Richard Kadrey - The Grand Dark

He opened the three locks that secured his flat and went inside.

Without turning on the lights, Largo went to the tiny kitchen and turned on the small Bakelite wireless Remy had given him the previous Christmas. Tinny dance music, all trumpets and drums, filled the flat. Through the small living room, he went to an even smaller room that housed a loft bed and a wooden writing desk that Largo hardly ever used for its intended purpose. The desk, with its numerous drawers and cubbyholes, functioned mainly as his dresser. He stripped off his clothes, hanging his damp suit from the underside of the loft bed, before turning on the light. More than the smells in the hall or his cramped quarters, it was the light that drove Largo mad.

The lone bedroom bulb hung from the ceiling by a thick cord. It flickered twice before fully illuminating. The light it gave off was a yellowish white that made Largo think of piss or cheap cheese. It covered everything, including him. He couldn’t comb his hair in the morning without feeling slightly dirty. Remy, of course, loved it. On the nights she’d stayed there she said it was like swimming in egg custard. Largo always smiled at the description, but he died a little inside each time he heard it.

The reason for the piss light and the perpetually black skies over Little Shambles was simple: the coal-stoked power plant on the next block. You couldn’t escape the stink and it covered all the streets and windows with a fine layer of soot. So different from Remy’s flat in Kromium’s artists’ quarter, which was powered by cool and lovely plazma. Her wireless was twice the size of Largo’s and the lights throughout her rooms were as bright and white as new-fallen snow. As he dropped the small coins and the Valda into a tin box he kept under his mattress, Largo debated with himself.

With my new position and the prospect of more tips like today’s, there’s only one question: New clothes or a new flat? If the company is going to supply me with a new suit, maybe I can think about rooms in Dolch or even Geschoss. No coal in Geschoss.

It was a wonderful thought until reality hit him. A flat in Geschoss would cost easily more than double his current rent. And yet … it was sure to come with a private bath. That alone might be worth the expense. As much as his custard-colored flat amused Remy, rooms in Geschoss would really impress her. They would make him seem more serious and substantial, and less of a frazzled boy. And, just maybe, perhaps a new flat would be enough that she’d even consider moving in with him.

But that’s a long way off. One Valda and a couple of small princes aren’t going to get me far. I need to cut my expenses and save every penny. It’s only the essentials from now on.

Which made him think of morphia.

It had been hours since he’d fortified himself and he was beginning to feel the lack of the drug. He took the little bottle from his jacket and put two drops under his tongue. The effects were immediate and heavenly. He dropped to the rickety wooden desk chair and let his head fall back. When it came to cutting expenses, morphia wasn’t an option. It was the only thing that made the squalor of his rooms and the monotony of his job bearable. What else was there to cut down on, then? But his mind was already drifting, softened in morphia’s gentle warmth. He’d worry about expenses in the morning. Now there was nothing but bliss, and soon there would be Remy—another, even better kind of bliss.

On his way across town, the coal-powered streetlights of Little Shambles gave way to the plazma illumination of Kromium. Where Copper Weg crossed Bronzegasse, a Black Widow carried a load of machine parts to the armaments factory. With his general hostility toward Maras and his frustration at the confrontation with Andrzej, a delicious thought came to him.

Largo knew that interfering with the armament factory’s business was a jailing offense and could get you a sound beating by the bullocks. Still, after checking the street twice for police, Largo sped along in front of the Widow and, while passing a shuttered greengrocer, kicked a trash can into the street. Under its load, the burdened Mara was too slow to sidestep the obstruction. One of its front feet came down on top of the can and pierced its side such that the can became stuck on its leg. The Widow stumbled drunkenly this way and that, trying to kick the can off. Before he turned off Copper Weg, Largo looked back and saw that a crowd had gathered where the great black spider was still hopping in the street. They smiled and applauded the contraption’s improvised dance routine.

That’s one for our side , he thought. He was sure Parvulesco would have agreed.

The marquee for the theater—his destination—lay a long block ahead, but it was still bright enough to light the whole street. With the morphia in his system and the theater just ahead, whatever memories Largo had of his strange day faded away.

Of course, the Grand Dark wasn’t the theater’s real name, but it was the one everyone knew it by because its real name was a mouthful. Over the box office, the marquee proudly shouted its true name to the whole district.

THEATER OF THE GRAND DARKNESS

Dr. Krokodil presents

Elegant Butchery

Sensual Slaughter

Voluptuous Demises

The top of the marquee was sculpted into the upper jaw of a great steel reptile. The lower jaw surrounded the doors and thrust several feet over the street. The pointed teeth along each jaw glowed a bright plazma white. For the patrons, entering the Grand Dark was a gleeful surrender, a leap down the gullet of an alluring monster.

Largo chained his bicycle near the back of the theater and Ilsa in the ticket booth waved him inside. He crept through the lobby and slipped between the red velvet curtains into the performance area. The first play of the evening was already under way.

He found a seat in the last row and sat down. The Grand Dark specialized in Schöner Mord, little productions of violence and depravity performed by life-size puppets controlled by actors backstage in galvanic suits. The dolls required no crude strings, but were instead powered by nearly invisible wires along the floor furnishing the watts needed to make them seem almost alive. They moved with fluid, eerie grace, like a three-dimensional zoetrope brought to life.

The night’s first production was called The Boudoir Phantasm . It was a fiction in which the ghost of a murdered wife possessed the body of the husband’s new bride and killed him with a cleaver, the same way he’d killed her. When the new wife came out of her hypnotic state and saw what she’d done, she threw herself from the boudoir’s window to her death, much to the delight of the murdered bride. It was a simple tale but elegantly produced. In fact, the run had been extended for two weeks. Since the end of the war, spiritualism was all the rage in Lower Proszawa, so ghost stories were very popular.

When the play ended, Largo wanted to rush backstage and tell Remy what a wonderful job she’d done as the murdered bride, but she never liked to socialize between plays, so he remained in his seat. Normally he would have joined the other patrons in the lobby for a smoke or a drink, but he was thinking about expenses again, so he stayed where he was. Besides, it wasn’t as if the show had stopped completely.

The small band that provided the soundtrack for the plays performed during the intermission for tips—and the Trefle numbers of elegant gentlemen and ladies they might meet for trysts later in the night. An evening of murder in the Grand Dark was known to get even the stodgiest patron’s blood up. And the drugs helped, of course. By intermission, the air in the theater was heavy with hashish smoke. In the dark corners of the lobby, men and women snorted cocaine together and kissed in groups of two and three. It was a condition of the tension that gripped the city: after the horrors of the Great War, grab as much pleasure as possible before the next, inevitable conflagration. Largo felt a stab of jealousy watching as other theatergoers with money spent it on such pleasures and indulged in them so deeply and openly.