Concerning Lavender Lightning. (521W)
Dear René,
With my husband away, I have nobody with whom to discourse upon the events of this night and so I set down this tale of true and marvellous events as much for my own peace of mind as for your enlightenment.
My mind was spinning with the ghost stories we had been telling a few days previously and I had determined to pen some supernatural tale myself. What that story was to be, I had no notion. The rest of my companions left the villa overlooking Lake Léman for the Alps and I remained behind to construct my story. Yet as I pursued ideas fantastical and supernatural, the farther they fled from my pen tip.
Yet as I gazed out across the night-darkened Lake, a strange cloud descended over the stars and turned the moon to ink. Lightning of a kind I have not previously experienced, lavender in hue and silent, played and rove the sky and danced upon the face of the death-black waters. And from this lightning, whether this can be believed as real or dismissed as a mere writer’s waking dream, a creature emerged on the jetty of the villa.
Fearful and yet entranced, I recovered one of my husband’s duelling pistols and, not knowing or mindful whether it be loaded or no, crept from the villa and onto the jetty where the horrid thing squat. It looked at me, René, with eyes not of this world. Its teeth were too many, its mouth too wide, its form more akin to an ape than a man – and it snarled and howled and drooled as though it were a wolf and I a suckling lamb. I found, then, that the pistol was not loaded and its paltry click was, in my jellied mind, perceived to be the last sound my mortal ears should ever convey to my brain.
At the very instant of my last moment on Earth, the lavender lightning flashed and roiled once more and spewed forth a man. A man, I call him, for surely man he was – but of no species I know. Huge, he was, and misshaped; yet handsome in a Hellish way. He carried in his fist a musket the like of which I have never seen and from this ugly weapon erupted such a blast as to reduce my attacker to mist.
“What was that thing?” I asked this new marvel, who had no interest in me.
Looking at me, as if for the first time, he replied, “A cruel experiment in energy and time. Dead now. Pay it no heed.”
This said, he activated some small device about his person and the lightning returned to engulf him and the horrid corpse of my attacker. I called out to him for his name and, as his physicality shimmered and rippled into nothingness, one word echoed over the waters of the lake.
“Kano,” he said.
It is hours later, now, and I finally have my story. Percy, I believe, will be enamoured with my work as inspired by my Promethean saviour.
Your friend,
Mary Shelley,
Geneva,
1818
