2At the salon, they curled her black hair and painted her face in hues of white and rose. In a red dress, she looked voluptuous and real. Remington had made her with lush curves and a goddess' breasts, reminiscent of the paintings he collected, and the perfection of her form made it possible to ignore the sickly tones of gray.
He couldn't even see them as in the night outside the ballroom, where a dozen men chatted outside with cigarettes and smiles and strange women on their arms, women who were all silent and shadowy and had blank expressions on their pouting faces. Their heads bobbed in the dark like buoys on the sea. No one seemed to mind.
Remington only stopped to talk to a man named Taylor for a moment before he led Rosa inside the dimly lit ballroom, full of more posh men and the melancholy girls. The room was a chess board of bobbing black heads and honey blondes, and many wore their jackets on inside. No one seemed to mind.
There was a live band, and they danced and they talked and sometimes told crude jokes while a subtle breeze of feminine voices rode the airwaves, quiet and unintelligible whispers drifting from unmoving mouths.
One of the men said to him, "That's a beauty you've got there," but he didn't know whether or not this was really true because from behind his shoulder stared a girl with prominent bones and thin lips and a starved perfection about her. The beauty of the women was never truly contested, however. They all knew the one principle to the melancholy girls—that beauty was truly in the eyes of the beholder.
He'd heard on the telephone that the King of the Beasts would be at the ball, and he found him now, standing taller and paler than the rest, so that he may have been one of the girls himself if not for his strange gray eyes. He talked smoothly and smoked a cigarette and appeared to be alone, but all of the men knew his secret. The girl he carried was finer and subtler than the rest, so human and real that he didn't even know the difference anymore and kept her as a wife.
After a while the King went to the dais and gently tapped the microphone. His voice was too deep for his pale hair and his pale skin and the way he was probably underweight, curved and slim. Remington didn't listen to him most of the time, browsing the room instead and pulling Rosa close as he led her from table to table, looking for an empty seat or an amicable man.
He presumed the lonely table in the corner to be empty, but he presumed wrong. One of the chairs was inhabited by a wraith in a luxurious fur coat, different than the melancholy girls in the fact that it was more terrible and strange than even them. Its eyes, black like forgotten seas, were cast down, and its sagging hair was not quite straight and just as black.
This creature did not look like the other girls. Remington could see that it had been dressed with the same amount of care that the others had, or maybe even more. Its tiny suit beneath the coat was clean and pressed and made of delicate tweed, a gloomy gray that was accented with buttons of white gold. A white rose was tucked into the button hole on its vest, and the shirt underneath had the glossy appearance of fine silk. And in its lap, it rested its delicate little hands, gentle things with manicured nails.
Remington turned to a man nearby. "Who does he belong to?"
On the dais, the King of Beasts smiled.
"See, they're all made up so beautifully," he said, "but we're all supposed to be celebrating what they truly are. I dare you all to take those nice little glasses there in front of you—yes, the ones on the table there—and wipe all the paint off their faces. Dance with them as they came, because that is why they are truly beautiful."
He turned to walk away from the dais, done with his speech. As he stepped down, a man chuckled and asked, "Fine sir, who will you dance with?"
They were not that far. Remington could hear them. The man smiled and turned in their direction, looking past the men into the corner. As if expecting an embrace, he held out his arms.
Remington heard the sound of rustling behind him, and he caught the wraith slipping from his heavy coat. Fixing his eyes on the smiling man who apparently knew him, he stood and, disappearing into a strange black mist, reappeared in front of him, looking up curiously.
Chuckling, the King of Beasts embraced him and led him away, losing sight of the other men in the room and sweeping the ghostly thing into the throng of men and girls whose feet did not touch the ground.
Minutes later, Remington had lost them in the crowd. Shaking his head, he joined the throng and with the dazed waltz in the air, he could have sworn he heard her whisper. He supposed it was all part of the spell.