Radiance

When the rumpus wound down and the confetti had been thrown, the poor girl woke with a start and found herself alone but for myself and a few of the catering staff tidying up. She climbed up onto the face of that glitter-caked dragon, standing on her tiptoes, surrounded by the funhouse-mirror Pluto, ruins, drawing room, and glacier, and began crying plaintively: Papa! Papa!

And for one moment—the only moment of the whole Proserpine shoot, I’d wager—I felt as though I stood on Pluto in truth; right there at the end of it all in the terrible chill and emptiness of that very real and very dead city, of which all that remains is a ghostly voice crying out one word to the night, over and over, without a reply.

Algernon B

Editor-in-Chief

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask:

The Murder of Gonzago

25 February, 1962. Half four in the morning, Setebos Hall

My hand shakes as I attempt to record the activities of the night. My lantern gutters, casting shadows like ink drops over my knuckles, my pen, my pages. There are sounds in this house…sounds I can scarcely begin to describe. I might call them howlings, and yet there is nothing in that lonely word bloody and primeval enough to encompass what my ears have been made to endure. Perhaps if I knew the Sanskrit for it, that ancient tongue of tongues, that would suffice.

I understand now that what happened in my presence in the throne room of the King of Pluto happens every night—it is a performance that repeats like a skipping phonograph, like a church bell. It was not done for my benefit; I am incidental. It does not alter; The King keeps a wooden hammer ribboned like a maypole at his side, and with this wicked gavel he punishes any improvisation or deviation with swift brutality. I saw with my own eyes a maid who mistakenly sang the word agony beset by hammer blows until she corrected herself, weeping: Ago, ago, I mean ago!

Enough, enough. Anchises, enough. There must be some comfort in relating of events, or else why has any tale been told? To salve, to soothe, that is the only purpose of language.

Cythera and I were guests of honour at supper tonight. We suspected nothing particularly untoward—at least, no more untoward than the average Tuesday on this accursed planet. We dressed accordingly, in black suits that invited no frivolous business. Even I managed to project a professional, detached air of importance, perhaps even a slight edge of intimidation. I flatter myself that I can pull off such a combination on some rare occasions. Cythera took my arm without even her usual sigh of distaste, ever-present yet almost imperceptible to anyone who had not shared quarters with her for three months, a sigh with deniability, as soft as loathing. But tonight she held it in abeyance, so I must have been in fine fettle. I closed my hand over hers and whispered:

“Cythera, you must not let your guard down around Varela. Whatever he has made of himself here, he is…a bad man.” I sounded, even to my own ears, like a frightened child. I had been just that when I last found myself trapped in a room with Severin Unck’s lighting master. Frightened of everything, but of him most particularly, of his stare, of his terrible lights in their black cases, gathered round him like the wall of a gaol.

“You’ve said nothing about him in your notes,” answered she, pausing at the door of our conjoined quarters. “Is there something you’ve neglected to tell me?”

I shut my eyes. From beneath years of drink and worse, images swam upward, breaking the surface: the cantina of the Clamshell, people weeping, men and women yelling, a doctor with yellow hands, a pistol belonging to no one…smoke—Stygian, unnatural, smoke with a vicious taste—but it was a smoke without fire…so much light, so much light. And then a man’s fists—Maximo’s—striking me over and over, his boot crunching down onto my deformed hand…

I swayed on my feet. Cythera steadied me, real concern in the eyes beneath her golden mask. What a wonder. She did worry for me, after all.

“On Venus I remember nothing of him except his smell—he took more care than the others for his personal cleanliness. Even Severin smelled sour in the morning, but Varela…there was always a breath of soap on him. But…on the ship, on the ship home. He beat me; he told me to keep silent. To never speak if I could help it. And he showed me the airlock. He asked if I liked it. Every day he asked. I ran from him…” But there was something on Venus as well. In the photographs, in the files, in my own memory, dancing just over the precipice where my brain dared not delve.