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Save Point: The Lightning Tigers

Somewhere On Exmoor

I am walking down the cool streets in the shadow of the evening, a while still before the lights come on. The pavement is gray, but the trees and shrubs planted beside the paths still appear the distinctive visible green of daylight.

Beside to road on the far side of town, I come across a strange girl who seems disoriented, or at least slightly confused. Her appearance is a little odd, her hair a shade of flame that doesn't match the pale tawniness of her skin, but she's attractive and looks available, so I ask her if she's feeling all right, to draw her into conversation.

"I can't quite remember who I am," she says curiously to me, eyes with gold pupils strangely distorted into slits, seemingly under the influence of some new and novel drug. "But I'm not really too worried. I'm sure I'll remember soon."

"Perhaps we could go for a walk," I suggest, slipping my arm through hers. She's most definitely attractive, looks like she'd she'd have sex with anyone at the merest suggestion, what with her current state of mind. I can't help visualising her on her knees under me in bed, haunches raised and straining, staring back over her shoulder at me through those peculiar golden eyes.

"Perhaps after we walk a little way, it'll help you to remember?" I prompt her, trying to stir her from her inertia. She tilts her head a little, looks at me questioningly, and then starts walking.

I decide inconclusively that we should walk in the general direction of my apartment. If nothing of particular consequence happens on the way, and she still seems so inclined once she's cleared her thoughts a little, then I'll do my best to bed her. She seems uncaring as to what is happening, willing to be led.

Through vehicles stalled nearly to a halt at the longest end of the rush hour, we cross the street to a traffic island of several directions, densely planted with low shrubs and many blooming flowers which we brush past, pushing aside stems so overgrown that there is no way to do otherwise.

"They smell nice!" she purrs delightedly, and pushes up against the plants with even greater interest. "Green like summer!"

Despite her fascination with the flowers, she lets me lead her on, back through the traffic again and out onto the other side of the street. The most interesting way from here is through a covered walkway, which has a steeply angled stone block wall to the right, and a wall made entirely from the facades of several small shops and cafes to the left. An overhanging walkway from the road above the stony side, and the shallow balconies of the shops to the left, provide cover and make it a safe place to put out a few chairs and tables, for sitting and drinking coffee outside the cafes and eating overpriced iced pastries.

The path is consequentially narrow, and she trails along behind me, holding onto my arm and looking interestedly at surroundings made new and amazing by whatever altered state of mind she's in. Two idiots with leather jackets, extreme hairstyles and a number of bottles of cheap beer have commandeered one of the cafe's tables, and are amusing themselves all too literally by trying to walk up the steeply inclined stone blocks of the wall, using the irregular edges to stand on as they climb. Naturally they aren't succeeding too well, and one of them glances my shoulder with his elbow as he slips down and jumps back off the wall.

After a brief disagreement with the individual in question, regarding his right to blunder clumsily into passers-by, we continue on our way. If they were actually dangerous, and not just stupid and a little drunk, they'd probably have achieved their little climb already.

Part of the way along the stone wall, further down, is an artistic feature of unknown subsequent addition, a gargoyle-faced beast that protrudes outward from one of the central blocks, with two big strong straight stone fangs and a flow of water that trickles from its mouth into a shallow pool beneath. I almost snag my coat on one of the fangs, put off balance by the narrow spaces of the walkway and the girl following along, but manage to slip free with no harm done. "Gargle beast," the girl acknowledges the creature cheerfully, nodding towards it as though to perform some quick ritual in passing.

At the end of the walkway a ramp rises up to the level of the nearby road, doubling back as it does so to meet with the ascending road because of the change in elevation and direction. Back up into the level of our general surroundings, we continue onward for a while until we reach a strangely complex urban intersection where several streets meet haphazardly.

At this point, something catches the girls attention. She grabs hold of my arm more firmly and points at a building across the intersection. "That's where I should be," she affirms, nodding her head. "Yes yes yes."

Interested by her response, I direct our walk across several further traffic islands and crossing points to reach the structure, which is a curious example of architectural design beyond easy description. It seems to share in attributes of both the circular and the curved, as though the two have been deliberately mingled. Which in turn makes it difficult to conclusively establish the buildings function. It seems to be somewhere between a restaurant and a club, out on the far edge of social inclusiveness where the two become hard to separate. It seems likely, in fact, that there are pretentious student artists and designers to be found somewhere inside.

Since it appears to be open, however, and there are no obvious restrictions on entry to the public at large, or anyone on the door, I allow the girl to lead me on and we walk inside.

Once inside, the architectural bizarrity of the building is irrevocably confirmed. It appears that someone has tried to build a stylish club and restaurant within the basic superstructure of an old spiral staircase. Internal stairs connect different levels of the spiral staircase, and various sections of it which have been refitted with level platforms to create working areas within the whole.

Other parts of the spiral have been left as is, acting as ramps between adjacent areas or as useful surfaces in their own right. The topmost part of the spiral ends at a blank wall, the angled floor refinished in polished wood and covered by the tables of the restaurant, kept level by virtue of being attached to fixed bases in the floor. The outer wall is made of square glass windows stacked together to form a picture wall as space permits, giving a sweeping view down over the city. The kitchens are in the opposite side of the spiral, furthest from the blank wall at the far end of the strangely curved room. Access is thus by one of the internal stairways, up half a level across the center of the spiral.

Since no-one seems to be stopping us, we walk upward and inward, halted for several seconds by the need to adjust to the novel geometry of the place. I have no way of knowing what it's like for her, but it must be either profoundly disorienting or completely natural, given her state of mind. She shows no evident response either way.

Displayed on the inner wall, just inside the dining room doorway, is a piece of abstract modernist art, a soft gray vulva-flower sculpted from some sort of stretchy, colored latex. It seems inevitable that this is artwork she is immediately attracted to, and she pulls free of my arm to go over and look at it up close, stretching and tugging and stroking at the matte latex lips, and working her fingers up inside of it without a hint of shame. "Remind me," she murmurs, almost to herself, and then pauses and listens as though to hear some unspoken response.

Dancing abruptly back over to me, she grabs my arm and pulls it though hers again, much as we were before. "Come with me to the bathroom," she insists. "Maybe it will help me remember."

Confronted with this strange and hopefully indecent request, it seems difficult to refuse. If she wants to be fucked, it seems just as convenient a place as any. If she just wants her own personal reference point guarding her back while she takes a leak, then that really makes no particular difference. It seems that either form of company would do her.

The bathroom of the restaurant is set with dark tiles in patterned slates of gray, walls and floors, and all the subtle shades of color that lie behind them. Most notable against all this dark is a full length silvery mirror, surprisingly clean and polished in the reflected light of the doorway. This is a glass to ask questions of.

The girl goes up to the mirror and looks at it curiously, blank-eyed, glass and metal. Her own reflection stares back at her, unsurprisingly, but this does not seem to be satisfactory, at least from her own personal point of view. After a few more seconds she reaches out and places her hand upon the glass, touching her own outstretched fingers as it is inevitable that she will.

The view changes! Her reflection in the mirror shifts! The image is different!

Where there was reflection of tiled walls in the background, there are now gray clouds, scudding past at ever-shifting speeds, dark with the suggestion of storms as yet forthcoming. The girl herself is still reflected, yet her appearance and outfit are utterly different. In the mirror she is dressed entirely in well-stretched black leather, clothing in a style which I have never seen before but which clearly reflects some sort of integrated design, made the way it is for a real purpose rather than just a matter of appearance.

The mirror-girl has wide-spreading long hair that is black like ravens, like her long-gauntlets and greaves. For a small fraction of a second, the change goes even further and there is a broad mask covering her face, a guard of the same material, long and reinforced, running all the way down to her upper lip to protect the bridge of her nose and her eyes golden like a tiger.

Then she pulls her hand away and the image returns to a litany of reflected tiles.

"This is what you are?" I ask, slightly stunned.

"This is what I am!" she cries, and dashes out of the reflected space. She seems exultant, rather than surprised, but there is no time to think about that now as I give chase to her. Outside the bathroom doorway I see her already halfway across the disorienting and strangely-angled dining area. To one side of the blank wall near the far end is a kind of built-in ladder, steeply canted, and it is to this that she is heading, as though she somehow knew it was there, even before she saw where it was. It must of a certainty be some sort of access to the roof, because there is nowhere else for it to go.

Quick as a cat, she has dashed past one or two startled diners and scaled it. I pursue her to the base of the ladder just as she has already slithered out and over the top, through a narrow trap-door that in some more sensible reality should really have been safely locked. Even climbing with all possible haste, it still takes precious seconds to follow her, and I barely have time to notice that we are both now out on the roof, dark tarmac and raised skylights like some misplaced scene out of a movie. The sky above is black, not just with the fading of the day but with a thick seething of the same dark thunderclouds I saw earlier in the mirror.

She sprints toward the edge of the roof, faster than a heartbeat, and with an almost implausible grace, dives smoothly out into empty air like it was black water.

And it is here that the amazement happens. For, in the frozen moment, she suddenly bursts apart into a multitude of shadows and reflections, smoke and mirrors made one, gray ghosts, invisible tigers. The multitude of aspects radiate outward from her like a fractal shockwave, tiger aspects, the first of them almost like reflections of her but with tooth and claw, becoming ever more abstract and animal until they shatter outward to fill the very edges of the sky.

Somewhere in the midst of the feral multitude, her real self is lost and separated as she becomes a thousand myths and fantasies and dreams, everything that is tiger burning bright.

Lightning explodes the world in whiteness and she is gone, a feline storm of fury from on high.

~*~