Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
After six months of rejection in the L.A. gallery scene, Lefty shifted from trying to get Daedalia shown to studying the people who bought art and the rules that governed them. At an opening he met Greta Krieger, who dismantled his hustle, flirted with him for sport, and left him with one directive—and her number: make a spectacle.
Clem Rousseau sat at his usual table in the back of the café, sipping a double espresso in the late afternoon. Normally, he was here in the early morning and wouldn’t risk so much caffeine so late in the day, but he had to be sharp for the evening in front of him.
It was his routine to wake early and come here to work on his latest column. It was preferable to write here in his yellow legal pad than over the small, cluttered desk of his studio apartment, which smelled of cat piss and stale cigarettes. The foul stench was all that remained of Roger, who had left him more than a year prior for an older model with a better bank balance. Clem had been walking around in a malaise until this morning, when he received a curious invitation with his coffee.
On the white paper cup, a single question had been handwritten with a fine-tip black pen. The print was so near-perfect that, at first, he thought it was clever printing on the cup, but there were small imperfections that made the writing distinctly human. He had an eye for such things. The simple question, on its own, was compelling, but what stirred his imagination was the arrow beneath it, pointing to the bottom of the cup. It tickled a part of his brain—unlocked a memory of decoding riddles on the backs of cereal boxes as a child.
He had looked around at the other patrons seated in the café, just as he did this afternoon, to see if any of them had received a cup like his. That morning he had tried to do this subtly, as he was loath to draw undue attention to himself. As far as he could tell, his cup was one of a kind. There had been a strong urge to lift it over his head so he could investigate the bottom of the cup, but that might have alarmed the couple sitting adjacent to him. So he waited, sipping his coffee at a pace that scalded his throat, his pen hovering over the draft of his piece on a graffiti artist whose work had been causing a stir on the New York scene for the past few months. The four-word inquiry carefully printed on his cup taunted him and felt deeply personal.
Did you lose something?
When he finished the coffee, he turned the cup over. In the same precise, tiny script, another message was scrawled, this one spiraling from the outer rim toward the center like a nautilus shell. He had to raise the cup inches from his face to read the message. What he read brought the slightest smile of satisfaction to his lips.
After weeks of hearing whispered rumors within the art community about these mysterious invitations and feeling excluded, he had finally received one. No two invitations had been the same, so he hadn’t even known what to look for—in fact, he had been afraid he wouldn’t recognize it for what it was. He reread the message repeatedly throughout the day as he traced his index finger along its spiraling path, entranced.
This morning, he nearly stopped to ask the barista about the special cup, but there had been a line of customers, and he discovered he didn’t want to know how the cup had come into his possession.
He worked for a couple of hours to finish up the piece he had neglected this morning. His deadline loomed and he was a professional, so even in this highly distracted state, he prevailed. It wasn’t his best work, but then what more did a graffiti artist deserve? Clem considered himself a fair and balanced critic, and unlike some of his contemporaries—who indulged in the cheap thrill of the hatchet job or the gushy sycophantry that ensured comp tickets to all the best events in town—he wrote his observations of art with a direct, honest intensity.
He checked his watch. It was only six-thirty. He still had five hours to kill before he could drive to the address written on the bottom of the cup. It was on the east side of downtown, off Alameda, and seemed sketchy to him.
Earlier, after leaving the café, he had stopped by the office to speak with his editor and made a point of asking around about the location. A grubby beat reporter with eczema—who had been eavesdropping on his conversation with his friend Cheryl in the break room—told him it was nothing but warehouses, cold storage, a trainyard. Not exactly a place for a gallery show.
For someone who rarely stayed out past ten, and whose idea of an adventurous evening was to try a new Vietnamese restaurant that had mixed reviews, visiting an unknown location in the warehouse district after midnight was both thrilling and terrifying. He would have asked a friend to tag along, but that was forbidden. What had the invitation said? This is a trip you must take alone.
Clem understood it was a stunt. He had seen them before from artists, but this one was different—and it wasn’t just that it was so exclusive. There was something about the tiny figure drawn at the center of the spiraling message on the bottom of the cup. He had studied it with a magnifying glass and marveled at how just a few abstract pen strokes rendered the perfect form of a rabbit. The image had stirred him deeply, and he couldn’t understand exactly why.
Rather than go back home—where he feared he might lose his nerve and not venture back out—he decided to stay out and find something to kill the time. Two hours later, he found himself standing outside the multiplex, staring at movie posters. It had been years since he watched a popular movie and he remembered why. They all looked so garish and overblown. He considered Coppola’s Dracula but decided he didn’t need to be more spooked than he already was, so he bought a ticket for something called A River Runs Through It that had the delicious Brad Pitt standing waist-deep in a mountain stream.
By the time the movie finished, Clem was weepy, exhausted, and embarrassed about being so pathetic. He wanted nothing more than to go back home, curl into bed, and dream of fly fishing. But a fate worse than death for an art critic is being the last one to publish an opinion on an emerging talent. So when he got back into his car, he gave himself a little pep talk and cranked the engine of his old Accord. The streets of West Hollywood were still humming with happy, drunk clusters of young people ambling down Santa Monica.
On La Brea, headed south, there was an atmospheric change. It was quieter, darker. By the time he crossed Olympic, he saw the shimmery halo of Hollywood fade in his rearview. He passed strip malls with psychic readers, boarded-up storefronts, and liquor stores with spastically strobing fluorescent lights. At the 10, he merged east, passing half-lit billboards, graffiti on overpasses, and endless concrete arteries. He hated the freeway, especially at night.
When he exited on Alameda, it was warehouses and shuttered loading docks, semi-trailers parked like sleeping giants marked with the bubbly graffiti of fading gang tags. No more palm trees. No more pedestrians.
He pulled slowly down a narrow street with nondescript industrial buildings on one side and a chain-link fence bordering a weedy parking lot with hulking warehouses on the other.
This was a bad idea.
He fumbled for the cup in the passenger seat, slowed to a stop, and checked the address. 2326 E. 8th Street. It was somewhere on this block, but nothing screamed art exhibition. “At least there’s plenty of parking,” he mumbled to himself like a man whistling in a graveyard as he put the car in park behind a gray Toyota Corolla, the only other car on the street.
He got out, closed the door, and looked up and down the street in both directions. The storefronts—if you could call them that—were all shuttered with heavy rolling doors or corrugated steel sliding doors with handles chained together and padlocked. The only working light was three doors down from where he stood, but when he walked up he saw the number was wrong and it was locked up tight.
Walking back toward his car, he was ready to give up when he heard the faintest strains of music: a solo violin playing somewhere farther down the darkened sidewalk.
The last door at the end of the block was partially open and the music was coming from inside. As Clem approached, he could see a faint light flickering from inside a chipped clay pot by the door. The candlelight illuminated a small card affixed to the painted cinderblock wall. On the black-bordered card, in the same careful print from the coffee cup, the sign read:
You found me, please come in.
He looked left and right. There was no one. It was unnerving and he felt foolish for allowing himself to be taken in by what surely was either an elaborate practical joke or a lure to attract an aging, lonely man and separate him from what little money he had.
But he had come this far.
He had to push with his shoulder to slide the door open enough on the rusty track above so he could squeeze into the dimly lit space. Once inside, his eyes quickly adjusted and his senses sharpened. There was a pleasant, earthy smell like cardamom, leather, and patchouli.
The room was large, easily a hundred feet to the back wall, where there was a single framed piece that appeared as a tiny window. It was so precisely lit from a powerful pin light somewhere above in the ceiling that it looked as though it were lit from within. The rest of the massive space was in inky shadow, with no other source of light.
As he moved toward the piece, his shoes scraped on the dusty concrete. The music swelled, the violin shifting into a high, aching register, the notes cascading and building upon themselves like the churn and roil of rapids on a river after a heavy rain.
Clem forgot himself—forgot to be anxious, skeptical, or afraid—as he drew near to the piece. When at last he stood before it, he found he had trouble understanding the scale of it. What he had estimated to be a frame less than three feet wide by two feet tall seemed so much larger up close given the incomprehensible amount of detail and perspective.
He understood right away this was not something to be consumed in one go. It required time and space to open itself. At a distance it had appeared to be one thing—a surreal, naturalistic landscape awash in tones of green and blue—but on closer inspection, it was an intricate, labyrinthine drawing in the same careful pen strokes he recognized from the cup.
His eye was drawn to the bottom left corner of the canvas where he recognized a version of the rabbit from the bottom of the cup. The creature was poised before an open gate, half-covered in ivy. Beyond the gate, his eye traced a path through the hedgerows that twisted back into the distance of the painting, sometimes disappearing behind a structure like a fountain or stone cottage and then reappearing only to twist back upon itself.
The piece provoked in him the same tingling sensation he had as a boy upon seeing his first M.C. Escher drawing, and yet it was different. This work tugged at something deeper inside him. For such a technical piece, there was a raw, visceral, emotional energy that built up as he lingered before it. He found he was no longer in an abandoned warehouse observing a work of art, but moving through long-hidden passageways from his childhood.
He had no idea how long he stood before the painting, and he might have stayed there until dawn if the music hadn’t faded and a man’s voice hadn’t broken his trance. He wasn’t startled, which he certainly should have been—alone in a dark warehouse well after midnight. The voice was low and soothing with a hint of Southern charm.
“Hello, Mr. Rousseau. I’m so glad you were able to make it.”
Clem turned to see a tall man with a rangy, athletic build wearing an open-collared white shirt with a dark suede jacket, jeans, and desert boots. He had a handsome face, a strong chin, and an easy smile.
“My name’s Lefty Moody.”
He offered his hand. The warmth and strength of his handshake made Clem feel wobbly and out of sorts. Normally, he prided himself on his unflappable ability to articulate in any situation, but he couldn’t find words.
“Can I offer you a drink?” Lefty asked. “I have some wine, whiskey, or perhaps a sparkling water.”
“Um… sorry, this is all just so strange. Are you the artist?”
“Oh, lord no. I can barely draw a square if you gave me three sides to start. The artist’s name is Daedalia. I represent her.”
“And is she here?”
“No, I’m afraid not. No one will ever meet her for reasons I can’t get into. Let’s just say she’s a private person.”
Clem’s face contorted. He had about fifty questions he wanted to ask and they were bottlenecked, leaving him, once again, at a loss for words. This man, Lefty, was patient and had an ease about him. He just seemed to be waiting.
Finally, Clem asked the only question that truly mattered.
“How did you… how did she know what I’d lost?”
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Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.
I am loving this story and this chapter kicked it up a notch. I love the way you are able to give me the sense of a place, I can see and feel it along with the characters. I love the spectacle they’ve come up with - and of course I really also want to know what Clem lost. So good.
“Someone who likes the long way into a story” is just a perfect description of the experience thus far. It’s a treat to be introduced to a new character with such firm, confident brushstrokes. And to see Kelly’s art through new eyes, albeit influenced by the whole mysterious setup to his viewing. Part film noir, part psychological thriller, the cinematic tone is working well. Clem is hooked!
Also, this made me LOL: “I can barely draw a square if you gave me three sides to start.” ☺️