The carriage rolled through a pink desert. Dunes drifted past, like overturned boats. Their flanks gleamed in dreamlike colors, creating the illusion of a landscape abandoned by a million glamorous fishermen. From horizon to horizon, wherever you looked, sand. And above it all, where the sky should have been, hung a mirror instead. It reflected everything below, tinting it in shades of red.
Orange-yellow-brown clouds, billowing here and there, made the reflection even more fantastical. I saw the carriage, stretched out across half the sky. I saw myself, staring up from below. My own mug blinked back at me from the cloud-high heights, but the greatest fright seared my mind when, off to the side between the reflection and me, I spotted a stone. A stone, blindingly bright as the sun, resembling the sun, almost the sun, but… a crystalline polyhedron, gleaming with the reflected light of some distant lamp, invisible from the carriage…
What was this?... Where had I ended up?... Where was I?
The carriage had ended up nowhere near where it had been going, and absolutely nowhere it could have gone…
“He welcomes you and invites you into his world! Make yourself at home” — a movie-trailer voice, from behind and above, tore me away from the window.
In the middle of the carriage stood a gentleman in a black tailcoat, a monocle in his left eye, a cane in his right hand. Snow-white gloves covered his hands. The old woman, back on her bench again, rose gracefully and threw off her black shawl along with a black cape. Well, would you look at that! Underneath was a tall, golden-haired woman, made three, four, five times younger! Her beauty was indescribable.
Women like this I’d only ever seen in dreams, and only there could I have found the words to convey that unsettling brilliance, that intoxicating radiance. Looking at her while awake was unbearable. I wanted to forget everything and throw myself at the feet of this magnificence, arrived in the shape of a dazzling diva. This wasn’t a woman. This was a narcotic, a poison. This was passion, dressed in a beautiful body and wrapped in a silver gown down to the floor. Swaying slightly with every step, she walked up to the gentleman and, flashing all thirty-two of her snow-white teeth, announced:
— They’re waiting for you.
Her eyes flashed like two diamonds.
Thunder rumbled, lightning flashed. Or maybe it wasn’t lightning, and wasn’t thunder. Hard to say. But something boomed. In the distance something flared and went out. Then it cracked again. The carriage stopped, the doors flew open. The fairy-tale-beautiful pair, having appeared from who knows where, stepped down onto the sand arm in arm and dissolved into the shimmering, bumpy horizon. The doors slammed shut, the carriage rolled on. Passengers, sprung from who knows where, took their seats on the benches and stared at the sands drifting past the window.
Where were we being taken, and how much would it cost to get back?
Right! The most important thing — I didn’t have a single kopeck. I was planning on getting back entirely on someone else’s dime. And it seemed I wasn’t the only one…
