The Secret Language of Stones

by M. J. Rose

  Succeeding in emptying the shelves and removing them, I stepped into the alcove, put my ear up to the wall, and listened.

  The only thing I became more sure of was that whoever was beyond this wall was speaking neither French nor English. If they were, I would have been able to pick up a hint of a word or accent. Pressing closer, I knocked over a candelabra, which clattered as it fell from a table onto the floor. The crash surprisingly loud.

  The noise on the other side of the walls ceased for a moment. Then, just as it picked up again, I noticed a flicker of light above and to my left. Investigating, I found a slim crack in the rocks with half an inch of loose mortar. Using a fingernail, I picked at it, dislodging another half inch more, creating a peephole.

  I moved the lantern away to the other end of the vault. If there was someone beyond the wall, I didn’t want them to see its glow and find me out.

  Finally, afraid I would spot German uniforms—or, worse, not see anyone and discover the sounds were not of this time or place—I leaned forward and peered into the room beyond the vault.

  Men’s legs. Hands. A long cream-colored cylinder I couldn’t identify.

  The dimness of the chamber, the angle and size of the hole, didn’t allow for much visibility. As far as I could tell, my peephole was only a few feet above the floor. I was almost eye level with chalky, muddy shoes. Five—no, six—sets of feet. Maybe seven. Too much movement, too many shadows. The noise was no more distinct. I realized I had, in fact, been listening to what these men were saying as well as hearing voices from the antiques around me. I couldn’t separate the sources.

  This was some kind of new hell.

  Closing my eyes, I tried to remember Anna’s advice on how to control the messaging. But we’d only worked on my psychometry, on what to do when I was touching something, not how to deal with untethered responses.

  Stop, I said to myself. Stop listening. And miraculously, after a few moments, some of the noise dissipated. Maybe now, if I looked through the peephole and focused, I could pick out their words, identify their language.

  I took a step forward, but before I got close enough to peer through, I saw a man examining the crevice from his side. A flash of hair the color of burnished bronze, heavy eyebrows, topaz eyes shining with suspicion. Could he see me, or was I deep enough in shadow? What did the vault look like from where he stood? I’d moved the lantern, but was its light reflecting off the gold and silver objects?

  I dropped to the floor. Waited. Listened. Still unable to make out the words or the language. Inching backward as quietly as I could, I reached the lantern and pushed it farther into a niche. I picked up a large onyx box and moved it in front of the opening. Now, if the men on the other side looked in, there was nothing to see but their own reflections. I studied my watch. I’d been down in the vault for almost an hour. How much longer before Monsieur came looking for me?

  For the next fifteen minutes, I sat still with my back up to the wall, my head pressed against its stony unevenness, listening, trying to pull apart the noises and recognize a single word so I could discern what might be going on. An innocent meeting of people who worked somewhere in the Palais? French soldiers searching the underground? Germans planning an attack?

  Finally, I heard shuffling and a door closing. The only sound remaining was the din I usually encountered in these dungeons. Slowly and carefully, I moved the box and then looked through the peephole. On the other side was nothing but darkness. All lights extinguished. All men gone.

  What had I seen? Monsieur Orloff’s émigrés meeting in a new place? A gambling den? Rumor suggested there were at least a half dozen such dens in the Palais. Or was it German spies? Were the cylinders rolled-up maps?

  Quickly, I replaced the shelves in the arch and arranged the objects sitting on them. I’d just begun sifting through the stones again when, for the second time that afternoon, I thought I heard Monsieur Orloff coming downstairs.

  “Let’s see how you fared,” he said after closing the door behind him.

  While he examined the stones, I tried to figure out what I should do. Ask him? What exactly? Or just tell him I saw men in a room beyond this one? What if it made me sound paranoid? Would he become hesitant about me doing my job?

  Maybe I was letting my imagination get the better of me. After all, there were stores on both sides of us and each of them retained access to basement chambers. I couldn’t be sure of the vault’s orientation. If we were beneath Grigori’s antiques shop, then on the other side was a coin collector’s shop. And if we were beneath the jewelry showroom, on the other side was a perfume shop. There was also the possibility that the vault backed up against tunnels that were not part of anyone’s shop and that the men were city workers. Maybe a sewer needed maintenance and the cylinders were maps of the sewer system. Or could there be a series of tunnels stemming off the metro line needing attendance?

  “Opaline?”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you daydreaming about?”

  “Nothing.” I hadn’t figured out how to explain.

  “Is it your voices again?”

  “No, no voices.”

  The less we talked about the voices and my talismans, the better. As much as he tolerated it, Monsieur Orloff was not in favor of my messaging. Married to Anna, of course he was sympathetic about my abilities, but also nervous about the police discovering what we were doing since talking to the dead and reading people’s fortunes was against the law and there were stories in all the newspapers of the prefecture cracking down. Monsieur wanted nothing to do with the police. In Russia the proliferation of secret police, spy organizations, and corruption had left him suspicious. He trusted no one. Almost obsessed, he went out of his way to avoid bringing the authorities in on any matter—even when we’d discovered a client shoplifting. I wasn’t sure why and hadn’t found a polite way to ask, but assumed it was related to him harboring refugees from Russia below the shop.

  As well, Monsieur wasn’t a spiritualist of any kind. Neither was he religious. To him, precious metals and gems were paints on a palette. A necklace or bracelet, ring or brooch, a canvas. He used gems to create art to adorn its wearer, not to stare into the faceted depths of the crystals and see the past or the future, as his wife was prone to do. He never closed his eyes when he held a stone and felt for its vibration, as I did. Monsieur Orloff bowed to its beauty; he didn’t commune with its mystery. So he tolerated Anna and her crystal balls and me and my voices. He watched us disappearing into her lair after dinner with a rueful smile.

  “This is good work, Opaline. Thinking to include the darker brown diamonds was an excellent idea.”

  I smiled. Compliments from someone who does not offer them often are all the more precious.

  “There’s not much left to teach you. Now I just need to push you to spend more time refining your designs and not be quite so impatient.”

  I wanted to laugh. He’d done nothing but push me since I’d first arrived almost four years ago.

  “Take the stones upstairs,” he said. “I’ll lock up—there are some things I need to get from the safe. Monsieur and Madame Bouchard are coming tomorrow to pick out a stone for a pendant.”

  Dismissed, I took the tray of stones upstairs to the workshop. As I climbed the steps, I worried that I hadn’t found a way to tell Monsieur Orloff what I’d witnessed. But what if it had been him and his group of Russians? He might be insulted I’d been spying. Besides, what had I seen? Really nothing suspect. Men in a chamber on the other side of the vault. Why was that suspicious? There were over fifty shops in the Palais and hundreds of residences.

  I’d spent too long listening to the voices of the soldiers, collecting messages for their mothers. My imagination was overworked.

  Later that afternoon, while I was still sorting the stones into gradations within their color groups, Grigori came into the workroom. Fresh from purcha
sing a collection of antique jewel-encrusted goblets, he wanted to show them to his father for an estimate.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” I told them. “Would you like any?”

  They both declined. As I stood up, I knocked a pair of tweezers off my worktable.

  I bent to retrieve them. They’d fallen close to Grigori’s feet, and I couldn’t help but notice pale gray mud on his shoes. Like the shoes of the men in the room next to the vault.

  This was more proof I was being melodramatic. We were having the rainiest summer on record. Mud covered all the streets in Paris. It was on all our shoes. And so, once and for all, I put the incident out of my mind and made my coffee.

  Chapter 11

  That night, after a light supper with Anna—Monsieur Orloff and Grigori were picking up someone at the train station—I retired early and nestled into the sanctuary of my basement suite.

  Strangely, I didn’t mind it being windowless. My great-­grandmother had contributed a few objets d’art to make it special. An old carpet, too worn in spots for her grand mansion but perfect for me. Dark green with lavender wisteria flowers, it set the tone for the colors of my room. She also had contributed a magnificent stained glass screen with a scene of Leda and the Swan on the shore of a pond in a forest. Cleverly, she’d told me to place a lamp behind it, and the screen lit up and offered a spectacular rainbow of magical blue, green, and lavender hues. My bureau was a fine piece of rosewood carved in an Art Nouveau style along with a matching headboard my father had brought from his factory. And I had a comfortable armchair upholstered in pine-green velvet, which my great-grandmother had donated. Retiring to my room was like escaping into the deepest part of the woods, where ancient pagans enacted rituals by the shore of a bubbling brook.

  A pale green glass globe Anna had given me sat on the bureau. Beside it a bowl of stones, for practice. I’d picked out and polished each precious piece. There were chunks of jade, amethyst, lapis lazuli, jet, and three opals. Usually at night, before I went to bed, I worked with one of them, trying to control and fine-tune my ability. Anna believed I must embrace lithomancy completely in order to learn to control it. She’d taught me how to meditate using one of the stones. How to relax and concentrate fully, feeling the stone’s energy and connecting to it. To become one with the precious object. To lose myself in its depths and search its secrets without fear. To just be and see what came to me. Anna cautioned me she’d been practicing her art for over thirty years and still found much to learn. I’d only been studying mine for three. But as Monsieur observed in the studio, I was impatient.

  Instead of practicing, I unbuttoned my chemise and withdrew the talisman I’d originally made for Madame Alouette. All day I’d been feeling its pull. As if it was calling to me, begging me to wrap my fingers around it and enclose it in my palm. Because the rock crystal lay between my breasts, it was warm. But it warmed even more as I examined its star-shaped inclusion. Wrapped in its gold cage of stem-like wires that wound around and then met at the top of the loop to create a link, it hung from its silk cord, shining in the room’s soft light. Removing the cord, I took a heavy gold link chain from my jewel box, strung it through the loop, and then lowered it over my head again. As the egg nestled once more between my breasts, I thought I heard a sigh.

  Preferring low light, I shut off all but a small reading light and the lamp behind the glass screen. Bathed in a peacock blue glow, the room really might have been in the middle of the woods. The night stretched ahead before me. After work, after supper, without obligations, I could do whatever pleased me. Most evenings, I read of other times and places to dull the sharp edge of reality we lived during the day. I was still making my way through my great-grandmother’s book of ghost stories by Edith Wharton and opened it to my silver bookmark—a gift from the Orloffs on my twenty-second birthday.

  Other women read love stories to forget the war; I preferred to go deeper into darkness, into manifestations of evil, to help understand the nightmare around us.

  I read a few pages but was distracted. A presence imbued the room. Not a shadow, not a scent. Almost a blur.

  Against my chest, the talisman seemed warmer than a few moments ago.

  “Hello?” I whispered to the darkness, feeling a little foolish talking out loud to myself. I waited. If I’d imagined my previous conversations with Jean Luc, then surely I could manifest another now.

  “We always need to weigh what we think we see and hear with our wish life,” Anna once explained to me. “Those of us with access to the future or the past, or who can speak to people no longer here, are prone to creative thinking. The line between reality and fantasy is so thin for us. Imagine a psychic says you’ll meet a tall stranger at the opera and marry him. The next time you go to the opera you find a tall stranger in the box next to yours. Believing in the reading, you might go out of your way to meet him, flirt with him, and entice him. If he then begins to court you, did you create that scenario, or was the psychic right? It’s important to learn to be strict with yourself and not manifest what isn’t there, what isn’t meant to be there.”

  I vacillated between believing I was going mad and concluding I just had conjured him the way children create imaginary friends. Maybe the conversations were proof of insanity. Or maybe just a manifestation of my loneliness.

  While Grigori provided some companionship, it was fleeting and there was no true passion. Without both, I felt alone. But since Timur had died, I felt it wise to deny that part of myself. Not only out of guilt but because passion had stirred my powers and I feared anything that would magnify them even more. Despite myself . . . was I yearning for it now? Yearning for love, despite the danger? Even knowing I had little hope of finding it? History had invaded my personal life. The war had stolen all our dreams. Women who were supposed to have had houses full of children would probably remain childless now; men who otherwise might have made their fortunes were now dead in the trenches. Even if I was brave enough to go searching for love, my chances of finding it were slim.

  If I was going to invent a companion, why not the author of the wonderful columns about art and individualism that had influenced me so long ago?

  “I went to the offices of Le Figaro,” I said out loud. “I met a receptionist who has quite a crush on you.” A moment passed in silence. Just about to be convinced yet again that, yes, I’d imagined it all, I felt an almost breeze blow through my room. There should be nothing suspect about a breeze. Except it was impossible. There were no windows here. Yet it brushed my face, ruffled my hair. The very air moved. I smelled limes mixed with . . . I sniffed again . . . mixed with verbena and a hint of myrrh.

  Why did you go there?

  “I used to read your columns about art, but then when you started writing about the war . . . I couldn’t anymore. I lived with too much news and reality from the front. But now that we’ve . . .” I hesitated, searching for the word. “Now that we’ve met, I want to read them. I planned on buying back copies, but only one was available. Who did you write them to? Who was Ma chère?”

  At the time I didn’t know. Now I think maybe I wrote them for you.

  “Me?”

  I think we were supposed to meet but I messed that up.

  “What do you mean?”

  It’s all my fault, I misread the signs, I delayed issuing orders . . .

  The words ceased. Silence. And then I heard what sounded like a sob.

  “Jean Luc, what do you mean about us meeting? About messing that up?”

  I think if I hadn’t made those mistakes in the field, I would have come back to Paris and visited your store and looked at the jewelry and seen something to buy for my mother and would have met you.

  I put my hand up to the talisman to touch it. To touch him?

  “But now you won’t.”

  No.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Yes. Me too. For you. For
so many, many things.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Don’t cry.

  He could see me?

  “How did you know I was crying? So you really can see me? Where are you?” I was so frustrated and confused.

  Until you started to make the talisman I was asleep, floating . . . and then the closer you came to completing it, the more aware I became. When you touch it, you come into focus. Through fog. As if there is a certain distance between us. Yet more clearly than makes any sense, considering I am a world away from you.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered. “And I am a little afraid.”

  And then I felt, or I thought I felt . . . no . . . I did feel his hand brushing my hair off my forehead.

  I don’t want to make you afraid.

  His touch made me shiver and begin to tremble.

  I can’t bear for you to be afraid of me. You, here, it’s the only time since . . . since it happened I don’t feel as lost.

  I tried desperately to quell the shaking. Pressure increased against the spot he’d cleared. Not lips, no. But a force suggesting lips. Perhaps from the shock, my shaking stopped.

  When I kissed you just now, you felt it, didn’t you?

  I nodded.

  And now, do you feel this?

  Somehow he’d taken my hand. I looked down and saw nothing but my own hand in my lap. I didn’t feel flesh. Instead, it was as if I were holding smoke. And where our hands met, my skin warmed to his touch.