ILLUMINATIONS

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  From Hell (with Eddie Campbell)

  Lost Girls (with Melinda Gebbie)

  Voice of the Fire

  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (with Kevin O’Neill)

  Unearthing (with Mitch Jenkins)

  Providence (with Jacen Burrows)

  Cinema Purgatorio (with Kevin O’Neill)

  Jerusalem

  Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic (with Steve Moore, John Coulthart and others)

  CONTENTS

  Hypothetical Lizard

  Not Even Legend

  Location, Location, Location

  Cold Reading

  The Improbably Complex High-Energy State

  Illuminations

  What We Can Know About Thunderman

  American Light: An Appreciation

  And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  HYPOTHETICAL LIZARD

  Half her face was porcelain.

  Seated upon her balcony, absently chewing the anaemic blue flowers she had plucked from her window garden, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks. Unadorned and circular, it lay beneath her like a shadowy and stagnant well. The black flagstones, polished to an impassive lustre by the passage of many feet, looked more like still water than stone when viewed from above. The cracks and fissures that might have spoiled the effect were visible only where veins of moss followed their winding seams through the otherwise featureless jet. It could as easily have been a delicate lattice of pond scum that would shatter and disperse with the first splash, the first ripple …

  When Som-Som was five, her mother had noticed the aching beauty prefigured in her infant face and had brought the uncomprehending child through the yammering maze of night-time Liavek until they reached the pastel house with its round black courtyard. Yielding to the tug of her mother’s hand, Som-Som dragged across the midnight slabs with the echo of her footsteps whispering back to her from the high, curved wall that bounded all but a quarter of the enclosure. The concave façade of the House Without Clocks itself completed the circle, and into its broad arc were set seven doors, each of a different colour. It was at the central door, the white one, that her mother knocked.

  There was the sound of small and careful footsteps, followed by the brief muttering of a latch as the door was unlocked from the other side. It glided noiselessly open. Dressed all in white against the whiteness of the chambers beyond, a fifteen-year-old girl stared out into the dark at them, her eyes remote and unquestioning.

  The garment she wore was shaped to her body and coloured like snow, with faint blue shadows pooling in its folds and creases. It covered her from head to toe, save for the openings that had been cut away to reveal her right breast, her left hand and her impenetrable, mask-like face.

  Staring up at the slim figure framed in its icy rectangle of light, Som-Som had at first assumed that the girl’s visible flesh was reddened by the application of paint or powder. Looking closer, she realised with a thrill of fascination and horror that the skin was entirely covered by small yet legible words, tattooed in vivid crimson upon the smooth white canvas beneath. Finely worded sentences, ambiguous and suggestive, spiralled out from the maroon bud of her nipple. Verses of elegant and cryptic passion followed the orbit of her left eye before resolving themselves into a perfect metaphor beneath the shadow of her cheekbone. Her fingers dripped with poetry.

  She looked first at Som-Som and then at her mother, and there was no judgement in her eyes. As if something had been agreed upon, she turned and walked with tiny, precise steps into the arctic dazzle of the House Without Clocks. After an instant, Som-Som and her mother followed, closing the white door behind them.

  The girl (whose name, Som-Som later learned, was Book) led the two of them through spectrally perfumed corridors to a room that was at once gigantic and blinding. White light, refracted through lenses and faceted glassware, seemed to hang in the air like a ghostly cobweb, so that the shapes and forms within the room were softened. At the centre of this foggy phosphorescence, a tall woman reclined upon polar furs, the cushions strewn about her feet embossed with intricate frost patterns. The glimmering blur of her surroundings erased the wrinkles from her skin and made her ageless, but when she spoke her voice was old. Her name was Ouish, and she was the mistress and proprietor of the House Without Clocks.

  The conversation that passed between the two women was low and obscure, and Som-Som caught little of it. At one point, Mistress Ouish rose from her bed of white pelts and hobbled over to inspect the child. The old woman took Som-Som’s face lightly between thumb and forefinger, turning the head in order to study the profile. Her touch was like crepe, but surprisingly warm in a room that gleamed with such unearthly coldness. Evidently satisfied, she turned and nodded once to the girl called Book before returning to the embrace of the furs.

  The tattooed servant left the room, returning some moments later bearing a small pouch of bleached leather. It jingled faintly as she walked. She handed it to Som-Som’s mother, who looked frightened and uncertain. Its weight seemed to reassure her, and she did not resist or complain as Book took her lightly by the arm and guided her out of the white chamber.

  Long minutes passed before Som-Som realised that her mother was not coming back.

  There was Khafi, a nineteen-year-old dislocationist who, lying upon his stomach, could curl his body backward until his buttocks were seated comfortably upon the top of his head while his face smiled out from between the ankles. There was Delice, a woman in middle age who used fourteen needles to provoke inconceivable pleasures and torments, all without leaving the faintest mark. Mopetel, suspending her own heartbeat and breath, could approximate a corpse-like state for more than two hours. Jazu had fine black hair growing all over his body and would walk upon all fours and only communicate in growls. And there was Rushushi, and Hata, and unblinking Loba Pak …

  Living amidst this menagerie of exotics, where the singular was worn down by repeated contact until it became the commonplace, Som-Som was afforded a certain objectivity. Without discrimination or favour, she spent the best part of her days observing the animate rarities about her, wondering which of them provided a template for what she was to become. Eavesdropping upon Mistress Ouish and her closest associates, patiently decoding their under-language of pauses and accentuated syllables, Som-Som had determined that she was being preserved for something special – special even amidst the gallery of specialties that was the House Without Clocks. Would she be instructed in the art of driving men and women to ecstasy with the vibrations of her voice, like Hata? Would Mopetel’s talent of impermanent death become hers? Smiling as she accepted the candied fruits and marzipans offered by her indulgent elders, she would study their faces and consider.

  Upon her ninth birthday, Som-Som was escorted by Book to the dazzling sanctum of Mistress Ouish. Her parched smile disquieting with its uncharacteristic warmth, Mistress Ouish had dismissed Book and then patted the wintery hides beside her, gesturing for Som-Som to sit. With what looked like someone else’s expression stitched across her face, the proprietor of the House Without Clocks informed Som-Som of what might be her unique position within that establishment.

  If she wished, she would become a whore of sorcerers, exclusive to their use. Henceforth, only those cunning hands that sculpted fortune itself would have access to the warm slopes of her substance. She would come to understand the abstracted lusts of those who moved the secret levers of the world, and she would be happy in their service.

  Kneeling at the very edge of the bed of silver fur, Som-Som had felt the world shudder to a standstill as the old woman’s words rolled about inside her head, crashing together like huge glass planets.

  Sorcerers?

  Often, sent to fetch some minor philtre or remedy for the older inhabitants of the House Without Clocks, Som-Som’s errands had taken her to Wizard’s Row. The street itself, shifting and inconstant, full of small movements at the periphery of her vision, presented no clear or consistent image that she could summon from her memory. Some of its denizens, however, were unforgettable. Their eyes. Their terrible, knowing eyes …

  She pictured herself naked before a gaze that had known the depths of the oceans of chance in which people are but fishes, a gaze that saw the secret wave patterns in those unfathomable tides of circumstance. In her stomach, something more ambiguous than either fear or exhilaration began to extend its tendrils. Somewhere far away, in a white room filled with obscuring brilliance, Mistress Ouish was detailing a list of those conditions that must be fulfilled before Som-Som could commence her new duties.

  It seemed that many who dealt in the manipulation of luck would themselves leave nothing to chance. Before such a sorcerer would enter fully into physical congress with another being, the inflexible observation of certain precautions was demanded. Foremost amongst these were those safeguards pertaining to secrecy. The ecstasies of wizards were events of awesome and terrifying moment, during which their power was at its most capricious, its least contained.

  It was not unknown for various phenomena to manifest spontaneously, or for the name of a luck-invested object to be murmured at the moment of release. In the world of the magicians, such indiscretions could be of lethal consequence. The most innocent of boudoir confidences, if relayed to an enemy of sufficient ruthlessness, might yield a dreadful harvest to the incautious thaumaturge. Perhaps he would be plucked from the night by
cold hands with unblinking yellow eyes set into their palms, or perhaps a sore upon his neck would blossom into purple, babyish lips, whispering delirious obscenities into his ear until all reason was driven from him.

  The intangible continent of fortune was a territory steeped in hazard, and she who would be whore to sorcerers specifically must also undertake to be the bride of Silence.

  To this end, Som-Som would be taken to a specific residence in Wizard’s Row, an address remarkable in that it could only be located upon the third and fifth days of the week. Here, the child would be given a small pickled worm, ochre in colour, revealing the greyish-pink mansion of her soul to the fingers of one who abided in that place, a physiomancer of great renown. At this juncture, the Silencing would commence.

  Connecting the brain’s hemispheres there existed a single gristly thread, the thoroughfare by which the urgent neural messages of the preverbal and intuitive right lobe might pass to its more rational and active counterpart upon the left. In Som-Som, this delicate bridge would be destroyed, severed by a sharp knife, so as to permit no further communication between the two halves of the child’s psyche.

  Following her recovery from this surgery, the girl would be granted a year in which to adjust to her new perceptions. She would learn to balance and to pick up objects without the benefit of stereoscopic sight or depth of vision. After many bouts of tearful and frustrating paralysis, during which she would merely stand and tremble, making poignant half-completed gestures while her body remained torn between conflicting urges, she would finally achieve some measure of coordination and restored grace. Certainly, her movements would always possess a slow and slightly staggered quality, but if directed properly, there was no reason why this dreamlike effect should not in itself be erotically enhancing. At the end of her year of readjustment, Som-Som would have a cast taken of her face, after which she would be fitted with the Broken Mask.

  The Broken Mask was not so much broken as sliced cleanly in two. Made of porcelain and covering the entire head, it would be precisely bisected with a small, silver chisel, starting at the nape of the neck, traversing the cold and hairless cranium, descending the ridge of the nose to divide the expressionless lips forever. The left side of the mask would be taken away and crushed to a fine talcum before being thrown to the winds.

  Prior to the fitting of the Broken Mask, Som-Som’s head would be completely shaved, the scalp afterwards rubbed with the foul-smelling mauve juices of a berry known to destroy the follicles of the hair so that there could be no regrowth. This would at least partially ensure her comfort during the next fifteen years, in which time the mask was not to be removed unless the slowly changing shape of her skull made it uncomfortable. In this eventuality, the mask would be taken from her head and recast.

  Covering the right side of her head, the flawless topography of the Broken Mask would be uninterrupted by any aperture for hearing or vision. The porcelain eye was opaque and white and blind. The porcelain ear heard nothing. Concealed beneath this shell, their organic counterparts would be similarly disadvantaged. Som-Som would see nothing with her right eye, and would be deaf in her right ear. Only in the uncovered half of her face would the perceptions be unimpaired.

  By some paradoxical mirror-fluke of nature, those sensory impressions gleaned from the apparatus of the body’s left side would be conveyed to the brain’s right hemisphere. And there, due to the severing of the neural causeway that had connected both lobes, the information would remain. It would never reach those centres of cerebral activity that govern speech and communication, for they were situated in the left brain, a land now irretrievably lost beyond the surgically created chasm. Her eye would see, but her lips would know nothing of it. Conversation that her ear might gather would forever go unrepeated by a tongue ignorant of words it should shape.

  She would be blinded, but not exactly. Her hearing would remain, after a fashion, and she would even be able to speak. But she would be Silenced.

  Within the flattering opalescence of her white chamber, Mistress Ouish concluded her descriptions of the honours which awaited the stunned nine-year-old. She rang the tiny china bell that signalled Book to the room, terminating the audience. Stumbling over feet made suddenly too large by loss of circulation, Som-Som allowed the tattooed servant to lead her into the startling, mundane daylight.

  Poised upon the threshold, Book had turned to the blinking child beside her and smiled. It wrinkled the words written upon her cheeks, rendering them briefly illegible, and it was not a cruel smile.

  ‘When you are Silenced and can reveal their conclusions to no one, I shall permit you to read all of my stories.’

  Her voice was uneven of pitch, as if she had long been unpractised in its application. Raising her ungloved and crimson-speckled hand, she touched the calligraphy upon her forehead, and then, lowering it, lightly brushed the lyric spiral of her breast. Smiling once more, she turned and went inside the house, closing the white door behind her, an ambulatory pornography.

  It was the first time that Som-Som had even heard her speak.

  The following day, Som-Som was escorted to an elusive residence where a man with a comb of white hair, which had been varnished into a stiff dorsal fin running back across his skull, gave her a tiny, brownish worm to chew. She noted that it was withered and ugly, but probably no more so than it had been in life. She placed it upon her tongue, because that was expected of her, and she began to chew.

  She awoke as two separate people, unspeaking strangers who shared the same skin without collaboration or conference. She was conveyed back to the House Without Clocks in a small cart lined with cushions. She rattled through the arched entranceway and across the gargantuan inkblot of the courtyard, and all that had been promised eventually came to pass.

  Twelve years ago.

  Seated upon her balcony, her half-visible lips stained blue by the juices of the masticated blossoms, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks. Unrippled by the afternoon breeze, the black pond stared back at her. Here and there upon the impenetrably dark water, fallen leaves were floating, motionless scraps of sepia against the blackness.

  Surely, if she were to topple forward with delicious slowness towards the midnight well beneath her, she would come to no harm? Dropping like a pebble, she would splash through the impassive jet of the surface, a tumbling commotion of silver in the cold, ebony waters surrounding her. Up above, the ripples would race outward like pulses of agony throbbing from a wound. They would break in black, lapping wavelets against the courtyard walls of the House Without Clocks, and then the waters would once more become as still as stone.

  Down below, kicking out with clean, unfaltering strokes, she would swim beneath the ground, out below the curved walls of the House Without Clocks, out under the City of Luck itself, and into those unchartered, solid oceans that lie beyond. Diving deep, she would glide amongst the glittering veins of ore, through the buried and forgotten strata. Darting upward, she would flicker and twist through the warm shallows of the topsoil, surfacing occasionally to leap in a shimmering arc through the sunlight, droplets of soil beading in the air about her. Resubmerging, she would strike out for the cool solitude of the clay and sandstone, far, far beneath her …

  Someone walked across the surface of the black water, wooden sandals scuffing audibly against its suddenly hardened substance, crunching through leaves that were quite dry. Unable to sustain itself before such contradictions, the illusion melted and was immediately beyond recall.

  One side of Som-Som’s face clouded in annoyance at this intrusion upon her reverie, half her brow clenching into a petulant frown while the other half remained uncreased and indifferent. Her single visible eye, one from a pair of gems made more exquisite by the loss of its twin, glared down at the visitor passing beneath her. Unnoticed upon her balcony, she studied the interloper, struck suddenly by some quirk of gait or posture that seemed familiar. Her left eye squinted slightly as she strained for a better view, deforming the symmetry of her bisected face into a mirthless wink.

  The figure was slender and of medium height, swathed in gorgeous bandages of red silk from crown to ankle so that only the face, hands, and feet were left unwrapped. The delicate line of the shoulder and arm seemed unmistakably female, but there remained something masculine about the manner in which the torso joined with the narrow, angular hips. Walking unhurriedly across the courtyard, it paused before the pale yellow door that lay at the rightmost extremity of the House Without Clocks. There the figure hesitated, turning to survey the courtyard and giving Som-Som her first clear glimpse of a painted face at once strikingly alien and instantly recognisable.