The Cryptids
and Entities

They roost in the highest rafters of the Lounge, where the ceiling disappears into something darker than dark. No one has counted them accurately. Numbers feel wrong in their presence, like trying to weigh fog. They are small — wingspan of a hand, bodies like a fist of black velvet — but their eyes hold the amber light of every reading that has ever taken place beneath them. They are the Lounge's memory made physical: each bat carries, in its echolocation, whispered fragments of past visitors' revelations. What you said aloud at the reading table, they know. What you almost said, they know better. Miss Riot Mayhem says they are not surveillance. They are archivists. The distinction, she insists, matters.

He stands in the hallway between the entrance and the reading room, and he has been standing there since before Miss Riot Mayhem arrived. He is dressed as a carnival barker: red-and-gold waistcoat, top hat tilted at an angle no physics supports, white gloves, a cane that taps a rhythm no floor should produce. He has no mouth. He has never needed one. He gestures. He points — not at the reading room, not at the door, but at the side of you that arrived without a name. The part that followed you in when the rest of you was still deciding whether to cross the threshold. Visitors who look where he points report seeing something they had forgotten they were carrying.

Three figures, amphibious in the way that bayou things are: belonging to both the water and the air, comfortable in neither, at home in the threshold between them. They appear in the Lounge's bathroom mirrors and only in the Lounge's bathroom mirrors — the ones with the gilt frames and the slightly wrong reflection angles. They appear when a visitor is on the verge of something they cannot yet see: a change they have already made internally that the external world hasn't caught up to, a version of themselves they are becoming before they've been given permission to arrive. The Bayou Daughters look like you. But not the you that walked in. The you that will walk out.

Void is made of negative space. Where she sits, a Void-shaped absence opens in the visible world. Her eyes are two points of light in that absence, the color of bioluminescence at the bottom of something deep. She arrived on the first night Miss Riot Mayhem stayed in the Lounge and has not left, which makes her, by duration, the Lounge's second-longest continuous resident. When Void sits near a spread of tarot cards, the cards flip to their shadow meanings: not reversals exactly, but the interpretation that lives underneath the surface interpretation. The uncomfortable one. The true one. Miss Riot Mayhem calls her "my editor." Void does not respond to compliments, criticism, or her name, but she will allow you to sit near her if you are not pretending.

He is made of old circus posters — not printed on them, not holding them, but composed of them: layers of faded broadside paper and lithograph ink that have arranged themselves into the approximate shape of a person. He moves through the Lounge slowly, trailing the slight smell of old glue and sawdust and the particular sweetness of ink from a press that no longer runs. He documents every reading. No one has ever seen him write. The documentation happens anyway. If you return to the Lounge a second time, there is a sense that he already knows what happened the first visit, and has adjusted his regard of you accordingly. He is not judgmental. He is thorough.