The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  The red pencil she was holding at this precise moment. Her new drawing depicted a shadow torn in two.

  She handed it to Ophelia, declaring solemnly:

  “But this well was no more real than a rabbit of Odin.”

  There was a crunching of gravel. Collaborators, inverts, and nanny-automatons were all moving aside to let the beetle woman pass through. She came close enough for Ophelia to see clearly the metal insect gleaming on her shoulder. With a mechanical click, it held out a magnifying glass, allowing the observer to take a close look at the drawing.

  She couldn’t stifle a jubilant smile.

  “Please follow us, Mademoiselle Eulalia. You are ready for the second protocol.”

  Hail fell from the sky.

  THE LOOP

  EXPIATION. CRYSTALLIZATION. REDEMPTION. Ophelia sensed the metal of the letters inlaid in the flagging under her feet, and the heady perfume from the censers all around her. She was moving between the nave’s towering pillars with a feeling of extreme heaviness, rather like the hail that had almost knocked her out as a cortege of observers escorted her here. Hail that had no effect on this place. The silent stained-glass windows presented a stark contrast to the commotion outside.

  This second protocol, where was it really located? Ophelia had been led here along a different route to that she had taken the first time. She had been led through an underground passage, before going back up a particularly narrow stairway. From then on, it was an endless succession of the same pillars, the same stained-glass windows, the same stoups, the same chapels.

  She felt as if she were stuck in the microgroove of a record.

  Since she no longer had her glasses to rely on, she prioritized her ears. The observers’ clothing, drenched in rain, made a continuous drip-dripping sound that combined with the slap-slapping of their sandals. They formed a moving wall, all around her, pushing her relentlessly forward without touching her or speaking to her. There were many of them—too many for her to use her claws on them.

  Ophelia had got herself into another fine mess. She wondered whether she would be taking Mediana’s place on the kneeling stool, but she couldn’t see her anywhere. Had the Seer been transferred to the third protocol? Would her fake funerary urn soon be joining all those lining the columbarium?

  Ophelia should have been scared. The trap she had been so determined to avoid had just closed on her, and Thorn probably had no idea.

  The cortege of observers stopped. All together, they formed an unavoidable yellow corridor leading to the door of one of the chapels. Their faces, alert behind their pince-nez, remained inscrutable; their arms, in their long leather gloves, made not the slightest movement. Ophelia had only a door handle to turn, but she had a lengthy struggle between right and left hand before managing to do so. No sooner had she gone through the door than it was closed behind her and locked with a key. That was it. No one had told her what was expected of her, just like for the first protocol.

  Ophelia blinked repeatedly, trying to clear away the flood of colors catching in her lashes. Lit through the stained glass of an oculus, the chapel’s cupola was composed entirely of reflectors that changed position every second, with a discreet mechanical hum. Ophelia immediately looked away from it. It was the same principle as the kaleidoscopic tunnel and the screenings: looking at it would mean further distorting her family power. Or even worse. She tensed her shoulders, hoping to prevent the split in her shadow predicted by Second’s pencil. She hated the idea that the future could be told in advance, just as she hated the bloodied reflection that had imposed itself on her twice already, like a promise of imminent death. She couldn’t see the “aerargyrum” made up of the shadows and echoes, but if it really was possible to convert it into matter, then she would shape the future her way.

  The chapel was empty. No chairs, no tables, no cupboards, nothing.

  Ophelia touched all the surrounding marble, looking for some crack as a way out, something to grip to hoist herself up toward the cupola. She succeeded only in breaking her fingernails. The only object she found, stored in a stone recess at floor level, was a chamber pot. Lurking inside it was a fetid liquid she preferred not to know too much about.

  Evidently, she would be here for a while.

  She noticed a strange relief, on the surface of the stone, right in the center of the flagging and under the light from the oculus. A figure lying on its back. A recumbent effigy? She approached cautiously to see it more clearly. The sculpture depicted a fleshless corpse, ribs in the air. It wasn’t an effigy, it was a transfixed skeleton. Its hollow eye sockets stared at the play of the reflectors above, as if showing the example to follow: lying down and looking to the end of time.

  There was an inscription carved into the flagstone its skull rested on:

  “TRUTH IS A LIE THAT LISTENS TO ITSELF.”

  It was only then that Ophelia emerged from the torpor she had sunk into since the beetle woman’s announcement. She suddenly became aware of the water dripping from her hair, of her tunic stuck to her skin, of her legs shaking, as if her own body were finally reminding her of its existence.

  She was terrified. She had never ceased to be, but had become too estranged from herself to realize it, until now.

  Before her, the hideous figure was bathed in the changing, clashing colors from the cupola. Ophelia closed her eyes. Instead of the transfixed skeleton, she saw the walkways, dormitories, corridors, and laboratories of the Good Family. She saw hundreds of students plummeting into the perpetual storms of the great void, where no one had ever been before. She saw the conservatoire giving way to extreme pressure, she saw the gymnasium windows exploding, she saw furniture and bodies smashed to pieces.

  She saw Octavio thrown against the ceiling of his room while sleeping. Chewed up by the invisible mouth of the Other.

  Ophelia reopened her eyes to gaze at the slack jaw of the skeleton, depicted by the sculptor with a morbid realism. Was that stranger she had pursued in the columbarium really responsible for all those deaths, as she was starting to believe? If she had caught him in time, could she have prevented a new landslide? She hadn’t managed to see his face once, and yet, at every encounter, he gave her an indefinable sense of familiarity.

  “Who are you?” she muttered, as if he could hear her from here.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  Ophelia felt her stomach lurch: it was the distorted sound of her own voice. She hadn’t noticed it, but the skeleton clutched a tiny automaton in its bony hands. A parrot. It had seemingly been designed to reproduce the first phrase it recorded.

  “WHO ARE YOU?” it repeated in Ophelia’s distorted voice. “WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?”

  Right. The recording was stuck on a continuous echo. Ophelia hit the parrot to stop it, but only succeeded in hurting herself. The echo was ricocheting against all the cupola’s reflectors, combining its cacophony with that of the colors. This chapel was just like Eulalia’s cellar: a place designed to be an echo chamber.

  “WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?”

  It was hellish. Ophelia now fully understood what Ambrose had meant when telling her that, of all Lazarus’s clients, the Deviations Observatory placed the strangest orders with him. That, at least, wasn’t a lie.

  She hammered on the door of the chapel for a long while before finally hearing some sandals approaching. A spyhole opened onto a small grille at eye level—for someone of average height, at least. Ophelia had to stand on tiptoe to glimpse the black pince-nez of an observer.

  “Let me out,” she demanded.

  No reply.

  “WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?”

  “Make this machine shut up, then.”

  Silence, again.

  Ophelia decided to lay her cards on the table.

  “Alright,” she said, loudly, to be
heard over the parrot. “You have a Horn of Plenty that doesn’t work. You need the Other, and, to draw him here, you need me. But why? What are your intentions? What will you do next? Just in case you haven’t noticed, it’s the fate of all the arks that’s at stake, out there.”

  The observer again refused to respond. And yet, rather than simply ignoring Ophelia and closing the spyhole, he just stayed there, waiting. Waiting for what?

  EXPIATION.

  Was that what they wanted to obtain from Ophelia? Repentance? A confession? Renunciation? Did she, like Mediana, have to ask for forgiveness for all her mistakes? For all her transgressions since turning her back on her family, and on Eulalia Gonde’s plans?

  “One moment, please,” she said.

  She moved away, returned, and threw the contents of the chamber pot at the pince-nez. The spyhole closed with a furious slam.

  “WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?”

  Ophelia sat against a wall, closed her eyes, and put her hands over her ears. Once again, anger was stronger than fear. She had wanted to return to the second protocol; now she was here, even if not in the way she had planned, she would finish what she had started. She would give them nothing more without getting some explanations.

  Silence for silence, words for words.

  Take it or leave it.

  She takes it.

  The sun. The fresh air. The open sea, above all.

  Eulalia rose early this morning with the need to escape from her study. Yesterday, she finished her latest story. The typewriter keys hadn’t even cooled down before she had thrown it all into the wastepaper basket, without even rereading what she’d written. It’s the second typescript she’s thrown away.

  Where had this sudden dissatisfaction come from, then? Since her encounter with the Other, she has never stopped feeling inspired, about everything. Never. So, what is it?

  Eulalia sniffs.

  Feet in the sand, hands in pockets, and eyes on the ocean, she breathes in the sea air, painfully. The fault surely lies with those sinusitis attacks. It’s hard to remain optimistic when one spends every night gasping for breath. Eulalia is still young, but she feels prematurely aged. She has offered half of her life to the Other.

  “Blasted brat!” screams a voice.

  Eulalia turns toward the peace school, which occupies nearly the whole island. Her school. She looks around for the caretaker, who is cursing louder and louder in Babelian; she finds him about five meters above the mimosa trees, in a state of levitation, hands gripping his turban so as not to lose it. He promises Ouranos the thrashing of the century if he doesn’t bring him down immediately.

  Their school. They have grown so fast . . . too fast. Already, they have all overtaken Eulalia in height, but they are still only children. Helen can’t go anywhere without her roller skates. Belisama accidentally made a eucalyptus sprout up in his bed. Midas turned all the silverware in the kitchen into zebra dung. Venus secretly bred boa constrictors in the fourth-floor bathroom. Artemis made an identical replacement head for the statue of the soldier outside the school, only to decapitate it once again. The lighthouse is under repair since Djinn, Gaia, and Lucifer conspired to invent some new meteorological phenomenon. Janus . . . Where has he disappeared to again, that one?

  Eulalia sniffs.

  She blows her nose, without managing to clear it. This dissatisfaction, whatever its cause, seems greater as soon as her attention turns to the school. She gazes at the sea, and, in the distance, glowing red in the sunset, the mainland still, and forever, being rebuilt. The war is not far away. Wherever one goes, the war is never far away.

  Eulalia reflects that they will need a guard to protect the school. A scarecrow. She’ll catch the boat shortly to return to the observatory. Everyone’s dead over there, since the great bombardment, just as the Other had predicted to her. The Horn of Plenty is hidden somewhere under the ruins, in a place known only to Eulalia from now on. She had promised herself not to convert anything else, but the children will need protection until they’re fully mature. The caretaker, who’s still cursing above the mimosas, is no spring chicken anymore.

  As for Eulalia, she may have lost half of her life expectancy, but time will soon be stopping for her. Her entire reality will be changing.

  She notices, while taking her walk, a large sandcastle; probably one of Pollux’s, judging by the aesthetic finesse of its construction. She then realizes, somewhat disconcertingly, that she’s tempted to give it a good kick.

  “Gonde?”

  Eulalia looks up at Odin. She hadn’t heard him coming. He is standing back a little, looking sideways, shoulders hunched, as if he felt he was taking up too much space, his large body a splash of white on the red beach. He is splendid . . . and so imperfect. Eulalia feels like both shooing him away and hugging him; she does neither.

  “I would like to submit something to you.”

  He expresses himself in Eulalia’s mother tongue, the language her deported parents spoke, that of a family that has disappeared, and of a distant land she can barely remember anymore. That language, if all goes according to her plans, will one day become the language of all humanity. Because war is when we stop understanding each other.

  “With your permission,” adds Odin, faced with her silence.

  Eulalia sniffs.

  This child is as quick to seek her opinion as he is to question it. When will he finally learn to hold his own, independently of her?

  “Submit it to me,” she replies.

  Odin slowly straightens up, making himself even taller, his translucent eyes screwed up in concentration, like a piano pupil preparing to play a piece to his teacher he’s practiced a hundred times. Between Odin’s almost joined hands, a mist gradually gains substance until it’s a tangible object. A box. He tries not to show it, but Eulalia notices, from the slight relaxing of his eyebrows, that he is relieved.

  She takes the box from his fingers, tests its solidity, turns it over, then opens it. It’s empty, of course.

  “And? That’s it?”

  Odin seems taken aback by Eulalia’s reaction. To tell the truth, she is as taken aback herself. It’s the first time he’s managed to stabilize an illusion; he must have practiced a lot to push the limits of his poor imagination this far.

  She must encourage him, he’s on the right path.

  “Pass me your Book,” she says, instead.

  Odin’s face dissolves like snow, but already he’s pulling out, from under his jacket lapel, the work he’s never without. He tries, in vain, to control this gesture with his other hand, subject to an internal struggle that’s lost in advance. Like his brothers and sisters, he is programmed to obey its orders. Eulalia is well placed to know that, since it is she herself who created this line of instruction in each Book.

  She pulls her faithful fountain pen out of her pocket and unscrews the cap with her teeth.

  “Are you angry, Gonde?”

  In Odin’s eyes, which he is careful to keep averted, Eulalia detects a glint of hatred and love combined. He is unhappy that he disappointed her, as much as disappointed himself by her.

  She turns the pages of the Book, conscious that she is touching Odin’s most personal possession. She knows by heart each of the myriad symbols that make up the code she invented. One section controls Odin’s motivity, another his ability to analyze, and yet another his perception of colors. She makes her choice, and stabs the metal nib into the flesh of the Book, ignoring Odin’s stifled cry, accepting the pain she is inflicting on her own child. She crosses out a line of code, making sure she marks only what she wants to.

  “You will eat without enjoyment,” she said, returning his Book to him. “No caress will seem sweet to you. I have deprived you of your right to feel pleasure.”

  Odin hugs his censored Book to his chest. The sea breeze lifts his long, Polar locks. His wide-open eye
s are filled with both disgust and adoration, but he is careful not to look straight at Eulalia. Despite what she has done to him, he doesn’t want to hurt her with this power that he can’t control.

  “It’s ordinary ink,” Eulalia comments, while screwing the cap of her fountain pen back on. “It will fade with time. Use it to help me save the world.”

  Odin runs off, leaving behind him the imprint of his shoes in the sand.

  Eulalia sniffs.

  She takes off her glasses, more dissatisfied than ever, without understanding why. As she puffs on the lenses to wipe them, the setting sun is reflected in them, and, suddenly, she sees it: the reflection gives her a knowing wink.

  Soon, says the Other.

  Eulalia hurls her glasses as far away as she can. Her temples are throbbing madly. Her sinuses are hurting. Her head is going to explode. What is she becoming? Through taking herself for God, is she losing sight of herself?

  It’s not her study she’s escaping from. It’s the mirror that hangs in it.

  “Soon,” she murmurs, her voice shaking. “But not yet.”

  Ophelia sniffs.

  She had woken with a start, breathless as if she had been running, gripped by a sudden feeling of falling upwards. For one moment, she thought the observatory itself was now collapsing. She sat up, numb from having dozed off on the flagstones. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore.

  “WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?” the parrot continued to churn out.

  The chapel was still there, immutable, its door stubbornly shut. The same delicate light was filtering through the stained glass of the oculus, as if the sun had stood still. The only variations in the lighting were down to the cupola’s mechanical reflectors, which Ophelia made sure not to look at. She felt headachy and thirsty. She had only a vague memory of her dream, but she had emerged from it with a stinking cold.