Please, ladies and gentlemen! Your protestations destroy the dark quiet of our little universe. I can see you leap quite out of your skin. You must be prepared for these interruptions, invasions, intersections. They are necessary. They are the exhalations of the dead. Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.
Now, listen: Our phonograph scratches up a man’s voice and a small girl’s, the very girl who at this moment is flickering silver and black on your thighs, sinking her face into balled fists under the murderous Clarena Schirm’s banquet table.
“How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?”
The man chuckles. It is a nice chuckle, tobacco-velvet, a chuckle that says: Oh, the questions my kid asks!
“As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it’s the other way around: one beginning but a whole Easter basket of endings.”
“Papa, don’t be silly,” the child admonishes in a voice accustomed to getting its way. “A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That’s the whole point. That’s how it is in real life.”
The man laughs again. You like his laugh. I like his laugh. We cannot help but feel well disposed toward a man with a laugh like that, even though it is not really his, but a laugh he learned at university, copied meticulously from his favourite screenwriting professor as you and I might copy from our neighbour during an exam.
“But that’s not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don’t even realise that what you’re choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won’t pan out till you’re sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.”
“Papa, you’re babbling. Ada says you have to stop that. She says you’re full of hot air.”
“I’m full of many things, I’m sure. Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”
A bright cascade of giggles splashes out over the crackle of the phonograph. The child lowers her voice to a whisper: “I like it when you swear.”
And at that moment the child leaps out of the phantasmal throng of dancing ghosts, out of the frame, out of The Spectres of Mare Nubium, and shimmers into the shape of the Venusian boy, his serious expression so like hers, turning in endless circles on a grey lawn.
Her name is Severin Unck. She is ten years old. She is talking to her father, Percy.
She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.
Welcome. This beginning is your beginning. We have saved it specially for you. Shall we?
Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!
Places, Everyone!, 3rd July 1919
Editor’s Note
My darlings, if only I could have brought you all with me! Just gathered you up in my arms out of your parlours and kitchens, still in your aprons and overcoats, and spirited you to the glittering premiere of Percival Unck’s latest thrilling picture, Hope Has No Master! How I would have loved to play Father Christmas and appear on the cobalt carpet with a sackful of my readers—nay, my friends—so that you could see the brilliant and the beautiful for yourselves, spilling out of their long cream-coloured limousines, cars clean and bright and glittering as though they’d just passed through a storm of diamonds instead of our lowly lunar raindrops.
Well, if I am not Father Christmas, who is? Gather round! The beard is quite real, I assure you. Here is an orange for each of you girls and a plum for each of you boys! Watch me string up the stars for you like lights on a tree, each one prettier than the last.
Limelight, 12th October 1947
My hungry gossip-hounds, today there can be no happy games of fetch between us. I come to you hat in hand to report the doings of the day, but I take no pleasure in it. My hat is black, and I know that yours is, too.
I personally attended the strange funeral of Severin Lamartine Unck, born 1914, aged but thirty-one (if the sub-light transits are all rounded down, as one ought to do for a lady) and passed out of our hard, bright sphere too soon. Whatever the truth, her gravestone will forever read thirty-one, and thirty-one she will, in all likelihood, remain. Her filmography stands tragically firm at a scant five: Self-Portrait with Saturn; The Famine Queen of Phobos; And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly; The Sleeping Peacock; and her final, deeply upsetting work, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew.
A sea of black greeted your humble whisper-collector as the empty coffin was interred in the marble halls of the newest edifice in Tsukuyomi Cemetery, the hastily built Unck family mausoleum. Poor Percy must have thought he would have more time to see to such affairs, or that his daughter herself would attend to them for his own eternal rest.
We assembled as if for a shoot…which of course it was, in a manner of speaking. Extras, dramatic faces, chosen professional mourners to round out the big crowd scene. Black, black everywhere. We did not know whether or not to cry—what was to be our cue, our script? What sort of Unck flick had hired us on: the father’s, or the daughter’s?
Now look there, children—Maud Locksley and her dashing companion, Wadsworth Shevchenko, fresh from the set of his sure-to-enthral historical epic, Cross of Stone. Maud ravishes as always in a sleek strapless number that rustles silver in the popping lights. When she turns, flashes of the palest pink feathers flutter beneath the hem. A slim triangle of dyed crocodile scales soars up to a daring rosette of amethyst and devilish croc teeth at the point of the gown’s plunging, bare back. How she smirks over her rounded shoulder! The smirk that cost a thousand contracts, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Wadsworth’s charcoal arm never leaves her waist, his trim, severe Eichendorff suit revealing its own surprise as the power couple pose: The tails of his tuxedo descend into a weave of raven feathers, stiffly, glossily pointing earthward. Our coal-tressed leading man finishes it all off with an onyx lapel pin in the shape of a lunar peony. I’m certain we can all envy Maud Locksley her journey home—save that a little bird informs your humble Father Christmas that Master Shevchenko’s burning gaze strays ever so occasionally from her charms to those of his co-star, Dante de Vere. But we know better than to listen to little birds, don’t we?