Ask and you shall receive, ladies and gents.  After I bitched some more about the last story, lo!  One turned up that I didn't hate!  In fact, it was pretty darn good!  Huzzah!

"Marian's Song" by James Kisner, 1989

From Phantoms, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Rosalind M. Greenberg, 1989

Grade: A-

When my notes on a story are full of question marks, it means one of two things: either the story was so bad at explaining itself and staying consistent that I was hopelessly lost, or it was so thought-provoking that I was always racing ahead to try to guess where the author was going.  In this case, it was happily the latter; if someone had been telling the story out loud, they would have had to hit me with a rolled-up newspaper to shut me up with all the, "Oh, does that mean that then?" "Are you going to hit this point later?" "Does that go back to that earlier part?"

This is a science fiction reimagining of the Phantom tale--or rather, of some of the Phantom tale's core ideas, because it's not a literal retelling by any means.  While I think a complete retelling in a science fiction setting could be done, I don't know that I have a lot of faith in humanity to do it well.  Sad, no?  Anyway, Kisner doesn't fall short in his treatment.  In this particular case, the Phantom is upgraded from unknown master supreme of the opera house to unknown master supreme of the entire universe, a move that enhances his power and grandeur while making his obscurity all the more poignant.  His music is vast, terrifying, and incomprehensible to the human ear, causing madness and death as well as a wild, Bacchanal ecstasy.  The human narrator refers to it constantly as "discordant", but the human ear is only equipped to handle so many variations and shades of tone and sound; the music is quite literally unthinkable, outside the meager ability of any human to comprehend.  The terror of the original novel hinged, as most terror in literature does, on the unknown--the fear of being unaware of a menace lurking below, of a being controlling your movements.  Here the terror is magnified not only by the fear of an unknown and unsurmountable foe, but of a phenomenon which is absolutely beyond understanding and thus well outside the realm of human control.  The ecstatic reaction of those few humans to submit themselves to the music makes it clear that it is transcendentally perfect, but to those others who refuse it and retain their sense of self, it is nightmarish and cacophonic.  It's a very powerful touch, and faithful to the original tale in a way that I haven't seen too much--Leroux's Phantom insisted that his music was too terrible and powerful for any ear but his own and would not allow even Christine to hear it, but most derivative writers have been unable to resist the temptation to include some form of Don Juan in their pieces (which suggests to me a point on the profound curiosity of mankind to investigate that which we have been told is forbidden, but that's another paper altogether).

The names are all significant, which of course always makes me happy.  The survey ship on which the crew sails is called the Balboa, a reference to Vasco Nunez Balboa, the Spanish conquistador-explorer who discovered much of Panama and became the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean through the Americas.  The name both nicely sums up their mission as explorers and discoverers of the unknown, and also presages their unfortunate fate (Balboa was framed for treason and executed despite his long-time loyalty to the crown).  The captain is named Richard--the name Richard means "brave" and "hardy", foreshadowing his eventual status as the only one to confront the peril and survive--and Marian, the Christine character, bears a name that means only "beloved", which suits her as that is basically her only role in the story.  The Phantom himself gives his name as Demiurge, an intensely interesting and largely forgotten mythological concept in current society: Plato, in his explanation of the universe, named the demiurge as the creator deity who, subordinate to the other gods, created the world.  In later Gnosticism, the demiurge (sometimes called Samael, the blind idiot god of evil on which H. P. Lovecraft based Azathoth) was also regarded as the creator of the world and identified with the Hebrew YHWH, but as Gnosticism viewed the material world and its works as evil, the demiurge was perforce also considered evil.  It's worth noting that in Gnostic tradition, the demiurge was not the first or the supreme being, but was born out of Sofia (wisdom) who was so ashamed of his monstrousness that she hid him away, and having never seen any other beings or matter, the demiurge concluded that he was the only being in all of creation (a very obvious parallel to the Phantom, whose hideousness prompted him to be shunned and relegated to his underground kingdom, and who can easily be said not to view other humans as beings like himself).  Demiurge, as the Phantom here, is a bitter and possibly, yes, evil being who asserts that he is the creator of everything, the lord supreme of the universe, and that his creations have now forgotten him, leading him to decide to destroy all his works and begin anew (not unlike the Noah story in the the Hebrew canon).  And of course, the staging ground and vast instrument he chooses for his final appeal to mankind is the planet Mars, named for the Roman god of war and the believed progenitor of the entire Roman race, presaging the strife to come and reinforcing the idea of a creator/wellspring of humanity.  The Greek mythology so prevalent in the earlier interpretations of the story and in the original novel makes a stunning return.

The crew of the Balboa at first believe there is some kind of disturbance causing the hideous vibrations that keep shaking their ship; after one crewman dies, an expression of horrified bliss on his face after tearing off his own ears, Marian first correctly identifies the sound as music, the beginning of the trend which will set her apart as the only human to understand and embrace Demiurge's weird music.  From the first crewman's death onward, the link between the cosmic music and madness is obvious and assured; as the plot progresses and the crew discovers that their data files have been erased by the vibrations somehow, it is reinforced by the idea of madness erasing or destroying knowledge.  The captain begins to hear voices whispering to him, an obvious parallel to Leroux's Phantom and his ventriloquism, though in this case it is obvious that the voices are hallucinations brought on by the music and not actually the voice of Demiurge.

After isolating the source of the hideous sound as emanating from Mars, the captain leads a crew down in fine Star Trek form to investigate (not out of foolhardy curiosity, however, but out of a very concrete need to have something to show when he arrives back on earth with fourteen years of data-gathering erased).  Marian is at the forefront of every investigation, intensely curious about the music and irrepressible in her desire to learn more about it; just as with the original Christine, Richard admires her and is made very uncomfortable as she continues to be seduced by music he can neither comprehend nor compete with.  Demiurge resides in an underground cavern, just as Leroux's Erik does, but where Erik is forced to hide from the world because of society's rejection, Demiurge does not have to hide from anyone, having been entirely forgotten by the entire human race.  Instead, he is underground for the express purpose of creating his music (another parallel to Erik, who would certainly never have had the ability to indulge his creative genius had he been subjected to the whims of a society that viewed him as a monster); the scene when Richard finally discovers him, conducting his horrible symphony seemingly to the planet itself, which responds by honeycombing and changing itself to become the perfect instrument (the far-removed descendant of Erik's pipe organ) for his design, is absolutely spine-tingling.  The sheer grandiosity of the scale of his universal music--a very literal preservation, by the way, of the Greek concept of the "music of the spheres", an awesome music made by the moving of the planets and heavenly bodies which is too great in scope to be heard by man--shows us Kisner following Erik to his natural conclusion, if you will: the ineffable music of the Phantom finally and completely uninhibited by society.

A second crewman bites it on the way in, leaving only Marian and Richard as survivors; the same form is used, the victim having apparently torn off his own ears and then expired with a look of agonized ecstasy on his face.  For me, at least, this begs the question: are they tearing off their ears in an attempt to stop the awesome, awful music, or are they tearing them off to ensure that that incredible sound is the last one they ever hear?  Kisner betrays quite a bit of Lovecraftian influence in his use of the enormity of the universe as the ultimate horror and the central concept of humanity as helpless and insignificant in the face of the real forces, but he does it in a way that makes the story all his own, and really, does anybody out there think I am even remotely capable of resisting the (well-done) combination of Leroux and Lovecraft?  The allegorical and mythological implications continue to pile up, as the descent into Demiurge's lair is very obviously an analogue to a descent into Hell, characterized by unbearable heat, unforgiving and alien red surroundings, and the continual discordant chorus of the damned.

Demiurge himself, in keeping both with mythology and with the Phantom story, is absolutely hideous.  Kisner describes him as having "all the disfigurements of man", a hideous potpurri of deformities and monstrosities that renders him instantly abhorrent.  In keeping with the enlargement of the Phantom story to this cosmic scale, the mass of disfigurements is appropriate; rather than Erik, whose death's-head appearance was horrifying because it reminded those who saw it of their own mortality and their inability to control it, Demiurge's visage is terrifying because it shows humanity all the many ways in which it can be ugly, replacing the horror of death with the horror of facing life as a beast.  And, like Leroux's Erik, Demiurge is a profound dichotomy, the contrast of hideous beastliness with his creation, the beauty of all the universe (as Erik's hideous appearance is contrasted with the beauty of his music).  Even as Richard instinctively denies Demiurge's assertion that he is the creator supreme of the universe, he cannot deny the pervasiveness of the music which Demiurge says is "in all things and makes all things", or the conviction that tells him that Demiurge, at least, absolutely believes his claim.

Marian's role here is as a receptacle; Demiurge has stated that he will spare creation if he can be convinced that even one of humanity can not only hear and comprehend his music, but respect and love it properly.  Here is where the greatest confusion occurs in the classic question associated with the Phantom--that is, whether he is a mortal man or some kind of supernatural agent.  On the one hand, Demiurge's insistence that Marian must stay and sacrifice herself for the rest of humanity doesn't make very much sense--if she obviously understands and appreciates it, why make her stay?  Isn't the stipulation fulfilled, then?  I'm reminded (Star Trek again... sorry) of the question, "Why does God need a spaceship?"  But then again, what the hell do I know of how a cosmic universal creator thinks?  In that light, my quibbles seem somewhat, well, small.  It is interesting here to note that in contrast to Erik, Demiurge couldn't care less if Marian likes him personally; he wants her to love his music, not his self.  Where Erik knew his music to be the most beautiful expression of himself and easy to love, and needed Christine to love him personally to affirm that the rest of him was worthwhile as well, Demiurge wants Marian to love his underappreciated and awe-inspiring music, which is sadly so far beyond the scope of his creations.  As an ultimate creator, Demiurge is no longer on a plateau where mortal love holds nay meaning for him, and thus his need for Marian is almost completely opposed to Erik's need for Christine.

In the end, Marian is actually absorbed via the music into the cosmos--or, possibly into Demiurge himself; it is unclear, as the narrator, Richard, is mentally overtaxed in a big way at that point.  The transformative power of the music to bodily lift Marian up to some kind of ascension or enlightenment is a powerful connection to the mythological and allegorical implications both of the cultures from which he is drawn and from Leroux's original work.  Despite the differences in their approach, Demiurge and Erik share the same ultimate goal; to be recognized for their merits, to no longer be excluded by a society that is inferior to them, to be given their due.  In Erik's case, he desperately needs the validation of society to convince himself that he really, truly is worthwhile and human; for Demiurge, we can only theorize.  If it's the same reasoning, that brings him abruptly down to a mere mortal, understandable human level, but it seems more likely that Demiurge acts from wounded pride, demanding the respect he feels is his due from his creations.  The entire planet of Mars is destroyed by the shattering crescendo of his finale, a symbolic destruction of war or strife by Marian's sacrifice of devotion, and not incidentally an impressive gesture by Demiurge to ensure that the humans will take note.

Of course, it doesn't work, as Richard is widely regarded as mad (and probably is, as we discover at the very end that he has removed his own ears like the others who were killed by the music) and humanity immediately ignores his tale.  The creeping, Twilight-Zoneish horror at the end of the story comes from our knowledge that Demiurge is still out there, and that our own hubris in refusing to accept his existence may doom us at any moment.

If I have a quibble with the story, it's that Kisner occasionally throws in some slightly jarring turn of phrase to remind us that, yes, this is totally a Phantom story, as though worried that otherwise we wouldn't figure it out.  Have a little faith in your readers, man.

All in all, Kisner has created an extremely engaging and thought-provoking horror story that not only follows Leroux's original novel, but builds upon it.  He's obviously done his research, and given the reader an interesting new viewpoint on the mortal/supernatural conflict that is so often central to the Phantom's character.

If only it weren't buried in the middle of an anthology full of crap, eh?

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