “Oh, I am.” I walked away leaving her standing there confused. I turned the corner and doubled back around a bank of machines. I saw her, with her card plugged into the same slot machine, slapping at the screen and reacting to what she saw there.
The screen was blank. The machine appeared powered off.
The only lights were around the card slot showing confirmation the card had been entered correctly and around the money deposit slot.
I looked at other players. To look at their faces, they were all enjoying themselves. Smiles, scowls, hopes, disappointment. I looked at the machines. Dull gray, in the manner that unpowered LCD screens present themselves. No lit buttons. No sounds. Only the card slot and the money deposit slot was lit.
“Unsure of which machine to play? Or is this your first time at a casino?” A helpful attendant appeared at my elbow. Black formal dress with a dull red vest worn over it. A walkie-talkie in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Saccharine smile and apparently dull eyes. Apparently. Her whole demeanor was one of a tired supervisor, tired of the same shit day in and day out. But when she glanced at the players, I caught a hungry flash in her eyes. This was her flock, and she was the shepherd tending it.
“Good. Maybe you can explain to me how the free play works? If it’s free, why do I have to put money in?” I intentionally sounded exasperated. Her face warmed with genuine glee.
“Well, first we start by inserting your card…” She reached for my hands and realized I wasn’t carrying the card. “Did you get a comps card? You’ll need one to earn free comps and such. Let’s get you a comps card first!”
“Oh, I have a comps card. And I read the brochure about the how. But I don’t understand the why.” She had tried to herd me towards the customer service counter, but I refused to be budged or even turned. At my words, her hand gripped my arm a little tighter, but immediately let go.
“Oh!” The practiced saccharine smile returned. “Well, it’s all a matter of good faith, you see. We don’t want people taking advantage of our generosity, so we simply ask that you show you are capable of playing the games after the free play is used up!” She chuckled brightly. “But most players continue playing once they find how enjoyable our large variety of slot machines are! Do you have a favorite theme or show? Maybe ‘X-Files’?”
She made me. “Isn’t that show’s tagline ‘Trust No One’? That’s funny and appropriate to find in a casino. No, there’s none here that appeal to me. I’ll just annoy my family already here.” I thanked her and started to walk away but she grabbed my arm again.
“Would be a shame not to use that free play. It’s the casino’s goodwill gesture to you, after all. Would be only polite to return the gesture. Just one dollar will secure it. You don’t have to play the dollar after. You just need to deposit it to the machine while your card is inserted.”
Now, I understand. “Oh. I see. Yea. You’re right. It is just a dollar. And it’s no risk to me.” She smiled with Barbie doll glee. All plastic and hard. “Okay. I’ll torment my relatives and then show them how to play these properly.” She released my hand and smiled.
I smiled as well, an open grin, like a mark that is fully caught in the con’s game. I left her and headed back to my mother. I hovered by my mother, watching her continue to feed money from her purse into the grey-screened machine. I covered my living eye and watched with my dead eye. Instead of taking money from her purse, I watched her pull a bone from her ribs and feed it to the machine’s insatiable maw. I covered my dead eye and watched with my living. The cornea itched, but my sight cleared. Each dollar bill hit a lever in the machine. Sometimes it caused a reaction. Often times, it did not. When it did, a small dose of narcotics was released through the card, through the lanyard, and fed into her body. She would get a little rush, and be back at it again trying to get that rush again.
What my living eye saw was Addiction 101. It could apply to anything that gave a person pleasure. What my dead eye saw, was more telling. It implied the casino was a beast in disguise, using gambling addiction as the means to siphon off the players. Okay. This I understood.
Still didn’t explain why I was caught up in it.
The floor was silent to me except for the motions of the players. They saw flashing lights and heard bells and whistles. The disconnect gave me a headache. I went up to my room to lay down and think this through.
I took the stairs to the second floor and spied an inconsistency when I came off the doubled back landing. The ceiling of the casino floor was at least three stories high with a multitude of gaudy chandelier lights. I should not be able to walk forward over the casino after only 14 low steps on a switchback staircase. I swiftly turned and raced back down the staircase. Instead of emerging onto the casino floor, I was at the main lobby of the hotel.
The casino was now across the street, viewable through the glass doors.
The casino supervisor that tried to get me to use the comps card was now the manager at the front desk. She looked at me and smiled her plastic sheen. “Anything I can help you with?”
“I got turned around and forgot where I was. Heh. Sorry. I’ll be going now.”
Her smile broadened. “If you need anything… any thing at all, do give me a call. I aim to please!” She nodded and half bowed.
The only thing this scene needs is ‘Hotel California’ playing in the background. “My wits. But I’ll have to gather those myself. Thank you!” I waved a practiced friendly wave and walked back up the steps. I wondered which was the beast, the building or the Manager Of All Trades. And why were they trying so hard. Were they supposed to capture me, or just keep me occupied?
I went to my room, intentionally blanked my mind of what (and who) I was expecting to see, and opened the door. “Hey, Honey. Did you have a nice time?”
I smiled at the image of my ex-husband. I have not seen him face to face for 15 years. The dream did a realistic job of adding age to my last memory of him.
“Define, ‘nice’.” I saw two sets of luggage. One bed. A television with local news on. (A bank got robbed, but first, the scores!)
“You didn’t punch anyone at the presentation. Right?”
Okay. No. I’m rejecting this one. “I’m leaving now.”
“But you just got here! Why are you leaving? Don’t you want to at least try and save our marriage? Why do you always run away from me?” He pleaded with me vocally, but his hands were trying to force me to stay.
Bait. Nothing more. I remember why I left him, and why I was the one to file for divorce. I did not answer. I refused to have any further interaction with this scene. I just turned around, walked out of the room, and locked the door behind me.
I walked down the hall and turned the corner. The manager was waiting for me. “I apologize. There has been a mix up with room keys. It’s been sorted out now. This is your room.”
“That’s a helluva mix up.”
She bowed. “Indeed. Our most sincere apologies. Your comps card has been loaded with a greater free play as part of our apologies.”
“Right now, I need a nap. I’ll work out the free play, later.”
I opened the door she offered, and stepped into “my” hotel room. It looked like any other hotel suite for one person. There was a single bed. A small table and two chairs. A kitchenette nook.
The door closed behind me. The manager did not come in with me. I sat in the chair and took a certain cord from my satchel. I tied something like a cat’s cradle in my hands and settled down in the chair for a mental nap. I was tired. To the unwary, it looked like I had bound myself. The wary would suspect something and stay clear. The foolish would be bound the moment they touched me.
I heard someone crying. I opened my eyes to find it was now the middle of the night in the hotel. A family had broken into my suite and was trying to sleep. A baby was crying. A man was in the bed. His wife and three children were on the floor. She was terrified, but I wasn’t sure of who. She glanced nervously between him and me.
I turned on the lamp. He muttered about turning off that damn light because he had to work in the morning. I reminded him whose suite this is. He started to get up to physically challenge me, but when he opened his eyes and took a good look at me, he changed his mind. “You don’t gotta work. I do. Have some mercy.”
“You broke into my suite, took over my bed, and expect mercy? Fuck you. I can snatch what you stole right out of your hands. So shut the fuck up and turn over and be glad I have a sense of humor tonight.” His wife whimpered on the floor in fear. He tried to glare at me with fire in his eyes, but quickly backed down and nodded in submission.
The baby started crying again. It was very cold in the suite, and the family were in thin wraps of cloth. Two young children, a boy and a girl, clung to their mother in desperate attempts to stay warm. The baby had nothing wrapped around it.
For a moment, I forgot this was an elaborate trap. I took the spare pillow from the bed, stripped off the thick pillowcase, and gave it to the mother to wrap up the baby. When she did, I felt a strange taste in my mouth. Like I was sucking on an iron nail. Like someone was bending the dream.
I tried all my usual ways of verifying the integrity of a dream, but they were all thwarted. I tripped the bending, so the dream appears to have been bent by me. The baby stopped crying. The children were suddenly nervous. The father had an eye on me. And I felt compelled to offer more to the mother.
Something is out of bounds. If only… oh wait… I can… “And now for something completely different!” The family looked at me strangely, not understanding the outburst. I spoke the words with surety and did something unexpected and different. I reached down, pinched the fabric of the dream, and lifted the scene like I was lifting a curtain. The family shouted in surprise as their reality was folded up on itself.
I saw HTML code of a live website. It took me a bit to understand what I was seeing, but I realized I was looking at a representation of the hotel room. A large block of code had been commented off when it should not have been. The result was that malicious code was being allowed to run by piggybacking on the broken credentials. What was the malicious code? The code that defined the family. What had broken the credentials? The moving of the block of code that represented the pillowcase. I knew what I had to do to regain autonomy.
I lowered the fabric of reality back down and patted it into place, smoothing out inadvertent wrinkles. The children clapped at the display and urged me to do it again. The mother was rocking her now warm and quiet baby. The father hid his head under the covers, terrified at the implications of what he had just seen.
I picked up the baby, removed the pillowcase, and placed the pillowcase back on the pillow. Still holding the baby, I threw the pillow back onto the bed. The iron taste in my mouth went away. The ‘code’ had been restored before the malicious code could gain admin privileges. The mother began shrieking. At first she cried in English, but the longer I held her baby, the more she reverted to a different language.
It was like listening to English devolving. Vowels cracked into consonants. Plurals ended with ‘ar’ instead of ‘es’. She stood up and began stamping her feet while gesturing wildly at me. Her language continued tracing across the European continent. It lost the Saxon influence. The Latin loanwords. Harsher and harsher were the gutturals. I knew where her language would end up. I was just enjoying the ride.
She ran out of expletives to hurl against me. She gathered up her other two children and rocked them, keening from loss. The baby was snug in my arms, looking at its mother with curious wonder. The father remained hidden in the bed, shaking in fear.
The longer I held the baby, the more the baby looked like me.
A changeling. Other events came to mind, and it suddenly all made sense.
I placed the baby on the floor between its mother and myself, and turned down the hotel room’s thermostat as far as it could go. To my amusement, that was 40F. The inside of a refrigerator. As soon as the cold floor touched the baby’s bare skin, it began to shriek. Its mother begged me to give it back.
“I will. Not yet. But I want to make myself clear, I am not keeping your baby.”
At 60F, the children suddenly became shaggy. Their mother scrambled to hide their changing form from my sight. At 50F, the father’s form changed under the covers, but he refused to show himself. At 45F, the mother’s form started to change, but she resisted.
“Be true to yourself, trollkona.” She shuddered and became a short, shaggy, bipedal creature. She gestured to the baby that had stopped crying.
“Shake the false form off of it, and reclaim your child.” She shuffled forward, picked up the now blue and silent child by the ankle, and snapped its form viciously. I saw a shadow fall off it. She now held something like a cross between a sloth and a pug puppy. The baby troll began screeching anew, sounding like a strangled kitten. The mother cradled it and the baby stopped crying and began babbling nonsense like happy babies do.
I have had enough of this show. I stood up from the chair. “The room is yours.” I handed the troll-mother the comps card that doubled as a room key. “I’m leaving.” The troll children screamed happily and climbed onto the bed. They started jumping in the bed around their father. Their father only growled at them to stop bothering him and let him know when the scary human had left. They only laughed at him and jumped with more determination.
Outside in the hall, the manager was waiting for me. “Are you leaving us, so soon?”
“Yes.”
“But there are so many other sights we have for you!” She stepped forward, reaching for my arm. She stopped when my deployed feathersword was a hair’s width from her neck.
“No. I’m leaving. Good day.” I turned and struck the fabric of the dream’s reality with the sword, slicing a dark line of shadow across the hallway. I stepped through the rip and left that dream entirely.
…
I entered a sandy area. I heard the rip between worlds close and seal itself behind me. Before me was a grand Egyptian temple. The pillars and walls were covered with carvings and bright paints. I had the feeling I had been here before, but I did not recognize where I was at.
I looked around. Far to the south were steep cliffs. The west was open, and had a well worn path leading to the temple. The north was marshy, but showed signs of recurring dryness. I inferred that to the east, beyond the temple, was a river.
I finished turning around, looking at the surroundings, and found myself confronted by a tall and athletic lioness-headed woman adorned in sheer linens and gold decorations. In one hand was a great sword. In the other hand was an ankh.
I grew cold at the realization of who I was standing before, and the implication of where I was. I looked down out of respect and realized I still had the feathersword deployed. I recalled it to my innermost at once and bowed.
“Mighty Sekhmet, Holy Daughter of Ra, if I have stepped where I should not, I accept my fate. I mean no disrespect towards you, Reaper of Men and Guardian of the Holy Eye.”
“You know me.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“And still you came here?”
“Not by willful intention, Ma’am.”
“I remember you.”
“I hope it is a good memory.”
“You fled from me when I judged you. And you did not flee from me when I judged you. And I found the better part was the one that stayed.”
“Ah. I remember that day. But I only remember it from the view of the one that stayed.”
“Then you have lost nothing.”
I smiled despite myself. I was deeply terrified, and terribly curious. Was she going to kill me for standing where I was?
“You have not tried to enter where you should not. Why should I judge you for doing what is right?” She read my thoughts as easy as a scribe reading papyrus. “Also, you are holding my daughter in safety until she recovers. Should I strike her guardian for finding safety with me?”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. The Kemetic Statue. “I have recovered her adornments, but I have not been able to recover her face. Until then, she is trapped.”
“I send my sister to you. She will be able to lead you to where you can find my daughter’s face. Draw your sword, [Fierce One], as what you need will not be given up to you easily.”
She extended her arm to me and a strange warm wind came from inside the temple and overcame me. I had drawn my sword as ordered, but had to cover my face from the stinging sands. When I lowered my arm, I found I was dressed in sheer linens and simple adornments.
Sekhmet was gone, as was her retinue that had come out with her. Instead there was only a woman with the head of a black house-cat with pierced ears. Gold hoops dangled from those ears, and loops of gold chains shone bright against the black fur of her exposed chest. She carried an ankh in one hand, and a small basket in the other.
“Bast, Daughter of Ra. I greet you.”
She said nothing, but purred a deep resounding sound. She took a few steps away from the temple and looked back at me with a very feline disregard. “Are you coming or not?”
I scrambled to catch up with her. Together we walked into the western wilderness. The further we proceeded away from the temple, the more my awareness faded, until the dream ended.