The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  “If you want to know, mademoiselle, go through the last door.”

  Until now, it had been hard for Ophelia to concentrate fully on the conversation. The strange glasses hurt her eyes, and her fingers were picking up the past of her fake reader’s gloves, imposing visions on her of their previous owner—a certain “Gigi,” from the Standard Program, who suffered from an obsession with cigarette lighters and yogurt.

  This business of the door got her full attention.

  She walked, with measured steps, toward the impressive ornate archway looming in the darkness. Fine letters, similar to those on the OBSERVATION and EXPLORATION doors Ophelia had passed on the day of her admission, were carved into the stone:

  COMPREHENSION

  They definitely had a thing about capital letters here.

  Ophelia screwed up her eyes to peer into the shadows under the archway. After a few moments, she could see two parallel lines. Tracks. What the observer called a door was in fact an underground platform. The tracks disappeared at the far end of a tunnel that descended into the bowels of the earth.

  “Is that the third protocol?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman had joined her at the edge of the platform. She cupped her ear to encourage Ophelia to listen. Ophelia could hear the tracks humming. Headlights dazzled her. A hot gust made her gown slap against her thighs. A train of just one carriage drew to a halt and an automatic door opened in front of her.

  “Each candidate admitted to the second protocol has had the privilege of going through the final door,” declared the woman, crossing herself. “It doesn’t matter that none of them crystallized before you did, they helped us to perfect the Alternative Program. So we weren’t ungrateful. As we’re speaking now, they have penetrated the final secrets of the universe. Bless them.”

  Pensively, Ophelia considered the stationary train.

  “They are all dead.”

  “No one is dead.”

  “So why do they never return?”

  “Yes, mademoiselle. Why?”

  Ophelia held the woman’s disturbing gaze. Was she insinuating that they had chosen not to return? It was hard to believe.

  Inside the carriage, the elegant seats were covered in velvet. The lampshades gave out a mellow light. There was no one in the carriage, not even a driver. The step at the door seemed to be waiting for Ophelia.

  “Am I supposed to board this train?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  Ophelia turned her glasses back to the closed gate of the crypt. Maybe it was from having eaten a real meal, or maybe the feeling of being in danger, but her strength returned, and with it her two family powers. She was no longer a mirror visitor, and she doubted she could repeat the wonders her animism had achieved in the chapel, under the effects of crystallization. However, she could feel the juddering of the mosaics beneath her feet, and the nervous system of the woman opposite her.

  The observer put her pince-nez back on, with a smile.

  “Your shadow is visibly bristling,” she said, with amusement, tapping her fingernail against one of her black lenses. “Are you thinking of using your animism and your claws against me to escape?”

  “Give me just one reason not to.”

  This woman seemed dauntingly confident. Ophelia wondered, once again, what her family power was.

  “In your opinion, mademoiselle, what does the third protocol consist of?”

  Ophelia held her breath. According to the Babelian legend Octavio had told her, the Horn of Plenty had judged humans to be unworthy of it, and had buried itself where no one could find it. Buried. Thorn and Ophelia had searched for it on every story of the columbarium; it was under the building that it was buried. And this underground train led directly to it.

  The woman studied her reaction with sympathy.

  “Curiosity is gnawing at you, isn’t it? You have that in common with all the other candidates. It’s that curiosity that made you such a talented reader of objects, that put you in Anima’s Museum of Primitive History, that led you to Babel’s Memorial, and that finally drew you to this crypt. As long as you don’t know the whole truth, you will never feel whole yourself. This train leads to all your answers.”

  These words made Ophelia feel a mix of exasperation and agitation.

  “All those who have approached the Horn of Plenty have looked truth in the face!” the woman insisted, with unfeigned fervor. “A truth that not only changed their conception of reality, but also changed them, themselves, profoundly. I have seen men and women setting off on the train so many times . . . I’ve lost count! It has always returned empty. No one chose to get back on it.”

  “Do you mean to say that you, personally, have never seen the Horn of Plenty?”

  Ophelia was amazed.

  “I don’t have the right to do so, mademoiselle. Not yet. We, the observers, still have work to finish here, aboveground. But the day is approaching, yes, when it will be our turn to take the train.”

  The woman’s eyes shone behind their black lenses. The beetle on her shoulder used an articulated stalk to tap on her cheek.

  “Quoi? Oh, yes, I was supposed to give you this from Mademoiselle Second.”

  The woman pulled out a piece of paper she had kept in a fold of her sari. Unsurprisingly, it was a drawing: a portrait of Octavio similar to all those Second churned out, depicting him surrounded by torn-up papers. His eyes—always that horrid red pencil—expressed unspeakable distress. A cry for help that Ophelia hadn’t managed to hear. She felt herself shaking, down to her stomach. Second had foreseen what would befall the Good Family, she had, time and again, tried to warn them, and once again, hadn’t made herself understood in time.

  “Sometimes,” murmured the beetle woman, “an echo reaches us before the source that caused it. Those echoes escape our lenses, but never escape Mademoiselle Second. That girl has a keen eye, if I may put it like that. She also asked me to repeat the following to you: ‘But this well was no more real than a rabbit of Odin.’”

  “What on earth does that mean?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” the woman assured, with a bigger smile. “Mademoiselle Second said those words just before your arrival at the Deviations Observatory, and repeated them several times since, which is pretty unusual. I presumed they would mean something to you.”

  Absolutely nothing, thought Ophelia. And, not content to repeat this absurd sentence, Second had illustrated it in a drawing that she had been determined, at all costs, to give to Thorn. She would bear the scar for life.

  “You are using her.”

  The beetle woman rubbed her chin, as if giving serious thought to this accusation.

  “I can’t pretend I understand her, but I think Mademoiselle Second uses herself, all on her own. She is essential to us,” she still, willingly, admitted. “She sees when crystallization is latent in an individual. The first protocol allows us to separate, as far as possible, a subject from their shadow, inverts being particularly prone to such separation, but the splitting is a spontaneous phenomenon. Mademoiselle Second can see in advance when a shadow is about to split. At the time when she wasn’t yet among us, when we could only rely on our lenses, our detecting was tardy: during the time it took to transfer the subject to the second protocol, the shadow separated of its own accord, without any control, or any receptacle, and the echo produced would be lost without crystallizing. Likewise, if we proceeded with a premature transfer, and neither the subject nor their shadow was prepared for the next stage, the outcome was fatal to them. All those stillborn echoes, all those minds afflicted with madness . . . a dreadful waste. Oh, yes, Mademoiselle Second was vraiment a blessing to us. Certainly, we have still had one failure after another since her arrival, many abortive crystallizations, but that way we could gradually correct our protocols, so that, on the day you entered my office, mademoiselle, we were fin
ally ready!”

  Ophelia looked more carefully at the stationary train in front of her, its open door, with step pulled out, its velvet seats inside, the soft light from its lampshades, which didn’t penetrate the darkness of the tunnel.

  “What you say is contradictory. How can one phenomenon be both spontaneous and foreseeable?”

  The beetle woman managed a sibylline smile, annoying Ophelia even more, and then indicated the portrait of Octavio, getting increasingly crumpled between her fingers.

  “Our mastery of crystallization is still not great, but we have at least grasped one thing about it. Loss plays a crucial part in it. It’s what we call ‘the compensation effect.’”

  Ophelia would have produced a conscious echo to fill the void left by Octavio? And Second would have been aware of that? She would have understood that the appearance of a new Other was conditional on the death of her own brother?

  Ophelia tore up the drawing. Today, more than ever, the idea of predestination was repulsive to her. What was the point of drawing shadows, splits, brothers, nails, old women, and monsters, if nothing was down to chance?

  “You have so many questions!” the beetle woman said, sympathetically, as she studied Ophelia’s face with an almost jealous interest. “Allow me to put one more to you. What would you give to see the world through the eyes of the Other?”

  Ophelia gazed at the torn drawing in her hands, just like her shadow had been. Eulalia had experienced a momentous revelation when she had conceived of the Other down that telephone line. Her vision of the world had been changed forever by it. As for Ophelia, she felt just as ignorant as before. She thought of the parrot, and again it made her feel uncomfortable. WHO IS I?

  The woman’s eyebrows twitched, mischievously, while her beetle waved its articulated arm toward the train, as an invitation to board.

  “When you have the answer to that, mademoiselle, you will have all the answers.”

  With these words, to Ophelia’s great alarm, the woman moved calmly away, signed herself as she passed the baptismal font, opened the iron gate, and climbed the stairs, without closing the gate behind her.

  No intimidation, no threat. Ophelia had only one decision to make: the train or the stairs.

  “It can’t be that easy!”

  Ophelia’s protest got lost among the religious statues. The woman and her beetle were already far away.

  On the platform, the door was still open. To Ophelia, boarding this train meant finally finding the Horn of Plenty, but also, perhaps, no longer being able—or no longer wanting, crazy as the idea seemed—to return. Going back up the stairs meant seeing Thorn again, who had been waiting for her for days; or, more likely, being stuck forever in some new spatial loop. Each choice contained both the promise of a reward and the risk of being condemned.

  The train, or the stairs?

  Ophelia was dying for some yogurt.

  She took off Gigi’s gloves, since she didn’t need to pretend anymore. She did, on the other hand, keep the glasses: suitable or not, they were always better than seeing nothing at all. She breathed out to empty herself, and, without boarding the train, seized the handle on the door with her bare hand.

  She ceased to be herself in order to slip into another skin, inlaid with gems, thin and dehydrated, the skin of a loser, the skin of defeat, a skin that hasn’t managed to obtain redemption, but so what, signorina, since I’m ahead of you. This last-chance train, I’m catching it first. Will you succeed where I failed? I don’t give a damn since I will discover the truth before you, and that, signorina, is the only thing, down here, that really counts!

  Ophelia felt a jubilant smile coming to her lips that wasn’t her own. It was the first time someone had deliberately left a thought on an object as a way of addressing a personal message to her. Mediana had boarded the train of her own free will, and was making sure she knew it. Ophelia would have had so many things to ask her, but she immediately felt herself being carried by the tide of time in reverse, going back further and further into the past of all the women and men who had grabbed this handle to climb the step. A crowd of souls, some impatient, others terrified, but all equally unsure of what might await them at the end of the tunnel, while still burning with curiosity.

  Ophelia let go of the handle and looked deep into the tunnel. Black. The blackest of blacks. All those people were convinced that this train would take them to the answers. Had the previous informer of the Genealogists been one of them?

  As long as you don’t know the whole truth, you will never feel whole yourself. It was true. Ophelia longed to give meaning to what had none, to find the one who had torn apart the world—her world—and finally get her revenge on them. Thorn also needed to do that. There remained too many questions without answers, too many victims without the culprit.

  She climbed the step and took a seat in the train. The door immediately closed with a mechanical bang. Ophelia’s heart was making pretty much the same noise. She took a deep breath, ready to face the mysterious terminus of this train. She vowed not to leave Thorn a fake funerary urn in lieu of her. She would return with the Horn of Plenty. She would get back her echo and her mirror-visiting power. Together, they would overcome all their adversaries.

  She was thrown forward as the train set off.

  It wasn’t going down. It was bringing her back up to the surface.

  THE RENUNCIATION

  Ophelia understood nothing about anything anymore. The train was going back into the bowels of the observatory at breathtaking speed, taking her further away, by the second, from her destination, from the Horn of Plenty, and from all the answers. Then it slammed the brakes on. Thrown back into her seat, she felt her lungs empty of air. The shades on every lamp in the carriage shook.

  The door opened. The step came out. Ophelia had arrived.

  She waited a while, in case the train decided to set off again, in the right direction this time, but finally accepted that it wouldn’t. She alighted onto a platform as dark as the tunnel she had left. She was still in the vaults of the ancient imperial city.

  The train left as it had arrived. Absurdly.

  Ophelia felt her way along a labyrinth of stairways. She felt increasingly disorientated. To this was added a new challenge: learning to walk again. After years of bad coordination, suddenly, no thinking was needed anymore, no wondering which leg to put forward first, when to bend which knee, and how to keep her balance. Moving ahead had become disarmingly simple. Ophelia had so little confidence in her own feet, she couldn’t just blindly trust them, but as soon as she sought to correct them, she unfailingly tripped.

  A sense of deep foreboding gripped her. It increased when, arriving at a crossroads, she finally found a source of light. All the bulbs were spent apart from one, which, flickering, showed the path to follow. The same thing happened at each intersection, each junction: one stairway was lit up, the others dark.

  After never-ending steps, Ophelia finally glimpsed the light of day. Of evening, in fact. A stormy dusk, fiery as a furnace, filtered through the barred windows of a cellar. The chirring of crickets combined with a whiff of damp vegetation.

  Freedom seemed too near, too possible. If that train led to all the answers, why, then, had it brought Ophelia back to where she started? Why had she been guided up to the surface, bulb by bulb? She knew far too much, the observatory would prevent her from rejoining civilization. She certainly wouldn’t be allowed to speak to Thorn.

  She would never be allowed to see him again.

  Ophelia blinked, dazzled by the sunset. The last stairway she had just, breathlessly, climbed had opened onto a splendid verandah, its glass panes shrouded by sulfurous clouds. Among the potted lemon trees, three figures, silhouetted against the light, sat at the end of a very long table. All had turned to Ophelia, but she only noticed the tallest of them.

  From the way Thorn had straightened up, he wa
s as surprised as she was.

  “Take a seat,” said a man, indicating a chair at the other end of the table.

  Ophelia sat down in a trance. She recognized the observer from the mechanical lizard he carried on his shoulder: it was he who had slapped her in front of everyone, on the first day. His dimple had turned into an unpleasant furrow. He seemed neither satisfied nor surprised to see her here.

  “It’s not her.”

  Ophelia tried to see whom this voice, at the other end of the table, was coming from. A combination of concentration, apprehension, and decidedly revived animism meant that the substitute glasses, after some refocusing, allowed her to recognize Lady Septima, installed in the seat of honor. Her eyes, redder than ever, were dissecting her at a distance, from under her fringe. The resemblance was so striking, it hit Ophelia like a punch to the stomach. Never had she missed Octavio more than at this table. On his mother’s face, hatred and grief were in harrowing conflict, as though she found it intolerable that this little stranger hadn’t fallen into the void instead of her son.

  “It’s not her, en effet,” said the observer, “but she can be seen as good compensation. She was your pupil, after all.”

  “What compensation?” asked Ophelia.

  She had to force herself not to turn to Thorn, whom she could just see in the corner of her glasses, sitting back a little. If she looked at him right now, she would be incapable of pretense, and would betray the true nature of their relationship.

  “My pupil?” hissed Lady Septima. “She never would have been if Lady Helen, God rest her soul, hadn’t imposed her on me. In any case, that’s beside the point. I was tasked by Sir Pollux, in person, to get all of his descendants to safety in the center of town. The minor arks are no longer safe, we must proceed with the evacuation of our citizens.”

  The lizard man agreed, while wiping his pince-nez on his gown.

  “Families who expressed the desire to do so could leave with our hosts, this very day.”