Plug speaks:

High up in Runyon Canyon, on a hilltop overlooking Los Celestiales down to the sea, a man surveys the scene below. The building at 1901 Fuller is in the center of his view.

This man is tall and lean. His face, with a merciless mouth and eyes always staring through anyone in his presence, has that chiseled, stern look of command for which any Moviewood casting director has half a dozen resumes – that look which, in person, turns men and women of weak will into hostages to a manipulator’s whims.

This appearance of authority is enhanced by his black bespoke suit, from a tailor that is centuries more ancient than Ede & Ravenscroft (founded 1689) but is never visited by the mainstream trade.

This other clothier, Borgia & Beelz, located down a narrow, little-traveled diagonal alley off City-on-Thames’s Bespoke Row, is rumored among the gossips in my network to have dressed Jack the Ripper and kings who lopped off their wives’ heads, among others.

In one of the wilder tales, it is said to have had the skill to outfit a werewolf with a suit that could pop off rather than tear at the advent of a full moon.

In these tamer days, when none of you believe in mystical creatures, this tailor is known only to a few individuals with whom you wouldn’t want to engage in a business deal. Or, for that matter, find yourself alone in the dark with.

His attire is wholly out of place on the steep, dusty trails of Runyon Canyon, of course, and he draws brief stares, followed by quick, sideways glances, seeking the location of a motion picture camera and crew.

There is no camera or crew. This is reality.

This man continues to stare down the steep, scrub-brush-covered hill toward the high-rise condo at 1901 Fuller.

Standing two steps behind him is another man: Grendelgore, a San Fernando Valley, Goldensun, porn film producer and the outcast son of Buttonwood* investment banker Sir Geoffrey Gelt d’Grendelgore. He’s dressed in an attempt to affect a Moviewood gunge look.

*(Buttonwood: metaphorically, it means the Empire City financial district, named after the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement founding the Empire City Stock Exchange; it might go by a different name in your iteration of reality.)

In his own milieu, this Grendelgore junior is a striking hunk of chiseled beefcake with a well-practiced smoldering gaze that, in his mind, takes women’s breath away and lures male sidekicks hoping to gather his discards.

But here, in the presence of the one he senses as leader – or, more to the point, the one who, like the late Baccarat Magot, commands paths to that which he values (power, profit, and pussy, to use his vernacular) – he hangs back, self-deflating, an obsequious worshiper.

The man in the bespoke suit raises his arms and waves them down at the high-rise like a choral conductor. The wind resumes, stronger now, and begins to howl and kick up dust. The dust swirls around the man in the black suit but does not touch him.

He slowly and deliberately takes an unfiltered cigarette from a gold case bearing a strange emblem, places the cigarette in his mouth, tucks away the cigarette case, and pulls out a matching gold matchbox.

He opens the matchbox, retrieves an ancient wooden lucifer match, and runs it across the striking surface of the box.

The match head of antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch lights noisily with a large, sparkling orange flare, giving off thick, black smoke.

Far down the hill, in the stillness, this small sound hisses loudly in my vicinity.

I crane my gaze up. My eyes widen in alarm, and my ears grow huge and rise to catch the noise. As I turn toward the sound, my neck movements are slow and jerky, making the sound of metal grinding on metal, like gears long left without lubrication.

Pedestrians flow by me, seeing nothing of my metamorphosis, for these two worlds, the Magical and the mundane, exist in the same space but occupy it under different physical laws, as if the Magical were on the see-through side of a one-way mirror in all dimensions, attached to the mundane only by time.

A dog, at the end of a leash, tugs his female human companion toward me.

Neither the human nor the dog sees me as the live metal being I am, craning my neck frantically toward the match-strike noise that they couldn’t possibly have heard half a mile up the steep hill.

As my transformation continues, my face fills out with features and expressions, and below my head, I now have shoulders. Stubby little arms – some sort of celestial joke in Creator’s mind, ha-ha – are forming.

But alas, no legs. Never legs. Being mentally connected to the knowledge residing in everything and every place through the electrons coursing through all the water on the planet, I don’t want to go anywhere, but I do have an occasional longing for at least one moving leg with a foot at the end in a cast-iron boot. Why? Here’s why:

The dog lifts his leg and begins to relieve himself. Oh, for a foot, just once! Instead, I jerk my head toward the dog with a sharp metallic grinding. The dog, but not the human (for dogs are Magicals; I’ll explain later), now suddenly hears the noise and notices my head moving.

“Piss off!” I growl in a deep, rasping rumble of a voice, much like the sound of worn drum brakes in a ‘57 Springbok SS coupe making a panic stop.

The dog yelps and bolts, dragging his confused human down the sidewalk.

I turn my attention back up the hill, where…

The man in the black bespoke suit lights the cigarette. He tosses the flaring, spark-spitting, ancient Lucifer match into the brush below.

The brush ignites. The flames, seething with the orange-and-black color of congealed raw blackfluid and a sulfurous yellow, carry the stench of both burning blackfluid and brimstone. They generate a heavy black smoke that does not rise; it drifts down the hill – just as I’d worried!

The flames also do not rise. They swirl around themselves and snake down through the brush in the gullies and hollows of the canyon, slowly at first, igniting everything made of wood or brush in their multiple, many-serpentine, diverging and re-converging paths.

A fire with a mind, it heads toward the high-rise building with inexorable, unstoppable purpose.

The tall man watches the flames for a moment.

“It is done.” He says this to himself, not to Grendelgore, but the latter takes his words as a cue and steps to the edge of the hill next to him to watch the fast-moving flames.

The man in the black suit turns and starts up the path toward Mulholland Drive. Then, like an investment banker in the wake of a financial meltdown, he disappears into the swirling smoke and dust, leaving Grendelgore alone, staring. After a moment, noticing that his master is gone, Grendelgore turns and retreats as quickly from the scene of the arson as his legs will carry his substantial corpus.

Here, at the bottom of the hill, I see the writhing, snakelike orange and sulfur-yellow flames and the thick, almost congealing black smoke pouring down toward me and the high-rise building. The flames grow larger, incinerating trees in their diverging and converging paths, turning them to ash but affecting nothing other than wood as they rush down the hill.

I clear my throat, a sound not unlike a human doing the same – if your throat were clogged with rust and hard-water calcium deposits.

“Fire!” I yell toward the Old Hag in the lobby – that is, if the sound of worn brake linings rumbling and rasping can indeed be called “yelling.”

She doesn’t notice. She seems to be staring blankly at the odd apartment door.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” I wave my stubby arms. Passersby cannot hear my alarms or see my gyrations. The Old Hag, who could hear and see me if she weren’t napping on the job, still doesn’t react.

The flames reach the building and rush through the open lobby door, instantly turning the wooden chair frames in the lobby one after the other to ash, leaving nothing but their cushions flopping to the floor.

The roar of the flames finally stirs the Old Hag. She springs to her feet just as her own wood-frame chair collapses into a heap of ash and cushion.

The fire leaps to the wood veneer of the 24-hour front desk and instantly turns it to ash. The panicked front desk clerk smacks the fire alarm button once, ducks the flying ash from the frame of a picture on the wall, hits the alarm once again, and bolts out the rear of the building.

Apartment doors fly open.

Residents begin running from their apartments, carrying or dragging whatever they treasure most: fluffed little accessory dogs, two scratching and clawing Siamese cats, a copy of the famous Terry Toto Fuchsia Slippers from the 1939 classic movie “The Emerald City Beyond the Rainbow,” with the star’s autograph personally forged by an assistant in the studio’s publicity department. Others carry jewelry boxes, laptops, or etherphones.

A woman runs from her apartment clutching a wood-framed, signed counterfeit of a famous pregnant actress’s photo. As she runs, the frame bursts into flames, and the photo and protective glass fall from the ashes to the floor.

The glass shatters, shredding the photo. The woman screams as if she were on fire herself.

A man runs out, then runs back into his apartment, takes several tries to open a safe, then grabs from therein his most precious possession, a priceless (or so he has been led to believe) magnum bottle of Chateau Légèreté Grand Cru 1789.

He starts to run down the hallway, cradling it in a silk wrapper as if it were an infant. Then he slams headlong into a woman who is texting on her diamond-and-ruby-and-emerald-jeweled iMobile 18 etherphone as she runs.

The wine bottle falls from his grasp. The jeweled iMobile falls from hers.

The two items smash together on the white marble floor in a heap of wine, glass, jewels, and spark-spitting electronics. Surrounded by swirling flames and choking black smoke, they both react in horror at the loss of their precious items. They scream at each other, and at the same time, both drop onto all fours and try to recover bits of their broken treasures:

– The woman scrabbles among the wet wreckage for loose, tiny jewels and the broken pieces of the jeweled phone case.

– The man bends down, sniffs the wine, hesitates, and then slurps it right off the marble floor, savoring the taste. He spits out a couple of tiny jewels.

The woman pushes him away from the mess and tries to pick up loose jewels and bits of the jeweled frame, glistening in the wet, purple miasma.

Both would be even more displeased if they knew what I know: the Chateau Légèreté is a fake, and the jewels are zircons; both of them have been scammed.

The Old Hag passes through the mess between these two without a glance – they glare at her and open their mouths as if to snarl caustic words, but none emerge – and rushes to the strange, massive wooden door.

At first, she seems to be too late; the face of the door is awash in flames.

However, maybe it is not too late: unlike all the other wood touched by these orange-yellow flames, this wood has not instantly disintegrated into ash. The fire sparks and hisses, intensifying and sending up billows of dense, black smoke, but it cannot burn down this strange door.

The fire shifts its attack to the painted wood ceiling and floor moldings in the hallway. It bores through them and seeps into the wall studs, and through these, it infiltrates the strange cave-like apartment from the ceiling.

Meanwhile, outside, a hook-and-ladder roars up Fuller, its siren wailing. It screeches to a halt in front of the building. Thankfully, it doesn’t obscure my view of the action. It is followed rapidly by two more fire engines, then more behind them. Others arrive from around the corner, totaling nearly a dozen trucks in all.

Firefighters leap out and, with the precision of a drill team, rush to their many jobs to fight the fire.

A crowd gathers and grows. The first individuals are frightened residents of the high-rise who have fled, clutching their most precious items, and who now feel compelled to stop and watch, apparently incapable of looking away from the horror of their communal home set ablaze.

They are joined by hikers streaming down from Runyon Canyon. Residents of neighboring apartment buildings fill their balconies; others pour out of their lobbies, taking up roosts on the sidewalk as close as they dare.

The crowd quickly grows to fifty, then a hundred, and then many more.

Firefighters rush to me and attach hoses to my stubby arms. They don’t notice that I am animated, of course. Nor do any of them notice my grimace when a burly firefighter attaches a huge wrench to the valve at the top of my head and yanks it to turn on the water.

With professional efficiency, they rush hoses and men into the lobby, some looking for the fire source, others ushering residents out the front, side, and rear exits.

Amid the confusion, the Old Hag, now hidden from the firefighters by flames and black smoke, pulls an ancient, large key from the folds of her dress and tries to place it in the keyhole in the middle of the emblem on the door.

At first, the hot flames flare and drive her back. She raises the baseball bat, raps the door sharply, and barks a command:

“Abate!”

The flames pull back from the emblem, but only for an instant, and rush back, flaring at her once again.

She smacks the door harder and yells louder:

“Abate, evil flame!”

Again, the intense orange flames retreat from the lock for only a brief instant, then rush back more fiercely than before, forcing her backward.

The inferno grows all around her. A huge billow of black smoke pours down the hall. Unnoticed by her but visible to me, even bigger billows of smoke now pour out of the windows of this apartment.

The Old Hag clenches her teeth. Her brow furrows deeply, and her cheeks ball up and turn a shade of hot pink. If you knew her as well as I do, you’d realize that this is the time to run for your life if you can; it’s too late to duck and plead for mercy.

She steps forward a third time.

“In the name of the one True Heart, by the power of her love for Mother Earth, Creator, and humankind, I command you, flame of the condemned: ABATE!!!”

With that, she stomps the baseball bat very hard on the floor.

The entire building shakes to its very foundation.

And, although the flames continue to grow and roar more loudly all around the apartment, and while multiple fire hoses pour water on the flames elsewhere to no avail, these particular flames, around the apartment door, are suddenly snuffed completely out.

She sets the key into the lock and gives it a hard twist. There is a creaking and clanking of ancient tumblers, accompanied by a small spray of sunset magenta, sky blue, and forest green sparkles emerging from the keyhole and dissipating in the air.

She gives the door a push. It falls open, revealing an inferno more intense than any of the flames outside. Flames rush out the door at her, but she holds up her shawl and the bat, warding them off.