Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Author:Gretchen Felker-Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

The Second Cut

Ellen met Rachel in the vacant lobby of the Brickworks on Wednesday a few hours after the receptionist left for the night. Rachel stepped through the front doors with snow swirling around her ankles and a cold wind at her back. Slowly, deliberately, she wiped her shoes on the mat while holding Ellen’s gaze. Ellen felt as though the photos on the walls were judging her. Ronald Reagan. Wilford Brimley. Clint Eastwood. The Old Men, Phillip called them. The weight of their scrutiny made her feel small.

“I apologize,” said Ellen. “For the other night.”

“Kiss my ass,” Rachel snapped back. “Shrier’s puff piece is filed. Let’s get this over with.”

They rode the elevator to the second floor in silence. The hall was dark. To the left was the theater where the Foundation sometimes screened significant films for its backers. To the right, the test-screening room where Ellen had watched the release print of The Baroness a few days earlier. She’d left the door open and the lights on. The projector was threaded.

She went to kill the lights as Rachel took one of the upholstered metal chairs. It was too small for the critic, but she made it look like a throne. She lit a cigarette. Ellen started the projector. The dark ribbon of the negative ran through it. Her palm itched and ached. Light painted the vinyl test screen.

The score came in, a dark flurry of strings over the abyssal pounding of a timpani, all speckled with pops and hisses. The title card. DIE BARONIN in ornate Gothic font, white against the black outline of a forbidding castle, and beneath it, ein film von Karla Bartok. A fade from the silhouette to the castle itself, an elaborate if slightly cheesy miniature perched atop a bald hill against a painted backdrop of imposing mountains. A winding switchback stair cut into the hillside, and a little figure climbing it. Another cut. Ilya Kapfelberg now. A boy. Seventeen or eighteen at the most, and with a nymphish beauty in his delicate bones, his pale hair blowing over the upturned collar of his coat as he labored up the steps against a stiff prevailing wind. Artifacts appeared and vanished. Black motes. Rippling lines.

The castle facade. Wood and canvas filling the shot around a backlit archway in the center of which stood a tall, bald man dressed all in black, the costume tight over the arms and unfolding from the elbows into voluminous sleeves. A strange metal half mask accentuated his lower jaw, hooking in at the corners of his mouth and banding the bridge of his nose. Two steps below, the boy stood in his shadow, looking up with trepidation. The English intertitles Ellen had mocked up for the duped print appeared.

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