The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  “You don’t have a handkerchief, I suppose?” she asked the skeleton.

  How long had she been locked up in this chapel? She had fought sleep, before being knocked out by it.

  And there was Thorn, waiting for her return . . .

  A sound of hinges drew her attention to the bottom of the door. A gloved hand was just sneaking through a flap to place a bowl on the floor. Ophelia rushed over to block the hatch with her thumb before it was reclosed. She hadn’t been subtle about it, but there was no complaint, and already the slapping of sandals was moving off. Ophelia counted to a hundred, and then lifted the flap with as little clumsiness as possible. The opening was astonishingly wide for a food hatch. She contorted herself to stick her head through it, and quickly looked up and down the nave: it was deserted, as far as she could see.

  She wriggled through the hatch, centimeter by centimeter. Had she been less slight, it would have been impossible. And yet she wasn’t entirely shapeless. She heard her clothes ripping. Each time she got stuck, she emptied her lungs to gain a little space. The nave’s acoustics were such that the hatch’s hinges were making an awful racket.

  Just don’t sneeze right now.

  Ophelia was almost surprised to find herself on the other side of the door without having attracted the attention of any observers. She had grazed her skin, but she had succeeded.

  And now, which direction to go in?

  To the left? Columns, chapels, rose windows.

  To the right? Columns, chapels, rose windows.

  Left, Ophelia decided. She ran through the smoky haze rising from the censers, with the feeling of losing herself in an eternity of marble and glass. Her myopia didn’t do her any favors. If she did come across any observers, she would only see them at the last moment. She couldn’t find the stairway she’d been forcibly escorted up. On the other hand, after endlessly running, she recognized a piece of her tunic, caught in the hatch of a chapel door. The muffled sound of her own voice was escaping through it:

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

  She had gone straight ahead, hadn’t turned any corners, and, defying all logic, was back to where she had started. This nave was contained in a spatial loop. There could be no doubting it anymore: such architectural mischief could only be the work of Mother Hildegarde.

  Ophelia set off in the other direction, determined to find the opening. There had to be one, to allow the initiated to come and go as they pleased. She flattened herself against a pillar that was sturdy as a tree, just to catch her breath. Her eyes then fell on a structure, tucked into a side aisle between two chapels, with yellow curtains.

  A confessional. If she could just get to the mirror inside, like last time, she would be saved.

  She rushed forward, no longer caring whether she was heard. Speed, not discretion, was of the essence right now. She banged her knee on a kneeling stool and fell into, rather than entered, the confessional.

  She looked for her reflection, but instead of a mirror there was a grille. And behind the grille, a profile.

  An adolescent was calmly leafing through a comic book.

  “Really, miss,” he said, stifling a yawn. “I had reckoned on it taking you less time.”

  He turned his bottle-bottom glasses, and his face tattooed with a big black cross, to Ophelia.

  THE ROLE

  Ophelia had last seen the Knight three years ago, at Farouk’s court. He had been judged, mutilated, and then forcibly sent to Helheim, an establishment with a sinister reputation where the Pole’s miscreants ended up.

  “I’m not there anymore.”

  The adolescent had preempted the question, while licking his fingers to turn the page of his comic book. Ophelia didn’t recognize his voice, it had broken so much. She had only a partial view of him due to the grille between them, but he seemed considerably taller to her. Blond curls spilled over his shoulders. Despite the black cross and thick glasses across his face, Ophelia could make out the bone structure that had replaced his childish chubbiness. She was able to check that he was indeed reflected in the varnished wood of the confessional, proving that he was neither Eulalia Gonde nor the Other.

  The Knight shouldn’t have been there. His presence in this nave, in this observatory, in this part of the world was, quite simply, impossible.

  “It was you,” whispered Ophelia. “All those setups—the exhibit from the museum, the automaton disguised as my mother . . . You handed my past to them on a plate.”

  The Knight’s smile revealed braces.

  “Of course. I promised it to them.”

  “To whom?”

  Ophelia’s ears were ringing. She was no longer conscious of her runny nose, or her swelling knee. The Knight had been deprived of his family power, he could no longer impose his poisonous illusions on her, but he was no less toxic for that. She should have run from this confessional as fast as she could.

  “Who?” she insisted, sternly. “Who made you leave Helheim? Who is really running this observatory?”

  The Knight closed his comic book, took his glasses off, and pressed his face to the grille, so hard that the lattice dug into his skin. He stared with eyes as pale as his cross was dark.

  “Those, miss, who see the infinitely bigger picture! They spoke to me as no adult had ever spoken to me before. They gave me the second chance my own clan refused me.”

  Ophelia backed away when the Knight’s fingers came through the grille to grip it.

  “I waited such a long time . . . I counted every day in that horrendous establishment. Do you have any idea of just how cold I was, over there? I thought that she, at least, would visit me.”

  Coming from the Knight, “she” could only mean Berenilde. Ophelia noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the quick. His obsession with Berenilde hadn’t abated with time.

  “She did not come,” he said, flattening his smile against the grille. “She abandoned me, but I, her knight, I will never abandon her. The day approaches when I will be able to fulfill all of her needs. They promised me plenty! We have at least that in common, miss, don’t we? A loved one to protect.”

  Ophelia appreciated less and less the turn this conversation was taking—if it could be called a conversation. The Knight excelled at monologues; in that, too, he hadn’t changed.

  She lifted the curtain of her compartment and saw, with no great surprise, that the confessional was circled by yellow figures. How stupid she had been! She had played her role to perfection. They had anticipated all of it, from her escape through the hatch to her hiding in the confessional. The message was clear: whatever she did, the observatory would always be one step ahead of her. One echo ahead, in fact. Second’s premonitory drawings probably had something to do with that.

  The Knight put his glasses back on and, with them, regained a little restraint.

  “All of this is clearly part of the Project,” he explained, with excessive politeness. “You have been participating in it for longer than you think. You are special to them—even though you remain, in my humble opinion, desperately ordinary. They were already very well informed about you, you would be amazed! All they expected from me were some details that were more . . . let’s say more significant about your past. The value of Anima’s museum in your eyes, your last day of work there, your complicated relationship with your mother, those kinds of little things.”

  Bothered by the stifling heat in the confessional, the Knight fanned himself with the comic book. Ophelia glimpsed some pink puppy dogs on the cover. She did her best not to show how sullied she felt.

  “I have never confided in you.”

  “But you did confide in your great-uncle. I read every letter you wrote to him when you were in the Pole. What I know isn’t very important,” assured the Knight, as Ophelia’s jaws clenched. “What matters is what they know. They knew, for example, that you would come to
the observatory on your own initiative. It was just a matter of time, they said, all we have to do is wait. It needed to be your decision, do you understand, miss? The whole experiment depended on it. Just as it depends on what you’re going to decide now. Either you’re a good girl and return to your chapel, or we cause harm to Mr. Thorn. Or Sir Henry, whichever. My lady hardly reacted well to my decimating her clan; I would rather not harm her nephew.”

  Ophelia felt as if every drop of her blood was frozen. The Knight’s words drilled into her chest. She should have run away with Thorn when they still could.

  “I want to speak to him.”

  “That’s impossible, miss. They have committed to no harm being done to him for as long as you show goodwill. They always keep their promises. Cross my heart!”

  With his thumb, the Knight had traced the vertical and horizontal lines that darkened his face.

  “Goodwill for what?”

  “For expiating, for crystallizing, and for obtaining redemption. They say that you’re nearly there, miss, but we can’t complete that work on your behalf.”

  “I have no crime to expiate, no idea what crystallization is, and you can keep your redemption.”

  Ophelia’s voice was as parched as she was. Anger was burning up what little moisture remained in her body.

  The Knight’s response gave nothing away:

  “They say that you will discover all that for yourself.”

  “And Mediana? I know that she was here,” said Ophelia, losing patience and throwing caution to the wind. “Has she crystallized? Has she found redemption? What have you done with her?”

  The Knight shook his blond curls, looking annoyed.

  “Your questions are devoid of interest. Personally, I can see only one that merits being asked. ‘Miss Ophelia,’ ‘Artemis’s girl,’ ‘Mrs. Thorn,’ ‘Mademoiselle Eulalia’,” he listed, with an ever broadening smile, “that’s a lot of roles for just one person. Without them, who are you really?”

  He knocked three times on the wood of the confessional. A glove immediately lifted the curtain of Ophelia’s section; the interview was over. The Knight had already dived back into his comic book, while gnawing at what remained of his fingernails.

  Ophelia was returned, under escort, to her chapel. Her swollen knee made her limp, but she made it a point of honor to walk tall. She wouldn’t let them see how shaken she was; absolutely not, she wouldn’t allow them that satisfaction.

  Once the door had been locked, she remained standing in the swirling colors of the chapel, as still as the transfixed skeleton, answering the parrot’s “WHO ARE YOU?”s with stubborn silence. She had already lived through all kinds of experiences that had bruised her ego. She had been belittled by the Doyennes of Anima, humiliated by the courtiers of the Pole, rejected by the city of Babel . . .

  Never had she felt ridiculed to this degree.

  Down by the hatch, the bowl still awaited her. Rice broth, now cold. Ophelia had to lift the bowl with both hands, she was shaking so much. She would have liked to throw it through the spyhole; she drank it. She would have liked to scream loud enough for Thorn to hear her; she kept quiet.

  She turned over the empty bowl. The meal had been as ghastly as all those in the first protocol. If she’d had a magnifying glass, she might have seen microscopic letters printed on the porcelain. With each mouthful, she had swallowed a former echo converted into matter. Her stomach was protesting. This Horn of Plenty was definitely far from perfect.

  What if the observers ended up achieving it, that perfection? If they proved capable of producing endless edible food, drinkable water, working objects, or even lands that didn’t collapse? If they decided to turn themselves into new gods? They would then be as powerful as Eulalia and the Other. As dangerous, too.

  But who really was the brains behind them, in the end?

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

  The bowl slipped from Ophelia’s fingers and broke into pieces at her feet. It instantly evaporated, returning to being aerargyrum, now that its code was shattered—just like with the old sweeper of the Memorial when the hunting rifle’s bullet punctured the plate on his forehead. Ophelia felt hungry and thirsty again, as if she’d never had any broth. She rubbed her tongue on her palate, but the unpleasant taste had disappeared.

  She gazed at the flagging, and the iridescent colors dancing on it. She now understood that this chapel was an improved version of the cellar with the telephone. What had taken Eulalia Gonde months would be accelerated here. The moment Ophelia looked up at the mechanical reflectors, she would be condemning her shadow. Would she survive that?

  She suddenly remembered that strange vapor that had left the Knight’s body when Farouk had withdrawn his family power. Had she seen aerargyrum at the time without realizing it? Was that what crystallizing was? Relinquishing part of oneself? How would that enable the perfecting of the Horn of Plenty? Until now, Ophelia had thought the observatory used the inverts to attract the Other by recreating the conditions of his encounter with Eulalia Gonde, but there was no cellar or telephone here.

  Nothing but a parrot, she mused, glancing at the automaton soldered to the skeleton’s hands. A machine condemned to repeat, idiotically, the same echo.

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

  Ophelia lay down on the flagging, beside the skeleton. She was so close to it, she could see the stone maggots coming out of its nasal cavities. The last time she had been forced to confront herself was in the isolation chamber at the Good Family. She had had to face up to the guilt and cowardice that were preventing her from going forward. She had no desire to live through that a second time.

  Ophelia turned from the cupola in a final act of resistance, but then she thought of Thorn.

  They always keep their promises.

  She opened her eyes wide and stared straight at the giant kaleidoscope above her. The optical shock made her back arch. Her myopia turned the geometrical shapes into a mire of colors. It was as if a rainbow were being pushed through her pupils, and then pushed further, deep into her skull.

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

  Had any broth remained in Ophelia’s stomach, she would have vomited it. She spat out acidic bile instead. She breathed deeply and, once the spasms had subsided, lay flat on her back. Above her, thousands of fragmented mirrors amplified the stained-glass window of the oculus, reinventing new rose windows, again and again and again. It was like confronting a galaxy gone mad.

  It was the start of a very long spectacle, at once sublime and terrible. Ophelia spent hours lying on the flagging, irradiated with colors. She would sit up whenever the migraine became too intense, her nose started bleeding, or she felt dizzy, but she always ended up lying down again. And so her ordeal carried on where she had left off.

  Contrary to what the Knight had told her, the decision as to whether to continue or to stop was in no way hers to make. Not if Thorn depended on it.

  Night never fell in the chapel; Ophelia soon lost all notion of time. She quickly gave up counting the parrot’s countless “WHO ARE YOU?”s. Instead, she made do with counting the bowls they kept sliding through the hatch for her, but their increasing number did nothing to reassure her.

  How she smelt didn’t, either. How long had it been since she’d washed?

  She allowed herself breaks that were as brief as physically feasible, to sleep and eat a little. She believed that the longer she exposed herself to the kaleidoscope, the sooner she would have completed her side of the deal.

  How could she know if she was on the right track? She heard the clicking of the spyhole, from time to time, telling her that she was being constantly observed, but she was never spoken to. No directions, no encouragement, nothing.

  And yet, Ophelia did notice some changes. And they weren’t pleasant.

  Such as realizing that the f
lagstones were inexplicably crumbling under her body, where she had taken to lying. Next, it was the bowls that disintegrated, moments after she held them in her hands, forcing her to gulp down her broth fast, before it disappeared. Her animism was no longer merely disrupted, it had become destructive. Using the chamber pot was nightmarish.

  Ophelia’s exasperation was at its height when her Dragon power started turning against her. Little by little, her arms and calves became covered in scratches, as if she were struggling through invisible brambles.

  Expiation.

  She was outraged at the thought. What was she being punished for? Everything was going from bad to worse, and it was the fault of Eulalia and the Other. A pretentious human and an insatiable echo. They had sacrificed one part of the world under the pretext of saving another; had come to their little agreement between themselves, unbeknownst to everyone else; and they were changing clauses of it today.

  No, it wasn’t Ophelia’s fault that the Other had used her, that she resembled Eulalia, that the arks were collapsing, and that Octavio had lost his life. It wasn’t her fault that she’d had to abandon her family. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t start her own.

  It’s not my fault.

  Ophelia was split wide open. Just then, what was that? She had felt dissociated from her own thoughts. New fractals were forming every second across the chapel’s cupola. Each combination caused her a jolt of pain, but she could no longer blink, or turn her head away.

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

  I am not them and they are not me.

  The lights, colors, and shapes were dancing. They weren’t only up there anymore. They were forming and re-forming in every molecule of Ophelia’s body.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  I am no longer an Animist.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  I am not the daughter Mommy wanted.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  I will never be a mother myself.