movement in the looking-glass: Francis was darting into the room —
the same costume, the same haggard eye — but his mouth and nose
were masked or muzzled, with nightmare grotesquerie. To and fro he
sprang, always assuming a Harlequin attitude; but instead of
Harlequin’s magic bat, Francis brandished a glittering canister. Gusts
of sweetness came fuming out of it, like gusts of air puffing from the
nozzle of a bellows.
My senses were swimming — cloyed with sweetness; the women
around me swayed; I was sinking to the floor, in a swoon.
I awoke — to my joy, I awoke from the entire nightmare! Here I am,
in the familiar study; feeling the bruises, from yesterday’s experiences
at W uthering Heights, more vividly than I might have hoped; but
alive, and sane. The clock is at the stroke of four, as I complete my
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account of this extraordinary nightmare; the house is in silence and
now, in spite of aching laziness of head and limbs, I too must summon
courage to go to my rest. But alas! I find myself the prey of odd sensations — even terrors — that seem to presage worse than the mere obstinate cold I was prognosticating for myself. The fire has long died
down, and yet — to me — the room seems still perversely warm; and
my imagination returns with sickly disquiet to an odd symmetry in
my dream — just upon waking — a trundling sound again, hastily
fading in the distance. Absurd as it is, I have the fantastic dread that
when I open the door, my candle will light me, not along the corridor
to my bedroom, but into one of those nightmare rooms again. And,
oh, my wearisome wonderings, all devoted to the enigmatic words I
saw upon the tongs, in my final attempt at mending the fire — ‘Made
in Taiwan’! Never mind. My good housekeeper shall explain them to
me, tomorrow.
Glass Reptile Breakout
©
RUSSELL BLACKFORD
On this hot Saturday night, past midnight on this delirious Sunday
morning. Bianca knew nothing of the forces which energised her
dancing at the Searoom — except that they were holy and not
perilous.
The main band was playing, the miracle band —Glass Reptile
Breakout was playing, and the big high room in St Kilda’s labyrinthine Season Hotel was all noise and smoke, clothing white or the colours of the sea, tight and supple or free and loose, and on the
half-naked young people the stigmata of fashion: shaven heads
plumed or finned with implants, bare arms bright with feathers or
glistening scales, soft dorsal sails, fins or spines (the latest fad) that
flattened or bristled, depending on what you wore over them —
though the drastic implants of a flick-dancer would seldom settle
under any clothing.
Bianca’s heart was set: she yearned to be a flick-dancer. She could
dance so slowly or so fast, free and wild in her roe tribe skirt,
glittermesh strips catching the light at waist, wrists, ankles. She
practised for hours in her darkened kiddy flat behind her parents’
home in M ount Waverley, practised until she had the control.
Didn’t she look right, almost? All her hair had gone for plumes.
H er father had grudgingly paid for the fin she’d had sewn into her
sleek olive back, knowing that if he didn’t Bianca would find someone else who would: there were always men after the roe at the Searoom willing to pay with favours. Bending her arm at an
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Russell Blackford
awkward angle, she sent her fingertips along her spine where the
translucent orange fin was grafted. The sutured lines of flesh
edging the cultured implant were still swollen and sore; she winced,
waiting for the next song.
Bianca hated bum ping into people because it jarred and hurt her
back; dancing, though, she hardly noticed. She’d already had one
BioFeed-music miracle, the time she went out too soon after a line
of unfashionable scales had been removed from her ankle. Even
before that she’d known she was a latent. She’d never heard people’s
thoughts— that was just make-up stuff—but sometimes she met
other latents at venues like this and said the strangest things to
them, or they did to her . . . And it turned out to make sense.
She believed in miracles, and though she knew she shouldn’t
have come dancing until her back was completely healed, she
trustingly awaited one.
Lachlan Alderson, QC, blinked as he dabbed with a small chamois
cloth at the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses;
