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 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.