Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond

Black Diamond Arts

Black Diamond, Alberta

Antonio loved playing the human idiot. He had so many roles to model himself on: the priest with the pointy hat who swallowed the sins of others by eating a wafer; the guru who walked on coals so he would be treated like a god; the Norwegian rock star who burned down churches in his spare time; the orange-haired politician who flooded the Internet with absurdities; the list went on and on. Among the many delightful roles to play, Antonio landed on that of the black magician who made things appear from thin air. This was of course an easy thing for a Fallarian, especially on a planet where the inhabitants couldn’t infract a pair of chopsticks from a two-by-four. He saved the real smoke and daggers for more serious business.

In playing out his role he told people he was a Grand Wizard from the small town of Ponoka, where the Council of Warlocks sat every 500 years. He then set up a wizardry boutique called Black Diamond Arts. The boutique was situated on the main street of Black Diamond, and specialized in antique mirrors, Victorian top hats, sparkly wands, ouija boards, dark velvet capes, and Persian cat food. Antonio also told people that he prayed to Wiccan gods who would rise again some day. He laughed behind their backs at the irony of it all: what he told them was true, yet not in any way they could possibly understand.

After a year of playing the diabolic buffoon, he started to get bored. Donning his pointy silver hat and eyeing his svelte figure in an art nouveau mirror, he saw what an absurd spectacle he had become. What he called the living satire of his life was starting to lack a point. Even his anarchic philosophy of lacking a point was starting to eat away at whatever elusive freedom he imagined he had attained. Not long ago he planned to dominate the Earth, and to crush the pretentious Vicinese notion of a Divine Order. Yet here he was in a purple cloak with a silver wand in his hand, watching the pick-up trucks and plumbing vans go down Main Street. He had wanted to make a joke of the puritanical world, yet everyone else seemed to be getting the last laugh. He looked at himself in the mirror again. Day in and day out he was all alone in the store, no one taking him seriously, mouthing imprecations to the stars.

If all the world was a stage, he was playing a bit part. And all his speeches may as well have been internal monologues. Something was missing from the picture, from his life. He had no friends, and his wife either ignored him or contradicted everything he said. He didn’t even have a son. Who would carry on his trade? Who would take on the mantle of his ingenious disguise? Who would learn the mechanics of his deceptive human art, the deep Fallarian skills that allowed him to mock and control in a single gesture? He came to the conclusion that what he needed was someone to carry on the family name. What he needed was progeny, and from hence a dynasty of Le Tristes that would control the dark forces of the universe till the end of time.

The lack of progeny preyed on Antonio’s mind. In the empty boutique he whiled away his time thinking about the son who might supply meaning to his life. He saw him taking his first step, babbling his first incantation, and tossing his soother like a little grenade across the room. He saw himself in a schoolyard, showing his heir apparent how to throw a curve-ball through the principle’s window. And he heard himself instructing his little prince in the ways of love, and explaining how to act in the presence of girls who pretended to be ladies. These thoughts possessed him until he couldn’t wait any longer: he dashed upstairs to find Beatrice, seduce her with menacing spells, and ensure his lineage.

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Beatrice had just turned off the TV and was sitting peacefully in front of the bay window in their bedroom. She was drinking Granny Güsfreude’s Special Gandleflower Tea, a unique blend of Mengding tea and the finest gandleflower tips of the Albertan wild gandleberry. Beatrice wondered why they debated legalizing drugs when this tea could be bought over the counter. For as she looked out the bay window, the sky appeared a soft teal, and the houses along the street were light green one minute and blue the next. A grand lover of specialty teas, she had just finished watching a PBS documentary called The Tea Horse Road, about the history of Chinese tea and the coolies who transported it — when her husband flew into the room and flung her onto their bed.

Antonio quoted several verses from Lord Byron, which would have to do for the seduction part, and thrust his iron rod of joy between her legs. As he plunged in and out, he imagined a scene in which he and his young squire went deep-sea fishing off the coast of Vancouver. How they guffawed and gambolled on the deck! What joy they shared as they strung live bait onto their hooks and dangled it in front of an ancient dagon fish who was directing traffic and lecturing the other fish on the usefulness of a number system based on 6, 10, and 60.

Antonio and his imaginary prince leaned back on the deck, slipping with laughter as they snagged a big one. The hook had pierced the jaw of the dagon fish, who was yanked from its school, at which Antonio assured his boy they never taught anything useful anyway. Antonio howled out Moby Dick! as the hook tore deeper into the fish’s mouth, cracking his lower row of serrated teeth. With exceptional grace, the dagon succumbed to the relentless upward pull and the wooden mallet that ended everything he had ever known about currents, plankton, and astronomy.

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Ragor the Clerk trained his little telescope across the front yard into an upper window of the three-story gothic mansion that blotted out his view of the Rocky Mountains. He saw a tall thin figure rise from his labours of lust. Antonio was in a fit of anger because all his selfish needs hadn’t been met. Ragor saw on his brow a vague fear, a doubt which dripped into the black holes of his eyes, which he then turned, sharp as cross hairs toward Ragor and his peeping lens.

Ragor’s father had bought him the little telescope for his 12th birthday, and Ragor intended to spy into everyone’s lives and see what life was really about. His parents had told him countless times, “Try to understand what people are really like,” which was exactly what he intended to do.

Like all Blue Dreamers, Ragor knew how to toe the party line. If his parents told him to monitor people down the street and to toe the line, he would clip an additional lens onto his telescope, politely excuse himself, go into the bathroom, and clip his toenails to ensure they weren’t even a millimetre too long. Of course, Ragor would completely ignore his parent’s advice if it went against the infraction parameters the Blue Dreamers had spliced into his genes and neurons when he was a foetus. 

Ragor sent all the data he collected to the Blue Dream Department of Future Affairs. He knew they were especially interested in alien agents — especially Tarnese from the Copper Tarn, Skiffers from the Frozen Skiff, and Fallarians from the Black Pulse. The blue Dreamers seemed like maniacal accountants, obsessed with protocols and historical documents, yet this was because they were intent on survival in a veruy dangerous cosmos. Mild-mannered and respectful of rules, they would break

He had detected a great deal of suspicious activity — darkslate purple beam fragments, midnight sidewinders, liminal cobalt irradiation, horned rattlesnakes, and tyrian omensweepers — east and south of Calgary, in the region roughly known as the Alberta Badlands. On his map, Ragor tried to isolate the suspicious occurrences, but they kept bouncing around the local towns. He saw an occult connection between certain place names, snaking between the bright blue dreamy towns into hellish drumming, beserkers chanting, and scorching air rising from the Cold Garden of black gold.

Oil, bitumen, sands of tar, they were all controlled from the golden towers of the Cold Garden. The sports stadium they called “the Saddledome” started to look like a gigantic cauldron…

To the south he saw waves of dark matter flowing under the sinister bridge and into the forges of the underworld god Vulcan, then into the high river of destruction, and from there toward the black diamond itself. Ragor had on more than one occasion suggested to the Department that Antonio was not working alone.

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The energy patterns indicated a great and sinister power, yet what he saw through his telescope suggested that Antonio was just a petty tyrant and a flake.

Spying into the bedroom across the street, Ragor saw that Antonio saw that he was watching him. Antonio’s face flushed with embarrassment and rage, just as it had when his father had walked in on him when he was 13 years old and he was sliding the breasts of his sister’s Baarbie doll up and down his cock. Antonio’s mind replayed the insults his father threw at him.

Ragor was confused by the shame on Antonio’s face, since he took it for granted that humans could do whatever they wanted in the bedroom. And if Antonio was in fact from the Black Pulse, then he wouldn’t feel guilt in the least. What had gone wrong?

The Prime Minister of the country, Pierre Trudeau, had even said, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Bludream infraction rules clearly stated that all species are entitled to do whatever the hell they wanted with their own bodies. Yet Antonio wasn’t a Bluplant and he was brought up in a world where the Pope still refused to hand out condoms and where preachers railed ad nauseum against the evils of promiscuity. As a result, Antonio was left with the dichotomous logic of good and evil, and his father’s insults burned into him like red-hot iron into the hide of a frightened calf. The branding iron seared his heart with scars that would never heal.

Ragor quickly folded up his telescope and closed the shutters.

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While Antonio wrestled with Moby Dick, working the sperm whale for all it was worth, Beatrice was by now only half-conscious. Yet she had a faint smile on her lips. Antonio took her smile as a sign that his efforts had the unintentional side-effect of giving her pleasure. In fact, Beatrice had succumbed to a redemptive fantasy.

The progeny she felt swimming within her would become the instrument of her revenge! The tadpole turned into a marlin, which broke upward from the dark blue water and took flight, its large fin becoming both rudder and wing. His fins spread out and he was now a magnificent bird, high above the raging waters off the coast of Japan. Beatrice had erased Moby Dick; her progeny was a bird.

Beatrice saw her ministering angel, who she called Baldric, the true knight with the emblem of the white hawk on his baldric, the truest of knights, descend like a kamikaze to smash the fleets of her husband’s evil. Her brave little Christian soldier would one day restore the rising sun of her lost childhood dreams. (Beatrice had been reading The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which also made her imagine she was a geisha trapped in a yakuza dungeon.)

As Antonio unleashed his DNA, her dream shifted, and she was looking down from a great height at the swirling wonder of the Yunnan rice paddies. Her white knight would someday take a plane and fly over Yuangyang County.

She descended to get a close look at life in the Middle Kingdom, where Baldric would set the record straight. Beneath her were the humble dwellings of the Bulang tribespeople. Baldric would enter these muddy streets, and proclaim his message of universal rights to the people. Sorcerers, snake-worshippers, and all other enemies of the state would be paraded around the town square and made to renounce their evil ways.

Beatrice was revisiting a TV documentary on China she had seen earlier that day. Her young squire had entered the documentary and was now walking on the ground, far beneath her. Swooping downward, she saw her little white hawk fluttering through the backstreets, making friends with the birds and mice he met along the way. As he held out some bread crumbs for a fluttering dove, she saw his palms were punctured and blood was dripping onto the ground. She tried to lick the blood from his palm, but her beak merely etched a Chinese character onto its surface. Just before she blacked out, she saw a white rabbit speed past them, complete with waistcoat and a timepiece.

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Next: J. Alfred and the Great White

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