Dark Degas
The Accursed Legacy
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- DIEGO DE OCAÑA (26): Night Archivist of the Reserved Collection. He wears a nineteenth-century style dark frock coat, a fitted black waistcoat, and a white shirt with a stiffly starched collar. His face is pale, with sharp features, deep shadows beneath his eyes, and slightly disheveled dark hair; his appearance reproduces with uncanny exactitude the youthful self-portrait of Edgar Degas. His demeanor is cold, hermetic, and armed with ruthless lucidity.
- BETHEAL (Age Indiscernible): A figure draped in a heavy gray coat of coarse wool, gnawed at the hems by dampness. His posture is stooped, yet he projects an oppressive verticality when approaching the light. His hands are abnormally long, with translucent skin and knobby fingers resembling unearthed roots. His voice lacks pulmonary resonance: it is an arid whisper, a friction of dry leaves and rotten velvet.
The subterranean vault of the Reserved Collection of an ancient university, built upon seventeenth-century black volcanic stone foundations. Towering walls covered by black cedar bookshelves that vanish into the upper gloom. The air feels thick, saturated with secular dust, cured leather, and cold tallow wax.
Center stage, a heavy mahogany table for researchers. Upon it, a bronze banker’s lamp with an emerald-green glass shade carves out a single circle of harsh, surgical light. Stage left, in half-shadow, DIEGO’s elevated desk. Upstage, a semicircular quarry-stone archway leads into an invisible corridor of pitch darkness. High up on the right wall, a narrow skylight flush with the street pavement outside lets in the incessant drumming of a nocturnal downpour.
The staging demands a hypnotic dilation of time. Silences are not pauses between lines, but psychological sieges. Every gesture—the turning of a folio leaf, the adjustment of a collar, the drumming of a fingernail against wood—must be executed with ritualistic slowness to build an atmosphere of claustrophobic dread and intellectual seduction.
Total darkness for ten seconds. Only the torrential rain lashing the upper glass and the extremely slow, metallic ticking of an unseen pendulum clock are heard.
The pull-chain of the brass lamp snaps sharply. The green light blooms over the center table and, by reflection, an ashen penumbra reveals DIEGO seated at his desk. He is completely motionless, like an oil painting framed by darkness. He holds a small leather-bound volume. He reads.
Two full minutes of real time elapse. Diego turns a page. The rustle of old rag paper echoes, amplified. He returns to stillness.
Suddenly, the pendulum clock stops dead. The interior silence becomes abyssal, contrasting with the rain.
From the blackness of the stone archway comes a wet, dragging sound. A slow step. Pause. Another step. It is the scrape of heavy soles that never quite lift from the flagstones.
Diego does not raise his head. His pupils stop moving across the line of text. He remains alert, barely breathing. He counts five seconds in silence, takes a black silk ribbon, places it between the pages, and closes the book without making the slightest sound.
From the mouth of the corridor emerges BETHEAL. He advances without his coat making a sound until he stops before the mahogany counter separating the vestibule from the reading room. His face remains buried beneath the shadow of a limp hat and the upturned collar of his coat. Only his hands emerge into the light: pale, impossibly long, resting upon the mahogany edge like two white spiders.
A prolonged silence. Neither of them moves.
Betheal does not reply. His right index finger, excessively long and crooked at the phalanx, rises and lets its nail fall upon the wood. Tap. Five seconds. Tap. Five seconds. Tap. The sound is hollow, as if rapping upon the lid of a coffin.
Betheal raises his chin slightly. The emerald glow of the lamp grazes his ashen lips, leaving the upper half of his face submerged in two sockets of impenetrable darkness.
A tense silence. Diego’s left hand closes very slowly over the cover of his small book. His face betrays no emotion, but his voice drops half a tone.
With reptilian slowness, Betheal slips two fingers into the inner pocket of his coat and extracts a rectangular card of yellowed pasteboard, stiff and stained dark at the edges. He slides it across the counter. The pasteboard produces a dry hiss as it grazes the mahogany.
Diego stands. He walks with severe poise to the counter. He does not touch the credential; he merely inclines his head to examine the dry embossed seals and the archaic calligraphy covering it. He notices that the visitor’s coat, despite the torrential deluge outside, is bone-dry and exudes a subtle scent of graveyard earth and ozone.
Betheal remains motionless for several long seconds. From his throat comes a sound like an old bellows drawing in ash.
Diego barely furrows his brow upon hearing his name—as he wears no badge—but decides to ignore the provocation. He pivots on his heel and ventures into the labyrinth of rear bookshelves, vanishing into the gloom.
Betheal does not move from his spot, yet his neck twists at an almost unnatural angle, tracking Diego’s trail through the shadows by ear. He raises one of his gaunt hands toward the green lamp; as he does so, his shadow cast upon the side wall does not reproduce the silhouette of a man in an overcoat, but an elongated, angular stain resembling a dried insect or a figure with folds recalling membranous wings.
From the depths comes the metallic clank of an iron grille opening, the rattle of chains, and finally, returning footsteps.
Diego reappears carrying with both hands a colossal volume bound in blackened calfskin, fastened with rusted iron clasps and hemp cords. He deposits it with reverential care in the exact center of the circle of green light. A dense cloud of dust rises and hangs suspended like luminous fog.
Betheal glides silently around the counter and takes a seat at the table, facing the audience, in profile to Diego. Diego returns to his desk, but does not sit: he remains standing, resting his fingertips upon his lectern, watching.
Betheal lays his monstrous palms flat upon the cover of Dossier 714. He closes his dark sockets and inhales deeply through his nose, with almost obscene delight.
Betheal slowly unties the hemp cords. He opens the heavy cover. The spine emits a sharp groan, identical to a tendon tearing.
The visitor turns the first folio leaf. Then the second. Yet he does not lower his head toward the manuscript. His pitch-black sockets are fixed squarely on Diego’s pale face. His long fingers caress the handwritten lines as if reading Braille through the damp stains.
Twenty seconds tick by. Only the sound of pages turning slowly—Tap... Rustle... Tap—and the unblinking gaze of the specter upon the archivist.
Diego remains silent. His fingers twitch slightly against the wood of his desk. Betheal turns another folio leaf with a dry snap.
The green light of the lamp flickers for the first time without any thunder outside. Diego’s breath begins to condense into a faint mist: the cold in the vault has turned polar.
A distant, cavernous rumble of thunder makes the cedar shelves vibrate. Dust falls like fine rain from the ceiling.
Diego does not wish to move, yet his legs seem to obey a different gravity. He steps down from his dais. He takes one slow step toward the center. Then another. The sound of his heels upon the volcanic stone echoes like a condemned man mounting the scaffold.
Betheal leans his face forward, entering the cone of emerald light completely. His skin is a cadaverous gray, clinging to the skull, furrowed by fine black ramifications like coagulated ink beneath the epidermis. His eyes have no sclera: they are two wells of liquid pitch reflecting the lamp.
Diego stops before the table, on the other side of the open book. His pupils dilate. He breathes with difficulty, hypnotized by the stained pages.
Diego rests his trembling hands on the edge of the table and sinks slowly into the chair opposite Betheal. They sit face to face, separated only by the inquisitorial dossier. Betheal’s shadow on the back wall swells monstrously, covering the bookshelves like a living black mantle.
Betheal smiles, revealing a row of small, dark teeth. Triumph swells his figure; the air smells intensely of wet sulfur and burnt myrrh.
Betheal extends his pale, arachnid right hand over the bloodstained page of Dossier 714, offering it to seal the renewal of the pact.
Sepulchral silence. Even the sound of the exterior rain vanishes completely.
Diego’s right hand rises very slowly. It trembles in the green air. Inch by inch, it advances toward the knobby fingers of the entity. The gigantic shadow on the wall curves over them both like a vault of jaws.
Diego’s fingertips hover a millimeter above Betheal’s dead skin.
A five-second pause.
Suddenly, the trembling in Diego’s fingers stops dead. His hand freezes with surgical precision.
Diego blinks once. The glassy veil vanishes from his pupils, replaced by an icy, cutting, and profoundly ironic gleam. With absolute calm, he withdraws his hand through the air, brings it to his own chest, and brushes an invisible speck of dust from the lapel of his dark frock coat.
Betheal suffers a spasm of bewilderment. His hand remains suspended in the void. The monumental shadow on the wall wavers and loses sharpness.
Diego presses his index finger firmly upon the open parchment.
With a swift, sharp movement, Diego seizes the edges of the cover of Dossier 714 and slams it shut right in Betheal’s face, forcing the creature to snatch his hands back to avoid being crushed. The boom of the closed book echoes like a cannon shot through the vault.
Diego pulls the heavy volume toward himself, stands up, and holds it against his chest like a shield.
Betheal rises from the chair with a guttural shriek, a sound of torn metal that cracks the green glass shade of the lamp. The bulb flickers violently. The creature’s coat billows as if inflated by an interior gale.
Diego takes a step toward the demon. Astonishingly, it is Betheal who recoils half a step.
The monstrous shadow on the wall begins to shrink rapidly, peeling away from the ceiling like heavy smoke falling to the floor.
Betheal seems to shrink physically inside his gray coat. His posture becomes decrepit, pathetic, stripped of all tragic grandeur. His knobby hands tremble as they grip the back of the chair.
Diego takes a pocket watch from his waistcoat, glances at it for an instant, and snaps it shut with a crisp click.
Diego raises his right arm and points with implacable rigidity toward the quarry-stone archway submerged in darkness.
Betheal holds his gaze for one last instant with a millennial yet sterile hatred. He retreats, dragging his feet, hunched, humiliated. Upon crossing the threshold of the arch, his silhouette does not walk toward the stair: it simply crumbles into the gloom like a handful of black ash swept away by a draft.
The very instant he vanishes, the pendulum clock resumes its regular, metallic ticking, and the steady, clean murmur of the rain returns to the upper skylight.
Diego remains alone in the center of the vault for several long seconds. His breathing is calm, rhythmic. He walks with deliberate parsimony toward his desk, opens a reinforced lower drawer, places Dossier 714 inside, and turns the key with two precise rotations.
He takes his seat. He adjusts his starched white collar, reopens his small reading book, removes the black silk ribbon, and continues reading at the exact line where he had stopped.
The green light of the center lamp clicks off by itself with a soft snap. Only a very faint side-light remains, carving Diego’s pale, melancholic face against the pitch blackness—identical to Degas’s immortal portrait, absolute master of his silence.
Slow fade to black.
DARK DEGAS: THE ACCURSED LEGACY. © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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