Tevun-Krus #100

90 - Frau Only Drives the Chrysalis - @WilliamJJackson - DieselPunk

Frau Only Drives the Chrysalis

By William J. Jackson / WilliamJJackson

Brune Adenauer, despite her name, awoke each afternoon blonde as a solar flare. Clearing out the cold from groggy, slender, cinnamon eyes, yawning from a petite rose mouth, she surveilled her spacious bedchamber. Mauve silk curtains curled in breezy air through open balcony doors which let in the sun, and scattered hopeful beams through small crystal chandeliers on the arched ceiling. Not a thing could be done until she lit a match, applied it to an Ecrivain's Specials and partook of three excruciating drags, cigarettes being the lady's choice for breakfast. Brune obtained a shot glass on the stand at her bedside, gargled its contents of Shalimar perfume, and danced about. Smidgen, her pet fox, purred in his sleep. Shoes, silk slip and a rhinestone studded sleeveless evening dress from last night's debauchery remained scattered about the carpet, evidence of a hasty retreat to dreamland. A quick waltz to the floor length mirror in silver frame to check her face. A plucky jig towards the imposing armoire of daunting oak for the hairbrush on its polished tray. She lived in luxury, this chamber the size of many a full house, the crackle of her fireplace sounded off as many rifles. She walked and slept amongst silver starlight, traipsed across garish carpets shipped from Siam.

Actress extraordinare. Czarina of Celluloid, world famous since the age of thirteen, when she first starred as the seductress of an elderly sheik in Das Nackte Leben, Naked Life, in 1910.

The sole object to spoil the view? Kriegtier, a man but not, robota but not. Huge, dark, miserable, a helmeted head with stubby horns over a jaw long ago scorched, ever observing. He, it, kept her safe. Ninety percent of him was cast steel plating and rivets down neck and spine tapering down to conical kneecaps and hydraulic brakes wedged between the stubby blades on each iron toe. Aerodynamic fins down the back circulated air and coolant to the small diesel motor wedged into the artificial abdomen. He represented a New Age stegosaur, an old thing whose flesh had been sacrificed to the tar pit of war, what remained petrified in armor. The Sky War, Germany's glory banner, Brune's most famous years and Kriegstier's despair.

Fans of the actress were legion, their calls outside faintly heard. They yelled about her performance in Ein Vert zu Klaus (1919), her comedic aptitude in the Konnenfeld shorts (1920-1926) and, endlessly, her decadent performance as the murderous Madame of a bordello in Lisbon (1923). Brune loved their idolatry as she peered out now and again to acknowledge her followers.

Brune saw the mammoth clock face, a full four feet in diameter, its feminine hands of platinum polish dictated the hour while she pranced...

"Oh! Seven-eighteen! Kriegtier! Alert Mamette and have Alma draw my bath super hot! The premiere! I nearly forgot the premiere!" She squeaked like a jackrabbit, startling Smidgen as her man-robot turned in hisses and pounding pistons to make for the door. A frantic Brune ran around the bedchamber. She had gams to shave, hair to curl, a fabulous garment to pick from amongst thousands plus a mind to prepare for social warfare. Fame had its price. Into the bathroom she fled, an oval oasis in the tower of her Queen Anne manor. Jade marble tiles welcomed her. A bathtub of black ceramic, trimmed in gilded leaves, was in need of water. Brune gazed at herself again, this time in the diamond-shaped mirror over the sink. She leaned on the jade countertop and grabbed her toothbrush. Alma, Brune's feisty Portuguese maid, shuffled in to commit to the arduous task of turning the hot water knob fully on before stripping her lady bare for the daily scrubbing.

***

Away from stardom and above the throng, the Mask attached the barrel, and waited. He viewed the Elbe River, serene as peacetime. In the distance, foreshadow loomed in the shape of a thunderhead. The Mask took the oncoming storm as a sign, a proper blessing, that this dawning evening would belong to him. The road he took to this moment, so long, so arduous, was now behind him. Fingerprints on file were stolen from the police station. It, and his identity, burned in a firepit. He was anonymous now, the perfect tabula rasa citizen to send a message to the Materialists, as much a monster as the vampire in the Fray. The seventh issue of that dreary horror comic pressed against his back, a rolled up memento from the past. As the fiend in that colorful tome stalked the unworthy, so too did he. The Mask looked down on the old Germany, one of stone, of efficiency, of manual labor and grew more malignant in his animosity of what the victorious Fatherland had become.