I knew she was trouble from the moment she scuttled in. Eight million segmented legs that a film editor couldn't help but slap the drones of a dusky saxophone over with a face that, while constantly rearranging slivers that reflected pairs of rotting leather footware in various stages of mired dust, was uniform in a prideful glower with no room for a reality for the word 'no.'
With no invitation or announcement, she slid up to my desk like a bus made of chitin and platinum, but with a more developed sense of taste when it came tailored business skirts of questionable length, and coiled her upper length up and around the sad, lopsided chair made of dead men's nails that I hadn't so much bought rather than acquired at a fire sale.
I didn't dare even blink when the chair creaked under bulk of her segmented coils.
A silence so loud you could hear it from the next nightmare over rang through the room, through me, so hard I clenched my teeth to keep them from shattering under the strain while the sickly light of the terminal bulb in the center of the office burned the walls a clenching red. I could fell the red closing in on the edges of my vision, like the feeling of water closing in over your head, or like that change in pressure that makes your ears pop when you move from one nightmare to the next with a dodgy visa.
And then, the silence was broken by, of course, the rustle of a battered carton precariously negotiated from my impromptu guest's overtaxed breast pocket. With the two fingered choreography of a long time smoker, she pinned one of the beetles inside and plucked its head off in one graceful motion as she slid it out of the carton.
Pausing, the wriggling dun brown carapace still clutched delicately between two long, freezing white fingers, she motioned it in my direction with a gesture.
"No, thanks. Trying to quit.", I said, having apparently found my voice.
A solid gold seal was summarily produced from a place I wouldn't dare guess was cleavage. I recognized the lion with wings and a man's bearded face form cast into one side, but the other symbols were lost on me. Except for one, nestled into what had probably once been the core of the seal, near the top, in an eye-watering tangle of geometric figures centered around a grid of squares was a much simpler symbol.
Or, rather, a brand.
The Factory.
I felt the once reassuring jab of the athame pressed against my side and hoped she couldn't also.
The top of the seal flipped open to reveal a lighter. I was discovering rich veins of shock never before disturbed from my soul as she lit the headless tip of her smoke, not with a blue flame, but an orange one.
Real fire.
"You know, those things'll kill ya.", I said, my mouth having never required any input from my mind before, leaving it free to reel privately.
She projected the feeling that this was the most moronic thing she'd ever heard with the ease of someone who never actually listens to what people say.
A piece of paper, because of course there was a paper, The Factory liked to stay to its theme, and layed it down on my desk. She tapped the heading with one mercury painted nail, punching it through the paper and, probably, three inches of beer-stained desktop.
I looked down at the paper.
I looked back up, the work part of my head automatically logging that she had worn a quarter of her smoke down while she was out of my direct line of sight.
"Who the hell is 'Mirror Jack?'"
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