Here’s the story. Some scientists who work at a laboratory in a little canyon have made a box of steel and glass, with a big adjustable dial on the front; it might be a version of the sleek ticket booth outside the Lyric, near the sidewalk. But this is a time machine; they set the dial for the past, turn it on, and the moon-shaped window of the chamber fills with fog. When the dry-ice vapors clear, lo! there’s something in the box, a very old stone tool, chipped around the edges, something retrieved from Neanderthal days. The scientists are astonished, or as much so as these earnest actors can seem, in turbid black and white, in heavy dialogue.

Now they set the dial for the future, the fog blooms again, then thins to reveal: what? An elongated form, biomorphic, black, rather Danish Modern: it is a vase, of some as-yet-unknown material. The machine has reached far into the future and snatched a vase!

That’s enough excitement for one day. The scientists yawn and go home, switching off the lights in the lab behind them. The sun goes down over the canyon; leaves are tossed by a wind, their undersides rippling silver; a coyote lifts his ears, watchful. Back in the lab an unsettling music begins, and we see that the dial of the time machine is still set at the year 5000 A.D. Our window into tomorrow fills with fog as before—but what is that gloved and sequined hand reaching from the vapors?

The Beast, of course, and the Beast is a woman. Or female, anyway, in a sparkling and hooded black bodystocking, all dimly gleaming waist and breasts, angling along in a sort of slo-mo sideways locomotion, elbows held way out from her body, long-nailed fingers spread wide, head to one side like a model’s, slowly turning, all arrogance and futurity. Now her music’s an oscillation between a wail and a high-pitched electronic drone: Wooo-wooo, veee-veee. She moves through the lab and out into the moonlit evening; her head’s still turned just to one side, but her eyes scroll back and forth to take in what is to her the ancient world. The black upper reaches of the trees shudder now; coyote howls and the crickets cease. We’ve forgotten there’s a security guard outside, at the wire fence’s barbed gate; he rises from his little booth. Has he heard that unnerving music? He says, “What the….” Close-up of his face filling with terror, fear commingled with pleading: have mercy. But she is mercilessness itself; she kills with a touch to the neck, black glove alive with little flashes of light as two fingers find his throat, as if she killed with sparkle.

Now, goodbye, coyote.