PSX: Everything Went Dark
Title:: Everything Went Dark
Author: liadlaith
Prompt: 1. Set in either the past or the future, not the present (before 1990 or after 2010); 2. Include a pocket knife and a black bird; 3. Begin with "And the lights went out."
Wordcount: 2,270
And the lights went out. No, wait - that isn’t where it began. It is where it will end, however. But I apologise: my ability to write in the accepted introduction-complication-resolution style has been utterly dismantled. I see everything from its third-act curtain.
Draw the curtain: I’m looking out on the streets of Deptford from the second floor window. It’s late in the morning, but the day is overcast: thin spring sunshine slices past me into the room. It’s not a pretty room; it’s made less pretty by its inhabitants. Skeres, Poley and Frizer are lounging as much as one can on the widow Bull’s bench, propped against the table. They’re watching me.
“Something catch your eye out yonder window, Kit?” Frizer asks.
“Nothing but the street, Ingram,” I respond. I can hear the taunt, but I won’t respond.
He mutters something to his compatriots, and a low laugh ripples out from them.
They’ll be staring into their tankards when I turn around, as though that will fool me. As though I’m a babe in the wilderness, unable to see what’s in front of me unless looking at it. They think me nothing but a poet, consumed by fits of divine frenzy, unable to navigate the seas of the real world. No, their masters think this, and they have suckled at their teats so long they cannot tell the difference between their opinions and their own. They are not their own men.
I smooth my hand over my doublet - the parchment insinuated between fabric and flesh crackles comfortingly - and I look up at the sky, white with clouds: the cataract eye of the heavens, looking down upon us. I sigh, running a hand across my face. How did I get here?
I turn around and they’re looking straight at me. No shame. I match them, stare for stare, but they don’t move.
At all.
“Frizer?” I ask. “Did you look at a Gorgon’s head?”
“Does he look made of stone, Marlowe?” I startle: the voice is unexpected. It is too high for a man’s, too low for a woman’s. It comes from the bed situated in the far, dark corner of the room.
I snatch the candlestick from the table in front of Frizer: he doesn’t move. The sputtering light does little to illuminate the figure sitting on the bed. He is dressed in man’s attire, but when he looks up from his completed game of Patience, I would swear I am looking at a maid. She, he - tresses shining like gold wire, skin as white as fresh winter’s snow, eyes as blue and as changeable as the ocean. I am as thralled as the three malcontents, rendered as stupid and tradition-dull.
“Who are you?” I ask. My lips part with the desire to have her mimic me.
He, she, the lovely creature in front of me, smiles. “I’m called Rex,” he answers. One perfect hand, shaped to rival those of our Queen, settles on one of two cards not in the four piles on the table. The King of Hearts. The other is the Ace of Spades.
Her eyes look up at mine, and her smile widens. I suspect her of laughing at my confusion.
Wait, stop the story for a minute. The fact is, I never found out if she was a he, or he a she. The clothes maketh the man, so let them make this one a man. His smile widens, and I suspect him of laughing at me.
I have had my fill of other people’s contempt today, and so I knock that cup from my lips. “Your name is a suspect currency, slight and worth less than its metal,” I sneer. “Perhaps it’s even counterfeit.”
Rex raises one elegant eyebrow. “My, aren’t you articulate?”
I return his gaze impassively. “I don’t have time for this,” I say.
He laughs, roses blooming in his cheeks. “I think you’ll find you do,” he says, gesturing with that lily-white hand.
I turn, and find that my three companions are still staring at the window. I whirl back to look at him, that amused smile still on his face. I am suddenly reminded of Helen of Troy, summoned from the depths of hell. “What devilry is this?” I ask, backing away.
Rex laughs again. “Oh Marlowe, I had always been told you were an atheist. ‘Fear not bugbears and hobgoblins,’ is that not what you’ve said?”
“Watch your tongue,” I retort, but there’s no conviction in my words. When did I lose even fear and anger, the gifts of this accusation?
He smiles, and turns back to his cards. I watch, entranced, as his hands move as softly as ghosts, stacking the suits (hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades) but leaving the extracted cards apart. The deck disappears - he’s keeping things tucked in his doublet as well, I notice - but another one appears just as quickly. Rex sets it on the table.
I raise an eyebrow as he turns to me again, this time with the King and the Ace in his hands. “This is me,” Rex says, gesturing to the King. “And this is you,” he continues, indicating the Ace.
“And now we’re getting out of here.”
He slips them into the new deck, and Deptford disappears.
The world slides back into place and we’re on a city street, unlike any I’ve seen before. I check quickly that the parchment is still nestled against me. The street stands perfectly still for a second, and then, like throwing a pebble into an undisturbed pond, Rex performs a sharp riffle shuffle and the city starts again.
It’s clean and loud - glass and steel spin upwards from between blocks of precisely cut stone, scraping against the sky. They’re reaching Towers of Babel, arms stretching like those of a baby, trying to touch the face of a parent. It even smells different; the very atmosphere has changed. Rex slips his hand into mine, and pulls me towards stairs sinking below the pavement.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The future,” he replies, as if that should be enough. “Come on, they make the best coffee ever here.”
“Coffee?” I echo in confusion as we sink below into the darkened shop.
Coffee, I discover, is like the kiss of the devil on my tongue, almost scalding to my mouth. But the taste is warm and bitter and milky-sweet, filling me with buzzing drowsiness. Rex is savouring his, curled around his cup with delight. Ganymede drinking his own libation. The cups, by the way, are the most exactly made I have ever seen.
So, this is the part of the story where he sits me down and explains it all to me. How it’s possible that ordering cards can slow the noctis equi, how shuffling them can start the music of time (it’s something to do with the stars, he tells me, mentioning an arrow of time, loosed when God created the Heaven and the Earth). He explains how people won’t notice my doublet, or my speech (though I notice theirs and am startled by it), and how he travels on decks of cards.
It’s all very important to the mechanics of the story, I suppose, but only to get you to believe that it happens. It’s not important to the part of the story that makes you remember it, that makes you think about it for days after. If this is a good story, it’ll have that. The rest is negligible.
Rex explains to me what he does - how he makes sure time stays in time with the music of itself, makes sure events occur and the dance unfolds as it should. What part I am to play in this (very small, he cautions me, no heroics or great turnings of tide. “Perhaps once you signed yourself as such, but right now you are not Tamburlaine.”).
Perhaps poets are easy to convince of fantastic things, especially those fantastic things which they might have some small hand in.
“What’s stashed in your doublet?” Rex asks, the question born suddenly in the silence of the coffee shop.
“A poem,” I answer, too surprised to lie. “It’s not finished.”
“Books are never finished,” he says, “they’re just published.” I suspect him of quoting. “What’s it called?”
“Hero and Leander.” I try not to say anything more, but the next bit spills out before I can stop it. “I know how it’s got to end, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”
“Things don’t always end the way they should,” Rex observes, and then the conversation falls.
He takes me to a stationer’s - what he calls a bookshop. The Blackbird Bookshop, to be precise. They don’t print their own books, but sell those made and owned by others. I have never seen so many books, not even in the University Library at Cambridge. However, no library would treat its books as this place does - they’re crammed into sagging shelves, spilling out of cardboard boxes, wedged into every possible gap. I suspect they’re two or three deep on some of the shelves. Blocking the aisles every now and then are stalagmites of books, twisting upwards and teetering precariously.
“Where is the order?” I ask Rex, overawed by the explosion of paper - for paper it is: no heavy, forbidding tomes of vellum and leather here, but battered, starved volumes, much abused and loved.
He smiles. “Time flies, here.”
“Why are we here?” I ask.
He shrugs, and turns away. “Amuse yourself,” he says over his shoulder as he’s swallowed by an over-crowded aisle.
I don’t know where to start.
Sorry, I’m going to have to stop the story again. I suppose I sound young and naïve - too young and green for a twenty-nine year-old man of the world. By this stage in my life, I’d seen more than most, I’ll admit, and when I first saw this I probably thought it was nothing new. But telling the story now, there’s only one appropriate response, and that’s awe.
I should have been more awed, then. But poetry allows us to make things as they should have been (thank you, Sir Sidney).
Twenty-nine is so young.
I find myself at the back of the shop, under harsh light that doesn’t burn, when a familiar name catches my eye.
Shakespeare.
There are hundreds of books here - about him, not just by him. At this point, I am awed. His name stares down at me, the word become the eyes of Argus watchman and the remains of Argus watchdog. We have both travelled time, I see.
I back up, and hit the bookcase behind me. A lopsided book tower topples, spilling volumes. These have my name on them. One of them is even entitled Marlowe, the Biography.
Faced with this, what would you do?
Would you look? Would you want to know?
I sit down. My heart - my heart feels like a trapped bird, battering itself against my rib cage. I reach out, several times, to pick up a volume. I can’t - I want to - I can’t. I remember Rex’s injunction against turning the tide (and surely such information would constitute a tide-turning), and try to use that as an excuse.
Coward, I hear in my heart. You’re as bad as they say. Too busy worrying about the philosophical implications of knowing instead of taking hold of the knowledge in front of you.
I scowl and grasp the first book to hand. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe.
And then everything goes white. Or at least, I want it to. I want that numbness, that sensory deprivation, that would stop me feeling. I feel too much.
In a daze, I open the book. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in Deptford on the evening of Wednesday 30 May 1593, are the words that assault me. I feel thin and immaterial, translucent and bitter.
I throw the volume away, scrabble to my knees. I throw up, barely. Even my vomit is non-existant.
I suppose I don’t need to tell you that, only hours before my indignity in a bookshop, it had been the penultimate day of May. Rex always had spectacular timing. In fact, he turned up immediately after I’d embarrassed myself.
He takes one look at me and the mess and laughs, not unkindly. A cool hand wipes the sweat-sticky hair off my forehead, while the other performs complicated, unheimlich manoeuvres with a deck of cards. I can feel time slowing as the cards are ordered.
“So you found your ending,” he murmurs, sitting me back down, pulling out a handkerchief.
I touch my doublet as he wipes at my mouth. “It found me, I think,” I reply.
I open my jacket and take out the parchment, resting it against my knee. The poem won’t ever be finished now. That thought constricts my heart.
There’s silence in this little pool in the time stream, this quiet cove he’s carved for us. He fusses with the handkerchief, folding it and putting it away. I lean back against the bookshelf, breathing in the dust.
“It doesn’t have to end,” Rex says, touching the poem.
I look at him.
“Not everything needs an ending,” he tries again.
I only partially understood him, then. I only saw the multiple beginnings in front of me. But now I see, everything is about the end, the third-act close.
That’s not to say Rex was wrong: he was right. Everything ends, but not everything needs an ending. Sometimes, it’s okay to just stop where you are and say, “that’s enough.”
And you all know how this story ends, anyway.
Everything went dark.
Author: liadlaith
Prompt: 1. Set in either the past or the future, not the present (before 1990 or after 2010); 2. Include a pocket knife and a black bird; 3. Begin with "And the lights went out."
Wordcount: 2,270
And the lights went out. No, wait - that isn’t where it began. It is where it will end, however. But I apologise: my ability to write in the accepted introduction-complication-resolution style has been utterly dismantled. I see everything from its third-act curtain.
Draw the curtain: I’m looking out on the streets of Deptford from the second floor window. It’s late in the morning, but the day is overcast: thin spring sunshine slices past me into the room. It’s not a pretty room; it’s made less pretty by its inhabitants. Skeres, Poley and Frizer are lounging as much as one can on the widow Bull’s bench, propped against the table. They’re watching me.
“Something catch your eye out yonder window, Kit?” Frizer asks.
“Nothing but the street, Ingram,” I respond. I can hear the taunt, but I won’t respond.
He mutters something to his compatriots, and a low laugh ripples out from them.
They’ll be staring into their tankards when I turn around, as though that will fool me. As though I’m a babe in the wilderness, unable to see what’s in front of me unless looking at it. They think me nothing but a poet, consumed by fits of divine frenzy, unable to navigate the seas of the real world. No, their masters think this, and they have suckled at their teats so long they cannot tell the difference between their opinions and their own. They are not their own men.
I smooth my hand over my doublet - the parchment insinuated between fabric and flesh crackles comfortingly - and I look up at the sky, white with clouds: the cataract eye of the heavens, looking down upon us. I sigh, running a hand across my face. How did I get here?
I turn around and they’re looking straight at me. No shame. I match them, stare for stare, but they don’t move.
At all.
“Frizer?” I ask. “Did you look at a Gorgon’s head?”
“Does he look made of stone, Marlowe?” I startle: the voice is unexpected. It is too high for a man’s, too low for a woman’s. It comes from the bed situated in the far, dark corner of the room.
I snatch the candlestick from the table in front of Frizer: he doesn’t move. The sputtering light does little to illuminate the figure sitting on the bed. He is dressed in man’s attire, but when he looks up from his completed game of Patience, I would swear I am looking at a maid. She, he - tresses shining like gold wire, skin as white as fresh winter’s snow, eyes as blue and as changeable as the ocean. I am as thralled as the three malcontents, rendered as stupid and tradition-dull.
“Who are you?” I ask. My lips part with the desire to have her mimic me.
He, she, the lovely creature in front of me, smiles. “I’m called Rex,” he answers. One perfect hand, shaped to rival those of our Queen, settles on one of two cards not in the four piles on the table. The King of Hearts. The other is the Ace of Spades.
Her eyes look up at mine, and her smile widens. I suspect her of laughing at my confusion.
Wait, stop the story for a minute. The fact is, I never found out if she was a he, or he a she. The clothes maketh the man, so let them make this one a man. His smile widens, and I suspect him of laughing at me.
I have had my fill of other people’s contempt today, and so I knock that cup from my lips. “Your name is a suspect currency, slight and worth less than its metal,” I sneer. “Perhaps it’s even counterfeit.”
Rex raises one elegant eyebrow. “My, aren’t you articulate?”
I return his gaze impassively. “I don’t have time for this,” I say.
He laughs, roses blooming in his cheeks. “I think you’ll find you do,” he says, gesturing with that lily-white hand.
I turn, and find that my three companions are still staring at the window. I whirl back to look at him, that amused smile still on his face. I am suddenly reminded of Helen of Troy, summoned from the depths of hell. “What devilry is this?” I ask, backing away.
Rex laughs again. “Oh Marlowe, I had always been told you were an atheist. ‘Fear not bugbears and hobgoblins,’ is that not what you’ve said?”
“Watch your tongue,” I retort, but there’s no conviction in my words. When did I lose even fear and anger, the gifts of this accusation?
He smiles, and turns back to his cards. I watch, entranced, as his hands move as softly as ghosts, stacking the suits (hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades) but leaving the extracted cards apart. The deck disappears - he’s keeping things tucked in his doublet as well, I notice - but another one appears just as quickly. Rex sets it on the table.
I raise an eyebrow as he turns to me again, this time with the King and the Ace in his hands. “This is me,” Rex says, gesturing to the King. “And this is you,” he continues, indicating the Ace.
“And now we’re getting out of here.”
He slips them into the new deck, and Deptford disappears.
The world slides back into place and we’re on a city street, unlike any I’ve seen before. I check quickly that the parchment is still nestled against me. The street stands perfectly still for a second, and then, like throwing a pebble into an undisturbed pond, Rex performs a sharp riffle shuffle and the city starts again.
It’s clean and loud - glass and steel spin upwards from between blocks of precisely cut stone, scraping against the sky. They’re reaching Towers of Babel, arms stretching like those of a baby, trying to touch the face of a parent. It even smells different; the very atmosphere has changed. Rex slips his hand into mine, and pulls me towards stairs sinking below the pavement.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The future,” he replies, as if that should be enough. “Come on, they make the best coffee ever here.”
“Coffee?” I echo in confusion as we sink below into the darkened shop.
Coffee, I discover, is like the kiss of the devil on my tongue, almost scalding to my mouth. But the taste is warm and bitter and milky-sweet, filling me with buzzing drowsiness. Rex is savouring his, curled around his cup with delight. Ganymede drinking his own libation. The cups, by the way, are the most exactly made I have ever seen.
So, this is the part of the story where he sits me down and explains it all to me. How it’s possible that ordering cards can slow the noctis equi, how shuffling them can start the music of time (it’s something to do with the stars, he tells me, mentioning an arrow of time, loosed when God created the Heaven and the Earth). He explains how people won’t notice my doublet, or my speech (though I notice theirs and am startled by it), and how he travels on decks of cards.
It’s all very important to the mechanics of the story, I suppose, but only to get you to believe that it happens. It’s not important to the part of the story that makes you remember it, that makes you think about it for days after. If this is a good story, it’ll have that. The rest is negligible.
Rex explains to me what he does - how he makes sure time stays in time with the music of itself, makes sure events occur and the dance unfolds as it should. What part I am to play in this (very small, he cautions me, no heroics or great turnings of tide. “Perhaps once you signed yourself as such, but right now you are not Tamburlaine.”).
Perhaps poets are easy to convince of fantastic things, especially those fantastic things which they might have some small hand in.
“What’s stashed in your doublet?” Rex asks, the question born suddenly in the silence of the coffee shop.
“A poem,” I answer, too surprised to lie. “It’s not finished.”
“Books are never finished,” he says, “they’re just published.” I suspect him of quoting. “What’s it called?”
“Hero and Leander.” I try not to say anything more, but the next bit spills out before I can stop it. “I know how it’s got to end, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”
“Things don’t always end the way they should,” Rex observes, and then the conversation falls.
He takes me to a stationer’s - what he calls a bookshop. The Blackbird Bookshop, to be precise. They don’t print their own books, but sell those made and owned by others. I have never seen so many books, not even in the University Library at Cambridge. However, no library would treat its books as this place does - they’re crammed into sagging shelves, spilling out of cardboard boxes, wedged into every possible gap. I suspect they’re two or three deep on some of the shelves. Blocking the aisles every now and then are stalagmites of books, twisting upwards and teetering precariously.
“Where is the order?” I ask Rex, overawed by the explosion of paper - for paper it is: no heavy, forbidding tomes of vellum and leather here, but battered, starved volumes, much abused and loved.
He smiles. “Time flies, here.”
“Why are we here?” I ask.
He shrugs, and turns away. “Amuse yourself,” he says over his shoulder as he’s swallowed by an over-crowded aisle.
I don’t know where to start.
Sorry, I’m going to have to stop the story again. I suppose I sound young and naïve - too young and green for a twenty-nine year-old man of the world. By this stage in my life, I’d seen more than most, I’ll admit, and when I first saw this I probably thought it was nothing new. But telling the story now, there’s only one appropriate response, and that’s awe.
I should have been more awed, then. But poetry allows us to make things as they should have been (thank you, Sir Sidney).
Twenty-nine is so young.
I find myself at the back of the shop, under harsh light that doesn’t burn, when a familiar name catches my eye.
Shakespeare.
There are hundreds of books here - about him, not just by him. At this point, I am awed. His name stares down at me, the word become the eyes of Argus watchman and the remains of Argus watchdog. We have both travelled time, I see.
I back up, and hit the bookcase behind me. A lopsided book tower topples, spilling volumes. These have my name on them. One of them is even entitled Marlowe, the Biography.
Faced with this, what would you do?
Would you look? Would you want to know?
I sit down. My heart - my heart feels like a trapped bird, battering itself against my rib cage. I reach out, several times, to pick up a volume. I can’t - I want to - I can’t. I remember Rex’s injunction against turning the tide (and surely such information would constitute a tide-turning), and try to use that as an excuse.
Coward, I hear in my heart. You’re as bad as they say. Too busy worrying about the philosophical implications of knowing instead of taking hold of the knowledge in front of you.
I scowl and grasp the first book to hand. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe.
And then everything goes white. Or at least, I want it to. I want that numbness, that sensory deprivation, that would stop me feeling. I feel too much.
In a daze, I open the book. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in Deptford on the evening of Wednesday 30 May 1593, are the words that assault me. I feel thin and immaterial, translucent and bitter.
I throw the volume away, scrabble to my knees. I throw up, barely. Even my vomit is non-existant.
I suppose I don’t need to tell you that, only hours before my indignity in a bookshop, it had been the penultimate day of May. Rex always had spectacular timing. In fact, he turned up immediately after I’d embarrassed myself.
He takes one look at me and the mess and laughs, not unkindly. A cool hand wipes the sweat-sticky hair off my forehead, while the other performs complicated, unheimlich manoeuvres with a deck of cards. I can feel time slowing as the cards are ordered.
“So you found your ending,” he murmurs, sitting me back down, pulling out a handkerchief.
I touch my doublet as he wipes at my mouth. “It found me, I think,” I reply.
I open my jacket and take out the parchment, resting it against my knee. The poem won’t ever be finished now. That thought constricts my heart.
There’s silence in this little pool in the time stream, this quiet cove he’s carved for us. He fusses with the handkerchief, folding it and putting it away. I lean back against the bookshelf, breathing in the dust.
“It doesn’t have to end,” Rex says, touching the poem.
I look at him.
“Not everything needs an ending,” he tries again.
I only partially understood him, then. I only saw the multiple beginnings in front of me. But now I see, everything is about the end, the third-act close.
That’s not to say Rex was wrong: he was right. Everything ends, but not everything needs an ending. Sometimes, it’s okay to just stop where you are and say, “that’s enough.”
And you all know how this story ends, anyway.
Everything went dark.