The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia mimed the sweeping movement of a yo-yo.

  “A gyroscopic precession,” translated Thorn.

  “Precisely. And due to a ricochet effect, the inverts’ shadows affect the shadows of all that surrounds them, which generates even more echoes. When an ark collapses, it produces an even greater disturbance. In the end, it matters little whether we call that ‘shadow,’ ‘projection,’ ‘propagation,’ or ‘echo,’ it’s one and the same thing. Aerargyrum.”

  “Aerargyrum,” repeated Thorn, seemingly annoyed not to hold that word in his memory’s library.

  “At any rate, that’s the name given to it by the observatory. It’s a matter so fine, it’s indiscernible to the naked eye. It can . . . how can I put it . . . be converted into solid matter if certain circumstances are combined. That’s what Eulalia Gonde succeeded in doing by creating the family spirits. That’s what the observatory wants to reproduce today within the framework of Project Cornucopianism. An authentic Horn of Plenty,” whispered Ophelia, her voice trembling, “that would produce limitless resources. Except they can’t manage to do that. Everything they produce is faulty, because they are missing what Eulalia Gonde had: they’re missing the Other.”

  Ophelia clenched her hands, which the observatory had made even clumsier and more wayward than ever.

  “The inverts attract the echoes. And the observatory exacerbates our inversions so that one of us invokes the most powerful echo of them all.”

  She lowered her eyes, without closing them entirely, the better to probe that second memory she was harboring.

  “The Horn of Plenty needs echoes to function. These echoes respond to their own laws and logic, and only an echo could explain them to us, had it only the gift of speech. From the moment Eulalia Gonde established a dialogue with her own echo, the Other, she developed a better understanding of the world in general, and the echoes in particular. It’s this understanding that allowed her to use the Horn of Plenty to its full potential. And it’s this understanding that the observatory covets.”

  Ophelia screwed up her eyes even more. What were the only three things Eulalia Gonde had needed, again? Words, echoes, and some compensation.

  “The faulty objects, like the family spirits, are echoes converted into matter. They have in common the need for a code to be embodied. On a tart pan, I discovered writing similar to that inside the Books. Elizabeth thinks she has been hired to decipher the Books and help out the family spirits. In reality, the observatory wants to create an equivalent code for its own use. As long as this code isn’t itself perfect, their Horn of Plenty will produce only faulty goods.”

  Ophelia then mentioned the files she had looked through; the split that Second had drawn in the shoulder of her shadow; the vision of Eulalia Gonde she had succeeded in triggering; her unexpected visit to the nave of the second protocol; and Mediana’s forced expiation in order to “crystallize.”

  When she opened her eyes wide, once she had finished, she realized that Thorn was staring intensely at her, in the hypnotic glow of the nightlights. His eyes glinted with some turmoil that, yes, looked almost like envy.

  “Good work.”

  Ophelia blushed right up to her glasses. A compliment, coming from Thorn, was quite something.

  “There are still many questions without answers,” she said. “I feel that this Horn of Plenty is itself just the surface of something subterranean, something much bigger, and that’s what scares me. We know practically nothing about this aerargyrum that surrounds us. And then there’s this ‘crystallization’ that seems indispensable to the Project. It’s the whole point of the second protocol, but I haven’t grasped at all what it consists of. Might it have something to do with that split that Second detected on my shadow?” Ophelia murmured, massaging her shoulder in search of some invisible fracture. “Since she drew one on me, I’m forecast for transfer.”

  Thorn dismissed this with a flick of the hand, as if these were but minor details.

  “Our objective was to find out how Eulalia Gonde turned herself into God, and her reflection into an apocalypse. We now know that the very function of the Horn of Plenty is to convert. To convert,” he repeated, punctuating the three syllables with his index finger, “not to create.”

  Ophelia agreed. There was an infectious energy in Thorn’s every sentence. It was hard to speak of enthusiasm when it came to him, but it was surprisingly close.

  “Eulalia wasn’t content merely to convert echoes into family spirits,” he continued. “She seems to have reversed the experiment. She converted herself. She gave herself all the characteristics of an echo in order to reproduce any face and any power.”

  “That conversion could have affected the Other at the same time,” said Ophelia, feeling her excitement rise. “It may be that conversion that took place in the walled-in room at the Memorial. And it may be that conversion that triggered the Rupture. The one conversion too many.”

  “If we know how Eulalia Gonde did it, we will know how to undo it,” Thorn reminded her. “For now, she and the Other remain discreet, but for how much longer? Our next step, here and now, is to find the Horn of Plenty.”

  Ophelia gazed at the urns in their alcoves, lining the entire pagoda.

  “In this columbarium?”

  An appalling screech made her jump. Thorn’s leg brace had jammed again, as he negotiated some stairs.

  “Forty years ago,” he explained, while releasing his leg, “this observatory underwent extensive renovation work. The setting up of the Alternative Program, and its three protocols, goes back to that period. As do the electrical installations. I explained to you that the observatory’s meters didn’t tally with the readings I had been given. During my surprise inspection, no member of staff could, or would, tell me where the surplus electricity went. All I got, repeatedly, was, ‘Désolé.’”

  The higher Thorn climbed, the deeper his voice got. The pagoda’s varnished wood turned him into a double bass.

  Ophelia tried to follow him from one set of stairs to the next, but tiredness and lack of sleep made her feet increasingly uncoordinated. She ended up losing sight of him. The countless rows of urns had the deceptively labyrinthine logic of a library. A macabre library.

  “What led you to this columbarium?”

  “Lady Septima’s daughter,” replied Thorn’s distant voice, from a corridor. “Indirectly, at least. After throwing herself into my claws, she was taken urgently to the Alternative Program’s infirmary. I accompanied her. At a distance,” he specified, after a pause. “I was keen to make sure . . . you know.”

  His sentences became stilted. Ophelia felt her stomach lurch. Thorn had never hidden his aversion to children, but having harmed one today weighed heavy on him. Maybe a part of him didn’t entirely reject the notion of having some one day?

  His voice moved with him around the pagoda:

  “I found myself in a waiting room, along with an automaton in charge of maintenance. An old model. It wore me out with its endless sayings. One of them, however, got my full attention.”

  Ophelia, trying to follow him by ear, went from one stairway to the next.

  “What did it say?”

  Thorn’s voice, wherever he was, went down another octave.

  “‘THERE ARE PEOPLE WHOM THE PUBLIC THINK DEAD BUT WHO AREN’T.’”

  Ophelia frowned. Certainly, Lazarus had implanted all sorts of dubious proverbs into his automatons, but that one was unlike any she’d heard before.

  “It was repeating something it must have heard here, in the observatory,” continued Thorn. “When I asked it for details, it was unable to give them, instead offering me a recipe for eggplant caviar. I thought back to what you told me about the third protocol: those transferred to it never return. And I had memorized this columbarium from the plan.”

  Suddenly, Ophelia felt as if she were being judged by the portraits of t
he deceased, lit by the nightlights, all around her. People whom the public think dead but who aren’t.

  “Would these funerary urns be empty, then?”

  Somewhere, the click of a watch cover, followed by a matter-of-fact answer:

  “Evidently not. But I wouldn’t affirm, for all that, that these ashes derive from human bodies.”

  “If the people in these photographs aren’t dead,” muttered Ophelia, “what has become of them?”

  Thorn’s metallic steps stopped.

  “Does nothing strike you?” he asked, after a moment’s silence.

  Ophelia felt that everything here struck her. A potentially phony columbarium. The faces of men, women, and children who had just vanished into thin air. Lives conjured away.

  “The bulbs,” she said, finally understanding.

  Here, there was a whole network of nightlights, and none was flickering, none crackling. This little pagoda, forgotten in a corner of the ark, on the very edge of the void, was better supplied with electricity than the entire observatory.

  “I am firmly convinced that the Horn of Plenty is close by,” commented Thorn. “If it converts the echoes into matter, it requires a large source of energy.”

  Ophelia agreed, but it was one thing having this knowledge, quite another making use of it. Was the Horn of Plenty part of these funerary urns? It must be immeasurably bigger. And all these people whom the observatory made out to be dead . . . could they be the compensation Eulalia Gonde had spoken of?

  The idea was terrifying.

  Ophelia half-opened the inside shutter of a window. Behind the glass, the neighboring ark of the Good Family appeared clearer to her from here than from the wall. No, it was the night that was less dark: the stars were fading, dawn was arriving. Ophelia absolutely had to be in her bed when the nanny-automaton came to wake her.

  “We don’t lead the life of a conventional couple.”

  Thorn had said this as a statement of the obvious, just as Ophelia had finally located him on the top story of the pagoda. He was carefully disinfecting his hands, doubtless due to all the urns he had opened and closed to check their contents. His eyes were now following the course of an electricity cable along the beams.

  “I like us not being conventional,” she assured him.

  She noticed, not without surprise, that Second’s blood had vanished from his uniform. Thorn’s fussy animism was already working, ensuring there was never a stain on, or crease in, any of his clothes. Ophelia, on the other hand, was battling with the caprices of her animism. Ever since she had got her glasses back, they had kept scarpering, obliging her to keep perching them back on her nose.

  Thorn frowned as he lost track of his cable when it entered the ceiling, and then turned his stern eyes onto Ophelia.

  “Earlier on, in the antechamber, you used your claws on mine. I would rather you didn’t do that again.”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.”

  Thorn’s tone had become harsh. Somewhat embarrassed, too.

  “No,” he repeated, less harshly. “In fact, I didn’t know that Dragons’ claws could be used for anything but wounding. But you won’t always be by my side to regulate my power. It’s for me to regain control of it. There are some problems we can only solve alone.”

  Ophelia knew that he was right, that she had been unwise to combine her deviant power with Thorn’s uncontrollable one. Her less rational side, however, resisted the notion that their “we” wasn’t enough to overcome all adversity.

  “Up there,” she said.

  Barely visible, a crack in the ceiling indicated the existence of a trapdoor. There was no pole around to open it from the ground, but Thorn merely had to stretch his arm. With a look of annoyance, he pulled down a foldaway ladder.

  “It’s impossible for me to go up on that.”

  Ophelia didn’t need persuading to climb up the rungs, even if coordinating her left side with her right proved even trickier than on stairs. Thorn had just stated that some problems could only be solved alone. She felt the need—a little childishly, admittedly—to prove to him that others could only be solved together.

  She felt her way to pull the cord of a ceiling bulb, which, once on, projected a weak halo of light under the rafters. More funerary urns! There was nothing there, at first sight at any rate, resembling a Horn of Plenty.

  “I’m going to take a closer look,” she said. “Keep looking down there.”

  “Ophelia.”

  Inquiringly, she poked her head back through the trapdoor. Thorn’s chiseled face looked up at her with a strangely solemn rigidity.

  “Me, too,” he said, after clearing his throat. “I like us not being conventional. A little more than that, even.”

  It was with an entirely inappropriate smile that Ophelia ventured among all the funerary objects. The urns and photographs appeared much older than those on display in the columbarium. Had they been stored up here due to a lack of space? The floorboards weren’t polished, either, causing Ophelia to grimace every time she got a splinter in a toe.

  Here, surrounded by ashes that may never have belonged to anyone, she thought again of the Other. The deeper she delved into the Deviations Observatory’s and Eulalia Gonde’s secrets, the less she was able figure him out. In her mind, he had no particular face. He was that voice that had asked her to release him from the mirror. He was that stranger that had messed up her insides. He was that mouth that gobbled up pieces of ark. He was that silence down the telephone that hadn’t answered her call.

  How could such a discreet creature have such a dramatic effect on the world? Since exiting the mirror, had the Other kept his ethereal, aerargyrum substance, or had he found a lasting bodily form for himself? And if the Horn of Plenty could convert echoes into matter, could it also reverse the process, as Thorn supposed? Would they, thanks to the Horn, be able to return the Other to his condition of echo, and Eulalia to hers of human? And above all, would they do it in time? And on their side, had Archibald, Gail, and Fox succeeded in finding the elusive LandmArk? Would they manage to persuade Janus and the Arkadians to join forces with them? Mastering space, that meant locating anyone and hiding anywhere; in short, it meant having a decisive advantage over an adversary. But what if that power ended up in Eulalia Gonde’s hands? Then they would have to confront not only an apocalyptic echo, but also an omnipotent megalomaniac . . .

  In the middle of all her questions, Ophelia stopped dead in front of one of the urns gathering dust. Shocked. With her glove, she wiped the old photograph that was on it, revealing a young man with gentle, antelope eyes.

  Ambrose.

  His arms and legs weren’t reversed, he was standing perfectly upright, and yet, despite all these contradictions, Ophelia felt absolutely sure this was Ambrose. The name itself featured clearly on the urn’s plaque, with a date of death going back forty years.

  There are people whom the public think dead but who aren’t.

  Ophelia’s breathing quickened. It was him, the invert who had been cut out of the old photograph in the directors’ apartments. One could just see an arm, around his shoulders: the arm of the young man posing with him and the other inverts, in front of a carousel. Ophelia now understood why he had seemed so familiar to her. It was Lazarus, forty years younger.

  Father and son at the same place and at the same age.

  Ophelia was mired in confusion when, suddenly, she saw something move. She spun around on her bare feet, searching the loft’s every nook and cranny. It wasn’t an optical illusion. Someone was there, just a few steps away, where the light from the bulb didn’t reach. Ophelia could make out only the outline.

  The silhouette moved slowly. It didn’t move around, but made silent sweeping gestures, like a mime artist. It pointed at the ceiling with its right hand and at the floor with its left, then at the floor with its right hand and at th
e ceiling with its left. Sky and earth, earth and sky, sky and earth . . .

  It was the stranger in the fog.

  As unbelievable as it seemed, it had found Ophelia again.

  “Who are you?”

  Determined, finally, to see its face, Ophelia plunged into the dark recess of the loft. The stranger dodged her with a simple somersault, gave a playful bow, and then disappeared, with a single leap, through the trapdoor. It moved so fast!

  Ophelia scrambled down the loft’s ladder. The corridor on that story was deserted. There were only urns there. She met the disconcerted gaze of Thorn, who had come to the bottom of the nearest stairway, alerted by the racket she had made.

  “There’s someone here,” she whispered to him.

  “I’ve seen no one.”

  If the intruder hadn’t gone down, they couldn’t, humanly, be far away. Had they gone up onto the roof?

  Ophelia pulled open a shutter and awkwardly tried to slide open the window, searching through the glass for a shadow among all those that lurked as night ended.

  She stiffened on noticing her own reflection. The reflection of someone dying. She was covered in blood. Even the scarf around her neck—a scarf she knew she wasn’t wearing right now—was spattered with it. There was no longer either a window or a pagoda or urns, only nothingness. A nothingness that had swept everything away apart from her, Eulalia Gonde, and the Other.

  Thorn’s hand on her shoulder brought her back to reality.

  “What’s going on?”

  Ophelia hadn’t the slightest idea. The vision had vanished like a dream, but the nausea wouldn’t go away. She had the inexplicable feeling that all her senses had detected some huge anomaly, out there, that she hadn’t been able to assimilate.

  Thorn looked out of the window himself. His steely eyes instantly froze, as if magnetized by a point in the sky. Except that, right there, there was nothing. Only then did Ophelia understand the signal her senses had sent her.