Lumière (The Illumination Paradox) (2 page)

“Very well then”—the carnie tips his hat—“Mrs. Soon
-
to
-
be
-
Benson. Shall we get started?”

She nods, holding her purse out to one side.

“No, no, like this.” The carnie steps in to adjust it. “Right in front of you please. Up tight to your chest. That’s it. Just like that. Now hold it.” He races from the stage, taking safety behind a short wall erected next to a cabinet-style box that sits on a table. He stuffs a crankshaft into the pinhole and begins turning it. Two large glass plates inside the cabinet start to spin in opposite directions. The noise is incredible.

“Hold it. Hold it,” he crows to the woman with the purse, as the plates begin to whir, louder and louder. Her eyes are big as saucers themselves. Electrical currents pop and sizzle along the wires. Several in the crowd place their hands over their ears.

My heart races with excitement. I leap into action, forcing my way through the tangle of legs to the front of the crowd. I don’t want to miss a thing. The whir of the spinning disks throws the hair back from my shoulders, but I’m not afraid. Unlike everyone else here, I know what’s going to happen.

“In a moment!” the carnie shouts above the racket. “Lightning will pass between the two brass bolts you see mounted there, on either side of the front of the cabinet!” The crowd gasps. “Don’t worry!” the carnie assures them. “Everything’s fine! No one will be hurt!”

Even the woman with the purse looks scared.

I lean in even closer to get a better look, my hair streaming wildly about my shoulders. Electricity starts to fly, jumping snake-like between the two brass bolts. I’m both anxious and exhilarated. It’s just as I remember.

Women scream. People flee. One woman nearly passes out. But not me. I smile at the familiar whirl of blood that races through my veins, the way my heart jiggles in my chest.

“Wait!” the carnie shouts. “The magic has only just started!”

The crowd settles down.

The apparatus picks up speed, and my skin begins to prickle. The hairs on my arms stand straight on end as if some spirit pinched me. It’s suddenly far too hot. It’s as though I’m getting sunburned; but I can’t be, my arms and legs are completely covered by clothing. I don’t remember feeling burned before, but then again, it was a long time ago.

An eerie glow begins to fester, streaming out, forming a halo around the machine. I don’t remember this either. My heart says to run. But my brain says to stick. After all, Father said there’s nothing to fear.

I raise a hand to shield my eyes, squinting as the waves of electricity grow until their heat is almost unbearable, the flesh beneath my skin rippling. I consider turning away, when at last it happens—lightning leaps from the bars at the front of the wooden cabinet, up a set of snaggled wires, over to a tube of glass that rests in a stand hovering above the young woman’s head. In the blink of an eye, there comes a
flash
, so big and bold it’s blinding. It sizzles down the long thin pointed nose of the tube aimed at the woman’s chest, before
zap!
It’s gone.

The young woman turns completely green. The outline of her body radiates luminously before the crowd. Her eyes distort, their centers turning red. She looks up, glaring demon-like out into the crowd.

People gasp and fall backward. One woman faints. Others flee. Screaming. My stomach falls to my knees. I think to run, but I’m stuck in place. It’s as though my shoes anchor me to the ground. I suck in a breath, my heart pounding in time with the whirl of the machine, the jolt of the current pulsing through me, until at last the demon leaves her eyes and the green glow begins to fade. The lightning bolts between the brass bars dissolve into little puffs of stinky smoke, zapping and twitching as they simmer. The glass plates inside the cabinet whirl slowly to a stop and I gasp, relieved, as my heart stops whirling with them.

“And there it is!” The carnie spins around, pulling a slate-colored screen from the backside of the machine. He holds it up, its image still glowing the most horrid shade of green. “The contents of her purse. Two jewelets, one juniper and a key!” He points to the skeleton of each object photographed inside the purse’s ghoulish green outline. Even the young woman looks amazed. A collective “
ahhhhh”
drifts up from the crowd again. Jaws dangle.

The young woman is quick to dump her purse and hold up each item, proving the photograph correct.

“There, you see!” The carnie waves his arms as if to part the sea. “And that’s just
one
of the many magical uses for the Great Illuminator!” He grins, and my stomach feels sick. What is he talking about?

“What else can it do?” someone hollers from the crowd.

“It might be easier for me to tell you what it
can’t
do!” the carnie chuckles. The crowd joins in as he paces the stage, his finger wagging as he shouts. “Suffer from migraines? No more! Unwanted hair? Gone in a flash! Unsightly scars, pits, birthmarks?” He snaps his fingers. “Consider them zapped! Why, this young woman had a moustache when we started”—the carnie points back to the woman with the purse—“and just look at her now!”

The crowd laughs.

The young woman looks confused, taking his hand to navigate her way from the stage. “Bring an end to facial tics, headaches, moodiness, depression—”

“It can do all that?” a plump woman shouts.

The carnie turns to face her. “All that is just the beginning!” He leans into the crowd, placing the back of his hand to his mouth like he’s about to tell a secret. “Expose yourself enough times”—he shouts in a half-whisper—“and it’ll even lighten your skin.”

The crowd gasps.

“That’s right, my friends. Now who among you will be the first to own one? ” The carnie waves his arms as the young woman flashes the price on a sign over her head. “That’s it! Step right up! Don’t be shy! Get your own, personal, party-sized Great Illuminator, today!” He lifts his arms and the crowd applauds.

All but me.

The carnie’s eyes settle on me in the crowd. “For you.” He grins and steps down from his soapbox, awarding me the photograph, like it’s some sort of prize.

I look down at it in disgust. At the jewelets, the juniper, and the key. “It’s not yours,” I whisper.

“I beg your pardon?” he says.

“It’s not yours to be selling,” I say.

The crowd falls hushed.

“Whatever are you talking about, child?” His dead-lark eyes flicker, worried, and he sort of laughs.

“The machine.” I point. “It belongs to me—”

“
EYELET!
”

My head swings around. My mother stands at the back of the crowd, looking frazzled. A week’s worth of toffee sags in her hand. She weaves her way to the front, apologizing, seizing me by the arm.

“But Mother—”

“Not now, Eyelet!” she hisses, urging me to keep silent, and drags me to the back of the tent.

“But it’s
not
his. It’s mine!” I shout. “Father made it for me. To look inside my head. Not for
him
to take photographs of women’s purses with!”

Heads swing ‘round. Mother gasps. The carnie’s eyes grow wide. Throwing back the flap of the tent, Mother yanks me through, hauling me stumbling out into the center of the midway.

“Where are we going?” I protest. “Didn’t you hear me? That man has my machine!”

“Not here, Eyelet.” She glances nervously back over her shoulder. “We can’t talk about this here.”

“Why not?”

She pulls me forward, but I yank her to a stop. Frustrated, she falls to her knees. Her eyes are wet, like she’s about to cry. The corners of her lips are trembling.

She runs her hands down the sides of my hair and scoops my cheeks into her palms. I can tell by the look in her eyes she’s about to tell me something bad. Something I don’t want to hear. “I’m afraid the world is not always as it should be, Eyelet.” She swallows, and the water in her eyes seeps over the edges of her lids. “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

I turn away, staring over her shoulders at the back of the red-and-white-striped tent. Hot tears prick my eyes. “He sold it, didn’t he?” I say. “The machine he promised he’d fix me with. Father sold that man my machine—”

“There they are!”

The carnie's voice rings out across the midway like the crack of an elephant trainer’s whip. “There!” He emerges from under the tent flap, pointing. The thug standing next to him gives chase.

Mother grabs me by the arm and hurls me onto her hip, though I’m much too big to carry, and bursts through the crowd, bouncing off the backs of patrons as she heads for the gates. My heart leaps in my chest. I bob along, clinging to her, hands clasped tight around her neck. Why is he chasing us? What does he want?

"I'm not sure," she shouts.

“Mother?” I say, looking back over her shoulder, my eyes catching on something strange.
“Mother!”
A ghoulish green glow rises up from the horizon, engulfing the whole sky behind us. “Mother!" I shout. "LOOK!”

She turns just in time to see it. A flash so big, so bold, so bright, it fills my head, my heart...the whole universe.

Eclipsing all that came before it.

And all that is to come.

P
ART
O
NE

O
ne

Eyelet—age seventeen

Living in eternal twilight might sound romantic, but it’s not. It’s simply depressing. No one in the city of Brethren has seen the sun since the Night of the Great Illumination. I close my eyes and try hard to remember what life was like before the flash. But I can’t.

It’s been nine long years since golden rays have warmed my skin. Nine long years of grey skies and continuous rolling cloud cover, living under a hood of darkness and gloom. Some say the flash knocked out the sun forever. But I refuse to believe it.

Personally, I believe its up there still, stuck behind all that cumulonimbus. I raise a hand, squinting through the layers of cloud. Perhaps it’s gone to shine over Limpidious—the utopian world beyond the clouds my father always dreamed existed. Or perhaps the flash just shorted it out and it’ll be coming back on soon.

Whatever the case, I’m tired of waiting. So until it reappears, I’ve created my own personal dash of sunshine. I pop open my latest invention: the skeleton of a bumbershoot stripped clean of its canvas, its remaining ribs and divers wound tight with wires and tiny hissing aether bulbs of hope. My own engineered solution to the gloom.

Slowly the bumbershoot blooms, wreathing my head in a mushroom cap of light, its warmth seeping through me, dissolving the chill from my bones. I flit around beneath it like a child, enjoying the presence of my uncustomary shadow stretching dark and lanky through the grey mist out over the cobblestones, recreating a longer, thinner me.

A puff of smoke spoils the moment, followed by a vulgar zap. The bumbershoot fizzles out.

“OOOooooo! You ornery thing!” I shake the apparatus in disgust.