Selected Stories by Valentine Mark

Author:Valentine, Mark [Valentine, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Fiction, Fiction.Horror, Collection.Single Author, Fiction.Dark Fantasy/Supernatural
ISBN: 9780956658760
Google: iFcMlwEACAAJ
Amazon: 0956658768
Goodreads: 18187154
Publisher: Swan River Press
Published: 2015-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Amber Cigarette

A silver cigarette case, slim as a sword’s face, and engraved with radiating lines, like a stylised sunrise: and the sun was a gem of jasper. It would do very well for his favourite brand, those delicate tapers of amber paper made only by Desmay. Inside was a couch of green sarsenet where they would nestle restfully.

“Each case is made only once, sir,” the young man said. He had fair hair, and a brittle stare, as if his eyes were made of crushed glass. The collector Ivor Seymour looked at the design again. How fine the filigree of the rays, as if light had been made tangible. The silversmith had incised the lines as delicately as a leaf-fossil. And the crimson stone was marked with strange veins.

“It is said the gem is Alexandrian,” the boy offered, diffidently. His customer looked up—steadily, so as not to show undue eagerness.

“Said?”

The youth adjusted his left shirt cuff, a shining white band.

“We cannot exactly state the provenance. But its cut, and its character, suggest that to us.”

“I see.” He was secretly amused by the lofty wisdom, worldly yet rarefied, that the young man affected.

The case must be his, to possess and to caress, so that his touch might traverse the scriven filaments and his eye gaze often upon the curious stone. He would own it. He nodded.

The boy covered the case in black waxed paper and fastened the parcel in straw-coloured string.

After the dimness inside, light streamed in the streets, and his eyelids faltered. He turned back once: on the drawn blinds, the assistant’s silhouette was still, a statue made of grey shade.

He kept the case in its dark veils for several days: he dare not look upon it. But his fingers found the little sable-coated packet often, and they longed to release the coarse golden cords.

He chose a day when clouds of umber squatted in the sky, and a dead gloom had descended upon his room. He felt out a solution to the locks of the knots the young man had made, and released the wrappings. The sliver of silver slipped from its sheath of shadow and shone like a shivering stream: and the stone stared at him. It was an amulet, he was sure: and it held within its red heart a serpentry of secrets, if only he could read its old chalcedony tongue.

He looked hard at the markings on the polished jasper and they almost seemed to form shapes, which, however, did not quite cohere, were always elusive. He thought of a cabinet of wax seals he had once seen, gouts of scarlet bearing creatures impressed upon them: sea-goats, gorgetted swans, staring gorgons, long-tongued lions, snorting wyverns, crowned ravens. He expected the stone, if he looked long enough, to yield up just such a beast, but perhaps one never known or seen before.

He pressed the lip to release the lid, took a handful of the Desmay cigarettes from an onyx box, and placed them one by one upon the green silk cushion within.

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