Radiance

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?

We suppose she is dead, though none of us can be sure. She is not here, though she is not there, either, so far as anyone can tell. What transpired that awful autumn on those far Venusian shores? What happened to her? Did she share the horrid fate of the ruined village, the very one she sought to uncover and explain? We cannot know. We know only that we will see her no more, and that, my loyal readers, must break every heart in two.

We all came together Saturday last to pretend we know what happened and can feel certain about burying her. The seven ex-Unckwives and erstwhile stepmothers of the young Severin stood at his side, their beautiful faces drawn in the refined sort of grief only those who have trained since birth to live upon the screen can produce, reflecting our feeling back to us like lunar emotions, softer and more silver, colder and more delicate.