Summary
A monochrome reverie unfurls as a solitary scarlet beetle—no bigger than a dropped sequin—scuttles across the cracked parquet of a derelict music hall, its carapace catching the projector’s guttering beam like a drop of congealed stage blood. Behind the moth-chewed velvet curtain, George LeRoi Clarke’s gaunt illusionist rehearses a levitation that never quite defies gravity; his eyes, cavernous as emptied top-hats, track the insect with the same rapt dread he once reserved for hecklers. Enter Johnny Hayes, a cigarette-boy turned clandestine chronicler of backstage rot, pockets stuffed with half-written confessions and match-sticks he chews until the sulfur bleeds. Marian Pickering glides through the wings in a moth-eaten tutu the color of nicotine, a forgotten prima ballerina convinced the beetle is her reincarnated lover—his soul, she whispers, trapped by a flubbed card trick years earlier when a guillotine prop severed more than the deck. The trio’s nocturnal séance spirals into a danse macabre: trapdoors yawn like unspoken regrets, footlights strobe like interrogation lamps, and the insect—now multiplied by mirrors—sketches a scarlet sigil on every cracked sheet of music. By the time dawn’s slate light trickles through the broken cupola, the hall is empty save for a single playing card impaled on a nail: the queen of hearts, her face scratched out, replaced by the iridescent shell of the ladybug—an exquisite corpse that twitches once, then folds into itself like a secret too obscene to speak.
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