Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of The Platinum Raven by Rohan Quine

On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from The Platinum Raven’s video-book format. On this page is a list of the teasers’ headings only. On both pages, the headings are linked to the teasers on Vimeo.

 

Teaser 1(i), Raven’s bunny in the sunlight

Easing out of sleep into half-sleep, Raven remembers what she is waking into, while carefully prolonging her comfortable haze of mind a little longer. She’s lying in bed at home, with her sleeping boyfriend’s naked warmth against hers. It is early one Monday morning, not long before her alarm-clock will be going off, and bright sun is coming through the gaps around the window-blinds. Keeping her movements gentle so as not to wake him, she squirms around to face him and brushes her black hair out of her eyes. The white sheet fully covers both their heads as well as the rest of them, and the sunlight is passing through the thinness of the sheet, so she has a clear view of this familiar face and body that she loves, that she has loved deeply for a long time now, lying not quite on his back nor quite on his side—her best friend in the world, right beside her in shared comfort and silence here, just where he should be. As far as the angles of his position allow, she arranges herself so as to lie on her side and to feel his skin on her own in as many places as possible, up and down their bodies, but neither so as to wake him nor to result in any discomfort for herself. The result is something between a half-embrace and a simple proximity, touching in three or four places in several permutations of limbs or shoulders but remaining apart elsewhere, here under this warm sunny tent of sheet. The biggest area of space between them is somewhere midway down their length, where they happen to lie curved apart in an approximate mirror image of each other. Raven shuts her eyes and lets herself drift back down into her own haze. Then she half-opens her eyes once more, and in doing this she becomes aware of a third presence, as there flickers up the image of a being she has not seen before—a small white rabbit curled up peacefully upon itself, right here in the rabbit-sized space between her boyfriend’s body and her own, in a state of semi-sleep like their own, its eyes half-opening and its perfectly white furry head and ears making slight movements from time to time, before its eyes close and its head and ears become still. Smiling, Raven whispers to herself in words she soon forgets, then sinks back into sleep, smiling still.

 

Teaser 2(i), icy beauty in the shimmer of the desert

Sitting there chewing her sandwich, she finds herself instead picturing how she might look to a camera that was somehow able to see her from outside this angular Shard of glass and light, hidden deep within its angles, in this small antiseptic conference room, gazing through unknown partition walls and steel and glass towards the lens she’s imagining. This camera zooms in to a close-up of her unfocused, thousand-metre stare, and then zooms back out again to embrace a wider shot including her as just one little detail among a myriad other bodies and objects stuffed into this glass tower. But she frowns, for the tower now looks different from how it did before the zoom-in a moment ago … in fact, it looks like a different tower, and an altogether more monstrous one.

Yes: from the middle of Dubai the tallest building in the world shoots up through the harsh dry heat, to the sky. It is the vaunting, inhuman-scaled Burj Khalifa. Visible from scores of kilometres away beyond the dunes or across the Arabian Gulf, it’s an elegantly complex, telescoping spike, of a stunning, otherworldly fabulosity—its beauty cool, mineral and icy in the undulating shimmer of the desert.

And there she is inside it, just behind the glass, staring west from a window in her 63^rd-Level apartment. Or rather, there is a woman whose face is just like Raven’s face, but whose long straight hair is a beautiful chocolate colour instead of raven-black; and without consciously choosing the name, Raven straightaway thinks of this woman as the Chocolate Raven.

 

Teaser 2(ii), traditional, feel-good, neighbourly hatred

A footfall overhead brings her attention streaking back across the waters and the cityscape, to where she is standing here at her window. She glances up. She harbours a secret envy of her neighbours immediately above her on the 64^th Level, because their apartment contains one of the building’s few and much-coveted terraces. She hasn’t yet found a way of meeting these neighbours, however; for despite their physical juxtaposition, such meetings are not so easy to arrange in an environment such as this, whose cushioned opulence overlays a structure of such unmeltable compartmentalisation that nobody is really meant to meet anybody. If only her windows could be opened, then perhaps she could lean out far enough to twist her body and head around to face the shiny sky and bellow something upwards in a casual and relaxed fashion, through the dizzying height of wind and sunlight, and maybe thereby catch their attention and elicit an invitation to saunter upstairs for spontaneous cocktails on the terrace; but alas, her windows cannot be opened.

Her envy derives not just from traditional, feel-good, neighbourly hatred. It derives also from a lifelong curiosity about how enormous buildings are structured—a curiosity she registers as mildly quirky, which has no connection with anything else in her life. In this case the building comprises twenty-seven cylinders of different heights, with each cylinder’s flat roof doubling up as a terrace for an apartment that’s one storey higher in an adjacent cylinder (except for the highest of the twenty-seven cylinders, of course, whose top has no such subservient function).

 

Teaser 2(iii), the Chocolate Raven’s chocolatiness

Just to think, there were still four residential terraces, each aching to be visited…

For yes, experiencing all of the Burj Khalifa’s terraces happens to be one of the Chocolate Raven’s goals, albeit one that she knows better than to admit to—

“Well there’s a lofty ambition, I’m sure,” sniffs Raven in her Shard conference room. “Most inspiring, I don’t think.”

But it’s no good Raven’s pretending such disdain, for she can sense that this unexpected Chocolate Raven woman is, despite her seeming shallows, a VIP guest within the residence of Raven’s own mind, and must be treated as such. What’s more, Raven is, frankly, rather hooked on her already. Hooked on her flashy surroundings, on her chocolaty hair, on her all-around chocolatiness—on the exoticness of her version of Ravenity, in contrast with Raven’s own. She knows little about this woman yet. But she’s hooked nonetheless, because this lustrously edible-coloured version of herself is standing high up in the most beautiful building in the world, not getting abused down the phone behind a reception desk, but instead surveying the geometry of an entire city as if it belonged to her, and pronouncing blithe, bitchy judgements on most of its inhabitants…

Really, what is there not to like in that scenario, from this windowless vantage point on a Monday morning?

This beautiful Chocolate Raven woman clearly has an altogether different life from Raven’s own. A life of comparative ease and pleasure. She has the manner of an authoritative, well-paid, popular, sybaritic party-animal, who lives in the fabulous Burj Khalifa in the desert kingdom of Dubai.

“And d’you know what?” says Raven aloud to herself, giving her mug of decaff instant coffee a stir. “That’s just what she is. And really, she is so like me.”

 

Teaser 4(i), hair dead-straight, splashing soft

Standing at the far left end of a swanky hotel bar after lunch, looking at the tableau of people on view in the impeccable mirror on the wall behind the bottles, the Chocolate Raven contrives to snatch another discreet look at the figure at the far end of the bar. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt and charcoal-grey tie, he is slim, pretty, watchful, with dark brown hair and big brown eyes, set within a pale face. There’s nothing overtly strange in his appearance, yet he strikes her as being somehow larger than life.

Within a few moments he becomes aware of her. Or was he already aware of her before she noticed him, and is he now returning his gaze to her? Usually she would have a sense of the answer to such a question, but this time she doesn’t. Either way, the same thing is true: within the instant when their gazes meet, his eyes see too much into her.

She imagines this man’s viewpoint on this same wide mirror tableau: standing again at the left side of the tableau (but in only half-profile this time) will be a glamorous young woman facing right, her long chocolate hair falling dead-straight and splashing softly off her shoulder, burning dark against the smooth white silk of her top. This is the Chocolate Raven herself, of course, though he won’t know her name yet. She half-turns her head in his direction, through real space along the bar; and for him, her hair in the tableau in the mirror must therefore be splashing a little differently now upon the white silk of her shoulder, though of course she herself can no longer verify this directly in the mirror.

 

Teaser 5(i), microscopic plunge into calamity

To be sure, this mechanical section, which in itself is the size of a small skyscraper in the sky, does contain eleven more head-spinning, eye-watering and doubtless diminutive terraces that form the flat roofs of Tiers 16 to 26—but alas, these terraces must remain forever aspirational.

Beyond that, in effect, is the silence and vacuum of deep space: just Tiers 27 to 30 constituting the skinny Spire, its interior a dark, tapering, mostly empty metal tube, rising to the Pinnacle. Not a place many people can access; but of all the places in the world, surely one of the strangest to reach.

The Chocolate Raven compresses her lips and sets off on her first approach towards this new-found terrace that has so unexpectedly become hers. The glass door is unlocked. She opens it and steps out across those planks, with trepidation—not so much from vertigo, as from an intimation of something momentous. Irresponsible. Irreversible.

Ahead, the terrace’s edge is bounded in clear glass up to stomach height, with a railing near the top. At her approach to this, an enormity of space yawns up around and into her, pulling her too far forward towards jelly-kneed weakness and the end of all her chances in a hopeless, powerless, microscopic plunge into calamity—

She stops. Acclimatising herself by degrees, she extends her left hand above the railing, then dabs a finger down to touch it.

 

Teaser 5(ii), an inverse Burj Khalifa underground

Holding the railing, she leans absent-mindedly out above the dizzying space beyond it, craning her neck around the side of the tower to peer along the lanes of horizontal lines that recede around its curve—then realises what she is doing and quickly steps back, her head swimming. Ahead of her the city stretches inland, into increasingly sparse suburbs. Over in Muhaisnah 2, she makes out the dismal grid of dormitories at Sonapur—now mostly empty, but for years an expanse of exhaustion and squalor, for a skyscraping labour-camp that spread across the cityscape. Then to the left of these, the airport in Sharjah, where a plane is taking off just now, tiny as a toy. Then the great expanse of desert, as far as the distant Hajar Mountains.

Perched high and tiny up here among the folds of this monster-building’s curves, the Chocolate Raven’s mouth gapes in an O, and a too-empowered force of noise blares out from this O, without exertion…

Was that herself? she thinks—and yes, she knows it was. She herself just produced that extraordinary, magnified bellow, which must only now be arriving over there, straight ahead where the mountains float in majesty beyond the desert sands.

Straightaway this knowledge is vertiginously scary, for she doesn’t yet know if this immense unnatural bellow is controllable or not, but she knows already that its power is so great that it could do disastrous damage. And if it’s not controllable, and if it then insists on emerging at the wrong time (but what would be the right time?), then her life may be finished, in effect, because… A nightmare erects itself, in sketchy form: the Chocolate Raven being quickly identified as somebody, or something, to apprehend and capture and restrain and enclose and imprison, then to sound-proof, then to bury in a tube far beneath the muffling sand, subsequently lowering her deeper, tier by tier, down an ever more unreachable, claustrophobic flue—an inverse Burj Khalifa underground, designed for her alone, a spike-shaped coffin sunk to isolate her further, as far and deep as possible, away from the fragile-eared species she’d belonged to, to bellow at herself in the darkness forever…

 

Teaser 5(iii), horror bubbles out from the mirror-glass

This alien voice that just took possession of her is associated, she feels, with a facial expression in which the mouth forms an elongated vertical slit with small rounded ends, and she realises in fascination and horror that her own mouth, while making the sound, did indeed become just this shape, after starting out as the O.

Her will ejects a jet of steel that hardens to a needle and she thereby hauls herself up from her wash of fear and into a decision: if she’s powerless before the force that just came through her, and if it won’t be explained, then she will run with it. She’ll hunt for the access-points tucked away in plain view within familiar space, she will ferret out the overgrown gates and the spyholes winking in the wallpaper’s pattern, and the keyholes and hyperlinks; and through them she’ll invite, from that realm furled behind the skin of day, whatever eye-like fingers accept her invitation and poke back through at her, slanting up the bedroom air towards her in the dead of night, when mystery and horror bubble out from the mirror-glass.

Streaming off this terrace, her attention slices through the miles of air across Dubai to the mountains, and her glance touches down where her bellow strikes the rock-slopes. And there, a mad-faced tower shimmers up, rising through the haze, perched among the mountain-folds and staring back at her…

 

Teaser 6(i), on Level 152, above Dubai

…And the appearance of that tower is a step too far, she knows. Its silent unfurling and rise, there in the mountains, is less overtly dramatic than her bellow was, but it feels more unnatural, alien, altogether ominous.

She tears her gaze away, returns to the wide centre-point of the terrace and forces her attention downwards, to ground herself in the familiar sight of the street grid running west beneath her. She’s lost track of time; late afternoon has slipped into dusk. The city is almost completely covered in clean white clouds, here seen from above, so only the pinnacles or upper levels of a few skyscrapers poke up through them. They grow slowly pinker while the sun sets somewhere beyond them out of sight over the Arabian Gulf, and then they start to clear away in time with the falling of dusk, so that those protruding pinnacles grow longer and begin their ascent from progressively nearer the ground. Within twenty minutes all the clouds have boiled silently away, revealing the full beauty of the city in this pinky-brown-grey light of early evening. Thousands of lights appear, and soon the entire sky is dark except for a soft band along the Gulf’s horizon.

Presently she will be brave, return to the left-hand end, and look back to where that tower seemed to appear, and perhaps it will no longer be there.

 

Teaser 6(ii), lights twitch and flicker in the sticky air

Sipping the wine, she leans on the rail and looks downwards a third of a mile, to where the lights around the Mall twitch and flicker in the sticky air. A car-horn peeps thin and yellow for a second, like a pin sticking out from the city’s endless thick electric pincushion night-roar.

Since the recent setting of the sun, it has come to seem to her that almost all of life is night. Alone in this eyry, she feels she is dealing now in night alone—the bright black night in front of her, cut with tracks of energy and pricked with coloured points of light. That’s fine; she likes the night.

Across the city, towers shine—some huge and beautiful, but none as huge or beautiful as this one that she’s in. Some bristle close to her; other ones rear up far away, colossal and alone, hard-wired to the same grid of lights. No one could know the whole city well, she reflects: many months might be spent, trekking all through its blocks, to the sad far marches on the edges of the desert.

She refills her glass, taps her cigarette ash off, draws in, exhales, and sees the smoke coil and hang and drift away to where the floodlights catch it from below.

 

Teaser 6(iii), a woman’s song that spans the world

She thinks back perhaps twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, to the extraordinary voltage and transcendence she achieved, through forces of creation she’d not known she possessed, when her mouth went so terrifyingly into first an O shape and then a vertical slot-shape with rounded ends, and she birthed that mad-faced tower on the mountains. And there rises in her now a feeling rather like a rich blast of organ chords across the sky in harmonies that hold aloft a woman’s song whose power and serenity and longing span the world. She knows that a second deployment of these new-found powers of hers will be occurring here, in just a moment or three—and she knows that this time the experience will be much calmer and gentler for her than that first time was.

So, she just starts doing it—and yes, it is indeed calmer and gentler, but nonetheless she feels it as electrically powerful, unnerving and excessive. Her hands grip the railing, as the voltage unfurls from her face and streams sideways, out across the desert to the mountain range. She shouldn’t have this much power. It’s too dangerous, in terms of what she might do with it down there in everyday life, instead of up here now—or whom she might turn it upon.

It’s time to look again, where she’s carefully not been looking.

Her attention shoots ahead, across the burn of the city and the blackness of the desert, to the canyon with the tiny glow of yellow-orange light…

And perched on the rock-slopes, just on a level with her, there is the mad-faced building she erected—still there, obediently waiting for her now. The folly made of iron, with the face of a mad tower: two round windows just beneath the turret, staring back at her…

 

Teaser 6(iv), hair burning white like a negative

So now what? she wonders. And while she does so, they hatch, right there in real time, tiny in the distant tower: fuzzy for a moment, till the auto-focus kicks in, but growing into sharpness as they swell to human size.

It’s a bar scene, she sees. Standing at the far left end of the bar is a glamorous young woman, facing right and thus in profile from this point of view. Her face is half-obscured by the long platinum-blonde hair falling dead-straight and splashing softly off her shoulder where it burns dead white against smooth black silk, like a burnt-out exposure in a photographic print, or a photographic negative of raven-coloured hair. She half-turns her head in this direction, and the Chocolate Raven blinks to see the face is like her own face. So similar is the woman’s build to her own, moreover, and so cleanly dramatic and unique is the opposition of her hair colour to the Chocolate Raven’s own dark brunette version of the same style, that she thinks of the woman straightaway as the Platinum Raven.

The barman hands her a wad of banknotes, which she stows about herself with speed and discretion. Then she stands contemplating the tableau of people on view in the mirror mounted along the entire length of the bar’s back wall above the bottles on the top shelf, looking in particular at the man at the far right-hand end of the bar. He is blond and attractive, his face alive with self-contained perceptiveness. The wide-set fluidity of humour in his eyes makes her think of Rutger Hauer in the desert: well-equipped, through ready charm, to hitch a lift.

She imagines this man’s viewpoint on this same wide mirror tableau: standing again at the left side of the tableau (but in only half-profile this time) will be a glamorous young woman facing right, her long platinum-blonde hair falling dead-straight and splashing softly off her shoulder, burning white against the smooth black silk of her top. This is the Platinum Raven herself, of course, though the blond man won’t know her name yet. She half-turns her head in the blond man’s direction, through real space along the bar; and for him, her hair in the tableau in the mirror must therefore be splashing a little differently now upon the black silk of her shoulder, though of course she herself can no longer verify this directly in the mirror.

 

Teaser 6(v), her devastating, desert-eyed perfection

And on her right will be a young Armenian man of maybe twenty-one, of a dark and delicate beauty in keeping with the silver scorpion pendant hanging at his neck, and whose glass she clinks with her own.

Without warning the Platinum Raven then turns her head further round, in slow-motion, to face this direction, as if she can see though the fourth wall of the bar-room and across the desert, to where the city of Dubai spreads out impaled by the Burj Khalifa’s spike.

The Platinum Raven’s eyes spend a few moments easing with infinitesimal precision up and down this building’s 30 Tiers—then they pinpoint the Chocolate Raven’s little i-shaped dot where it leans at the rail of Level 152, holding up a glass of red that’s lit from within by the dusk-light passing through it here on the roof of Tier 14.

The platinum-lashed eyes stop their hunt. They focus more; and now they stare straight across, cutting clear and cool through the miles of desert in between, directly to their chocolate-lashed double’s own eyes.

On the wet smooth curves of the Platinum Raven’s eyes sits an identical pair of images of the Chocolate Raven herself, ever so tiny and ever so perfect: crouching in the glare of a parked car’s headlights, just beyond the power-station complex on the desert coast, over-exposed in a light that burns her face to white, moaning in pleasure there impaled on a man in shadow, crouching with her luscious straight chocolate-coloured hair across her face, until she raises her head and the hair slides away… And now her own devastating, desert-eyed perfection meets the Chocolate Raven’s gaze full on, electrifying—animal, expressionless, an icon of ecstasy and chocolate and sweat in wailing silence in the headlights, as dust floats around her through the siren-song behind the air.

 

Teaser 6(vi), fem in black, a Scorpio pendant at his neck

The Chocolate Raven’s glance zooms back out again, to re-embrace the bar scene in the tower once more, where beside the Platinum Raven is the other one: the Armenian boy dressed in black, a Scorpio pendant at his neck. No smile there at all, too much tension and exquisiteness and fierce vulnerability.

For him it wasn’t easy, no one-two-three. But here he is—just as if in some club, deep in a city. A sudden smile leaks through, a flush of light across his face, for an instant. Then once again, no smile. Fem in black, for this is realness. So waltz darling, deep in vogue.

—There he is, right now.

Perfection, for all time…

The Chocolate Raven thinks of him as Scorpio, murmuring the name as she watches him, unblinking so as not to miss a split-second’s portion of this advent of an unpredicted figure whom she nonetheless feels that she’s known all her life.

He snorts a line of cocaine from the bar’s immaculate shiny top, then he turns his dainty head to one side and slightly up, to hear the Platinum Raven murmur something in his ear. And only now does the Platinum Raven release the Chocolate Raven’s gaze and turn away, back towards the mirrored bar tableau and her own world, there in the mad-faced tower on the rock-slopes.

 

Teaser 7(i), scratches of voice across the desert

So, from her eyry here, the Chocolate Raven watches events unfolding tiny in that shaft upon the mountain-slopes. The Platinum Raven’s gregariousness with the tower’s other denizens never undermines her striking poise, and the charismatic smile in her interactions seems powered by a universal awareness of her authority. Little of all this lively verbiage can be made out, however, from across the desert. From here on the Burj Khalifa terrace, only snatches of chat make it through the desert dust-storms and the shiny-squinting wind-whipped sunlight, to the Chocolate Raven’s ears; but even these snatches remain incomprehensible. As for lip-reading, she can make no sense of what those three sets of mouths are saying to one another. It doesn’t seem to be English. Are they speaking in Arabic? Possibly; but strange, if so. Scorpio could pass as a native, but not the other two—and how many resident non-natives bother learning more than a couple of words of the language of their Emirati hosts, here in Dubai? Despite her best efforts, those tantalising vocal snippets therefore remain indistinct, like the archaeological scratches of human voices in a faint and intermittent radio signal.

This is mostly a limitation on understanding the Platinum Raven in particular. For Amber doesn’t speak much: he seems rather to embody some inevitable darkness in the building, that prefers to show than to tell. And Scorpio’s presence has a kind of divinely eloquent dance within it, which feels to be more the soul than the sound of the tower.

 

Teaser 7(ii), that elusive apex of fabulosity

The eccentric beauty of the structure gives no clue to its function; but as she surmised, it is in fact the darkest, brightest and strangest of nightclubs, despite its bizarre location. Indeed it is no less than the Ultimate, Mythical Nightclub, because for a couple of recent years it housed a weekly party whose legendary scene cast a longer and richer-coloured shadow through the worldwide conception of the city than any other ever has: in particular, the city as nocturnal playground, stage and killing-floor for those who have the inclination and ability to inhabit the apex of fabulosity; the party monsters who reject the general herd in favour of those avid, self-selected few who strive without rest but always want more. The echoes of its nights have travelled down through the intervening months and years and seeped across the continents—in snapshots and video snippets, in the memories of the chosen who were present and who lived that crazy chic, and in the consciousness of all who have seen or heard or read of this scene before relaying it in Chinese whispers all around the globe. Higher than the underground pinnacle of that elusive night at That Venue, at an hour when the whole crowd was calling down the spirits: higher than the penthouse of that undated night at That Other Venue, in one of those months in that particular year when perhaps … well, if you weren’t there or you couldn’t get in or you didn’t even know of it, then I’m sorry, baby, but you missed the ship. You missed a ship the like of which there won’t be again. Sure, there will be other scenes in other times, with other little life-boats to hop into. But in comparison with those little vessels, this was a crystal ship—an opalescent quinquereme gliding up the coast at night, dispelled by a morning light that still picks out the ship’s glassy wake across the ocean…

 

Teaser 7(iii), exquisiteness in damage under Little Fluffy Clouds

Secondly, in an access of flamboyant love, the tower gave these bright sweet misfits such an addictively hedonistic playland, spread across a labyrinthine floorplan so filled with such enticing spaces and jam-packed with addictive substances, that the misfits were unaware of being turned into beings who would be unsatisfiable at any other venue on earth.

And thirdly came the flowering of the tower, where the lack of any surrounding competition helped it become the clearest channel for all that was suppressed throughout the region. There on its isolated hillside outside any city limits, this place became the epitome of such urban sophistication and sybaritic urbanity as to feel quite vertiginous, certainly for anyone stepping into it for the first time, but even to many of the assorted international party monsters who already made regular pilgrimages from New York, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai and European capitals, in search of the most fantastical and transcendent confluence of subcultural energy anywhere in the world. For here was where white rabbits not only conquered telephone cubicles, but made those cubicles scream and bleed, for the damage they’d inflicted on a million Ravens globally.

Sometimes the whirl of flesh and lights and hazy sound seemed to slow for a moment to a still frame, and eyes of experience would then be caught on camera, in a face amid the swirl—a face you’d half-recognise from before, when you’d seen it on a big screen perhaps, or in a memory seen through champagne upon a terrace under heat-lamps, while the music span forever on that summer night before—wide eyes, prominent and grey, camera-frozen in a face soaked in way too much experience.

At this point the fabulousness of the denizens grew so indefatigable as to become ferocious. The dance-floor was a cat-walk, under little fluffy clouds where the skies went on forever and the clouds would catch the colours—purple and red and yellow and … on fire. And every night the anorexic models floated through, beautifully drugged-out and weak and untouchable, forever down the runways of their airport lanes, each expressionless in damage through the night-lit clouds, with their make-up flashing soft in the lights, like perfection, clad in shreds of lightest silk that concealed the needle-marks.

 

Teaser 7(iv), in Arizona the clouds would catch the colours

The clientele’s long-standing ambiguity of male and female began to become more concentrated, as the rest began to diminish by slow degrees, leaving an increasingly hardcore population of fabulous monsters whose very gazes seemed intent on drawing blood. Soon the club came to be running almost 24/7, still profitably open to passing trade from around the world during regular nightclub hours, but in reality the permanent realm of a loose cadre of what can only be called transsexual death-ghouls—the global elite of that disparate band for whom this natural direction coincided with the means never to have to think of such dirty considerations as money, work or food. The mad-faced tower had become, in effect, a drug-den in nightclub drag.

And onwards it barrelled through the months, with its own unique momentum, pulling world-class DJs in and world-class spending in their wake. With all volume limits removed, the pumping of this building’s music and the flicker of its sky-sweeping images came to populate the whole grand space: over the desert, in between the aeroplanes in Sharjah, over the labour camp at Sonapur, up through the night-time city sky, and up and out above the Gulf.

Within the air came the echo of a tower-spike to match the Burj Khalifa, made of giant plinks of light and shafts of sound branching upward, hard and colour-smooth and perfect—like the dream of a thousand-storey Dubai skyscraper, pitched like a rocket-launch upon a draftsman’s screen with a mega-project soundtrack, to haul in investors. See the tower-spike sprout like an inverse water-spout, up among the mountains; and helter-skelter round its shaft at breakneck speed through the whistling air of night, via software magic, all set to the soundtrack’s stunning flash and burst of perfection and echoes… Two voices glance through this world-circling flash and cool of music: first, a yearning woman’s murmur rises through a howling wind, “Noémi … Noémi … Noémi…”; then that dead, passive, flat super-model voice again, weak and beautiful and affectless and Arizona-damaged, with her fluffy clouds and skies that went on forever, and the clouds would catch the colours—purple and red and yellow and … on fire. You don’t see that—you might still see them in the desert.

 

Teaser 8(i), those party monsters’ skeletal fabulousness

She’s what I want to leave behind me, thinks the Chocolate Raven: a creature of harnessed passion, recompense and mode for desires I had to sublimate…

She pours herself another glass of red from her bottle and lights another cigarette. It’s less than a couple of hours since she first discovered the mad-faced tower, but already she is starting to wonder how she did without it until today. And how recent that was! Can there really have been such a stretch of time before that? And why on earth, during that stretch, did she never realise what was lacking? How could she have failed to realise this? Why did she never protest that it lacked? Why had she never put her foot down, in some way?

“OK,” she thinks, “it’s clearly time we drove there.”

It isn’t hard to arrange, after all: there’s a car, there’s a driver, there is certainly petrol, and there must surely be some kind of route to the tower, for all those party monsters to have chattered and preened their skeletal fabulousness all the way across the desert to its door.

…And hence it is that the Chocolate Raven’s forehead is pressed against the rear left window of a car shooting down a road, dead-straight for hours, through the dunes and across the plain.

Presently the sand on either side of the road gets rougher, giving way to dirt and scrub. Stones push through the dirt, and then the dirt becomes stone. The knuckles of endless rock stretching away in all directions remind her of the tale of a castle she once read and now cannot remember.

By the time she reaches the first toes of the foothills, the weather is turning. The colour of the sky above the road ahead is dirty rust: its surface bellies out with a flicker underneath, then a giant gash of ochre lightning rips through its height. This dazzling crackle stands out a split-second, vanishes—reappears a long half-second—then is gone.

 

Teaser 8(ii), a vision of the Great Lie

Now the car is climbing the foothills. The humming of the engine in the glass on her face is hypnotic. Electric pylons march beside the road, then swing away down a sudden valley with a giant span of metal struts and wires into dark. She catches a sudden glimpse of the tower, far up ahead on the rock-face, before it swings out of view behind an intervening hill. Her scalp gives a tingle.

Vertiginous, she leans forward with her elbows on her knees, feeling she is shrinking in the width of the back seat. Ahead through the windscreen she sees, with a dread-prickle, manicured toy-sized trees shaped as fluffy grey teardrops, flanking the road where it climbs straight ahead. These toy-land trees start swelling as she watches them: top leaves writhing and twigs tight-clenched, all bathed in an odd and windless milky-yellow light. She feels as if she’s shrunk to a speck upon the seat, while the trees quiver ever upwards, as if they want to breathe: the fluffy tears of foliage have risen, so the car now climbs along a corridor of bare trunks as straight as metal bars. A rabbit springs across the road—ears in the headlights—and vanishes.

And now at the crest of the tree-chute, the mad-faced tower once again appears, this time very much closer and for real, with its two brown windows staring down upon her. Around the tower’s base upon the rock-slopes (wreathing the space where the pug hangs sluggish in its pale blue strait-jacket in amongst the struts, spitting sand), a fog churns and eddies. Feelers seem to stir in it, and now the Chocolate Raven’s scalp tightens even more, as a shape like a ram’s head starts from the fog, statuesque as a bust, flings its snout up and bleats while its eyes cut straight down the road into hers with a look of such sadness and loss and desolation that she feels she is seeing something nobody deserves to see: the Great Lie.

Streaks of pain and horror shoot around her through the air, and among this buffeting she half-hears snatches of beauty winging past her in gusts, like a distant music blown around a mountain by the wind. She sinks her head between her legs, here on the back seat, blocks her ears tightly with the sides of her knees, screws her eyes shut and screams out “DRIVE BACK NOW PLEASE…”

 

Teaser 9(i), pink dusk on the city on the Gulf

She puts her phone away and returns to the circular window, where she stretches up her arms, leans her head back and lets her long body squirm. She gazes through the deep squirly brown of the glass, out across the desert, to the city and the ocean. She eases her feet further forward on the wide sill, onward through the thickness of the high turret’s walls, and extends her limbs to touch the round embrasure’s edges all at once: planted there in Renaissance diameter, her arms telling ten past ten and legs twenty-five to five, she purrs in measured harmony and scans the view ahead.

Dusk is falling. Over on her right rise the neighbouring hills, pink and brown in the sidelight. Far ahead, the island in the Gulf is silhouetted on the baggy blooded orange of the sun above the water’s curve. Through the rich brown swirls in the thickness of the glass, she lets her gaze wander down: from the stillness of the Gulf between the island and the shore, to the city on the coast many miles away, spreading inland in a grid of twinkly lights. As her gaze sinks further, it runs across the darkened dunes, across the stony miles of scrub and up through this canyon, whose nearest tracts are hidden by the coping of a balustrade around the rooftop here below her. Just beyond the balustrade a slope of boulders funnels to a precipice of weeds in half a circle like a lip, around a lethal shriek of air a hundred metres sheer and twenty wide, making of this present site a small hanging valley. Planted one each side upon their tails on this coping, a pair of carved seahorses rise up majestically, blank stone eyes flecked with moss and reddish lichen scales, fixed on the clouds over seas out of sight.

 

Teaser 9(ii), transfixed by the Burj Khalifa’s spike

As the orange orb widens, it shrinks around the island, which cuts it then in half—two slopes across the disc now chords moving outward to kiss its upper curve on either side and so extinguish it.

The dance and the flicker of the city grow alive, transfixed by the Burj Khalifa’s spike at its centre: darkness of energy and pulsing of violence, flickered out shaft-wise up through the air, over pink, over mauve, through to indigo and black.

As the sun rolls away around the globe to the west, the higher black weighs heavy, pushing down the lighter colours, so she sees her own reflection growing clearer against it: blonde hair platinum, splashed over brown eyes, cheekbones top-lit, lips curving up together, sensual as lovers.

Of a sudden round her torso from above her snakes a tendril, the first wisp of mirror mist. She grins. Condensing on the window, it diffuses her reflection. She brings down her left hand, and on the glass with her finger she writes out her name across the sky above Dubai—THE PLATINUM RAVEN.

For a moment then, she splits her attention into three: first the panorama, a-flicker in the distance; secondly her name squirling through the condensation (independent of the squirls in the brown itself); and thirdly the slivers of her eyes in the glass, clear again within the newly-wiped width of the letters.

What a night it will be—the mad-faced tower’s very first night of mirror mist!

 

Teaser 10(i), from Western to LaBrea after midnight

He achieved both aims, but at the cost of an addiction that saw him scoring heroin at seedy bars and clubs in Hollywood: at the Study perhaps, or at Tempo or Plaza with the drag queens, or at Blacklight with the derelicts. Or if he could get a lift, at other likely sources further away, like Scores or the divey Jalisco Inn in Downtown (he shakes his head involuntarily, to recall these old names that he’s not recalled for months, but here they are, still tucked away in his memory-banks and popping out now). Chico in Montebello, Suave in Carson, the Annex down in Inglewood—or Jewel’s Catch One, for a bit of scale and glamour. Oh, fuck… They were mean times, cut with flashes and jagged stabs of fun, but always followed by more mean times.

He worked Santa Monica Boulevard with the other girls, in twos or threes if possible but often alone. Scorpio was just a working name at first, chosen on a whim to undertake this paying work, in place of the boy name Angel that he’d grown up with in Asbury Park; but since this paying work was the only kind of work he found himself doing, and these girls his only colleagues and friends, he quickly morphed into Scorpio for all purposes. How well he got to know that long, grungy strip of Santa Monica throughout those months, from Western to LaBrea after midnight: so much verbiage and congregation, business and action there at Highland, near the donut stand, perched on the grimy wall, just beside the bus-stop; or standing at Gower by the disused gas station, sitting by the strip-malls at Van Ness or Wilton, on the bench at Budget rental cars at Orange, or beside that sports field down at Cahuenga, a block away from that hustler who disliked all proximity… Then if the girls’ ships had come in that night, walking west, rich and hungry and closer temporarily, across the city limits into West Hollywood, where a plate of food awaited at the Yukon Diner. Or if no ship had come, then sprawling at the furthest, ever-unwiped tables in the 24/7 drive-through burger joint beside LaBrea—covering perhaps for one another, as they shot up in the men’s or women’s room right there, in a grimy rush of over-yellow mustard and onion-rings.

 

Teaser 10(ii), aquiver and alone on the Hollywood hillside

One night he had a fix already in his pocket, and he and another working girl met, both dressed in boy garb, and drove in someone’s clapped-out car, up to the Griffith Park observatory and sat upon the parapet above the wooded slopes and had their fix. So they sat immobile there; then sweetness, richness and losing track of time… Sitting there poised, poisoned, overbrimming with exhaustion and sensory overload, Scorpio scanned the City of Angels spread beneath him in the black, black heat. Pressed down by this heavy sticky night that never seemed to end—an L.A. night that sealed a day that always felt like the last day of all. The grid of bright darkness and points of coloured light stretched west and south and east to infinity, to suburbs that were so far, they surely wrapped around the earth and came back here, the neighbourhoods melting so together, fading on and on… Cars poured numberless and tiny on the freeways that sliced the flat enormity; then slower on the Avenues and Boulevards, from traffic light to traffic light, flicking north and south, east and west, north and south, east and west; then trickled through the darker grid of Streets from stop sign to stop sign, winking into shadow-view, glimpsed in the gaps between the buildings and the palm trees, residential stucco and security gates, where the lawn-sprinklers sprinkled…

At last the friend had to leave, and offered a ride, but Scorpio said he’d stay there alone. They air-kissed as usual, and off the other went. Then he sat upon his hands on the parapet, right there, his feet above the hillside, aquiver and alone again and hurting with the rawness of a squirt of flesh and nerves among the concrete and steel and the plastic and the gasoline that threatened and addicted him, week after week. Blades, rocks, glass, edges; fists in the shadows of the city, cocked in wait for him, spying out of doorways at the shapes of the contents of his pockets, or to check he was alone; and the gayness of his body in the pools of the street-lights. Hatred and desire and indifference coiled and built around him, oiled to spring. A crackle lit the sky of a sudden in the west (black wires up the hillside, aerials on orange-tinged night above the canyon), but no thunder yet drowned the endless cricket-chirp.

 

Teaser 10(iii), city-grid, night sky, cricket-chirp, canyons

Looking down Normandie, he found the line of Santa Monica Boulevard—there. So further over, somewhere there, was Circus, the warehouse-sized club where that boy had danced who crackled when he looked at Scorpio. Nor had thunder followed then, just tightness and an ache and further crackle when their eyes met, and thunderous industrial music playing loud, then Scorpio’s knowing that the boy had gone. Then beside Circus was Arena where that blond boy, slumming it from West Hollywood, bearing ecstasy, had held him through the night, with his suntan and muscles, then had vanished in the morning. Then had been the thugs in the parking lot with baseball bats, seeing him and pointing at him, nodding at each other, laughing, shouting, veering by degrees across the parking lot towards him, their bats swinging, ready for him, all the while his blood pumping; lowering his head, slowly steering away from them, trying hard to walk with authority and strength, even striding. The thugs came closer—then a bus stopped in front of him, as if to deliver him, stopping just in time for him to hop aboard before they reached the bus-stop too and struck the closing doors behind him…

His eyes refocused as he jumped at the sound of a gunshot from the east. His fingers gripped the parapet. The moon ahead was low, heavy amber in the haze, and suddenly he knew: he must leave L.A. and clean up at the same time, or else he’d never leave and would end up living Downtown, there on Skid Row, sleeping in a box on San Julian or Fifth Street, where once he’d gone to score and smelt the hopelessness… No—never.

He swung his legs up, twisted round and dropped his feet back down, facing up at the observatory. “Angels, I’m leaving you,” he sweetly spoke, and spat upon the ground. “Thanks a bunch, and have a nice night.”

He turned to the city, bowed once, then he skipped away suddenly: across the parking lot and down the hills into Hollywood; across a spell of months comprising struggle and transition; then inexorably here, to Dubai and the tower and its first night of mirror mist!

 

Teaser 11(i), neon flickers in the yellow dusk

Yelps in the yellow dusk, car lights and neon flickers, far below their window, by the club’s front entrance. And down there one night, strangely incongruous, a little child’s voice wavered upward to their window, as frail as a thrush’s egg and cutting through the babble with a question: “What’s a thousand miles above heaven, then?” Scorpio’s waking eyes re-opened on Amber, who drew him close. The bed seemed to sway, like a cradle in the sighs of a summer wind. Reflected on the silver curtain-strips by the bedside, fountains of candle-light shimmered in the breeze from the open window, splashing onto both their naked bodies. Candles burned scattered round the room: a town of lights they awoke to find had died—as the cities of the world would die as well, long after Scorpio and Amber themselves had died and crumbled into dust and to the sea, emitting two entwining strings of fizzy champagne bubbles…

 

Teaser 12(i), there again, the thunder on the left

Side doors lead off periodically from the steep spiral staircase, set into the left-hand wall as she descends several storeys. She jangles the keys, before stowing them about herself, and stands a moment, smiling as the booming of the music makes the staircase resonate. She stops before the next door, unlocks it, passes through and clicks it carefully shut behind her.

Here above the lobby, she can see the punters coming in below her: people paying, checking items in, then heading to the door of the main bar, or straight towards the music down a passage where a wisp of silver vapour licks the shadows. Good evening, mesdames et messieurs, my little monkeys, she feels like announcing, through the rush inside her now: if you’d like your ears to bleed, please form a queue for the bass-bins on the speakers—they’ll be loud. More generally, however, can you all hear the thunder on the left? I hope you can. Are you ready for tonight? Amber’s ready, so is Scorpio, and even her up there upon the tower in the city. The mist tastes nicer if you’re ready for the hurricane, the quicksand, the flames in the night sky, the poison and the dry ice. The flood-water’s right beneath us, hissing up tight through the pressure-fault just below the lobby here. There’s also a grey-lit cellar downstairs, where I bid you lend Amber the keys to your skeleton: the rating will be X, but you’ll learn new things as your guts are mixed with light and sound and shot around the globe. As for me, I thought perhaps I’d stay behind the billows with my breasts pointing upward and my groin pushed out, with my right hand skyward and my left hand on my hip, eyes wide in the silver staring softly through the mirror mist unblinking (if that’s fine with you?). —There again: the thunder on the left. Did you hear it?…

 

Teaser 12(ii), Amber’s past, as the Hitcher

It’s strange, she reflects, that she herself is the only one of this trio whose back-story is quite unknown to the other two. Neither Amber nor Scorpio knows anything of where she came from. And that’s how it will stay. After all, she is an Icon of Platinum Perfection, of a kind whose back-story is never known; and in running this tower she does quite enough to recompense them both for the lack of one.

By contrast Scorpio’s back-story, on Santa Monica Boulevard and before then, is known in therapeutic detail by her and Amber, because he’s needed to tell them.

As for Amber’s back-story, it lies somewhere between those two extremes, in the sense that it’s just as specifically detailed as Scorpio’s, yet can be told in words as brief as those describing the Platinum Raven’s historical lacuna. For although this back-story is an extraordinary one, it is also simple, with an infernal simplicity and logic that are at the heart of this tower of shadow: Amber’s past was precisely captured on film as The Hitcher. The Platinum Raven doesn’t know whether or how much Scorpio is aware of this; nor, if he is aware of it, whether Amber knows he is. But it’s not her place to pry into their relationship in order to find out, and still less her place to spring upon Scorpio the fact that his lover is the continuation of Rutger Hauer’s character after those cameras stopped rolling in the desert, if he doesn’t yet know this or hasn’t yet admitted it to himself. In any case Scorpio has come to no harm, it would seem.

 

Teaser 12(iii), the space of Siberian heart in your eyes

She pictures him, down in the bowels of the building now: the metal stairs clank as he descends nine steps, turns down another nine, his hand on the cold rail, then another flight of steps and on down several further levels. He grins in the dark as he runs his fingers lightly through the dust on the rail.

At the bottom, through a door, is an outside space among the struts that support the tower. Hidden here in the shadows, he can peer out and down, to that long straight road climbing steeply up this canyon from the desert, with the fluffy grey teardrop trees on either side of it.

(The Chocolate Raven blinks and swallows, on her terrace in Dubai.)

Where the straight road ends just below him, cars must twist around the cliff to the club’s front entrance: their lights swerve around through the night as they do so, swinging round cautiously in order not to break through the barrier and fall into wreckage on the far rocks below. Across the city-swelter shines the ocean, where a dog-faced moon leers down like a floodlight. It’s too far away for him to see the waves shivering, but Amber could swear he sees the Gulf’s surface swell and sigh, as if a liquid muscle flexes there beneath the shimmer of the water’s curve… Wasps buzz suddenly behind him. He turns, clambers in between the beams, further inside the hill, through a pale weeping light where the long grass rustles. “I’m on my way!” he murmurs through his flesh, then he halts: there ahead hangs a figure in a pale blue strait-jacket, fixed to a harness on a rope within a wooden frame. Your craze was emptiness, mine was alcohol, comes a voice of sighing shingle through the outsize pug’s face, measurelessly ugly and exhausted and sad. The rope, playing out from the frame, lets the figure down a metre, then stops, so it bounces in mid-air before ascending again, as it has clearly done for years. Now a hum sings thick upon the air, as the figure chokes a sob back and spits dry sand. See the space of Siberian heart in your eyes—I think you know it shows through, sighs the voice at him, falling out tired from the rank grey muzzle to the ground.

 

Teaser 13(i), three Beasts in the mirror mist

The Platinum Raven glances up at the podium across the room, and smiles with a burst of love and pride at what she sees. High above the dance-floor, Scorpio dances amid the silver mirror mist, lurid in the lights—every movement so electric, so mesmerically divine, that a crowd has stopped below him, just to wonder—as with perfect unawareness and control he taps an energy that ought to make him vaporise…

Then she bends her gaze to the DJ booth and grins with a different love. Demonic in that black-wired den up there, working both the music and the lights in the hall, Amber’s making love with destruction and violence, radiant in damage, spinning heaven on a sound-flight destined for hell. “And we’re just getting started,” she reflects.

OK, the night’s a bull’s-eye—so now it’s time to have some fun herself. She settles back upon a flight of steps above the dance-floor, and lets her eyes wander, unfocused. Mirror mist billows at the edges of the hall, across the floor and the ceiling, so the bodies and the music in the middle might be any size. Rust-coloured spotlights burn through the gas, cutting in between the billows in a twitching of shafts, as the sun-spokes flicker through the boiling of the clouds in a speeded-up video. Denser billows split the rays, letting through a little light and bouncing out the rest into sprays so weakened that they glance off every other cloud, are split and then diffuse.

The scene has grown more lurid and her seeing self-reflexive, though she’s not yet lost the knowledge why this is: bit by bit, her seeing is informing the scene. She watches her perception participate in what it sees; sees that interaction bouncing back from the billows; sees it modify them further in the course of bouncing back.

 

Teaser 13(ii), the engines of a town of sound

So here is the gift she gives the world tonight! To every self, a mirror of its own upon the vapour, every mirror made from the self it reflects. This, for example, is herself to the tenth power, carried on the music through the lens of the gas, liberated from the grind of the dragging of a body through the heaviness of weight and fatigue and breakability: her own sound, dark in a flexing of planes coloured black and rust and ochre; dry heat, unnatural as the heat within a russet-coloured light-bulb (day or night unclear, as in a dream or a painting); hellfire, lazy with the sureness of power unqualified…

The music draws her up above a vast plain, whipping at the sky and digging down through the clouds. Line, space and colour lean together with its pull. From its underside it fires down a shaft that descends with the slowness of enormity to hit the plain and carry up the engines of a town of sound. Hardly has the shaft reached the ground than another drops ahead to tread the plain a moment later, then another and another at a constant rate… One layer upward, the middle notes stroll, growing creamy in their freedom not to fall but climbing further with their own strength. Out from their hide clicks a dry articulation, quick as arm-bones. Below them then, a skyscraper pile drives down, of a size that dwarfs every shaft so far, falling slower, with a force of inertia unrelenting and terrifying. Dust falls ahead of it, the plain too has fallen, so the pile seems to linger; then it hits the ground. Before any crash can travel up to her, the pile has pierced the plain like a nail through sand; another shaft is even dropping too, by the time there returns, on the beat, from the pit, the explosion of the first monster nail—sight and sound on a scale that leaves expressionless attention as the only response. Triggered by the shock, a jagged buzz from the cockpit of the music shoots ahead across the sky, to be lost at its edges. Every sixteenth shaft, another pile drops, to sink through the plain: thus enslaved, she gears her mind to awaiting its explosion, with a hunger for the sight—then the silence—then the crash—then the hunger for the next one…

 

Teaser 14(i), Scorpio’s dance upon the silver mist

Sweet dreams! he murmurs. Golden lightnings are his arms, as they rise, swoop, cross, sweep and quiver in a mesmerising union with the music. Bright golden rings sway glinting from his ears, sweeping up to which his neck curves delicate and graceful; around it hang a few dark strands of his hair, broken free from the rest which is tied above his head within a band that makes it issue down his back like a fountain. His lips, repeated everywhere, are pouting with the business of such raptness of regard, he sees; they smile at being caught thus. His face is pretty, elfin, not a face to take seriously, he thinks, except the eyes. The eyes… Open wide, unable to hide, and unable not to see inside the people around him, often wishing they could see no further in than people’s irises but forced to see behind their pupils and beyond—too deep for both the looked-at and the looker. Psychic eyes, naked eyes, eliciting revulsion in the few, adoration in the many, but exhausting either way. He sees them all about him now; flicks his own around, seeking anywhere they’re not; but they multiply in flicking. (So how did he contrive, until a moment ago, to look around and notice any other thing but these?) They pierce to the depths of his own gaze, and frighten him—pin his isolation down. How beautiful they are. How clear and how breakable—how burstable a window is each one. They bewitch. In fact, he’d almost say he loved himself…

 

Teaser 15(i), the shrieking of the caverns in the sky

The Platinum Raven swings her head back down from watching the podium. She stands, steps ahead across the floor and sees the bodies parting like the Red Sea either side of her. A lane of space clears ahead, the bodies like the walls of a tunnel she is sliding down, and either side another space pressed in again to form a tunnel running parallel with this, then another and another, like lanes on a freeway. Rails whine, wires sing. A roadscape fans out, empty and vast on a slim black bridge above a frost-lit gulf. At her in the tunnel on the left comes a car, with the face of a fly and a roar like a burst of metal laughter—stretched out and lowered, as it shoots away behind, to a swollen single bellowed word NO-O-O-O-O-O-O… After the car has gone, the word runs ahead, ringing out among the struts of the bridge across the gulf, magnified through the shrieking of the caverns in the sky to a twang like an orchid blade stabbing out of dust folds. Up from the railing of the bridge on either side spring cables a metre thick, strung far ahead upon the tips of a bridge-tower, lofty and silver in the shape of a guillotine; next to descend rather slower on the other side, dip to pick the road up and soar to a second tower tiny in the air where it pricks the horizon, framed in the bottom of the frame of the first one; then to be lost in a curvature of shadow.

 

Teaser 15(ii), salmon-marbled bloodlight on Jupiter

A flap upon the road ahead. Reaching it, she sees it is a cat—or half a cat, the other half a furry jam squeezed on the tarmac. Caught in the headlights, glassy eyes ablaze, fur on end, paws rigid, it recalls a set of bagpipes of muscle clad in velvet. Her cockpit rises, filling up as wine bubbles out from the pedals; and the smoothness of the rising is the smoothness of a blood-let in a warm bath. Moon and stars and fires burn, cruel as an ice-blink. Huddled in the stratosphere, planets hang heavy—tucked up, as if in bed, against a bank of livid clouds. Saturn seeks her out, dead blue eyes peering up from under thin rings. Tiny blind Pluto hisses, icy-black and bat-faced. Uranus transfixes her, with mirrored contact lenses and a smile both delicate and dangerous. But there in the middle of them, licked and caressed by a mane of pale fire, shines the vainest and most captivating beauty of them all: the planet Jupiter, the heavenly equivalent of amber-coloured lovers’ eyes and angelfish in mirror mist, radiant in majesty of salmon-marbled bloodlight. It gazes upon her, from its churning red storm, through the mighty revolution of its cloud-belts, and winks, as if to promise she can one day come to live on it forever…

 

Teaser 16(i), down deep, the squeaking of an injury

Amber’s booth swims up in front of her. Her head clears somewhat. She gazes up, locates him, and watches as he works, buried deep within the mixing of the music and the lights. Huddled in a hole made of black coiled wires in a whirlpool of switches and red winking lights, Amber grates laughter of charcoal in his throat, feels the mirror mist licking at his eyes, behind his fingernails and coiling in the notches of the walls of his windpipe. The thrill of the mist in his lungs is a thrill like the blood-flecked coughing of a skinny Siamese cat whose ribs his fingers circle… He flicks a switch, pushes up a slider and listens as the pounding of a new music merges with the old and overwhelms it.

A sound in the new track starts through the din and throws him down into horror, with a shudder as at something that was ancient and primal, with the words rising up, the adventures of the little girl, the girl from Virginia—the little girl called Num-num! Demons seem to giggle, and his eyes water freely. Another’s eyes flash, those of somebody unseen, now remembered in a horrid blaze as Amber shivers inside his flesh. That name—yes, the little girl’s name!—cuts his stomach open, burrows deep inside, laying bare a brood out of some deep well. No single image, but a shadow-play of downward-pointing glee and fear: down, down deep, with the squeaking of an injury, the mewing of the dead girl, the laughter of goblins… We’ve had one or two little girls expire of water, says the other with the eyes—so let me cut the eyeballs of your feet, would you like that, Amber? So now he strokes his skull, as if to stroke the lobes inside it. Here it comes! From the undershaft, intoxicating evil creeps, taps him on the shoulder, whispers Go! in red and bites him sweetly on the neck. Reënter pain in two dots: dieresis in blood. He feels, as if in sour sleet, the power of things to hurt a body. Living in a body is a gamble, at best; as is sleeping with a person who knows its seven deadly points and isn’t quite balanced. He glances at the sliders, changes the music with his hands and eyes on autopilot, gives a bloodshot gurgle and prepares for a night of corruption, of sickness and gangrenous delirium…

 

Teaser 16(ii), lemons hatched in metal corners

Lumps of heart were chopped out and replaced with slate, which congealed with the rest to form the Black Slab inside his chest—the Slab that provides him with the body and the mien of death and flavours every single thing he ever says or does or feels or sees. The Black Slab is sensed, like a metal bar through plaster or a tendon glimpsed through milk, by all who meet him. All in all, it opened up a new life for Amber: infernal dark cabaret of Amber disease, lemons hatched in metal corners, barking spiders, blood as thick as cheese and even worse, with a permanent erotic grinding pain within his spine and a colour in his skull beyond admission. Cutting through the city in the night, as a boy, Amber knew he was pursued through the grid of ash and stone by a single hairy human leg, knew that disfigurement lay just around the corner like a kiss, knew he’d sucked his lemon-whiskered heel dry in childhood. Time was a pump pulled behind him by the leg; pressing on against its drag with unrelenting effort, Amber struck sparks, yellow spasms in an endless procession made of charcoal and loss. Hearing Num-num! giggled out across the gulf of death at him; in bookshops, going blind; smile of evil and jelly in his knees as he turned to find a rotting swamp of dead twin foetuses, an intimate Sargasso in a wider sea of slugs. All his brothers!

 

Teaser 16(iii), his own blood-rush among the worm-ropes

[…]—just before the sky went out, the bulb fell out, the Slab forever night—

A pale fleshy spider scuttles over the equipment in front of him: his hand, flicking slide-controls, manoeuvred by the long dead finger bones inside it (his nurse once confirmed, upon a close investigation, that his skeleton was black). He smiles as the speakers belch a bolt of thickened sound to stain the mirror mist, pushing like a worm’s head, honeycombed with loathing. The worm pulls its black scaly shaft above the dancers, turns in his direction, feels the billows with its eyes as if with tentacles of darkness down a tunnel, finds him—locks his frozen gaze into its own, until he moans… Catch you later! mouths the worm, winks and unhooks its jaw, sicking grey ropes of gristle through the air at him. Delusion! he shrieks at the worm, you’d rather see me paralysed! Words surge up his throat: You wanna see a slice of my insides, freak? Feed me razors—what’s the matter, has my face changed? The worm’s head dips now, fading as it chuckles; but its chuckle hovers on, glowing blood-red and gibbering towards him through the gas. (Oh, to hear one’s own blood-rush among the worm-ropes! Oh, to hear one’s own death-rattle, amplified; see the black fungus sun revolve; and worship…)

 

Teaser 17(i), lethal chase above the dance-floor

Then she freezes. Somewhere across the hall, in among the mirror mist, she just sensed something wrong; a wrong little movement.

Frowning, she scans the hall again. And there it comes again, but higher up now. Where the hell was it?… And raising her eye-line, she sees it. Yes—that’s it.

Silent in the din, and very wrong, is a pudgy hand grasping the banisters beside Scorpio’s podium, rising as its hidden owner scales the steps behind.

Now she spots Amber, reaching the podium and starting up the steps.

Above him in the spotlight, Scorpio is dancing, forever and oblivious—twirling and swooping, electric in bright white, swathed in the mirror mist as if in silver silk…

The man glances down, hesitates at Amber’s onset, then continues up at frantic speed. He keeps himself steady with the pudgy hand she saw, while his other hand clutches the bottle that he broke, with a kiss of jagged glass where he smashed off its neck.

Amber flies up behind him. The man attains the podium and steps across to Scorpio. His hand swings the bottle, and the Platinum Raven bends her will like steel wires across the room.

Amber leaps up onto the podium. He grabs the man’s shoulder and pulls him off-balance as the bottle whistles downwards, just past its target. Scorpio continues dancing unaware, then sees them beside him and starts away in shock. He darts down to snatch the bottle while the man regains his footing; then the man makes a lunge at Amber, half catching hold of him.

The crowd below has seen them and moves back quickly. The pair struggles, teeters on the edge, then topples. Three metres down, they slam upon the wooden floor messily together. The man somehow wrenches up his bulk to its feet, then away through the crowd and disappears. Amber springs up as well and dashes off to follow. The Platinum Raven cranes up, to keep them in view. The man barrels over to a small door half-hidden by a curtain, wrenches the handle—and opens it, to her surprise (it really should have been locked), and vanishes. The door slams. A moment later, Amber reaches it, flings it open and dives inside; and once again it slams shut.

 

Teaser 18(i), the Platinum Raven in the round brown window

The Chocolate Raven pours another glass of red, takes a sip and sets it down, braces both her elbows on the railing, holds up a pair of binoculars she has brought with her, and trains them on the tower. As she fine-tunes the focus, an unexpected seahorse shimmers in from the haze and stands sharp, its stony head lushly capped with a crest of mossy hairs where a pencil of moonlight hits it from above.

Easing the sight-line upwards minutely, she almost drops the glasses in shock, for there’s the Platinum Raven in one of the round brown windows, holding up binoculars directed straight at her. I SEE YOU! the latter mouths in silence, across the desert miles, then she winks and turns away.

The Chocolate Raven flicks the glasses down, alarmed and guilty: they aren’t allowed, as very well she knew. She shivers, shuts her eyes, shakes her head, puts the glasses down, leans on the rail and grows attentive once again…

 

Teaser 18(ii), without exertion and divinely, as if for all time

Somewhere in the turret room, the Platinum Raven’s fingers find the air-conditioning dial, rest upon its circle for one second longer, and then rotate it clockwise: the pointer on the dial’s edge sweeps from 2 to 10, and the tower in the Hajar Mountains fills up with mirror mist, denser than any tower’s ever filled before.

Somewhere in the main hall far underneath her, in the softness of the billows, re-projected on a thousand mirrors, Scorpio dances on: silently, alone, without exertion and divinely, as if for all time.

Somewhere in the labyrinth of passages around him, Amber stalks: relentless, bent on destruction, without the possibility of failure or surrender.

Somewhere in the labyrinth behind or ahead of him, despairing in the mist far more than he’s ever done, hopelessly lost and endowed with a lethal sense of who is in pursuit of him, an unnamed man lives a nightmare.

Mirror mist, on full…

 

Teaser 19(i), filtered through the tar and futility of flesh

Through his feet upon the labyrinth floor, Amber feels it. Underneath the cellars and the sump of the tower, in among the struts and the beams even further down, something creaks. Up the hill, past the teardrop trees, a cold breeze rolls, and the full moon slips behind an isolated cloud.

Amber stalks the silver billows, glimpsing his quarry everywhere he turns his eyes. As his pores ooze blacker than the tears of a corpse, love and hope hang respectively defined in the gas: the anatomy of love-bites and the absence of the hoped-for. His helmet of Amber-thoughts fills behind the visor with the vomit of remembrance that his dreams and those of everyone are filtered through the tar and futility of flesh, like wounds seeping through a soldier’s uniform. He sniffs, and smells the staleness of the billions: pushing, toiling, failing, there they go, bent on goals so insignificant, minute and all-consuming, it is painful to watch. From table to cupboard, from cupboard to door, to table again they go. From room to room; from door to road, from road to door; from town to town; to work, to eat, to sleep, then up too early and out again, to car, road, traffic again; day in, day out, year in, year out … their labour then converted, by a vast grimy effort, into different kinds of shortfall from the things they desired. Days fading out through their uniform lives, their identity a function of the sounds they make—then illness and death at last for every single one, asking if they’ve ever said or thought or felt or done or even really been at all. Such is the use decreed for life, as Amber knows: inward grunts from a body buried live, made and hurt and kissed in mud.

Why not bare your fangs, then, as Amber does, peering from the windows of his yellow night train! See the fall on both sides, just a parapet’s thickness away beyond the yellow glass. Freeze, at a spider the size of a dog, huddled horrid in a corner of the carriage, poised to wriggle. See the people slaving for the transient and breakable, whose permanence they yearn for, whose relevance they can’t afford to question. D’you wonder how so many human beings are so numb? Wonder rather how they aren’t, who are not!

 

Teaser 21(i), black shreds of flame ripple tiny on the star

She’s finding, however, that thinking is getting difficult, as this mirror mist is now taking control of her own thought processes. Any requests? the mirror mist asks her. —Oh, all right, she answers it. If you insist… OK, let’s have the Platinum Raven, please, on a pinnacle of rock a mile high, on a stage at the summit just three metres wide, strutting out for the billion heads who carpet the mountain-bowl below, while the sky is a screen where her face sings down. Raising her head, she sees the image on the sky-screen zoom to a single eye of hers, whose pupil grows until it fills up the heavens. In its depths, at the pole, hangs a beauty that is madness: the black sun, the ball of spinning fire around the ultimate destruction at its heart, the Great Attractor… Here is an Absolute, unanswerable, no fooling round, no disco but the real thing—awesomely, calmly, majestically inhuman. Matter spirals inward, elongated into whistling strings. Black shreds of flame ripple tiny and distinct around the surface of the star, the roar and prickle of their burning both gigantic and soft across the emptiness of space… That will still be here when every human being rots, when this tower’s archaeology for alien crustaceans—and after them forever, till the future is the past or vice versa, she reflects. Through her head flits a memory, vivid and pathetic, of the capsule of mirror mist she buried on the mountainside nearby, with her name in it: a tentative graffito, “I was here” upon the walls of the darkness whose enormity she now sees clearer, her message-in-a-bottle for an unknown claw in the future to find for its gallery or freak show. (Come see the fossil of the vision of humanity, the one remaining flicker of their bright imagination! Tiny silver glints in a bubble in the rock…) Her blonde hair streams across her eyes; she brushes it back to find control has fled, the black sun has swollen, sinking nearer straight above, descending now on the pinnacle, the wind howls—

 

Teaser 21(ii), her flesh contracts

A sixth sense creeps from a crevice in her chest, spreads its openness ahead, reads the darkness like a grain of sugar spreading through a water droplet: sinews of tautness and tension hold the space, sprung elastically in arches on unseen wires. She freezes, feels her muscles tighten more. From a corner on the left a tiny sound cuts the silence and is gone—the tightest clink, as of the plucking of a tine or the cracking of a fibre in the ribbing of a bridge. Blood pumps hard below her skin; from her ribcage the thuds push a dark field of furrows through the air. Sparks on her right lick the blackness with a squeak, as if a blade is being drawn along a rail. She shoots a glance, too late. Something invisible progresses in an arc around her body; she can pinpoint its position with exactness. Straight ahead, from where she stares, comes a scratch and a twang: a jet of sparks curls upwards in a tusk, growing brighter and solid, giving off a metal roar specked with tinny clicks. Her flesh contracts painfully. The jet thickens, tightens and points in her direction. A snick cuts its side near the base as she stares, sending spurts of vermilion to chase one another, twisting up through the whiteness and expiring at the tip. Burning rubber stabs the air. As the snick grows, she sees that it’s caused by a wire’s end puncturing the tusk. A mass of wires catches fire, flaring like a sudden head of hair. In its light she looks around—and leaps aside, as a knife-edge of glass comes screeching towards her. She wheels, sees it streak away and vanish in the stillness, the whistle of its passage dying fast into nothing. The wires flicker on; she tries to pick out her surroundings. Depths of illimitable blackness recede from her, cross-cut with metal and the glint of splintered glass. Black steel sheets slash the air at every angle, immobile and razor-edged, reflecting the crackle on a thousand jagged shards. Moving from the firing line of any of these edges leads to that of twenty more. She freezes again. The angles reflected in the light from the jet shift subtly in response to every tremble of the sparks: the slightest movement in the tusk opens up on every side a set of vistas, infinitesimally tunnelling afresh or hitting planes where there were tunnels. The effect is of cathedrals of ice, locked around and inside and throughout one another in the very same space; from every point in every vault springs a new unique innumerable set of points of view of every other—crushed to nothing on the instant by a further unrepeatable and infinite division, both deriding and miraculous, triumphant yet without choice itself.

 

Teaser 21(iii), face tight-snarled and her lips like a spout

Something snaps. Orange light burns in a grey metal corridor. Behind her is the end of it, blanked-off, doorless. Ahead, a blind corner where the way turns right. A grind and twang of metal growing nearer… She runs to the corner and stops dead. A chewing mass of spines fills the passageway, expanding as it comes, treading quick, thick and beastly as the breeding of an alienly complicated spider or an undergrowth of ants with a single volition. She bangs the walls. She backs away. She knows she is immune to being hurt in this—this is only mirror mist, no more! But she runs, she strikes the walls in every place she can reach—cold steel. Now the spines have reached the corner, mounting up against the outer wall. She stoops, runs a nail along the angle where the wall meets the floor. No crack; they are one, angled clean. She flings herself against the passage end. The chewing mass dislodges, and springs around the corner, leaping forward, building up again just short of where she’s stuck like a poster on the wall. There it stays a moment; through its snout, a shifting of internal knots of mesh suggests jerky navigations of the corner further back. Then it twitches into motion once again, nuzzles closer. She screams. Her face tight-snarled and her lips like a spout, she slams her fists on the steel wall, screwing up her eyes as the spines shiver forward to kiss her face, her skin crawls—

Falling to the floor, she encounters no resistance but a tickling of mirror mist. The spines have collapsed into silver dust. A human sigh unfurls (under Sigh Street, she thinks), then she starts—flicks her eyes where they’ve just been. She feels more than knows what she seeks, what she wants. It sneaked across the borders of her vision, slipped away as she instinctively returned for it, and hides a moment longer. There. Is it what she thinks it was? Yes! A human neck, tan-coloured, wedged in the angle of the passage twenty metres off, hidden from the jaw up, a knife-edge cutting through the faint down … it’s Scorpio.

 

Teaser 22(i), the crumbling golden ballroom

Scorpio and she sneak down the passageway, across an eerily quiet dance-floor, and through the door where Amber and the man fled—the door to the labyrinth.

The mirror mist has dissipated for the most part, leaving just a haze of silver. They scour several semi-familiar reaches of this warren-like region of the building, which is decorated with a faded opulence. A small stairway appears, which she recalls she has noticed before but has never got round to exploring. They sneak up the stairs, aware of every creaking floorboard. At the top is a space full of stage props and costumes. On the wall hang many masks, which stare down at this pair of unaccustomed visitors with expressions either haughty, evil, sweet, grotesque, anguished or laughing. They both tiptoe through the wings of a theatre and emerge onto a stage with a grand proscenium facing a crumbling golden ballroom, resonant and empty in the moonlight that pours through the dome of clear glass in its ceiling. They play their flashlights over the plaster garlands and fruits on the pillars in silence, whispering to each other in excitement and surprise to have found such a place: they must be deep within the mountainside by now, as this whole complex of dusty spaces would surely never fit within just the footprint of the mad-faced tower itself.

“We need to find Amber,” whispers Scorpio and tiptoes on across the empty stage to the opposite wings, where a door stands open in shadow. He peers through it, hesitates, then turns and beckons to her. She steps across the stage and through the furry darkness of the wings, to join him.

 

Teaser 22(ii), a sick space, but empty

Once they are through the door together, the atmosphere changes abruptly. They each reach for the other’s hand and give it a squeeze.

A passageway some twenty metres long lies ahead, lined with cracked glazed tiles of a colour best described just as “off”—off-white, off-brown, off-green, one couldn’t say which. The air is damp, and the walls appear to crawl and glisten whenever a flashlight is pointed at them. The flashlights are not the only source of illumination, however. It’s impossible to tell where else any light might be coming from, unless it’s from some residual play of reflection bouncing or regressing infinitely upon itself in the remaining flux of mirror mist in the air; but there does seem to be some other source, albeit of a light that’s oddly filtered and choked, with a rotten orange tinge to it.

They waver forward through the gloom of the passageway. The Platinum Raven shakes her head involuntarily. A sharp organic smell spreads thick upon the air. Dripping sounds plink with an unexpected sharpness, drawing her attention to a hum she can now hear, running underneath the floor or somewhere in the walls—a faint thick buzzing as of meat-flies, carried through a medium more glutinous, perhaps.

Two doors stand in the wall on their right, and one more at the end, all three ajar. She and he squeeze their hands together, disengage them, and tiptoe to a point just short of the first door. She leans her head forward and peeks through the opening, past the door’s rotting wood. Dirty orange light stares in, through a frosted window-pane and three splintered metal bars, to illuminate a washroom. Pushing at the door, she feels her fingers sink a little in the surface of the soft wood. The hinges give a wet grind and the door swings free. Basins line the mirrored walls, perched on metal struts—her reflected face ahead makes her start. The door hits the wall with a crash; a rain of white plaster streaks down from the ceiling, like a curtain on the darkness, and they both jump. The room is nearly bare, though. A sick space, but empty.

 

Teaser 22(iii), an orange tinge thick upon the air

They look around, and quickly at each other. Then they press on down the passageway, level with the second of the three doors. She raises her foot, slow and quiet—then she boots the door, jumps back and stares wildly in.

Through another barred window, the same orange light pours. Cubicles yawn high and narrow. Eyes wide, she darts in and glances into each of the cubicles: all are dank and mildewed, one full of some kind of rubble that she can’t identify. Once again, a dead space.

Returning to the passageway, she reaches for Scorpio and holds him to her chest. Conscious of the texture of his black-flaming hair between her fingers, she peers beyond his head to the end of the passageway, where the third door stands ajar in the wall straight ahead of her…

She freezes; and feeling this, he turns in her arms and sees it too.

From underneath the door, a wide stain of dark fluid seeps down the passage floor towards them.

Hand in hand, they approach. He pushes lightly on the door. It creaks, as moisture shines tiny in the bruises on the wood, where his fingernails press.

Inside, steam swirls. Drips plink quicker than before. The orange tinge hangs even thicker on the air.

Slopping noises come, and then a bellow bursts out. Amber flings the door wide, a dripping knife in hand—his eyes at first possessed, then quickly softening as he sees them both. Scorpio steps inside, stares around and halts, moving almost in slow-motion. The Platinum Raven follows him in, watching him ahead turning back, outlined in black against the steam, looking blank and sick, pointing with his finger silhouetted on the gassy swirl.

 

Teaser 23(i), high terrace dawn in the Hajar Mountains

Turning round to gaze up behind the turret roof, where the dawn light is growing now beyond the mountain-tops, Scorpio yelps as a sudden dense cloud of fresh mirror mist belches from the low door and tumbles down the steps to the terrace. “Look, it’s on again!” he cries out. “Amber’s still down there—turn it off!”

She laughs. “It’s only turned on here, in the turret. Everywhere downstairs it’s still turned off. I just thought we’d have a final puff of silver here now—you know, it helps to break the ice at parties.”

“I don’t want to think about what we just saw,” he says. “Not yet. Later.” And with that, he hops up onto the coping of the balustrade, midway between the seahorses.

The Platinum Raven starts to freak out, staring aghast at what’s beyond the balustrade: that short slope of boulders, funnelling to that precipice of weeds in half a circle like a lip, around that lethal shriek of air one hundred metres sheer—

Then she decides she will just trust him in what he’s doing: after all, she knows he has the control of an acrobat and an almost alien lack of vertigo. So she stands there on the terrace, in the shadows of the Hajar Mountains, watching him in wonder as he starts to dance right there, his little pointed boots twirling deftly on the stonework; with mirror mist surging through the gaps between the balusters, out and down the shriek, to where a silver death awaits him if he trips…

The canyon below the tower lies in rocky shadow still.

Beyond it, the width of the desert spreads in subtle shades of brown and black enormity.

Beyond that, the city grid of Dubai is waking, its coloured points twinkling in the dying night.

And high above that circuit-board, one single structure is tall enough for its pinnacle to be caught by the rays spilling across the desert from behind the mountains in the east: a skyscraper’s point like no other in the world, shining silver and alone where the sky grows pale. It’s an elegantly complex, telescoping spike, of a stunning, otherworldly fabulosity—its beauty cool, mineral and icy in the sharp-edged light of the dawn.

 

Teaser 24(i), sunlight’s edge hits the Chocolate Raven

Leaning at her terrace rail on Level 152, the Chocolate Raven sees that the sun will soon appear, poking up above the Hajar Mountains’ outline, far ahead. She turns her head and looks above her, up towards the Pinnacle, which shines in a light that has caught it alone as yet. While she stands and watches it, this sunlight’s lower edge travels down from that point, down the metal Spire’s flank, and then it slides down the building’s skin of smooth brown glass, sinking fast towards her terrace right here. Soon this light-edge reaches her—and just as it does, she brings her gaze back down to see the sun push into view above the mountain-line before her.

Easing her sight down minutely from the mountain-tops, she finds once again the mad-faced tower on the rock-slopes. Underneath the tower, in between the struts and the beams, emerges Amber as she watches him, stalking through his hatch, bearing something in a sack.

 

Teaser 24(ii), an icon of ecstasy and chocolate and sweat

High above this, just below the two brown turret-windows, silver mist belches out, flows across the terrace past the pair at the parapet, billows through the balustrade, sinks in slow motion down the lethal shriek of air and carries on down, filling up the canyon of rocks to the brim and heading out across the desert on its way to the city here.

In welling up around that pair of figures on the terrace, it projects their image upward and out above the mountains. First there is Scorpio, dancing with his eyes closed, now and forever on the balustrade electrically, just as he was when she first saw him flicker up: the Armenian boy dressed in black, a Scorpio pendant at his neck; no smile, too much tension and exquisiteness and fierce vulnerability, but then the flush of light across his face for an instant, fem in black; and there he is forever now, perfection, for all time… Then the Platinum Raven’s face is vast and serene in the dawn sky beyond him, evoking when the Chocolate Raven’s devastating, desert-eyed perfection met her very own gaze for the first time, electrifying: animal, expressionless, an icon of ecstasy and chocolate and sweat, in wailing silence in the headlights, as dust floated round her through a siren-song behind the air… The Platinum Raven winks at the Chocolate one, down across the desert with the calm of divinity, mouthing Catch you later!

 

Teaser 25(i), the Great Lie revealed

Remaining at her terrace rail, the Chocolate Raven lights a cigarette, pours a final glass of wine and lets her face sink into her hands, with her eyes closed.

The air is heating fast, as the morning sun slides up another busy city day. The night is gone entirely. And now that it’s gone, she can see a truth that she hates and despises with a vengeance as soon as she catches sight of it.

In effect she’s seeing the nature of the same Great Lie that she half-glimpsed on the occasion when she drove to the mad-faced tower. Then, she had the option of postponing apprehension, by burying her head between her knees on the back seat and wailing to the driver to drive away at high speed. Now, she doesn’t have that choice. It’s too late, for now she’s seen too clearly what nobody deserves to see.

What this knowledge comes down to, in her case at this moment, is that when she lifts her head again, then not only will her visions a minute ago of Scorpio and the Platinum Raven in the sky have both vanished in the glare of day—but the mad-faced tower will have disappeared from the rock-slopes too, with what she recognises as a senseless but inevitable fuck-up that she should have seen coming.

No more Amber.

No more Scorpio.

And no more Platinum Raven.

And maybe this will sound strange, or maybe it will not—but either way, this freight of brand-new but familiar knowledge leaves her miserably desolate.

 

Teaser 25(ii), but there’s ALL THAT, living in the mountains

She is desolate, quite simply, that her tower full of magic has vanished into thin air, leaving her just standing here prosaically alone on a weekday morning, halfway up a building in a city.

And yes, by the way, today’s a school day, let’s remember: in just a couple of hours there’ll be paying work to do, with computer screens, corporate bookings and financial responsibility. In a moment, therefore, she will make a move. She will do the requisite. She will navigate herself through these things, just as she is practised at doing.

But oh, how desperately sad and desolate the Chocolate Raven is to have been forced back down into such quotidian drudgery, when she knows that in reality there’s ALL THAT, living up there in the mountains!… Oh, why couldn’t she just live forever in that tower of wonders?

Not that she’d pretend it was the most reassuring or relaxing of places, up there. There were nightmarish elements in it, for sure, and even its wildest heights of beauty had something of the colour and poison of a nightmare somewhere beneath their surface.

But how electrically alive and happy she was, nonetheless, for as long as she was up there in that tower on the rock-slopes!

And why should she now be compelled back down to answer questions from all those tired, ordinary businessmen and all those soul-dead, wearily superficial, exhaustingly trivial and soporifically privileged Jumeirah Janes who populated her normal working days? These were the working days and pleasures that used to fill her life exclusively, that she’d assumed were pretty much the only kind of days and pleasures to be had … but that was a time before she had discovered the mad-faced tower and thereby found herself plugged into such a voltage of brightness and passion and excitement as dwarfed any other she had ever known.

 

Teaser 26(i), a convulsion, tiny in the distance

Anyway, these ruminations are silly; he’s just someone she once met in a bar. She picks up her mug of coffee and heads back to her desk.

…But that’s not quite going to cut it, is it? It’s not going to cut it, because let’s remember he was the figure who gave her the mysterious red card-key. She hasn’t been able to make any sense of that key. It doesn’t appear in any of these expense lists that she’s been ploughing through today; and among the hundreds of room bookings she becomes aware of every week, she still cannot remember or find any record of having anything to do with that unusually elite corporate suite, so very high above her own apartment in the Burj Khalifa. Furthermore (and most importantly, to be frank), the suite in question then became the location of her witnessing, without warning, the explosive unfoldment of a convulsion, tiny in the far distance, between four iconic figures in a tower across the desert, that was destined to re-slant her own life forever—first on account of the convulsion’s very nature, and then on account of the shocking desolation and sadness of its escape from her grasp this morning, with such an intimation of permanence in the escape. Could she ever have witnessed that from any other terrace, from any other suite, than the one on the 152^nd Level? Either way, how could those events not have left Jaymi elevated in her memory, standing up there staring down at her from the still centre of an aura as strong as a whirlwind?

 

Teaser 26(ii), the empty labour-camp hiding in Al Quoz

At 152 she steps out into the small, quiet lobby where several unnumbered but differently-coloured doors present themselves—one of them red. She inserts the strange card-key in this door, hears the lock click open and pushes the door inwards.

Inside, she is expecting that internal hallway with its neutral luxury she has seen in a thousand upscale corporate suites. Instead, she recognises an avenue she once drove through, located in the grim labour-camp district hidden at the centre of the vast industrial expanse of Al Quoz—its dismal concrete bunkers now deserted. The hallway door snicks shut again behind her. Empty lots of wire-mesh and gutted cars slide by her; the pavement is overrun with grass and weeds waving restless in the wind blowing in from the Gulf. A low repeated squeak cuts the breeze, where a rusty sign swings from a metal pole. She hugs her arms around herself and darts on down the hallway. Ahead the warehouse looms, its tall chimneys black upon a sky-glow coloured like a bruise. As she finds the warehouse door and slips inside, a dog bays savagely a block away.

Inside, shafts of yellow spotlight fall, checkered by the gratings of walkways above. A wax model of a human head appears beside her face, hanging on a rope and swinging as she passes it: two daggers are stuck deep into its forehead, above a pair of eyes where power and beauty and violence are combined. Not far beyond it hangs a second wax head, coarse and piggish rather than beautiful, with a dagger stuck into each cheek up to the hilt.

 

Teaser 26(iii), Jaymi’s music growls dark

Music growls dark; somewhere water drips. She presses on, her black-toed steps quick and delicate around the potholes in the floor, where droplets glisten tiny in the blaze of the spotlights. A hiss from above. She glances up—sees a snake’s tail swinging—sees its thickness curling up to a slender-framed figure on the walkway above her and coiling round the figure’s neck, ending in a pair of jaws. Black against the yellow light, this figure leans easy on the rail, unmoving as the snake draped around him hisses loud and flicks its tongue. He is slim, pretty, watchful, with dark brown hair and big brown eyes, set within a pale face. “Jaymi!” she calls, her voice echoing around the atrium. “Jaymi! (Jaymi—Jaymi—Jaymi!) It’s the Chocolate Raven! (Chocolate Raven—Chocolate Raven—Chocolate Raven!)”

That dark growly music explodes in volume, like a soundtrack. Crashing drums and shrieking voices rip through the space, all redoubled by the echo and vibrating through the walkways. The drums and the wailing and the feedback peak, until the floor and the gratings of the atrium resound: chains clank, lights swing, wires sing and pipes shake, spilling out steam-jets side-lit in white. Planting her legs wide, the Chocolate Raven raises her arms and her face and shuts her eyes, as the climax thunders to an end.

Jaymi grins. “Thanks for visiting,” he says and claps his hands together once—

Blackout. Not a move, not a sound.

 

Teaser 26(iv), the hanged man thrashes on

The Chocolate Raven’s hearing licks the dark, pushing fingers into corners, seeking anything… She shrinks within her body, but feels the latter follow her inside and shrink too, so she can barely breathe. She tries not to shrink further still inside her own frame, but cannot prevent it. Her skin shrinks again, so taut that it burns with the nerves’ dance pressed against her skin’s underside. Her heart thumps, ramming her corpuscles through capillaries that nearly cannot open, constricted as they are by the ever-mounting pressure from the skin pressing round them. The fluid in her ears sings a worm-song chorus, like a stream of vermicelli squeezing underneath her scalp. As her heartbeat mounts, a light flicks on; looking up, she sees a single stained light-bulb fixed to a ceiling coloured yellow by the years. A poky little washroom sways and yawns around her, two metres square, with a tiny barred window. Turning, she jumps as her gaze eats the image, in a mirror on her left, of her emaciated frame: her cheekbones stare from under black-ringed eyes of the worst kind of orange, which consume her watching self with a lust so naked, desperate and brutal that she cries out in panic and delicious fear, running her fingers over her emaciation in horror and delight. A scent of fucked-up dark devouring hunger stabs her nostrils. Transfixed by her own desperate eyes, she feels herself advancing on them, loins burning, legs wobbling into motion like a pair of stilts—then she freezes, seeing that behind her on the wall, in the image she’s approaching, is a great pink spider the size of a dinner plate, legs thick and soft like a set of human thighs… As it wriggles into horrid life, a sudden ring of hanged men drop against the walls and swivel jerkily, their necks snapped down at an angle by their ropes. A bath-water gurgle of suffocation bubbles; one hanged man launches up his head and writhes, bellowing and flailing on his rope, which begins to work loose from the ceiling. She spots a door located halfway up a wall. She reaches up to it and tries to turn the handle, but it won’t move. She locks both her hands onto it and wrenches, as if to kill it. The hanged man thrashes on, staring at her, fierce and bug-eyed, his rope very nearly worked free.

 

Teaser 26(v), the lift has other ideas, however

Retching with horror, the Chocolate Raven can take no more. If this continues, she tells herself, then she will faint or lose her mind. At this, a crack rings out, then slides into a grating rush, as if it spreads. Beside her the bathroom mirror slides down the wall, its surface cracking into shards … and right behind it is a blissful sight: an exit to a lobby!

Leaping through this exit, she recognises once again the small, quiet, bland central lobby of this Level 152, where several unnumbered but differently-coloured doors present themselves, one of them red.

She sprints into the open lift, slams her hand onto the Down button, and stands there panting, weeping, dripping. She has no direct view from here to where she emerged into the lobby, and she can no longer hear any of the sounds she was hearing in that wash-room; but she’s had enough of Level 152 and she really wants to leave it.

The lift has other ideas about what to do, however: absolutely nothing, for several long moments, with the lift-doors standing wide open in case anything else wants to get in.

“Stand clear of the doors, please,” says a soothing female voice at last.

With painful slowness, the lift-doors glide to a close.

“Going down,” says the voice.

The lift descends.

 

Teaser 27(i), the dim cool flue of Tiers 27 to 30

By no means does the Chocolate Raven’s descent progress all the way to the base of the Burj Khalifa, nor even as far down as her own apartment on Level 63: rather, she contrives to ascend quite mightily in the aggregate, having first descended no more than is necessary to reach the nearest major cross-over lift-lobby (whose Level number she is still in far too much of a swirl to notice or remember).

This down-to-go-back-up manoeuvre is followed by a jagged lightning symbol’s progress: past Level 152 again without stopping, and up the rest of Tier 15; alighting then to effect a most fortunate breaching of the usually impermeable membrane between the highest front-of-house Level 155 and the lowest back-of-house Level 156 at the base of Tier 16 (this being a key step and frankly the Chocolate Raven’s secret weapon); soon enough embarking on a sequence of ever-tinier industrial landings, discreet passages over unwonted thresholds, clattery service lifts and industrial hatches, so as to rise through the inorganic mechanical sterility of Tiers 16 to 26, in themselves the height of a cathedral in the sky; and finally via a head-spinning series of metal stepladders, up through the dim cool quiet endless flue of Tiers 27 to 30, the Spire … to wriggle up through that final hatch into an enormous sky.

 

Teaser 27(ii), the crackle and pulse of the whole city

Rising, she steps away from the hatch and rests her hands on top of the rail encircling this little space that she never thought she’d see—here, for the first and only time in her entire life of lusciously chocolaty Ravenicness, paying the Ultimate Terrace Visit to crown her entire prized collection of terrace visits—the Pinnacle!

She smiles like a child.

Beneath her, Dubai spills its molten metal light across the sand, fractured into amber grids and tracks, strips and pools and points, flowing bright with tiny cars or rearing upward in a complicated bed of little geometric towers. The crackle and the pulse of the whole city fills her ears at once: the glazed bleep of life-support machines in diapason with the honky bleep of vehicle alarms; the tick of traffic signal boxes flicking lights from red to green, and the silent tick of money flickering green on computer screens; car dispatchers’ street directions spat through radios in cabs, a million numbers fed through phones, and countless voices buzzing, screeching, purring, barking, squeaking, droning through the air or on the airwaves; towns of electric wire on struts in gravel compounds, fenced-in and humming, sprouting insulator cones; insect needles twitching on unfathomable dials; and the hum of CCTV cameras everywhere, from concrete isolation-wing corridors to sleekly polished skyscraper penthouse lobbies.

She hears the brutal hardness of all this hardware in sharp plastic clarity, she sees the wash and flicker of the software within it, and the spectre of their confluence she loves as a home.

 

Teaser 28(i), see how bright the Dark burns

He stands upon his toes and lifts one arm with simple grace, like a ballerina brandishing a whip.

A distant groan of dogs. He purses his lips and frowns, the city’s noise recedes … then a burst of current shoots up his legs, makes his groin pulse and burn red as neon, fills his chest, and explodes through his neck into his brain, so his mouth yells, Watch me now… He feels his beat across the planet, emanating from this Pinnacle. Around him, indistinct upon the air, shimmer two-legged creatures of different genders, skinny beings, all of different hues. He rises on his toes and twirls around to see them everywhere. Their pleasures and their unrelenting need make him love them. Bolts of amber lightning crackle outward from here and split the night across Dubai. A billion voices roar and swell around the world below and then are drowned, as music wells above him from the sky’s brightest cellar. At this, the bolts of amber bend around and coalesce, streaking up and out beyond the Palm Jumeirah’s curve, where they stab and leap and dance until a face flickers up through the sky above the Gulf. The face is a human’s of a colour unidentified, loving and malefic, of a beauty that is cruel in its epicene perfection—bewitching, androgynous, a male so richly and gracefully feminine, a female simply and childishly masculine, fused in the golden eyes and contours of his own face, singing (though its lips are closed), See how bright the Dark burns—kiss the beauty in the nightmare—hear the moan of sex reversed, playing just like grief.

 

Teaser 29(i), joyful release for the pug among the struts

The two-legged creatures whose shadows whisk around him on the air see his eyes flash, and draw closer in to him. He bares his teeth and grins at them, his canines on his lower lip, his body like a whip whose end slinks and strokes and twitches on the flesh around a shoulder. A smell of musk and incense rises, coiling through the billows of a smoke that appears, stained red in long cones as of spotlight. The shadow of a forked tail flexes behind him. He grins again, without choice, and tastes sudden blood: in the process of pushing out, his canines are digging at his lower lip. He grins more, they bite more—then he thinks of opening his mouth a little wider. A pair of shadow-horns curve up from his head, and he clutches them: they’re just a little daintier than dangerous, he feels, but are horns nonetheless.

A reek of streaming blood smiles out from his face, as his eyes burn scarlet like a pair of lasers cutting through the dry ice. The creatures stare at Scorpio, enraptured. “D’you find free will unnerving?” he grates. “Now be honest.” And he vomits up a black scream of tendrils of sound, wrapping round one another like a mass of worms and weevils.

“But look,” he whispers, seeing that a new figure flickers up beside him. “It’s the Pug Among the Struts!” And that figure from beneath the tower hangs in its frame. Scorpio reaches out and strokes the pug’s face … whereupon the frame melts away, the strait-jacket falls off, and down the pug steps, glowing young and free. The skinny creatures gasp with relief.

 

Teaser 29(ii), I can slant Dubai to light us up

Black eagle-wings form at Scorpio’s shoulders. He flexes them, feels them as his own (his own black eagle’s wings!), beats them and cautiously rises, as the rest of him morphs to eagle shape. Flying faster, he cries out with happiness. An urge arises in him for another little eagle he can soar with, another he can sing for—another sleek flying creature, feathered just as he is, so they’ll share the magic fully in the coiling of desire. He looks around but sees no other like him. Other pairs of wings he hears nearby, from birds that hide, and he turns to each in full view, with joy and hope; but every time he does so, the hidden bird squawks in fear and flies away. Many hundred pairs of wings he hears, and some he approaches, but every one flees. He circles a long time, alone and confused, until a thought strikes and chimes in him: “But maybe those were sparrows, all frightened and brainless!… Then if so—well, who can blame them?”

Next the air darkens, and he glances up and thrills to feel the gust of a wing-span many times his own, as a giant golden eagle sweeps above him, awesome in its power and its beauty and its solitude, gold feathers glinting in the tower-light from underneath… It wafts him up towards it and holds him there gently, then it speaks, not in words but in the rhythm of its wings around his body: “Relax, I shall never let you fall. You are safe, little Scorpio: just let go.”

Acquiescing, Scorpio discerns the other’s name: “D’you scent the damage in me, Amber? If not, let me know, so I can slant Dubai to light us up better from below. But if so, any theories as to origin?”

 

Teaser 30(i), oh, the eyes, the eyes again

The Ravens look into each other’s eyes. Unsmiling. Taking information in. “Oh—the eyes,” murmurs the Chocolate one. “The eyes again…”

The Platinum one’s gaze narrows. “We know each other,” she accuses. She returns her attention to the highway ahead, then shoots a glance back at her new companion. “Have we met?”

The Chocolate Raven makes to nod, then shakes her head. “Well, not directly…” And for the first time they smile, still guarded, remaining ready for whatever may happen.

The Platinum Raven flicks a switch and the car’s roof slides back. She presses a button and music pumps hard and loud around them. From being mostly empty, the highway is gradually filling up with cars. The course of it ahead seems to rise and dip in turn, as if they ride the early slopes of a giant roller-coaster. Ever more crowded grows the road: advancing with a rush of cars in front and close behind them, the Chocolate Raven knows they cannot halt or escape but must sweep along, drawing ever closer to whatever lies in wait.

And there it is, ahead and above, looming into view, looking very like a loop-the-loop, around which the highway runs … yes, it is! One enormous loop of struts and lights, twinkling into sharpness in the night, like a grand suspension-bridge wrapped all around a Ferris wheel. The Chocolate Raven cries out: “How the hell are we meant to drive around a loop-the-loop? I’m mostly thinking of the bit at the top, where the car will be upside down…”

The cars in front, behind and either side are all accelerating, drawing closer in and whining loud, sucked ahead by some relentless pull. The Chocolate Raven glares at the Platinum one, thinking that perhaps it no longer matters if the latter even holds the steering-wheel or not: either way, their situation has the savour of a done deal.

The Platinum Raven’s voice is dreamy: “Yes, I was wondering if you’d noticed the loop-the-loop. I didn’t know if I should point it out.”

 

Teaser 30(ii), her mouth like a horn kisses hers

The edifice towers high above them, as the road begins a sharp curve up towards its base. The Chocolate Raven checks the speedometer and starts in her seat—a hundred miles an hour and rising still, as all adjacent cars draw ever closer in, each a metre away at most. The highway lanes have multiplied, ten on either side; the engine roar is deafening. The Chocolate Raven checks their speed again—a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Now the car is tipped back, its nose high above them. “Please,” she shouts above the din, “What shall we do?”

“This!” the Platinum Raven shouts, launches her hand up to the music-player, slams the volume up, then lands back down in the seat and flings her arms around the Chocolate Raven, squealing with delight and fire and terror and desire. They slide together, screaming, yelling, laughing, crying loud into the sky. A plane roars above them through the music, climbing steep, while they both blur together in a hot rain of mouths and hair and skin and hands and long legs and laughter, encircling each other.

Gigantic spokes slash the sky. Gears grind bass somewhere underneath, horns blare, lights flash, cars elongate into shrieking pipes and tubes. Her mouth like a horn kisses hers and sucks her in, fingers sunk in spumes of fountain flesh, her flashing eyes and hair that clings in mouths’ and bodies’ mingling. The sky is burning, a sea of flame (the clouds all scatter, now they ride the outside lane) while the moon upon the waters of the Gulf swings and shines below. A sunburst flowers as they come together, shrinking on the instant to the swirl of a tunnel where they streak down whirling in a chute of fluid white lion-horses roaring spinning in infinity from burning pole to frozen tropic: she, by choice exposed in too much access but with notional command; and she, wide eyes and overkill as usual, fainting weak with pleasure—

Freeways shriek and feedback whines, as the steam peels back from the sky above Dubai where a waterfall roars with tremendous fire, then blackout.

 

The above teasers for The Platinum Raven‘s Video-Book are here too:

And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for THE PLATINUM RAVEN by Rohan Quine”.

And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for THE PLATINUM RAVEN by Rohan Quine”.
 

Here are the basics of what the novella is all about.

Here are some great reviews of it.

Buy The Platinum Raven in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

To watch any of the 31 complete and unabridged chapters of the novella’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for chapter 1;
here for chapter 2;
here for chapter 3;
here for chapter 4;
here for chapter 5;
here for chapter 6;
here for chapter 7;
here for chapter 8;
here for chapter 9;
here for chapter 10;
here for chapter 11;
here for chapter 12;
here for chapter 13;
here for chapter 14;
here for chapter 15;
here for chapter 16;
here for chapter 17;
here for chapter 18;
here for chapter 19;
here for chapter 20;
here for chapter 21;
here for chapter 22;
here for chapter 23;
here for chapter 24;
here for chapter 25;
here for chapter 26;
here for chapter 27;
here for chapter 28;
here for chapter 29;
here for chapter 30; and
here for chapter 31.

Buy The Platinum Raven in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

Add Rohan Quine’s The Platinum Raven in Mobi or ePub or paperback format to Goodreads.

 
Rohan Quine, The Platinum Raven, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, science fiction, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, Dubai, Burj Khalifa, Palm Jumeirah, London, Shard, skyscraper, desert, nightclub, drug