Radiance

The Man in the Malachite Mask

(Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako

MAKO: No, no, Percy, listen to me. It’s not working.

All right, it’s working, but it’s not right. The noir setup has a certain energy, I agree, but it sits pretty heavy on the action. Though I like making Cyth Brass a secretary. We should keep that. She’ll probably sue us for defamation. But we said we’d give him a love interest, not a probation officer! And what are we going to do when we get to Venus? And we do have to get to Venus, I promise. You can dawdle all you like, but it’s there in the middle of the story, throwing its gravity around, warping everything toward it. The point is, what kind of hardboiled finale did you mean to stick on it? Shootout at Adonis? Breathless bullets and betrayal and a fedora on her grave? Is that what you think happened? That she’s buried in a swamp somewhere with a hole in her head? If you go with noir, you’re building in a certain expectation of violence. Of death.

PERCIVAL UNCK: Varela has said she’s dead all along.

MAKO: And Erasmo has said she isn’t. You said you’d rather not have death, but you’re stuffing it in from all sides. And…Severin’s outside the scope of the story. She can’t help it. That’s all a script like that will let her be. An object on a mantle that has to go off by the third act. A gun that must be fired. She’s not a person, the way you’ve got it set up, with your broads and bitches and dark streets at the edge of space. She’s just a goal.

UNCK: Not a goal, Vince. A Grail.

MAKO: Sure. Fine, Percival. A Grail. Very clever. Very subtle. But a Grail isn’t an alive thing. It has no blood but the blood of another; it has no life but the life it grants. Its job is to sit there and…be a Grail. To be sought. That doesn’t sound like anyone we know. And, frankly, it’s all a bit pedestrian for you. For us. I think you’re holding back. I know I am. Because…because we think she’d want us to. To double down on the kind of stories she liked to tell. Really, how different is your Te Deum from the actual digs? Barely a streak of grime out of place. It’s just…events that could really happen taking place in a real city. That’s not you. That’s not me. That’s her.

UNCK: But it did really happen. In a real city. Just not that city.

MAKO: When has that ever slowed us down? We put vampires in The Abduction of Proserpine! That was a real thing that happened in a real city. And Proserpine is a real city that really disappeared off the map of Pluto, I think it’s fair to point out, not so different from Adonis. We shovelled in vampires by the coven and we didn’t even blink. We just ordered up a vat of fake blood and started stitching capes.

[Unck laughs, a laugh that is half a grunt.]

Listen, I have an idea brewing. It’s just a little shift, really. In perspective. In framing. Because noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That’s all they’re about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.

And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that’s where we live, Percy. That’s our house. So why don’t we lose the trench coat and pick up a black cloak. Turn the Byronic all the way up. An ancestral curse, a mad lord, a brooding castle. Obsession, desire, secrets. It’s all already there. And a ghost. Because the truth is…the truth is, this is all a ghost story. It always has been. We’re pouring out a bowl of blood on the banks of the Styx, asking her to drink it and speak.

UNCK: That’s…not bad.

MAKO: I know, dummy. It’s my idea. Of course it’s not bad. We’ve already sent him to Pluto. It’s perfect. Nothing darker and more mysterious than that blasted place. For all anyone ever hears out of Pluto these days, it might as well be Hades itself. A whole planet that’s nothing more than the haunted mansion on the hill. Lights in the dark. Sounds in the night.

Percy…we owe her our best, not just our most polite. You and I, we’re no good at telling a story straight. It won’t come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl? So, look. She’s…she’s captive in a black palace of a thousand rooms. Imprisoned by a terrible master. Behind briars, Sleeping Beauty in black lipstick. No one has seen her for years. She’s a legend, a whisper in the taverns and the alleyways.

UNCK: And a stranger comes to town.

MAKO: A stranger with a hidden past. An unnatural secret. A concealed deformity?

UNCK: And a curse, Vince. You’ve got to have a curse. It’s the accessory the fashionable antihero cannot go without. How about…when asked, he must always tell the truth. It’s not even much of a leap from the detective who must deliver the truth to his bosses. We’ve still got all the Pluto sets from Proserpine. And the Bertilak woods from Sir Gawain on Ganymede.

MAKO: And Varela slots right in. He was always hip deep in a phantasmagoria anyway. You want to look that liar in the eye? Let’s do it. Maximo Varela did actually run off to Pluto when Oxblood turned him loose.

UNCK: And the end, Vince?

MAKO: How do all Gothics end? With magic. And with revenge.

The Deep Blue Devil

The Man in the Malachite Mask:

My Sin

20 February, 1962. Early morning. Obolus cantina.

During the whole of that frozen, dark transit through the glittering, howling autumnal moorlands of the trans-Neptunian wastes, as the ice road hung thin and ragged as funereal curtains beyond the portholes, I had been keeping studiously to myself within the confines of our slim vessel as it passed through that singularly lonesome expanse of darkness and, whilst the blue and ghostly shades of morning at the edge of civilization roused the passengers, drew within sight of the melancholy face of Pluto.

Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.

“There is naught on Pluto but magicians, Americans, and the mad,” rasped the old woman who had settled in beside me