Carabas

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

I'm tied up in a chair, and this guy who was interrogating me is now struggling with another guy who wants to get me out. The guy on the rescue mission was carrying a needle, and during the struggle, the contents of the needle wind up getting sprayed into the air - they're behind me at the time, so I don't see it, but I can feel the spray, and I don't hear them fighting anymore.

The guy on the rescue mission's been captured. It turns out he got a small dose of the contents himself during the fight. This will cause something that we refer to as 'hunger', and he believes this is something he'll be able to use, to focus on his enemies. Having experienced it myself in the past, I know he's mistaken, and that it'll make it more difficult for him to think clearly.

We're both taken out of the building. Outside, we're in a junkyard, and there are a few men with guns escorting us. The guy on the failed rescue mission is starting to have a hard time walking, and one of the guards is shouting at him about it. I'm remembering a time in the past when I'd been out of it and he'd carried me. I'm aware I should do the same for him now, but I don't. I don't want to be associated with him.

Switching to third person, there's a kid watching us from a distance, out of sight. He leaves, gets on a computer and reports what he saw to a woman who I think of as the mother of my POV character, though she looks too young for it - long brown hair, upper-class British accent. In the kid's report to her, he mentions a "guy that you call the Judge" who's holed up in the woods nearby.