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10:52. Not good. She wanted to be finished here by 10:45. Tap on the glass. 1 + 4 + 5 = 10, a number signifying strength, whereas 1 + 5 + 2 = 8, lie it on its side and you have Infinity, one face of the great nameless adversary. The evening air is heavy and charge with unseen energies. Unfortunate to end up with a bad number. Tonight, tonight. She bangs on the glass and says to the speaker mounted to the wall, "Kletch, let me in." I can feel it in my soul. The beginning of the end. A sliver of light, cold and white, under the door leading to a room at the back of the costume shop on Canal Street. She hates Kletch with unspeakable passion. He belongs to a part of the world that is the antithesis of her soul. The things that she knows about him. He gambles. Has a taste for young women. Drinks to excess. That back room. One can only imagine what goes on back there. The stories she'd heard. He's on the list. I'll deal with him. The speaker burps and stutters. "Come back tomorrow." "Is it ready?" "Come back tomorrow." "Kletch, Kletch, Kletch. . ." "Is been long day." "I have cash." "Who is this?" She whispers her name into the speaker. Not her true name reserved only for the magnificent purity that rules all good elements of the universe. Agnes Dunbar. Selected at random from the Manhattan phone book. "You going to pay in full?" Kletch asks. His voice is tinny and distorted by the speaker, which appears to have been hammered by a shoe or rock. This is not a great part of town. Canal Street is on the list. "Let me in," she says. "You got cash?" The entire city is rotten. Thieves. Prostitutes. Crooked cabbies. On the list, on the list, on the list. "Yes," she says. "Okie-dokie. One minute. For cash I stay open late." On top of everything else, he's a tax evader. All on the list. Tires screeching. A distant gunshot. People yelling. Soon it will all change. A police car drifting past, not in a particular hurry to be anywhere. I will serve as an example to them all. A small man emerges from the back room. The way he moves, his body could be fabricated from cobwebs. What spider spun him into life, and for what purpose? This isn't a human being. Kletch must be some kind of humanoid construct, certainly in the employ of the great nameless adversary. He doesn't walk, but floats on breezes so slight as to be imperceptible to human senses. He fumbles at the door. What is his true nature that a simple lock should confound him? "In spite of cash you are being huge pest," Kletch says in his terrible English, with the strange lisp and the odd stretching out of vowels. He finally gets the door open and lets her inside. "Already I was preparing to go home for dinner. Another five minutes and I would not have to deal with you at all." "Is it ready?" she asks. "Just this afternoon finished. After considerable labor, I do not mind adding. This fabric you insisted upon has mind of its own. I am never liking silk. Fabric should be slave to my needle and thread, not other way around. Many are the damages to my fingers. For this I should charge extra, but we have deal and I am, of course, honest man." She thinks, Hah! "And such colors. Never have I put yellow orange, and red into same garment." "I want to try it on," she says. In the small dressing room she changes into the tights, cape, hood, gauntlets, boots. Not looking into the three-fold mirror for a long time because the anxiety, it has her. Mirrors are weapons of the great nameless adversary. Mirrors, they are how he reaches into her very thoughts and plants doubts. No good, mirrors say. Not worthy. Fat. Ugly. She turns slowly. There is nothing to fear. This is my destiny. She's beautiful. "You are going to party?" Kletch asks through the curtain. "No." "This costume, you're saying, is for work?" "Yes." "What kind of job you got?" "An important one." "Who is ever hearing of job where people dress in such a way?" I am the Solar Queen. She found the final message in a copy of Weekly News Hotline, hidden among accounts of alligator men and space aliens in the White House. She circled letters at random, her fingers dancing from one article to another. That was the key. Vital communiqués required spontaneity of motion. You wanted to avoid conscious thought during this particular process. Self-direction interrupted the flow of cosmic mind-thought particles and caused the message to be garbled. One should treat mind-thought particles with all due caution. With respect. It was all spelled out for her in the articles. E V I L W I L L D E S T R O Y A L L E N E R G Y I T W I L L B E T H E F I N A L B A T T L E F O R M A N During the following weeks, the citizens of New York report sightings of a mysterious entity lurching across rooftops and staggering along subway tracks. This new crimefighter issues no personal statement, no manifesto. Her purpose remains veiled. She spray-paints messages that no one can read. She calls the mayor and speaks in tongues. At one point she's spotted buying lunch from a hot dog cart in Washington Square Park. Witnesses claim to see her doing a load wash at a laundromat in the Village. A fuzzy photo appears in the Hotline, but that could be anyone. In time the woman with the glowing sunburst on her chest disappears, which might have been a sign of something important, but by then we're deep into the ultimate conflict and the public has other matters on its mind.
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