THE PLATINUM RAVEN

6 Platinum hair on black silk

THE PLATINUM RAVEN

6   Platinum hair on black silk

...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. To assist its absence, perhaps she can now break the spell by stepping back inside for a moment. So she turns and heads through the doors into the corporate suite. In its well-stocked kitchen she lights a cigarette, opens a bottle of red wine and pours a glass. Then she carries bottle and glass back outside, turns left, heads to the very end and places the bottle down in front of the railing.

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 her first visit here yesterday, it has come to seem to her that life is somehow mostly 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.

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.