Stars Rise

II. Louis Reveur, Somnambulist

The Sleepwalker

Media Nox — Midnight

The gold on the black nameplate on the desk in Louis's office read: Louis Satchmo Reveur, D.O./Ph.D. Alone in the empty office, he reflected that a hundred years ago when he had chosen that name he didn't like it nearly as much as he did today, light-years away from where he had been at the time.

Louis Reveur sat back in his looming red armchair, red like the blackened bricks of his semi-detached bay and gable, his Morpheus armchair. Morpheus, god of sleep, god of dreams. Then he wondered again how a client managed to schedule an appointment for midnight, but there it was in his schedule: "Prince, Leander — 12 a.m."

Prince Leander? You gotta be kidding me. Louis almost got up from his Morpheus chair and went home to sleep right then ... but something stopped him. Nervous and twiddling a ballpoint pen between ex-drummer fingers, Dr. Reveur twiddled a funny idea out of his head. Of course the name had been there a minute ago.

It was written there all day.

Princes. The lack of princes was what he liked about this place. No princes, no dukes, no kings, bards, squires, lords. No damn knights. Cutthroat corporate stooges trying to kill each other amounted to about the same, but at least no one expected Louis to bow when they entered a room. Or get up out of his seat.

If the words had only appeared now, he wondered what he had been doing in his office all night. He almost checked to make sure the bottle he kept in his desk cabinet wasn't empty.

Loosening his blackened red tie, Louis peered into the shadows in the corners of the room, expecting them to move. A luminous desk light suspended itself like the sun by nothing, a gravitational pull all to itself. It lit up an empty desk chair for visitors, three walls lined with textbooks, an empty charcoal fainting couch. Everything as it should be.

An avalanche of snow came past the window. Louis shuffled his weight around in the chair and twisted over its arm at the same second the snowstorm was set alight by more than moonlight; a white fork of lightning, however unlikely, cut through the blizzard. The white zigzag imprinted on his retinas along with a thousand brilliant snow flakes.

Lightning in a snowstorm?

A knock thundered at the door at the same time thunder clapped at the window. Louis bolted upright.

For a second he questioned what would happen to him if he didn't answer. "Come in," he said. Quietly. If Prince Leander didn't hear, maybe he would go away.

The silence smacked him. It hurt his ear drums. The seconds became long as Louis's heart palpitated, sprinting, his thoughts raced his heart beats, he swore out loud, though quietly, and called, "Come in, please, it's open."

The stranger who came in was so out of place that Dr. Reveur knew he was exactly where he should be.

The door closed itself behind the prince. Prince indeed. Despite a fine wool, precisely tailored, charcoal gray suit, at the moment Leander looked like the prince of the corner of 14th Street. Fabric wrinkled like the newspaper he may have slept on, subtle narrow notched lapels, a subdued gray chalk-stripe suit jacket long out of fashion and time — and above the breast pocket the fabric was torn in the shape of a bullet.

The blood was brown and congealed on the fabric, beginning to dry.

The stranger didn't appear to be wounded, however, so the uninformed would perhaps guess that Prince Leander had stolen the suit from the body of a rich time traveler.