Radiance

Now that I am closed into my bedchamber, surrounded by deep ochre silks and curtains and writing with ink of that same sunrise shade, I recall only the throne room. I can call it only that. In our headlong flight we passed by a pair of open doors and looked within—we are human, we must always look. The room thronged with people, pulsed with warmth stolen from some impossible engine made to fight the awful extropy of Pluto’s strict climes. Masks moved and spun like a field of un-sane flowers; some bore not only masks on their persons but wings and tails protruding from their bodies. And how those bodies writhed, how they arched and shook! In the midst of it all, on a tall black chair tipped with garnet pomegranates and silk asphodel and cascades of ribbons, sat a man who wore a mask made to look precisely like a human face. Not his own—not the face of Maximo Varela, for I know now it was none other than he—but the face of Severin Unck, moulded in resin and satin and paint, as perfect as the first moment I saw her, brow as clear, colour as bright, pride as pointed in those high, high cheeks.

My flower-fattened belly lurched in horror and fascination; my skull seemed to wriggle within my skin. The body beneath the mask was a man’s—lithe, healthful, ageless, and beautiful, but male, dressed in a magician’s motley colours, a tunic tight at the waist and thigh, blossoming at the shoulders. The black hair that fringed the mask was longer than Severin had ever worn it, cascading in curls as thick as any Juliet’s on any stage, a savage woman’s hair, a Medusa’s, a lion’s. Bubbles of music popped and frothed around me. He rose from his throne. A youth and a maid, lying sprawled at his feet, trailed their hands after him, willing him to stay. Severin’s face floated to me, moving through dancers and prowlers and pipers and hounds. As if no other soul in that place existed, the Mad King of Pluto took me into his arms, crushing me to him, whispering into my ear in a deep voice I knew out of the depths of my memory—a rough voice, a fragile voice, the wrong voice, not hers at all, but bearing the words I had so yearned to hear her say:

Anchises, Anchises, you’ve come home.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[SEVERIN UNCK stands amid a tangle of cables on the set of The Abduction of Proserpine. Vampire extras mill around her, touching up their makeup, chatting, taking their teeth out to smoke. She is very small, perhaps four or five. She wears a black dress with a black bow and black stockings. Her face is painted deathly white. She looks up at a demonic ice dragon with sword whiskers and icicle teeth, a massive puppet managed by the renowned TALMADGE BRACE and his team. She does not see her Uncle Madge pulling on the puppet’s works. It towers over her. She stares at its tinfoil eyes intently, quietly, hands clasped behind her back. She rocks up on her toes.]

SEVERIN

Did you eat that big old city all up?

[The ice dragon nods solemnly. His lines creak.]

SEVERIN

What a bad thing you are. You ought to be punished.

[The ice dragon nods again. TALMADGE works his lines and pulleys just out of frame, slumping the creature’s snow-puff shoulders in deep shame. He can barely suppress his amusement.]

SEVERIN

Why did you do it? If you were really so keen, I should think you’d have waited till the city fattened up a bit. It couldn’t have filled you up! It was only little.

[TALMADGE cannot answer; the beast will never have a voice, so he had no reason to devise one to match its vast crinoline body.]

SEVERIN

Daddy says the settlers dug too deep and woke the ancient heart of Pluto. But you have wet glue on your nose, so I don’t think you are the ancient heart of Pluto.

[The ice dragon shakes with TALMADGE’S silent laughter. Severin reaches up and wipes away the glue with her thumb. She whispers into the puppet’s huge, glitter-spackled nostril.]

SEVERIN

I forgive you. I get hungry, too.

And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly

 (Oxblood Films, 1941, dir. Severin Unck) 

(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 8, SIDE 1, COMMENCE 0:12)

SC1 INT. LOCATION #19 NEPTUNE/ENKI—STORM

OBSERVATION DECK, DAY 671. NIGHT

[29 NOVEMBER, 1939]