The House of Lesslie

Behind me, James told them.

That I was now Mistress of the Mansion.

III.

It had caught up with me in Hong Kong.

It had been a voice on the other end of an intercom, speaking in Mandarin. Outside my office, the grey skies rained down on a chaotic assembly of buildings, shacks and houses that no amount of water, no amount of god's loving piss could ever clean. The filth down in the streets, gathering in the alleys accepted it, nonetheless.

I looked down on the city it inhabited. I looked down on them.

Crawling through the thing they called life. Obedient little things, they were, a trait that I had come to appreciate about the Chinese. They dared not look up. Dared not to dream themselves. Perfect, little bees. Buzzing in that strange language that could mean so many things.

Every now and then, for my own pleasure, I reached down onto those streets and decided to lift one of them up, to give one a glimpse of a life that was different. The voice on the other end of the intercom had been one of them. Had been living a low life, had been a boy, had been imperfect, before I saved him, turned him, made him not only a personal assistant.

"Mistress?" the voice said.

"What is it, Chan?" I replied. Even through the electronic distortion that made the voice a ghost in the machine, I could hear the apparent displeasure in my personal assistant's voice.

"There is a man here to see you. He knows your name."

"Everybody in Hong Kong knows my name. That is no reason to disturb me, Chan."

"Your real name, Mistress."

My real name. Now there was something that was reason enough to disturb me, in more ways than one. Men were not, not even powerful ones, of which I had become friends with, often quite intimately, over the years.

But they knew me in a different fashion. As their goddess, as their lover, as their mistress, and the name that had been spread throughout the streets of the city below, had only been whispered in the halls of politicians and businessmen, had been nothing more than a title.