Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  “‘A new sort of radiation …’” Cyril’s tone blended skepticism and amusement with more than a touch of awe.

  “Because the three species are so unstable, Newton predicted each would last a quarter of an hour at most.” Stephanie consulted her wristwatch. “In a few minutes we’ll separate Psi—at 1:55, to be exact. We should be able to observe paleodarkness until 2:10, and then it will decay. Next we’ll isolate Phi. After that dimension fades, we’ll split off Omega starting at 2:25, the moment of midtotality.”

  “Midtotality in New York?” I asked.

  “In Hopkinsville, Kentucky, actually, but our present location should be more than adequate.”

  “This isn’t the sort of thing we do at the Academy of Art,” said Cyril.

  “Lenny, you’ll be our primary observer, reporting aloud on everything you see with those keen eyes of yours.”

  “And Cyril will be my backup,” I said. “His eyes are sharp as X-Acto knives and twenty years younger than mine.”

  The experiment began with Stephanie turning off the electric lights, filling the studio with an emphatic gloom. At her fiancée’s command, Olivia opened the iris diaphragm, and a shaft of compromised sunlight struck the seam joining the Φ face to the Ω face of the prism. An instant later a shimmering ribbon of Psi darkness emerged from the center of the Ψ face and contacted the bottom left corner of my painting.

  “The separation has occurred,” I narrated. “A pure Psi ray has hit the canvas—at least I think that’s what I’m seeing.”

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” said Olivia.

  “Me neither,” said Stephanie, “but it’s all in the Nocturnomicon.”

  “I think I can see it,” said Cyril. “Yes, I can see the ray—I can see it!”

  Abruptly the beam changed course, sweeping left to right across the bottom of the canvas, then right to left, left to right, right to left, leaving black filaments in its wake. Now the Ψ ray ascended, slowly but inexorably, with the result that, line by line, sweep by sweep, Beyond the Pale began to disappear behind a shroud of paleodarkness.

  “It’s like the scanning-gun in a cathode-ray tube,” I noted.

  “Newton predicted all this,” said Stephanie. “White becomes

  black, day becomes night, the canvas becomes a gateway.”

  “A gateway?” said Olivia.

  “Close the iris, darling,” said Stephanie, and Olivia did as instructed. With halting steps, my ex-wife approached the canvas. “The darkness beckons. It beckons. It beckons. …”

  “Honey, you’re scaring me,” said Olivia.

  Stephanie summoned me to her side. “There’s a key hidden somewhere in the canvas,” she insisted. “Not a metal key—a symbol, a black Delta on a black background.”

  “All cats are gray in the dark,” said Cyril.

  I scrutinized the void, east to west, north to south. In less than a minute a barely discernible ∆, no larger than a playing card, appeared before my eyes.

  “I see it.”

  “Touch the apex,” said Stephanie.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Touch it!”

  I poked the peak of the Delta. What happened next flabbergasted me. The ∆ expanded until each side was at least five feet long, even as the interior transmuted into a silken, opaque, triangular portal.

  “Good heavens,” I muttered.

  Stephanie stretched forth her arm, pushing it through the ∆ and into the Ψ zone beyond.

  “Yikes!” gasped Cyril.

  “This isn’t possible!” wailed Olivia.

  “For the sake of science,” said Stephanie, “I must march open eyed into paleodarkness, as Newton did—probably did—before me. You three will sustain the experiment in my absence. When the Psi dimension decays, leaving Lenny’s white painting behind, rotate the prism counterclockwise one hundred twenty degrees and open the iris. Allow the sunbeam to pass through the Phi face and blacken the canvas, then close the iris. Thus shall I be privileged to experience teleodarkness. When Lenny’s painting reappears, rotate the prism a second time and let the Omega ray do its work, so I can tour the terra incognita of omnidarkness.”

  Olivia moaned and wrung her hands. “It’s one thing for Newton to stick needles in his eyes—”

  “We’ll be laughing about this on our wedding night,” said Stephanie.

  “And quite another to surrender yourself to a physics that was

  never meant to be.”

  “All physics was meant to be,” said Stephanie, disappearing completely into Ψ.

  I would like to claim that my reasons for following her were noble and heroic, the selfless ex-husband bent on protecting his reckless ex-wife. But the simple fact was that I too had succumbed to the fever. I needed to behold those arcane electromagnetic regions that no artist before me (with the possible but undocumented exception of Jan Vermeer) had ever visited.

  “You have your instructions,” I told Olivia and Cyril.

  “This isn’t happening,” said Olivia.

  And then, lured by some irreducible amalgam of choice and compulsion, I took a deep breath, climbed through the ∆, and melded with the newborn world.

  The next thing I knew, I was afloat—not in the air but on a nocturnal canal. Our vessel was a Venetian-style gondola of the sort Erik the Phantom had employed to ferry Christine Daaé through the sewers beneath the Paris Opera House. I was seated facing the prow. The waters exuded a perfume at once beguiling and corrupt, Eau de Décadence, perhaps, or Fleurs Diaboliques. A gibbous moon navigated a starless sky.

  Coincidentally, the most recent trade-paperback reprint of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera boasted a Leonard Moncaster cover. In interpreting the Angel of Music, I’d worked hard to avoid evoking the gloriously hideous makeup Lon Chaney had devised for the famous silent-movie adaptation. My paintings might be lurid, but they are mine own.

  “There’s nothing in the Nocturnomicon about a canal,” grumbled Stephanie, seated beside me.

  “This is astounding!” I trilled.

  “Yes, but it’s not physics,” said Stephanie.

  I torqued my body and took the measure of our gondolier, who in fact rather strongly resembled Lon Chaney’s skull-faced opera ghost.

  “Call me Fidelio,” he rasped in the tones of a clinically depressed basso profundo. “I was told to expect a Dr. Beswick and a Mr. Moncaster. Alas, these days I don’t get much business. My last passengers were Sir Isaac Newton and a Dutch painter whose name I’ve forgotten.”

  “They must have been disappointed,” said Stephanie, facing the gondolier. “Newton and Vermeer were hoping to see paleodarkness, a band of the electromagnetic spectrum not normally available to human perception.”

  “But this is paleodarkness—only we don’t call it that,” said Fidelio. “We prefer ‘romantic darkness,’ and in fact our realm delighted Newton. He told the painter, ‘Behold the night in all its gnarled beauty.’”

  The passing scenery seemed intended to illustrate the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ravens stood perched in dead trees. Fog enshrouded a mansion to which Roderick Usher might have held title. The moon cast its rays on the sallow stones of a ruined abbey. A churchyard glided past, roiling with chiaroscuro wraiths, ambulatory corpses, amoral cats, and—judging by the muffled cries—premature burials.

  “And what did the Dutch painter make of romantic darkness?” I asked Fidelio.

  “Our werewolves terrified him. The vampires were more to his taste.”

  Stephanie encompassed the entire Ψ world with a single extravagant gesture. “This is why I married you, Lenny.”

  “So we could go to Transylvania together?”

  “Your loft in Chelsea, your rants about art, all those uncanny visions you somehow got onto canvas—the whole romantic package. I thought your bohemianism would help me become a dreamer as well. Scientists need to dream.”

  “And did that happen?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “And yet you le
ft me.”

  “That’s hardly a mystery, is it, Lenny?”

  “You were always an overachiever.”

  Even as I spoke, the Ψ phenomenon ran its course, the moon growing incandescent, the shadows becoming shards of light, the canal turning into a gleaming lagoon.

  “Your white canvas is reverting to its original state,” Stephanie hypothesized, eyeing her wristwatch. “Two ten, just as I calculated.”

  “I have no friends in this place,” said Fidelio. “Please come back.”

  Evidently Olivia and Cyril had lost no time rotating the prism, opening the iris, and allowing Φ to manifest itself, for a cocoon of teleodarkness suddenly enveloped Stephanie and me. She emitted a staccato gasp. My consciousness slipped away.

  Awakening, I found myself wandering the fogbound, night-mantled streets of a nineteenth-century metropolis. Presently the misty scrims parted to reveal four horses, black and shiny as anthracite, harnessed to a waiting coach. A cadaverous figure with a drooping mustache stood beside the open door. He bid me enter. I climbed into the compartment and settled down next to Stephanie.

  “Where to?” the driver croaked, addressing the third person in the coach.

  “Whitechapel,” she said.

  Stately of demeanor, zaftig of form, our traveling companion wore a Victorian-era gown of cobalt blue. A black lace veil descended from her velvet hat, crosshatching her face.

  “My name is Jacqueline.” She raised her gloved hands and lifted her veil away. Her features were comely, her eyes bloodshot, her countenance cruel. “You must be Dr. Beswick and Mr. Moncaster.”

  The driver closed the coach door with the world-weary air of an undertaker securing a coffin lid.

  “I hope you savored the pleasures of romantic darkness,” Jacqueline continued, each sibilant partaking of the reptilian, “because pathological darkness is a rather different realm.”

  “Isaac Newton gave it the name ‘teleodarkness,’” said Stephanie.

  “How euphemistic of him.”

  I peered out the coach window. Caught in the public gaslight, a palpably degenerate man in a clawhammer coat strangled a rawboned indigent, then employed a butcher knife to—I cannot think of a more delicate way to put this—reduce that week’s grocery bill.

  The coach lurched forward. Sixteen iron-shod hooves reverberated off the cobblestones.

  Jacqueline rubbed her palm across a polished mahogany case resting on the seat beside her. “Believe it or not, I once made love to your Mr. Newton, right here in this coach. I told him he was good at celestial mechanics but not terrestrial hydraulics.”

  “That’s all very interesting, but we have less than fifteen minutes to study this phenomenon,” said Stephanie.

  “As you might imagine, pathological darkness thoroughly unnerved Sir Isaac,” said Jacqueline. “Mijnheer Vermeer was even more horrified. Luckily, on the morning of the experiment, Newton had woken up fearful that the third realm might traumatize him and Vermeer, so they’d instructed their assistant back in Delft to leave the prism alone after Phi decayed to whiteness.”

  “For better or worse, Dr. Beswick and I will be traveling all the way to Omega,” I said.

  We caromed past a gang of hooligans who, having chained a naked man to a marble obelisk, were in the process of skinning him alive. The clatter of our horses’ hooves failed to mute his screams.

  “Shall I tell you the most important fact I know?” Jacqueline unlatched the mahogany case, tilting back the lid to reveal a glittering array of surgical instruments. “The authorities investigating the Whitechapel murders have made a foolish mistake. They’re assuming the killer is a man.”

  Laughing like hyenas, two drunken youths trapped a harlot in a back alley and began tearing off her dress.

  “Would you mind closing that box?” said Stephanie. “I don’t like looking at those things.”

  “Consider my situation,” said Jacqueline. “Ten years ago I saw my mother and my aunt die of malignancies unique to their sex, and now a female cancer has visited itself upon my beloved elder sister. Curing Kitty, or at least prolonging her life, has become my obsession, my religion, my raison d’être—and yet every medical college in London has rejected me on account of my being a woman.”

  “Please close the box,” said Stephanie.

  Our coach rolled across an iron bridge, the adjacent quay providing a convenient place for a well-dressed gentleman—top hat, silk scarf, evening clothes—to use his silver-headed walking stick in decerebrating a ragged child.

  Impulsively I looked at my watch. Two twenty-two p.m. In three minutes, God willing, we’d be outside the Φ realm.

  “The surgical profession has improved markedly in recent years,” Jacqueline persisted. “Sharper knives, reliable anesthetics, carbolic acid to kill germs. Recently I realized I could save Kitty, and many worthy lives beyond hers, if I could acquire a rigorous knowledge of female anatomy. And so, barred from Imperial College, I have taken to the streets of Whitechapel.”

  On both sides of the coach, coils of light sinuated through the teleodarkness like elongated albino earthworms, while back in my atelier (or so I assumed) Beyond the Pale was restored to its pristine state. Street by street, building by building, the city turned white, as if blanketed by snow.

  “My dear Dr. Beswick, yours will be the last cadaver I need to dissect,” said Jacqueline the Ripper, removing a scalpel from its green felt nest. “If Kitty were here, she would praise your willingness to endure unimaginable pain for her sake.”

  I like to think I would have improvised a way to rescue Stephanie, perhaps by bludgeoning the madwoman with her instrument case, but the dissolution of the Φ dimension made such violence unnecessary. Back in New York, Olivia and Cyril quickly brought the Ω beam into play, so that dozens of invisible hooks or claws buried themselves in my clothing, lifted me from the coach, and bore me through the omnidarkness as if I were being abducted by a colony of bats.

  My flight ended at 2:27 p.m. The minions of Omega deposited me in a spectator’s box, one of several occupying a vast chamber that I immediately knew—as one knows such things in a dream, though I was fully awake—to be a kind of timeless or quintessential courtroom. A feeble facsimile of light trickled through the smudged windows.

  My companions in the box included Stephanie and a high-domed, diamond-eyed android sheathed in an iridescent alloy. His portrait might have adorned the cover of a pulp science-fiction magazine.

  “Lenny, this is Percival,” said Stephanie.

  “Omnidarkness is a pit that has no bottom,” said Percival, his voice crackling like a Van de Graaff generator. “The Omega ray limns the worst of all possible worlds.”

  “The jurisprudential?” I asked.

  “The political. Imagine a court consecrated to some Platonic ideal of injustice.”

  As if cued by Percival’s remark, twelve black-robed jurists, evenly divided by gender and exhibiting assorted racial lineages, filed into the chamber. Sour of face and haughty of demeanor, they installed their rumps on plushly upholstered chairs behind the judges’ bench, then immediately set about their business, systematically increasing the quotient of inequity in the universe.

  An alleged Renaissance witch called Theodora Bole came before the twelve and was forthwith condemned to be burned at the stake. A twentieth-century orchestra conductor was shipped off to a labor camp for the crime of being named Rothstein. His Excellency Bishop Vitos Orloff, who’d done nothing to protect the victims of a pedophilia epidemic in his diocese, was summarily exiled to Rome, where he would spend his remaining days drinking Chianti Classico and reading Saint Augustine in luxurious papal apartments.

  Stephanie and I exchanged looks of utter dismay. Our horror traced no less to the duration of these proceedings than to their content. The clock on the wall read 2:55 p.m. The jurists had been plying their trade for nearly half an hour.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” I said. “Did Newton hypothesize that Omega would prove more stable
than Psi or Phi?”

  Stephanie shook her head.

  The proceedings continued, relentless and perhaps—heaven help us—interminable. A runaway black slave named Malachi, the property of a nineteenth-century Virginia planter, was brutally deprived of his left hand and right foot before a cheering mob in the balcony. Dolly Finch, Natasha Godwin, and Margo Attebury, all of whom had been raped by His Honor, Rowland Q. Tucker, the oldest and most respected jurist on the bench, were made to atone for their irresistible charms, first by cleaning Malachi’s blood off the floor and, second, by becoming Judge Tucker’s indentured servants. Oscar Laird, the CEO of a chemical company whose products had caused leukemia in countless children, was forced to step down and accept a sinecure as the American ambassador to an idyllic South Seas island.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall. Four o’clock p.m. “And now it’s your turn,” Percival explained.

  In a succession of fluid gestures the android clamped handcuffs on my wrists, then led me by the chain to the front of the courtroom.

  “But I haven’t done anything!” I protested.

  Had there been a guillotine in the chamber all along? I couldn’t say, but now I was aware of its menacing presence.

  “In the case of Leonard Moncaster, we shall follow the usual protocols for visitors from unconventional dimensions,” said Judge Tucker. “First we shall decapitate him. Next we shall deliver the verdict. Then we shall hear the evidence. Executioner, do your duty.”

  The android dragged me toward the death machine.

  “But I haven’t done anything!” I screamed.

  “He hasn’t done anything!” protested Stephanie.

  The android forced me to kneel, then inserted my neck in the stocks, directly below the angled blade.

  “Does the prisoner have any final words?” asked Judge Tucker.

  “I certainly do!” I shrieked, staring into the wicker basket.