Читать книгу The Grand Dark - Richard Kadrey - Страница 13

From the profile “The Theater of the Grand Darkness” in Ihre Skandale

It seems entirely appropriate that the land where the Grand Dark sits was once known to the area’s residents as “Ein Verfluchter Ort”: a cursed place.

A boardinghouse once stood where the theater is now. Among the house’s long-term residents was Otto Kreizler, the serial killer better known as the Brimstone Devil for his habit of burning his victims alive. In the year it took the authorities to track Kreizler down, he murdered at least thirteen people. After a short trial, he was hanged and his body was buried in an unmarked prison grave. Still, it seemed that the Brimstone Devil hadn’t finished his work, since soon after his death the boardinghouse where he’d once lived burned to the ground, killing three people.

After the boardinghouse burned, the land stood vacant for some time. Since the area was known as an entertainment district for the lower classes, the first building to occupy the spot was Kammer des Schreckens, a wax museum of horrors depicting famous historical murders. This was later expanded to include a small cinema specializing in illicit erotica, thus adding to the area’s already dire reputation. Still, the Kammer drew steady business, so local cafés and merchants didn’t complain.

During the Great War, stray bombs leveled every building on the street—except for the Kammer. However, during those years of social repression and heavy censorship, the authorities eventually forced the theater to close.

Una Herzog, along with her business partner and lover, Horst Wehner, purchased the Kammer just a few weeks before the armistice was signed. Wehner is acknowledged to be the Dr. Krokodil in the theater’s name, but little else is known about him, as he disappeared soon after the site was rechristened the Theater of the Grand Darkness.

Like Wehner’s, Una Herzog’s past is shrouded in mystery. It is rumored that Wehner had been a spy during the war and might have been killed on one of his assignments. It’s further rumored that Una was credited with seducing one, and perhaps more, enemy officers and obtaining vital war plans. A darker version of the story goes on to say that, having grown weary of Wehner’s secrecy and possessiveness, Una convinced one of those officers to arrange for his murder.

Of course, this remains mere conjecture.

Una has stated publicly that the Brimstone Devil’s murders were her original inspiration for the Grand Dark. She’d already seen Schöner Mord—short one-act plays of murder and depravity—while abroad and believed strongly that she could bring the form home to Lower Proszawa.

While the theater went through renovations, Una’s theater troupe performed in the nearby ruins of bombed-out buildings, giving the productions a level of verisimilitude never before seen in the city. Even with the area’s unsavory reputation, the plays brought in viewers from all over Lower Proszawa, and the theater was a success from its early days.

There is one question that certain critics and conspiracy theorists always come back to when discussing Una Herzog: Where did her puppets originate? No other theater in the city had them and few people had seen similar appliances outside of the military and large corporations such as Schöne Maschinen. Whatever the truth, the strange stories swirling around Una have only enhanced her enigmatic reputation and added to the otherworldly luster of the Theater of the Grand Darkness.