Something More Than Night by Kim Newman

Author:Kim Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

19

Question Mark growled.

I got up off my knees.

Ariadne had put in her appearance and left the stage. That didn’t mean the show was over. She was the match that lit the fuse. There would still be fireworks.

The machine whirled faster.

The hanging man kept coming round, arms swinging loose.

The all-new Junior Home commanded the balcony. He was the Green Knight returned for the second round of the beheading contest, but with the wrong noggin – a meagre poke-snatcher or pig-thief, executed and forgotten before the feast – set where his properly titanic crown should be. His corded neck and expanded cranium made his face look too small.

Dr Vaudois cringed in his shadow.

Junior came forward. His tin tuxedo was a lightweight studio mock-up. Painted fabric or silver foil. Ben-Hur muscles sculpted into the breastplate. Fascist fancy dress, patterned after Roman legionaries and Teutonic knights. Add a goldfish bowl helmet and he could be a pilot of the future, steering rocket ships to the stars or vaporising cities with wonder bombs dropped from outside the atmosphere.

I itched for Junior to get too close to the edge of the balcony and tip over, crashing on his stupid little face. I’d forgotten the Vaudois-Quin Process hadn’t just made him taller and wider. He possessed stolen talents too.

He stepped off the balcony and stood stock still in mid-air, gauntleted hands on metal hips.

Junior Home had conquered gravity. Here was Nietzsche’s Overman come to California in a fanfare of tubas.

Bims thumped their chests – right fist raised, thumb-side to the breastbone. They gave themselves three quick blows.

It figured Junior would have his own salute. I bet he’d had one of the studio’s indentured writers come up with it.

Junior saluted the crowd in return. His triple-thump put a dent in his Pyramid logo-marked chest-plate. He puffed and the dent sprang back with a wobble. Despite his ascent to demi-divinity, Junior was ridiculous. Most tyrants are. People only stop laughing when the pile of corpses reaches the roof. Even then, the temptation of black humour remains.

The jokes we told about the mangled dead in the trenches don’t bear repeating. Never let the civvies back home find out how callous we became wading through mass murder.

Junior floated gently to the ground. His bootheels crunched into slushy gravel.

He had mastered the old conjurers’ trick of wireless levitation. The Home House experiment gave him the power of mind over his own matter.

Dr Vaudois stayed up on the balcony, alone.

We had been blessed momentarily with the presence. Now we had to endure the pain of fresh memory. Ariadne wasn’t inside the building, out of sight. She was gone. Junior Home was left to get on with his rigmarole. The rest of us were extras. After her, even miracles were an anticlimax.

I felt Ariadne’s absence the way philosophers feel the absence of God. An ache in the heart, a bleeding into a void. Her image was a hot coal that hurt to retain in the mind. If held too long, it would do real damage.

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