“I am peacefully deepening . . . deeply peace-loving. I have always stood up to all worms of defiance . . . forms of violence. So please, my dear, don’t force me to yurt who . . . hurt you.”
The bench had disappeared; Anima had, too. They were now both in the middle of what seemed to be a schoolyard, on the ark of Cyclope. The place had been hastily evacuated. Hoops, marbles, and satchels were floating here and there, in a state of weightlessness, abandoned on the spot. A chasm the size of a volcano had swallowed up all the surrounding buildings.
Ophelia was alone facing the Other, whose every fingernail she could feel digging into her throat. She had to shift her feet not to lose her balance. She didn’t know how she had the guts to keep speaking to her, but the words poured out almost despite her:
“You sincerely think you’re the real Eulalia, don’t you? You’ve appropriated her ideas, her contradictions, her ambitions, you’ve adopted her scenario to perfection for centuries, but it’s merely a part that you’re playing. This mask that you wear, you know, deep down, that it only covers up a void. You’re a reflection that’s lost its own reflection. That’s why Eulalia’s face wasn’t enough for you, why you started reproducing more faces, more masks, always more . . .”
The Other dug her nails deeper into Ophelia’s throat. At the other end of her elastic Metamorphoser’s arm, at the top of her immodestly arched Arkadian body, it was her face’s turn to change appearance. Her skin grew pale down to the neck, her hair became thick and curly, and a pair of glasses sprouted on her nose.
This head of a woman, who looked like Ophelia without really being her, was that of Eulalia Gonde.
“Who are you to seaside . . . decide who I am and who I am not?”
Ophelia was starting to run out of breath, but she kept going:
“Ask yourself where she herself is.”
The Other’s eyes contracted at the same time as her muscles. The setting itself started to fluctuate again, sweeping them from a grand skating rink to a department store, then from zoological gardens to a beach made out of mandalas. They were being carried from ark to ark, but whatever the location, the ground was pockmarked with sinkholes. These pieces of world, now on the Wrong Side, had left behind nothing but aerargyrum vapors.
Hanging from the fist around her throat, and seeing stars, Ophelia couldn’t breathe anymore. The scarf struggled, in vain, to free her. Did one turn into aerargyrum when one died? She doubted it. She would never see Thorn again.
The Other finally murmured, reluctantly, with head hanging, as though addressing Carmen’s naked body:
“Lead us to Eulalia Gonde.”
Ophelia collapsed in a heap of scarf. Air surged into her lungs; she coughed for ages to get her breath back. The stars scattered. Above her, a globe hovered under a sky of glass. She was back in the Memorial, in the atrium itself, in the middle of the family spirits.
At the Other’s feet.
His polymorphism had got worse: as well as the naked body of an Arkadian, the oversized arm of a Metamorphoser, and Eulalia Gonde’s head, he now sported the long nose of an Olfactory, and was sniffing the air for a particular smell. He stood in the center of the circle of family spirits, and was casting his eye around suspiciously, from one to the next, as if the culprit he was after was hiding inside their very skins. They must have recognized who he was themselves, behind his eclectic appearance, and despite their bad memories, because they all backed away on seeing the Other. All apart from Farouk, who, having become like a statue of ice, was staring at his face with fascination and revulsion.
As the patriarch of Babel, Pollux greeted the Other with a timid bow.
“Welcome. I believe we were expecting you. With regards to . . . well . . . this.”
Hesitantly, he indicated the perilously close abyss that had devoured the entrance to the Memorial, and distress clouded his golden eyes.
“Our sister . . . My sister . . . I’ve already forgotten her name. She has left us, but I know, yes, I know that she would ask you for an explanation if she were still here.”
“That’s not him.”
Farouk seemed the first to be disconcerted by his own words, as if he himself didn’t know where they came from. And yet he repeated them, extremely slowly:
“That’s not him. That’s not God. Not ours.”
He had pressed a large white hand to his Book, secreted somewhere in the thick layers of his Polar overcoat. A part of him, deeply buried, remembered having already been desecrated.
The Other paid no attention, either to Pollux or to Farouk.
“Where is she?”
It was more an order than a question, addressed only to Ophelia. She tried, awkwardly, to get to her feet, leaning on the halves of her hands. Her neck was hurting her. She searched all around for the real Eulalia Gonde, but didn’t find her. Looking up, her eyes crossed those of Artemis, with their vaguely questioning expression, as if the family spirit suspected some kinship between them, but couldn’t remember exactly what. Looking up even higher, she saw all the people crowding around the railings of each story, and, among them, on the top story, her family, all calling to her and gesticulating, frantically.
Stay up there, she felt like shouting back at them.
“I don’t see Eulalia Gonde here,” murmured the Other. “Would you have panel mutated . . . manipulated me?”
Just as Ophelia was wondering whether she would survive another strangling, she jumped, as a large cat dived between her calves. Twit?
“Come, come now, anger does nothing for your complexion.”
Archibald had, literally, appeared out of nowhere, twirling his hat on his forefinger. True to character in all circumstances, he was smiling. Gail, who had likewise not been there a second before, dragged Ophelia as far away as possible from the Other, and then, without asking, lifted her chin. She swore when she saw the bleeding fingernail marks on her neck.
“Should have kept that scum under triple lock and key, not been content to spy on it out of the corner of some opera glasses. You’ve messed up, Don Janus.”
The air in the atrium crumpled like fabric, and a giant half-man half-woman burst through it, landing on his feet beside the family spirits, as if space, to him, was merely a theater curtain. Ophelia now understood where Archibald, Gail, and Twit had sprung from. She also now understood why the Other had kept moving from ark to ark, to elude the surveillance he was under.
With Janus, the siblings were finally all present. This family spirit, of indefinable gender, made his high heels ring out on the flagstones and then planted himself in front of the Other, looking down on him from on high.
“You did not respect our agreement. You were supposed to maintain total neutrality in exchange for the power of my Aguja. You claim to be the only person who can stop the landslides? Fine. But don’t interfere in our business, and, above all,” he stressed, with a theatrical flourish in Ophelia’s direction, “never again raise your hand to one of our children.”
With a grotesque contortion of his legs, the Other turned to Janus. The inhuman sound that came out of his mouth reverberated across all the marble and glass of the Memorial:
“Until today, I have watched over each young of new . . . one of you, from the wings. I believed you to be capable of preserving the perfect world that I had created for you. I was too permissive. The moment I delegate, you go astray. Chins are going to range. . . things are going to change.”
Murmuring spread around each story of the Memorial, but no one spoke out loud. Ophelia did, however, notice a man, too far away to recognize, charging down a transcendium.
“I will save this world for the second time,” declared the Other, “and then I will devise new rules. Many rules. I will earnestly pleasure . . . personally ensure that everyone abides by them. No more intermediaries. I will be everywhere, I will know everything.”
The fam
ily spirits exchanged uneasy glances. Farouk was visibly struggling to stay focused on what was unfolding here. The most distressing thing, thought Ophelia, was that they would all soon have forgotten what they were seeing and hearing right now. All infinitely malleable, they hadn’t been deprived of their memories for nothing. Indeed, that was doubtless the first thing the Other had done, after taking Eulalia Gonde’s place.
Only Janus seemed to be in full possession of his faculties. His dark eyes shone, as he pulled, ironically, on the curly end of his moustache.
“And what if we refuse?” he sniggered.
With nostrils flaring, the Other sniffed him out, like an animal. A third arm sprang out from one of his ribs, like a jet of water, plunged into Janus’s skull like a blade, and then steadily continued its downward trajectory, with some crunching of bones, until it had sliced him right down the middle. Janus’s entire body then went up in smoke, leaving on the floor just a Book, cut in half.
Nothing remained of Janus. It had taken the Other no more than three seconds to bring to a close several centuries of immortality.
Ophelia’s astonishment was shared by Archibald, Gail, the entire Memorial. Twit flattened his ears back and growled very quietly. The family spirits were all bent double, hugging their stomachs, and looking deeply pained, as if the death of their brother had affected them physically.
“What have you done?”
Elizabeth stepped out from behind Pollux, who was gently sobbing. Long and white as a candle, and unnoticed until then, she stared unusually wide-eyed at the Book that was torn in two. She made straight for the Other, so fast that her frock-coat flaps lifted, clicked her boots together while raising her fist to her chest, on which the LUX insignia gleamed, and glared at this protean creature, which now bore no resemblance to a human.
“I . . . I don’t know who you are, or what you are, but, in the name of the power conferred upon me, I am placing you under arrest.”
Ophelia had to admit that she was impressed. As for herself, like all those present in the atrium, she no longer dared to blink for fear of being sliced in two. She finally saw Elizabeth as she was, or, more precisely, as she herself could have been. Her tawny hair, her freckles, her tallness, her good sight, even her age: none of all that really belonged to her. Elizabeth had taken from Ophelia, just as Ophelia had taken from Elizabeth.
With the only difference being that Ophelia was now aware of it. It was her she had seen, instead of her own reflection, in the mirror in the Wrong Side.
The Other, whose third arm was writhing with tentacular spasms on the floor, suddenly reached the same obvious conclusion. What remained of Eulalia Gonde’s face, under that prominent Olfactory nose, cracked into a smile.
“So it’s you.”
Elizabeth jumped when the Other disappeared and then reappeared right in front of her, deformed body against formless body, a mere breath away. Avidly, he studied the shadows under her eyes, her wounds, her shapelessness, feeding off all the weaknesses he discerned in her.
“It’s you.”
“Sorry?”
Elizabeth seemed completely lost. She tightened her knees to lessen their shaking. The Other’s smile just kept on growing, tearing his skin as if it were a fabric mask.
“You are Eulalia Gonde.”
Elizabeth instantly stopped trembling. Those four words, which should have restored her identity to her, had the opposite effect. Her body withered even more, her face emptied of all substance. It was as if her spirit had withdrawn deep inside her.
“It really doesn’t matter who, of the two of us, is first, does it?” continued the Other. “I am superbly infinite . . . infinitely superior to you. Just look at yourself, you pathetic little thing, you don’t even know who you are anymore. So I am going to tell you: you are a traitor. You belong with all that was corrupt about the old world. By returning, you engendered . . . endangered those you claimed to want to save. It is my duty to send you back into the mirror that you should never have left.”
A third leg sprang out of the Other to give an almighty stamp on the ground. The atrium’s flagstones exploded due to a violent seismic surge. The earth shook. The cupola rained down a torrent of glass shards. The bookcases spewed out their collections of books. Ophelia had been flung to the floor by the quake; roaring and screaming rang in her ears. When it was all over, her scarf wiped the dust off her glasses.
She couldn’t recognize the atrium. The ground was carpeted in glass and rubble. The colonnades had cracked, some had collapsed. Several of the family spirits held fatally injured men and women in their arms, who had been sent flying from the stories above by the impact. Ophelia couldn’t see any member of her family among them, but screams were still reaching her from all four corners of the Memorial. She hoped they were safe and sound up there. She suddenly realized that she would, herself, have ended up crushed under a block of marble had Artemis not used her animism to hold it back.
“Thank you.”
In the middle of all the debris, there was a couple in a passionate embrace. The man Ophelia had seen charging down the transcendium, it was Fox. With his hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, he was clinging to Gail as tightly as she was clinging to him. He was covering her in kisses, she was covering him in insults. A bubble of joy in an ocean of chaos.
Ophelia kept at bay the vision of Thorn, left on his own in the Wrong Side. She couldn’t allow herself to weaken; not now.
As for Archibald, he was covered in scratches. He had mainly Twit to thank for them, having squeezed him tight to protect him from the splinters of glass. He let out a long, appreciative whistle.
Ophelia’s eyes followed his. Exactly where the Other’s third heel had struck the ground, a combination of rough rock and carved stone formed a stairway that had not been there before. It reached, steeply, all the way up to the floating globe of the Secretarium, under a cupola now bereft of glass.
The hanging mirror, Ophelia realized. The mirror in which Eulalia and the Other had changed places on the day of the Rupture. It was there that everything would be decided.
THE SPACE
The void was gaining ground. It had swallowed up the automaton-statue from reception, and was continuing to eat into the Memorial, mouthful after mouthful, as if the Other’s excessive use of his family powers was also powering the inversion of the world. The ever-stronger pull of the wind made Ophelia feel as if she were fighting against the current of a river. At this rate, there would be nothing left to save.
“I hope you have a plan, Mrs. Thorn,” Archibald whispered to her, as he contemplated the stairway climbing up to the sky.
“I do have one.”
Except that it relied entirely on Elizabeth. Ophelia had been relieved to find her virtually unscathed. She had fallen to her knees before the Other, her hair streaming over her shocked face. Without her, it would have all been over. With her, it might well be, too. Everything now depended on whether she was willing, or not, to accept the truth. She played along when the Other took her by the hand, like a little girl, and forced her to climb the stairway with him, no longer concerned with anyone else. At every step, new limbs and organs—arms, feet, noses, eyes, mouths, ears—sprouted from his body, making him lose any semblance of a figure. He was becoming ever more massive, ever more unstable, as though every identity he had stolen over the past centuries sought preeminence.
As he gradually made his ascent, the men and women at each level drew back, but couldn’t look away. The Other could have transported himself directly, and discreetly, to the inside of the Secretarium, to send Elizabeth back to other side of the mirror, but he had gone for the dramatic performance. The stairway, this step-by-step ascent, was a public condemnation.
God had come out from the wings, and wouldn’t be returning to them.
A shiver coursed through Ophelia, even beneath her skin. She thought of Janus, the immense, the el
usive Janus, killed in an instant; and then she made straight for the stairway.
A giant hand gently held her back, by the shoulder. To her surprise, it was Farouk. He shook his head at her. Did he, somewhere deep inside, vaguely remember her, or would he have stopped anyone from doing what she was about to do? Ophelia held his icy stare, despite the mental pain this visual contact triggered, until he consented to let her go.
Gail, who was biting Fox more than kissing him, suddenly let go of him.
“Don’t go. I tried countless times to bump him off, and, no offense, I had all my fingers. That creature is indestructible. You’re not.”
Her eyes, one a blue sky, the other a night sky, shone with contradictory emotions. As for Ophelia, she felt but one emotion. She was scared. But she would climb that stairway all the same.
“Eulalia Gonde no longer knows who she is. I’m the only one who can help her to remember that.”
Puzzled, Archibald scratched the beard that had taken over his entire jaw.
“That’s your plan?”
“I’m not asking you to accompany me.”
Ophelia clambered up the steps as quickly as her sandals allowed. It was the steepest stairway she had ever climbed. She was skidding on bits of glass and stone, and there was no banister to hold onto. She stopped looking down once the ground became too distant, just fixing her eyes on Elizabeth, higher up, forever higher up, stumbling pitifully in the Other’s wake.
“You were born in a distant land, a very long time ago,” she told her, in a loud voice. “You were recruited into Babel’s army. You worked on a military project. You crystallized your echo with the help of a telephone receiver.”
Ophelia’s words seemed to bounce off the surfaces of the Memorial without reaching the person they were addressed to. Dragged unwillingly from step to step, Elizabeth was more expressionless than ever. Seeing her like that, one really might have thought that she was the echo.
The Storm of Echoes Page 44
