We clattered up cast-iron steps to the landing, turned. A tall rectangle of lead-coloured light hung before us: the doorway to the studio was propped open. The short hallway beyond led to a set of double doors between whose seams the flickering light danced.
This is taking too long to tell. Longer than it took to happen, by far.
What I heard next I recognized from my “dream”: the brazen bell, a slow, awful tolling; the fast, terrified breathing, thick and raspy with the air it gulped. A racketing thunder, more like a train hurtling along tracks than a film chittering through a projector’s reels. And all with the faraway tinny sound of a gramo
phone recording, despite the fact that I knew, knew, the film should have been silent—the silver nitrate stock we’d given Sidlo had no track for recording sound. And somehow beneath, around and surrounding all this noise, the utter, hypnotized stillness of an audience caught completely in a film’s spell—the stillness of a mouse before a snake, a rabbit before a stoat.
Oh God, I thought, while beside me, Safie was whispering something in a sibilant, guttural tongue. None of it made sense till I caught one name—Malak-e-Tâwus—and realized she, too, was praying. I shook her by the elbow.
Our first step forward felt like we were lifting our feet against gravity ten times that of Earth, the barely visible doors stretching away in a classic Vertigo push-pull zoom. Then we were past the threshold.
A thunderous WHAM of light and heat smashed against us, almost knocking me on my ass, but the noise that followed pulled me right back up, like a cord.
Screaming.
The first person we found as we fought our way into that sudden inferno was Leonard Warsame, who’d been doing doorman duty—unobtrusively helpful to the last, like a good boyfriend should be. He was collapsed on the floor near the doors, hands over his ears; we helped him up, turning our faces away from the horrible radiance pouring out of what had once been the screen. I remember shouting, but I don’t remember what; later, in a Toronto Star article about the “disaster,” he was quoted as saying: Lois Cairns told me, “Don’t look,” and I said, “Believe me, I won’t!” At the time, all I saw was him nodding then following us back in, hunched over to stay below the smoke rapidly collecting against the ceiling. The air tore at our lungs as we bent, again and again, stumbling over knocked-down folding chairs, hauling up people lying limp or shaking in spasm, bleeding from noses, ears, eye sockets. I wound up with bloodstains on my palms, warm and coppery, as I had to feel my way over people for a handhold. Some bore bright, shiny burns on their faces and hands, eyebrows and eyelashes gone as if they’d been cooked. One man was having what looked like a full-bore fit, flinging himself up and down; it took me, Safie, and Leonard together to drag him toward the doors, and when we got there I collapsed, coughing.
“Got to stop it . . . at the source,” I wheezed to Safie, who nodded, hacking up black phlegm. “The projector. Can you see it? Don’t look at the screen!”
Safie nodded, covering her eyes with one hand and tilting the bottom edge up slowly, head ticking slow from side to side. At last she pointed, shouting: “There! Straight ahead. Lots of chairs in the way, and people. I’ll yell when you get near! Go!”
I plunged back in, the smoke so thick it almost masked even the burning screen’s light. Faceless shapes stumbled past me, vanished. I tripped over a chair and just stayed down, crawling over the hot hardwood floor on hands and knees. For half a second, the slightly cooler, cleaner air was a blessed relief, till somebody crunched what felt like a size-sixteen boot down onto my left hand. I screamed, curling ’round the injury, then forced myself to straighten and kept crawling, sobbing, this time on only one hand, the broken one sweeping side to side. When it smacked into the projector stand I gave another yowl but didn’t stop—grabbed on with other hand, got my knees under me, then my feet. Forced myself up, tear-blind, the projector’s rattle a deafening roar. And then—
The noise stopped.
Everything stopped.
My eyes snapped back into focus, clearer than they’d been since I was five. Like I was wearing glasses with an absolutely perfect prescription. My hand—red and swollen, one finger bent sideways at an angle—stopped hurting. I took a breath but tasted no smoke even though I could still see it everywhere around me, frozen in mid-air like blackish-grey wool muffling moviegoers caught in impossible poses, still trying to escape. Plus, cringing against the wall with one eye peeking through his splayed hands, Wrob Barney himself, paralyzed, appalled. Like Todt before the lost Ark of the Covenant.
The moment between the minute and the hour, Vasek Sidlo seemed to say, in my mind. And the screen’s light shifted, brightening till it glared down from overhead, furious: the stark and pitiless noonday blaze of the fallow field, the wasteland, turning everything around it to a cut-out silhouette—reflecting something entirely outside the world I knew.
I did then what I’d ordered Leonard not to—what I suppose I’d always known I would do, anyway: I looked.
It was only a film, after all. Right? A permanent record of a single string of linear time, “cut” in camera to pull seconds together, to create a reality of its own, encapsulating a larger one. Its emulsion scored by nothing so crude as waves of lens-bent light, but by thought itself, because nothing else could part reality’s layers deeply enough to reveal what truly lay beneath: what was even now stepping down from that screen, towering up impossibly far beyond what the smoke-shrouded ceiling should have permitted.
For two or three heartbeats, I tried to pretend it was nothing but Iris Whitcomb’s ghost again, in full Lady Midday drag—but all that stopped when the figure lifted its hand, simply wiping away that illusion, that glamour-shroud cocoon. What emerged was a thousand times more vast—the face, not the mask, or even the mirror: the Eye of the World, the still point, the muse. The thing that opens your own eyes from the inside, killing you with its glory.
The truth, plain and simple: that every idea—good or bad—comes from someplace entirely other, knocking on the inside of your skull, trying to get out. And not everyone survives its scrutiny.
(what sad damage she’s done you, that daughter of mine, in her raging. and all to keep you from me)
(a thankless task)
(your curiosity draws you to me, like moths to light. you see. you are seen)
Not words, so much, but their meaning, placed directly into my brain by something for which speech was an impediment, not a tool. And on the same level I thought back, desperately:
The hell do you want, anyhow?
(what is due, only)
(feed me. love me, and die of it. feed the earth, make it grow)
(do your duty)
Yeah, no, I thought back, before I could think better. Fuck that mediaeval bullshit, right in the fuckin’ ass.
Then cringed, expecting annihilation. But it didn’t come; only stillness—a long, long no-moment. Followed by something I hadn’t expected, at all.