The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Thorn stops suddenly, in the middle of the whiteness, and in the middle of the memory—a sudden freeze-frame. From the doorway, Farouk, petrified, stares at Eulalia Gonde’s back; she is on the very edge of the void, facing the hanging mirror, her long dress and thick hair billowing in the draft. She shows less interest in the apocalypse that has torn the world apart than in this mirror. Incredulous, Thorn observes the mental slideshow his memory projects inside his skull, through Farouk’s eyeballs, over Eulalia Gonde’s shoulder. A reflection briefly overlaid hers, as fleeting as lightning: Ophelia (Ophelia with shattered glasses (Ophelia in a blood-spattered gown (Ophelia fatally injured))).

  An advance echo. Thorn has just seen the future inside a memory that is several centuries old. And what he has seen is unacceptable.

  Swiveling round a full 360 degrees, he scans the aerargyrum that surrounds him, searching for a way out. Wherever he might be, if he’s managed to get in, logically, he can get out. And even if he can’t, he must. If need be, he will force open every door on every ark, and a little more than that, even.

  He looks more closely at what, at last, seems to be the contour of something, behind some pretty thick fog. Fancy that. Thorn was looking for a door; he’s just found a well. It’s a very old structure, going by the crumbling state of its mortar, and the spread of moss between each stone. There’s neither bucket nor chain nor pulley, but Thorn would never have considered drinking water that had touched everything unhygienic that nature can throw up. The smell coming from this well is indescribable. Had it not been the only feature of the decor, Thorn would have gladly avoided getting any closer to it.

  He leans over the edge of it, making sure not to touch it. What should be murky inside is, paradoxically, light, almost dazzling, and that spares him no detail: fungi, miasma, worms.

  And, right at the bottom, a kid.

  She is up to her waist in water (is it just water?), and her skin, hair, eyes are so dark that Thorn can’t see the features on the face she’s turning up at him. She says nothing. Against all this darkness, only her eyelashes stand out, abnormally white, framing two wide-open eyes. Thorn has never met this child, and yet he recognizes her without hesitation. It’s Berenilde’s daughter.

  At the sight of her, before even wondering, reasonably, how she could have ended up in such an unlikely place, nearly nine meters underground, in this supposedly nonexistent part of the universe, Thorn is gripped by a feeling of pure hatred that he is the first to be surprised at. He hadn’t realized, until now, how much he had tried to deny the existence of this cousin, who, just by being born, had stopped him being indispensable to his aunt; how much he had begrudged that aunt for not being satisfied with just him; how much he reproached himself for not being able to fill the heart of any mother with joy; how much, finally, he had, in consequence, been tough on Ophelia, at the risk of dragging her down to the bottom of his personal well. And now that he’s looking into his cousin’s big eyes, him above and her down below, he realizes the true extent of his stupidity.

  He must get a move on, before the future revealed by the advance echo, in the Memorial mirror, becomes the past.

  Thorn clambers over the edge with big, awkward movements. Ever though he no longer feels pain that doesn’t mean that his bones won’t break if he falls. He supports himself using the sides of the well (one meter twenty-four in diameter), wedging his boots and fingernails into the gaps in the mortar, and slipping on the slime. Every contact he makes seems abstract, as if he were in an invisible diving suit, but the deeper he goes, the stronger his revulsion. Several times, his bad leg lets him down, almost making him lose his balance. He won’t allow himself to think about what the journey coming back up will be like.

  Having reached the bottom, he is up to his knees in a mire that is definitely not water. His thorn-laden shadow, betraying the shameful power of his claws, certainly isn’t enhancing his appearance: his cousin has flattened herself against the side of the well. So here she is, this great rival (eighty-nine centimeters tall). Thorn can see her face better now, even if he has to bend over to do so. Despite the darkness of her skin, she looks undeniably like Berenilde; he hopes she doesn’t share Farouk’s IQ. Her eyes, looking up at him, are wide open.

  How does one address a kid of that age so as to be understood? Thorn suddenly realizes that he’s unable to do so, and it’s nothing to do with how uneasy she make him feel. He who never forgets a thing can’t even put together a coherent sentence, either semantically, or syntactically. What would he have said to her anyway? That even if she makes him late, on top of making him feel pathetic, he can’t bring himself to abandon her in this well?

  He thinks again of Ophelia, of her blood. Must be quick.

  Thorn, who had always sworn never to adapt his height to that of others, crouches down in the mire. He holds out his arms. The blinding brightness of the well makes the darkness of his scars stand out; he should have buttoned up his sleeves, children get upset over nothing. He grabs hold of his cousin, who comes without a struggle, which is surprising, but preferable. The claws bristle all around him at just this contact, and pulling her out of the mire is no picnic. Thorn is taken aback by the weight of this kid—her lack of weight, in fact. But what amazes him even more, beyond all that he had prepared himself for, is how impulsively she clings onto him with her whole body, as if, despite the nasty claws and rough gestures, his presence here in this well, with her, were the most comforting thing in the world.

  Thorn has the irrational feeling that this weightlessness against him is seeping between his ribs, spreading through all that he is, and freeing him of a heaviness he hadn’t been aware of feeling.

  He wants to find Ophelia, but first he must return Berenilde’s daughter to her.

  No sooner has this priority become clear to Thorn than the space around them starts to change shape. The well has suddenly widened, reaching the size of a room, and the mire has evaporated into a thick layer of aerargyrum. Figures move around nervously, without noticing Thorn and the child he’s awkwardly clasping. Their voices and colors are muted. They would remind him of ghosts were he not convinced of having become one himself. Whatever this room might be, he understands that, as far as time goes, they are all on the same page—these people recto, Thorn verso, and his cousin between the two, like a little ink blot that has marked the paper without soaking right through it.

  The aerargyrum engulfs the entire décor, apart from a large baby carriage, with another kid lying in it. She’s white from head to toe.

  Thorn was sure of it. What he has fished out of that well is a mental projection. His real cousin, physically speaking, has remained on the world’s recto. She’s contemplating, with glazed eyes, the hood of her carriage, pulled out above her, and, judging by how skinny she is, she can’t weigh much more than the little shadow clinging ever more tightly to Thorn. Doesn’t she recognize herself, then? It would be easy, not to say expeditious, to place her in this carriage so she has to return to her body.

  Thorn reviews the hazy figures coming and going around them, until he locates the only one standing still, very upright in her dress, and near enough to the carriage to keep an eye on it. The fog doesn’t allow him to see her face, but Thorn doesn’t need to. He points the figure out to his cousin, whose white eyelashes instantly open wider. If she doesn’t recognize her own body, at least she will recognize her own mother. Thorn can feel her trembling, about to rush forward, but against all expectations, and instincts, she looks at him one last time. At him. Thorn is hardly sensitive to the human eye (that external organ that produces crusts, tears, eyelashes), but those eyes, dark and deep as the night, seem to see in him something that he has always been incapable of seeing.

  The next moment, his cousin vanished from his arms, like a soap bubble. There’s no more carriage, or aunt, or room, or anything. Nothing except for a mirror that returns an image of Thorn that he manages, for the first time in his
life, to find acceptable. The shadow of his family power has drawn in all its claws. There is the immediate, staggering certainty that he will no longer have to suffer their tyranny, because a kid gave him, yes, him, the most absolute feeling a being can feel. And because another kid pushed him into a cage.

  Second hadn’t taken revenge on him. She had made sure that he would be in the right place, at the right time. She had repaired the man who had damaged her.

  Thorn contemplates his arms, now empty, and yet full of a new strength. Arms capable of the impossible. A little more than that, even.

  He now has an advance echo to catch up with.

  THE COUNTERPART

  In the Wrong Side, all perceptions are warped. Colors, sounds, smells, space, and time follow a different logic. As her echo is about to fling a flagstone at her face, Ophelia wonders whether it will be as unpleasant as it seems. At the same time, she also wonders where on earth it managed to find a block of marble in the middle of a dome made exclusively of panes of glass. Finally, she wonders why it wants to kill her, after having saved her life.

  “Who is I.”

  The echo’s face, a perfect reflection of her own, has a questioning expression, behind its glasses, as if waiting for a sign to decide whether or not it should split her skull open. It hasn’t stopped its strange chewing for a second.

  There is no sign. However, appearing from nowhere, a frail adolescent delicately removes the flagstone from the echo’s hands. When he drops it beside his babouches, it goes right through the dome without breaking any glass. With that sorted, the adolescent bows in greeting to Ophelia and her echo, who are both flabbergasted. There is nothing natural about the discoloration of his skin, his eyes, and his hair; just as there isn’t about his presence at the top of the Memorial, indeed.

  It’s Ambrose. An Ambrose with his colors inverted, without a wheelchair, or any deformity. The Ambrose of the funerary urn at the columbarium.

  The very first Ambrose.

  His long, pale eyelashes protect lucid eyes; he doesn’t have the lost expression of others encountered in the Wrong Side. He gives a nod of the turban to the echo, as though in thanks for having brought him Ophelia, and then turns his smile on her. There’s the same gentleness in his manner, the same curiosity in his eyes. She’s relieved that she’s unable to speak to him; like that, he will be unaware of the suffering he causes her by this resemblance, and won’t know, either, that for her, there will only ever be one true Ambrose. This adolescent in front of her is a stranger, and, moreover, forty years older than he looks.

  He was Lazarus’s friend. So he can only be Ophelia’s enemy. She becomes as tense as her scarf when he raises his fists, but, mischievously, he just sticks his thumbs up. Only then does she recognize him. He is the Shadow. It’s him she saw at the edge of Babel, him who guided her to the automaton factory, him she chased in the columbarium, him who visited her in the chapel.

  Ambrose 1 indicates Ophelia to her echo, and her echo to Ophelia, mimes a reconciliatory handshake with his hands, and then cheerily invites them to follow him, as if the matter were closed. The glass structure instantly takes on the consistency of water under Ophelia’s sandals. She feels herself sliding through it, just like the marble flagstone did, but never really feels like she’s falling. Now, all three of them are descending a stairway that goes deep into the Memorial; a stairway presumed no longer to exist for centuries.

  Ambrose 1 leads the way with jaunty little steps. For an individual who has been stuck in an inside-out world for forty years, he is strangely lacking in restraint. Ophelia doesn’t know whether she can trust him, but she knows that he is the Shadow, and that will do her for now. He managed to communicate with her from the Wrong Side, and several times, at that; by doing so, he proved that the frontier between the two worlds is permeable. Maybe he will be able to get Thorn and her back over to the right side?

  Ophelia can’t stop nervously turning her glasses over her shoulder to check that her echo, walking backwards and silently chewing behind her, isn’t still planning to smash her head in. She can’t understand what got into it, back on the dome, but she also can’t fathom her sense of déjà vu.

  All around them, the Memorial is even crazier than everywhere else in the Wrong Side. Half of the building is shrouded in an aerargyrum haze, through which Ophelia recognizes the thousands of bookcases, the transcendiums, and the topsy-turviums winding, story by story, around the vast atrium. But the other half of the Memorial, in the negative, is unknown to her. It is all old parquet floors, rooms invaded by vegetation, and deserted classrooms. It is where the family spirits grew up.

  Ophelia lingers at a paneless window. Of course. After the Rupture, part of the tower was rebuilt above the void, because the architects at the time thought it had gone down with the rest of the island and ocean. They didn’t know that it was still there, but inverted. Ophelia remembers never feeling at ease when she browsed the bookcases in this section, a malaise that she put down to the precipice beneath that part of the foundations. She now understands that it actually came from the coexistence of the two spaces.

  And Ambrose 1 is leading her to where the two spaces are most entwined: the heart of the building. On one side there is the weightless globe of the Secretarium, in which a second globe hovers, where Eulalia Gonde’s secret room was immured. On the other, there’s a tangle of old spiral staircases. The two dimensions overlap so smoothly that the walls of the globes and steps of the staircases are as translucent as tracing paper.

  In places, Ophelia can see, under her feet, a floor that is located two hundred meters further down. She even spots people in the atrium, tiny as nail heads in the midst of the fog. Could it be the great interfamilial meeting now taking place in the world’s right side, on another plane of existence?

  Ambrose 1 stops with a bow. With no architecturally logical transition, Ophelia realizes that they have arrived at Eulalia Gonde’s room. She is disappointed. She was hoping to find Thorn there, by some extraordinary ricochet of fate, but no one’s there. Half of the room is immersed in an almost aquatic blend of mist and cobwebs. The other half offers a spectacular contrast, with its highly polished furniture, floral wallpaper, and all of Eulalia Gonde’s personal effects, including her typewriter, which had remained intact in the Wrong Side.

  And, between these two halves of the room, straddling both worlds, the hanging mirror. When she had been in the Right Side, Ophelia had passed through it twice by accident. She finally sees the wall, inverted at the same time as the old world, to which the mirror has never ceased to be attached. Rather than a wall, it’s more of a partition between Eulalia Gonde’s bedroom and her writing study. How many hours had she spent sitting there, conversing with the Other, literally solving the world’s problems together? Ophelia almost feels as though she’s reliving them herself, those hours, as if two memories were superimposed inside her, like the two halves of the Memorial.

  In the meantime, she hasn’t got very far. She turns to her echo, which is having fun randomly tapping away on the typewriter, its letters having disappeared from its keys; and then to Ambrose 1, who is passively waiting in a corner of the room. Is this what he wanted to show her? An empty room?

  He indicates the mirror to her, with an insistent smile.

  Ophelia goes up to it. Looks at herself in it. Is transfixed.

  She accepted the idea that the Wrong Side was governed by singular laws, more symbolic than scientific, but to see her reflection—her authentic reflection—gives her a terrible shock. This person, in the mirror, has nothing in common with her. She has neither her features nor her measurements nor her eyes nor her hair. And yet, she is the final piece missing from the jigsaw puzzle.

  It explains everything. It explains absolutely everything. Ophelia now knows who the Other is, she knows what the counterpart was to the inversion of the old world, she knows the role this mirror played in history, and that it wi
ll still play. She also knows why it was imperative that she be aboard that long-distance airship, with those expelled from Babel, because otherwise the entire course of history would have been changed forever.

  She rushes over to Ambrose 1, shows him the mirror, the door, the ground, the ceiling, trying to make him understand, with exaggerated gestures, that now he must help her to find Thorn, because they have something very important to accomplish out there, behind behind, together!

  The old adolescent folds her hands in his, to contain their flapping. Black teeth glint through the gap in his smile, but something deep in his eyes, with far more experience than Ophelia, makes her calm down. She realizes that he, too, has something very important to convey to her, and has done for a long time, even before their first encounter on the edge of the ark. Ophelia may have been unaware of his existence then, but he was already aware of hers, even if he had to wait for the two worlds to be sufficiently merged in order to appear to her. He explains all that to her without uttering a word, with his eyes.

  He gently swivels Ophelia’s hands, right palm facing up, left palm facing down. Then, contrariwise, he swivels them again, right palm facing down, left palm facing up. And then again, facing up, facing down, facing down, facing up, faster and faster. The echo copies their movements, dislocating its elbows, as if it were a game with rules it would never understand.

  As for Ophelia, she fears understanding them.

  The scarf jumps on her shoulders. A flash has just sliced through the air, as if lightning had silently struck at the very heart of the Memorial. In a blink, half of the room disappeared and reappeared, as if trying to rejoin its other half in the world on the right side. Ophelia silently questions Ambrose 1, who concurs, confirming her fears.