A Monstrous Romance

Prelude

Document 1

A young man's journal, found wedged beneath an armoire in a row of London flats scheduled for demolition

Dated 1923

The woman was stunning.

You will notice that I do not say she was pretty, though I suppose she might have been. The fact is that I was already too far into an altogether too pleasant evening to make any reliable statement of the sort. I was admirably soused, naturally, but that was not the whole of it. No. While the libation was strong and abundant, and I should probably have been favourably impressed by anything minimally more feminine than an African Cape buffalo, there was also the fact that I simply could not see enough of her to form an opinion one way or the other.

Part of the trouble, of course, was the lack of cooperation of my own gin-drenched eyeballs, but it was not at all helped by the sea of aromatic tobacco smoke ebbing and flowing through the club, nor by the fact that she had chosen the gloomiest of corners in a building constructed entirely of gloomy corners.

So, you see, I could not rightly have called her pretty, but I do feel thoroughly justified in calling her stunning, because, you see, she stunned me.

Something about her struck my champagne-addled brain sort of sideways, like one of those mad, mind-bending surrealist paintings which chew up one's sensibilities, swish them about a bit, and then spit them out again, and not always in an entirely unpleasant way.

I stood for a moment in the grip of a strange paralysis, my drink frozen halfway to my lips. It felt as though all the club had stopped right along with me, caught in a sort of metaphysical shudder at the sudden realisation that the universe could get queasy. Gooseflesh on my eyelids, and probably on my tongue, too.

At any rate, I took it upon myself to investigate. Poor dear, she sat all alone. Maybe she was waiting for someone, but her potential companion had not yet arrived. Why not go offer a moment of comfort to the lonely thing?

Plucking another drink from the tray of a passing waiter, I made good use of my elbows in crossing the crowded dance floor, two steps forward and one stagger back. It was a trial. A cloud of fringe and sequin impeded me, but I persevered.

I drew closer, and as I did, her eyes fixed on me. Or, at least, her head turned toward me and stayed there. I could not see her eyes; they were hidden behind small, round, tinted lenses, but gin or no gin, I would swear I could feel her gaze.

She smiled as I approached.

My confidence thus bolstered, I strode right on up and gave her the drink in my hand and my name.

This, of course, I considered a charity in my drunken state. The solitary darling, I could see in closer proximity, was robed in a singularly unfashionable frock of midnight blue, with a high neck and long sleeves edged with lace. Her tall boots were likewise outdated, as were the long gloves. The turban was just strange. In contrast to her parochial dress, she seemed to wear an outlandish amount of makeup, caked so thick that one could scarcely tell what her natural skin tone might be, and yet so artfully applied that she seemed more like a mobile painting than a professional woman.

A second wave of disorientation overtook me. There was something more, something I could not place. She was not an old woman, dressing in a nod to her youth and painting her face in a nod to her wrinkles. I doubt that would have so punted my brain, even tight as it was, then. No, that would have been natural. It was something else.

I wove closer and plopped down in an empty seat at her table. This did not seem to surprise her, so I chose to interpret her smile as an encouragement.