Radiance

by Catherynne M. Valente

  He did. He turned to me and smiled. He looked so much like my father. I saw the scar where I’d got him with the dart all those years ago. And then he jumped into the well.

  [long pause. Sounds of fingernails scratching against the table.]

  It was very deep. I heard him land.

  CYTHERA: Had Horace St. John shown suicidal tendencies before this? Do you have any idea why he would take his own life?

  ERASMO: [ragged breathing] Stop it. I don’t like you using his full name. He was just Horace. I loved him. Horace was sixteen months older than me and our fathers were brothers. Horace’s mum sold hats in Grasshopper City. Horace would not abide anyone calling him Ace, and God knows I tried. Horace liked to bake. You wouldn’t think a bloke like him would, but he made coronation cakes that looked like iced heaven. If you lined up everyone I’d ever met, he’d be the last one I’d pick to kill himself.

  CYTHERA: And when the others found out?

  ERASMO: [quiet weeping] They didn’t, right away. Because Mariana woke up with one of those mouths in her hand where she’d slapped the kid, and she started screaming, and it was the same scream we’d heard on the static wind hours before. So it took a while before they listened to me bawling my eyes out that Horace was dead.

  CYTHERA: I know this is difficult. But I have to ask, for insurance purposes—what was Mr Covington’s reaction to all this?

  ERASMO: Arlo? Oh, he said the shoot was over and we were heading back to White Peony as soon as the equipment was packed.

  Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

  Places, Everyone!, 4th May, 1924

  Column #431: The Man in the Moon

  Greetings and salutations, cats and kittens, darlings and dear hearts, galactic apples of my all-seeing eye! What have I got in my pockets for you this week? A little sex, a little decadence, a dash of illicit never-you-mind, a lashing of underage naughtiness? YOU BET.

  Yours truly secured an invitation Saturday last to what is sure to be remembered as the shindig of the century, or at least the week: the wrap party for Percy Unck’s newest flickie, The Abduction of Proserpine! Don’t ask how I came to be in possession of my invitation (engraved in silver, naturally, on black paper—our man Unck omits no detail!) for I shall never tell.

  I am your eyes and ears on the Moon—I see all and hear all! And what did I hear and see on Saturday?

  Well, you already know, loyal readers, that Mr Percival Unck was turned down flat by the Americans when he tried to pop out to the nether quarters of the solar system to shoot his little Gothic trifle in the actual ruins of poor Proserpine. People are so funny about tragedies! So what did the King of the Silver Screen do? He built Pluto on the Moon. That’s right, all that hush-hush hustle and bustle out on the Endymion Flats beyond Grasshopper City, all those trucks bouncing out of the Virago lots, all that grumbling and rattling you heard from the Oxblood and Plantagenet offices? All of that was to whack us up a little Pluto of our own. Oh, it’ll be gone by the time you read this—that’s just how the celluloid crumbles—but it’ll be alive forever up there on the cinema screen come autumn. The camera eats the world: points itself at everything, and sucks it right up into Movieland.

  But on Saturday, oh, on Saturday, we all danced the Charleston on Pluto’s night-drenched shores! We drank pomegranate smoke out of stained-glass snifters and wriggled into paper buffalo suits left lying all over the sailcloth glaciers like party hats. Mickey Hull himself played the evening away with his twenty-man band. Miss Mary Pellam, half out of her dress by nine p.m., brought the house down with “It Never Rains on Venus.” Mickey H. belted out “I Left My Heart on Halimede,” and, I tell you, there wasn’t a dry eye.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Our host set the soundstage up like a labyrinth—the flats and mattes arranged so that we revellers got quite lost, plunged into the mixed-up world of Unck Brand Patented Instant Pluto—Just Add Cameras! The interior walls—all painted windows with real curtains, candelabras and mantelpieces concealing the triggers to hidden stairways—stood at ninety-degree angles to broad landscapes of the frozen Plutonian tundra: wild silver-tailed buffalo prancing, Charon looming huge and sinister and shimmering with what I could only assume was enough glitter to entirely coat the island of Madagascar. Expanses of the ruined city of Proserpine had been swept aside to make room for sets of the city at its rough-and-tumble height. No one could find their way; we stumbled over each other, giggling like children at a slumber party. Tucked into every turn of the maze were caches of drink and delicacies—usually tipped over and scattered by the time I found them. But all roads led to Unck, and the winding, wriggling paths eventually emptied out into a great central stage where Talmadge Brace’s gargantuan ice-dragon puppet wrapped around Mickey Hull’s band and a ballroom floor the colour of blood. The red positively throbbed in my eyes after all that gentle silver and black and grey and white.

  And who did I see on the dance floor but beefy Capricorn Studios golden boy Thad Irigaray putting the moves on Mary P, the current Mrs Unck! Not that the chap was doing much of a job of it. And what’s this? Old Wadsy canoodling with Richard Boreal over by the vampires’ chiaroscuro hideout, my my! Quel scandale—or it would be, if I hadn’t told you all about it months ago. Our leading lady and gent, Miss Annabelle August and Mr Hartford Crane, kissed grandly in public view, but went to the bar separately, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. The birdies say those two kids can’t stand each other, and Annie’s looking to jump ship to Capricorn with Thaddy-boy—but who’d let a dove like that go? I smell a skirmish coming, so batten down the hatches and hold on to your hats.

  Percy himself held court in a dashing green suit, so unusual for the monochrome mishmash of the Virago homestead! And don’t think I missed the sidelong looks he dished out to that pretty little ballerina we’ve been seeing in the chorus lines in Grasshopper City. I miss nothing.

  More troubling to my eyes was the sight of little Severin Unck, but ten years old, weaving in and out of the labyrinth with more ease than any of us, darting into the flats to sling back vodka and Callisto bourbon like a bad wee fairy child, some wastrel by-blow daughter of Puck. By midnight she could be found curled up on the massive snout of the ice-dragon puppet that features so prominently in the film, her fingers tangled in its tinfoil whiskers, stocking feet tucked up under her petticoat, a crystal af-yun atomizer clutched in her fist. She would not be the first child to go that way on our Pleasure Island in the sky, but it hurt my heart all the same.

  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.

  My companion gave me a glass of her own brandy, a Callisto vintage she must have hidden away from me aboard ship; I felt my strength returning. Perhaps all the strength I’ve ever owned has come from a bottle, from an atomizer, from a syringe. Without them I am friendless.

  “You are not a child now, Anchises. He cannot hurt you. He certainly can’t hurt me. I’ve stared down men with more mettle than some pisspot theatre-rat, I assure you.”

  How kind she was to me then. I’ve no idea what came over her. Perhaps she was ill. If only we had known.

  Boatswain and Mariner appeared, once more maddeningly silent, maddeningly masked, and led us into the dining hall. A long black table lay prepared, groaning with wonderful foods, Earth foods: glistening roast turkeys and geese, bowls of green vegetables garnished with sweet nuts and butter, steaming bread, champagne, cold cherry soup, pumpkin tarts, everything as perfect as if it were made by some St. Louis matriarch in one humble kitchen. Merrymakers already sat at table, talking, laughing, even singing, as though nothing could be the matter. We took our places at the far end of the banquet table. At the other end sat Maximo Varela, the great lighting master, the Mad King of Pluto. He wore a suit not much different from ours—yet still, too, that unsettling, uncanny Severin mask.

  We ate; yet it did not satisfy. The turkey, the goose gravy, the broccoli and Brussels sprouts all tasted the same, their flavour no stronger than that of the infanta flowers: sweet, complex, but hardly a patch on a leg of lamb as I remembered it. No one spoke to us; they behaved as though we were quite invisible, reaching across us for second helpings, kicking our shins beneath the table. I searched Varela’s eyes for the man in my memory, the man who had pinned my arm with one boot while he ground his other heel into my hand. But all I could see was the plastic face of Severin Unck, expressionless, unnerving.

  Afterward, the company processed into a dark chamber adjoining the dining hall. Real fear moved in their eyes. The nakedness of it all unsettled our bones—naked walls, without sound, without light, yet nothing guarded. The hyena of the human heart had been loosed in the rooms of this place. I offered my hand to Cythera, but she refused it.

  “It’s not your comforting I was concerned with,” I mumbled, and she gave me that old shipboard glare I knew so well.

  Very well. Comfortless, we faced that lightless room, wide and long enough for draughts and echoes to play awful, invisible hosts. I could feel the movement of bodies, hear the rustle of fabrics, the soft thump of objects, but nothing had a name or a shape; nothing was yet itself. Light, finally, began as dawn begins: barely perceptible, except as an ease in the air, a redness. I could hear, suddenly, overwhelmingly, the crash and boom of ocean waves. Shadows leapt into stark existence—cretaceous shadows, of vast ferns and trunks, of tangled bush, of thorns and brambles. I felt a raindrop land on my head. I smelled ozone, moss, a storm just wandered off. Green lights like lost emeralds spattered down from the black depths of the ceiling. The silhouettes of broken ships, of broken palaces, of broken bodies came into relief. Lights the colour of drowned flesh crept in, slithering forward to meet the King as he stepped into the world of his making.

  He stepped. And stepped. And turned. In a small, tight circle, round and round. He no longer wore the mask of Severin’s face. Now a grotesque Green Man rode his skull, a tangle of kelp, wild orange blossoms, and cacao-bark; hanging vines and fish bones. The King turned round and round, his head down, clutching his hand to his naked chest. No, no, no, I whispered, shaking my head from side to side, trying to retreat, to back out of that place before the place could see me, but a wall of bodies caught me, kept me. The King spun. The heavy leaves of his mask quivered in a real wind that picked up from nowhere, swirling, clawing at my gloves as if it knew, it knew what it would find there.

  I began to weep. I am not ashamed. Any man would.

  The King stopped as suddenly as if he had been stabbed through the eye. He turned his head toward me, his body motionless. The eyes of his mask were holes gouged in the green. Two long tendrils hung down nearly to his waist. They ended in coppery globes sloshing with some terrible pale wine—and didn’t I know that wine? How could I not? I clutched at Cythera Brass.

  “Get me out of here,” I hissed. “I cannot be here. This is cruel. Protect me. Do your job.”

  “Get yourself under control,” she hissed back.

  The King spoke: “No tale can truly begin until its author is shriven. Thus, I offer up my confession on the altar of the telling. Will you hear me? Will you do as I ask?”

  I did not, could not, answer him.

  “Do it!” the King of Pluto roared. He ran at me suddenly, as a lion after wounded prey, his limbs painted, streaked, splashed with black and white, stark, terrible. Pigment dripped from his biceps, his hipbones; viscous, greasy tears.

  “Do it,” he cried again, and sank to his ruined knees. His fern-tangled mask implored me with its empty sockets. What did his face look like? I should remember it; should remember him, Max, the man with the lanterns; should recall him as vividly as
any child recalls a favourite character from some charming tale told in the wee hours of their youth. But there was nothing. My mind refused. I shook my head, held up my hands, choked back the bile churning through my body. I was all bile; I was nothing else. I did not know what he wanted from me!

  “Do it,” he whispered. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I killed her. Forgive me.”

  I stared down at the pitiful wreckage before me. Could it be this easy? As simple, as quotidian, as quaint as murder? He loved her, and she didn’t love him; or she fired him, and he could not bear the shame; or they quarrelled, and he did not know his strength? I tried to imagine it, his choking the life from Severin, dashing her brains out on the flat rocks where my parents had laid out laundry to dry before they were clawed from the surface of the world. Perhaps…perhaps I saw it happen, and that is why my mind refuses to grasp those unspeakable days on the shores of the Qadesh.

  “Never,” I hissed. “I will never forgive you.”

  But he only laughed: high, screeching, shrill, boiling laughter that steamed away into the nothingness of that horrid vault.

  Maximo Varela snapped his fingers. A campfire appeared in the centre of the room, its embers seething. Drums began, and pipes as well—hooting, owlish horns. Eight figures danced around it, naked, painted, masked: a silver man in a beaked mask with deep camera lenses over its eyes like a raccoon’s bandit face; a man and a woman painted like flame and forest, her mask a clock face, his the burnt ruin of a diving bell; two men, their clothes all woven of priceless grain, a woman cyclops, her single eye a pit of blackness; an indigo man with the face of a bull and a scar like a star on his cheek; and a chalk-marked child, clutching one of his hands with the other, his mask a simple, harlequin white with two black hearts where the dimples ought to be, his mouth a heart-shaped hole. I clutched my own hand reflexively, instinctively. Beneath my glove I felt the topography of my scars; the ropy flesh; the hidden, seeping wound; the soft, sinuous writhing of it…Saints in heaven, why now? It had not stirred in years.