Carabas

Visiting the McKittrick, I've been following the taxidermist - a bald man with sunken eyes, looks starved and intense - as he talks to a young blonde man with a heavy jaw who works for the hotel, very earnest type. When it's time for the final banquet, they meet up with two women in clothes from the Victorian era and accompany them down the stairs - but I come to realize their final scene won't be with everyone else at the banquet at all. The women dance down the stairs, floating from one bannister to the other. Standing with them on the bannisters, so close to the ceiling, I'm very aware of Hecate's influence on the floor just above us.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just walked away from a room where I'd been talking to a woman. Now I'm standing in the ruins of a building, on a street where a lot of buildings have been destroyed. Nearby there's a large brown rat on top of a pile of rubble, and I have a sense of fellow feeling as I watch it. I don't really want to go out into the street - it's much too exposed - but I don't see any way around it. Once in the street, I catch sight of a woman in a white dress two or three buildings down, behind a wall of iron bars. She sees me and jumps up and down to get my attention. "Nick! It is Nicky, isn't it?" I recognize her, we're close. I (or rather my POV character here) use several different names - 'Nick' is for all intents and purposes my (POV character's) real name, but I haven't heard it for a long time, so this is something of a reunion. But I'm debating whether I want to take the time to rescue her from behind those iron bars.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been walking around backstage at a sort of club in the 1930s or so after leaving the audience of a show on stage in the main room. Talking to various people, overhearing conversations by dancers. I'm just now leaving a smokey room where two men have fallen asleep. I've been looking for someone, a specific woman. There's a disaster or a tragedy that's about to occur here, and I have to find her first.

The show in the main room ended while I was backstage, and everyone's straggling out. In the lobby, I come across a large man I remember meeting earlier. He's putting on his coat. Near the doors, his wife and daughter are waiting for him, and he introduces them to me. I recognize the daughter as the woman I was looking for - she's just a kid. I hadn't been expecting that she'd be a kid in this era. I kneel down to introduce myself to her eye to eye, using the name "Deacon Willfire" - it's the fake name I've been using here in the past, but Deacon is similar to the name I'll be using when she meets me as an adult in the future. She's very shy here, can barely look at me, but I'm aware that meeting me here will make an impression on her, and the similar names will help that memory along when we meet in the future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in that kid's room, standing by an empty fireplace that's so large I could easily fit in it just by ducking a little - it's grabbing my attention. But I'm also talking to the kid, saying to her, "A 300-year-old vampire for an imaginary friend?" (I'm referring to myself. She thinks I'm imaginary.) "You're trouble for sure." I'm thinking about the way I'm meeting her at various times in her life out of sequence. From her perspective, proceeding through time in the usual linear fashion, I've wound up being someone she grows up knowing, someone who's been around for most of her life.