THE PLATINUM RAVEN

19 Mirrors in the labyrinth

19   Mirrors in the labyrinth

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! Amber fantasises hanging by his tail from the ceiling, racked with week-long muscle spasms, vomiting erotically without relent and drowning when the room is filled above his snout. What a use for life this is—no destiny or meaning, just compulsion and error, pushing slops of grey at cliffs of blank. Down is the bottom line; up's preserved for next time. Listen: every single thing passes, tires, breaks. Like the sudden grey fingers at the edges of a photocopy carelessly executed, everything distresses on reflection! Amber can't be bothered to supply us with a proof, but he's right, fuck his eyes! So let the show carry on, then—there might be a joke!

...And from underneath the tower comes a sigh of spitting sand.

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Platinum Raven, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/synopsis-of-the-platinum-raven/

For some tasters from it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-novella-ebook/

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The Platinum Raven is triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert – then back down again, forever changed. A lot of its action happens in my favourite building, the fabulously flashy Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest skyscraper.