Radiance (29 page)

CYTHERA:
If we could step back for a moment: What steps did you take to investigate the source of the static? Did Dr Nantakarn suggest that you might have been hallucinating? It seems that all of you freely indulged in drugs and alcohol …

ERASMO:
Oh, please. Don't patronise us. Retta heard it, too. So did Aylin, and neither of them touched a drop of anything even the slightest bit
altering
. We did what you'd expect—strip that sound equipment, son! Get into those Edison innards. But it was all fine. Mariana kept saying, “It's perfect, it's perfect.”

CYTHERA:
The rest of the night passed without incident?

ERASMO:
Reasonably. We decided not to try to get anything out of Anchises yet. He slept like he'd died. At breakfast the next morning—

CYTHERA:
This is December third?

ERASMO:
Sure. Who cares? At breakfast I offered him some eggs—he wouldn't eat solid food yet, but I made him a plate just in case. Max had taken him walking on the beach earlier in the morning and the boy seemed almost cheerful. I offered him eggs and he opened his mouth and static came pouring out of it—but inside the static we heard something else.
     Mariana. Screaming.
     It was only a coincidence; he wasn't
making
the sound. It came from everywhere—from the sky, from the Qadesh—but he opened his mouth in time for it to look like a cue. Mariana's scream was clear as bleeding daylight, and we all knew it was hers. Mari lost it. You have to understand, she wouldn't have suffered the indignity of getting certified on Edison gear if she didn't have a delicate ear and love that mixer on her hip like a child. She screamed in harmony with herself, holding her hands over her ears, yelling over the sound of this other staticky voice we didn't recognize yet, garbled, warped, followed by a lot of audio vomit. From then on, it never stopped.
     You understand, we didn't know what it was saying then. Afterward, Cristabel and I played back Mariana's tape in the studio on the
Clamshell
and cleaned it up. Only then could we get at the actual words.

CYTHERA:
Which were?

ERASMO:
“Now my charms are all o'erthrown, and what strength I have's mine own, which is most faint.”
     Billy Shakes, my dear.
The Tempest
. But it was just growling then. Growling, and that vicious, shrill screaming. It never stopped after that. None of us could sleep in that invisible static mess, listening to shredded voices coming from nowhere. It just swallowed Mari up. She spent the morning banging on her temples to make it stop. Moaning, rocking back and forth, clutching her mixer to her chest.

CYTHERA:
Alfric struck the boy, correct?

ERASMO:
That is so entirely, utterly irrelevant. Yes, she slapped him, that morning when I gave him a plate of eggs and he gave us the hell's loudspeaker. When it looked like the sound was coming from him, she slapped the scream off him.

CYTHERA:
Was that the only time she made physical contact with him?

ERASMO:
I don't know. Probably not. Maybe.

CYTHERA:
Varela said he argued with Severin on the night of December second.

ERASMO:
I think everyone argued with everyone on the night of December second.

CYTHERA:
Do you know what they argued about?

ERASMO:
She said it was nothing. She and Varela had a thing when they were kids—really, just kids. So they couldn't just disagree on what gels to use, it was always the wrong gel
and
you broke my heart a million years ago. I usually tuned it out. But Mari was still an absolute wreck and the static kept rising and falling like waves, hitting us over and over, and it wouldn't stop, it never
stopped
. Max was worried about Severin. Maybe that was it.

CYTHERA:
Was there a physical altercation?

ERASMO:
She wouldn't have told me if there was. I'd have slammed his face into a tree so hard he'd have had to live there. And she liked his face.
     We were all on edge. Sleeping in that ghost town, in the middle of all those shattered houses and wreckage and misery, feedback sawing on our ears every minute of every hour and the sun never coming up or going down and this poor helpless kid with the monster in his hand … By the fourth hour, I wanted to slide out of my own skin and return to the invertebrate sea. I would've been thrilled to hit something. Anything.
     You want to know how bad it was? I can sum it up for you. That night, after eight or nine hours of that horror show ripping through the air, Severin curled up next to me and hauled my arms up over her body. She was hiding in me. And do you know what she said?

CYTHERA:
What?

ERASMO:
Miss Severin Lamartine Unck said to me, “Baby, I'm so scared.”

CYTHERA:
What did you say?

ERASMO:
What do you think I said? I said what you say. I said I loved her right in the face. It was just some kind of malfunction in Mari's gear:
you know how touchy all that Edison rot can be, don't worry, go to sleep, I'm right here. Not going anywhere, my love
. We sang “Down to the River to Pray” to Anchises. We always sang beautifully together, Rin and me. We sang to him and he stared up at us and his eyes didn't seem quite so horsey anymore.
     I woke up late that night. Both Rin and the little bit were snoring away. Click, sigh, choke. I put my trousers on and went out to the village well—I suppose that would be the hotel lounge, wouldn't it? If Adonis had a hotel anymore. I knew Horace would be there. I sauntered up. The static sizzled madly in the air. I mimed holding a glass full of sweet pink lady and lifted it up like I was going to toast my cousin. But he didn't move. He stared straight down into the well.
     “Hey, mate,” I said. “You sleepwalking?”
     Nothing. I grabbed his shoulder, a little roughly, but he was upsetting me with this nonsense. I yelled over the static, “Horace, wake up!”
     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!
, 4
th
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.