Radiance Read Free

you’re full of hot air.”
    â€œI’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! , 3 rd 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.

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    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.
    Â Â Â Â Â 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 .
    Â Â Â Â Â 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.
    Â Â Â Â Â 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?
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    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