Лаура Гилман - The Underwater Ballroom Society

As science fiction and fantasy writers, the power of ‘what if’ is our stock in trade. But ‘what if’ means nothing if it’s not followed with ‘yes.’

It was years ago that I first heard the tragic (and quite Gothic) story of the underwater ballroom at Witley Park. The tale of Whitaker Wright and his fraudulent investment schemes in 1890s London is surely worth a novel in and of itself, but the estate he built (and abandoned) at Witley Park with its underwater ballroom has captured many imaginations. I had saved files and images of it, knowing I wanted to write a story about it someday, unsure quite how I would do it justice.

Then, one day I saw my dear friend Stephanie Burgis talking about it on Twitter.

“Wouldn’t it be great if…?”

“What if…?”

We asked each other what if we edited an anthology in which each story featured an underwater ballroom, but then we took the crucial step of saying yes to the adventure before us. Immediately, other authors who saw the conversation wanted into the ballroom, and thus The Underwater Ballroom Society was born. We built it, and they came.

In this anthology, you will visit an old hangout one last time with an ex-punk siren and find out what the twelve dancing princesses learned in their secret world. You will feel the fallout of Oberon stealing a guitar god. You will wonder if magic might finally find a lonely officer of the Crown and a smuggler. You will learn about the secret society of Mycologians and find love with a girl who never otherwise fit in to society’s expectations. You will know what happened to Syrus Reed after The Tinker King , and you will be swept away by the determined romance of Amy Standish and Jonathan Harwood in Spellswept , the prequel novella to Snowspelled . You will solve mysteries with Harriet George under the Valles Marineris on Mars, and you will be left longing at the rusalkas’ ball.

Setting is so often relegated as mere furniture in stories, but it is far more than that. Setting not only imbues a work with atmosphere, but often has a mind of its own. As Robert McFarlane said in Landmarks , “Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us.” We hope this book will leave its mark in you, and that you will return often to the underwater ballroom.

Once upon a time there was a band that was bigger than big, louder than bombs. This was back in the glorious days of the Old Regime, long before the Waking World fell at last fast asleep. Long ago fabulous days, when the Voivode of Shingleton swam the poisonous Winnequah Sea for a five diva bet, and died not long after of an agonizing skin ailment, smug with accomplishment to the end. When the great singer Lotta Peachblossom, in the role of Joleta, sang el dugüello at the Porkopolis Opera House, shattering all the glass within a twenty-mile radius and giving every spectator a migraine that lasted for two weeks. When the lift took three hours to get to the top of Porkopolis’ tallest building, The Gaudy Pikestaff, and served snacks on the way and had velvet couches to nap upon. When Drusilla Van Hofferan tricked ice elementals into freezing her rooftop pool and hosted an ice skating party there—in the middle of the inferno summer. When the dancer called Lady Grinning Soul was fined ten thousand divas for walking a were-lion down the Munificent Mile during rush hour. When Puppy Blake and the diarist Xi Hoon conducted a duel to the death entirely with bon mots while standing at the bar in Brennen’s Hotel drinking pink gins.

A glorious time, full of glorious people, and this band, Love’s Secret Domain, the most of glorious of all. Everyone in the Waking World knew Love’s Secret Domain. They knew the band’s singer, the incandescent Sylvanna de Godervya, who kept that incandescence, her fans whispered, by bathing in donkey’s milk and faery ichor. They knew Merrick, the drummer, who had been a pig changeling in Faery until he had been released by Titania in exchange for a jar of thick-cut tawny marmalade. By then, Merrick had been a pig so long that he couldn’t change back to human entirely, but his trotters were more formidable strikers than the hardest drumsticks. (The tabloids said that his drumskins were made from his own sloughed pigskin, but that rumour was completely unverified.) (And yet one hundred percent true.) And Litacia, the bassist, whose skin crawled with tattoos of every note of her bass lines, and who, it was said, was handfasted to a percussion demon from the fourth level of Erebus.

And the guitarist: Robert Mynwar.

O Robert Mynwar! That iconic portrait, guitar slung to his knees, white doves in flight over his sun-kissed, wind-blown, blonde locks, hung on thousands of walls, sighed over by thousands of day-dreaming fans. The glittering blue eyes; the oh-so-very-tight kilt, slung so low over that taut belly, the fantastically muscled calves. They said that the Muse of Music taught Robert Mynwar to play: that She made his guitar, the Queen of Life, with Her own hands, carved the guitar’s body from Her own shin bone, strung the neck with strands of Her own hair, and made the pearlescent inlays on the fretboard with teeth plucked from Her own mouth. When Robert Mynwar’s long elegant fingers blurred along the neck of the Queen of Life, the sound he coaxed from her made the Waking World fall silent. Birds dropped from the sky, so struck by the melodious rhythm that they forgot to fly; rabid dogs lay down peacefully in the street, foaming no more; crying children found their tears had turned to diamonds. Newly-made spouses left their partners at the altar to hear Robert Mynwar play; babies came early; the dead left their graves to dance.

Perhaps somewhere there were a few people who had never heard of Love’s Secret Domain—hermits, castaways, cat-ladies—but by the time the band was midway through the Horses of Instruction Tour, those people were few and far-between. Word of their musical prowess had spread beyond the Waking World, into Faery, into Elsewhere—and beyond.

The Horses of Instruction tour was massive; each show more legendary than the last. The show where Sylvanna’s and Robert’s voices entwined into a summoning of the Muse of Music Herself, who stayed to play an encore that left the delirious audience’s ears permanently ringing with the final lick of The Crystal Cabinet . The show where the stage slowly rolled forward during the band’s biggest hit, A Tender Curb , crushing twenty-five ecstatic fans into jelly. The show where the son of financier Sookie Kodos flung himself onto Robert Mynwar, hoping to clip a lock of that sunshine hair; instead, Sylvanna beat him around the head with her mandolin before the bodyguards dragged him offstage. The show where Robert’s guitar solo ignited the roof of Oaktown Ballyhoo on fire, and the rest of the show had to be canceled much to the fans’ dismay, who would have been happy to be burned alive if they could do so while listening to the pulverizing roar of The Crystal Cabinet . The show where a glade of aspens uprooted themselves from their hillside, and, lured by the thundering bass line to Pity, A Human Face, tried to storm the Ticonderoga Gaiety Music Hall only to be repelled in a pitched battle with an enormous murder of crows, who had been following the band from town to town for weeks.