The Secret Language of Stones

by M. J. Rose

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And now, still, you conjure the smell of apples when you work on a piece and feel ill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear Madame Maboussine’s son’s voice while you made the locket?” Anna asked.

  “No, that didn’t happen until I gave it to her and she put it on. At first it was just a faraway whisper. A young man’s voice: Tell her even though I’m gone, she’s my mother forever. Tell her, please, for me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I excused myself, got up, and went into the showroom, thinking someone was there. But there wasn’t. I opened the door to the staircase, thinking I’d heard someone below, but the stairwell was empty.”

  “You didn’t realize yet?”

  “No.”

  “Or you didn’t want to.”

  “I was convinced I’d heard someone whispering. His voice was that clear and distinct. I just didn’t know where it was coming from.”

  “How did you feel?” she asked.

  “Confused and afraid.”

  Anna nodded. Then, in the quiet, I suddenly heard chanting. Panic rose in me like bile.

  Anna noticed my expression. Instantly, she tried to calm me. “I hear it as well,” she said reassuringly. “It’s the monks chanting.”

  I relaxed.

  “I believe that in the moment you cut yourself and bled over the soldier’s hair, you lowered the curtain between our plane and the one beyond.”

  I shivered.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A saying in my family having to do with blood.”

  She nodded. “ ‘Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting.’ Is that the one?”

  “How do you know it? Did my mother tell you?”

  “No. I knew about it before I met her. Most of us who are involved in the occult here in Paris know of it. It’s referred to as ‘the curse and the blessing of La Lune.’ ”

  “But it wasn’t complete. I remember my mother sitting with me in the bell tower the year I turned thirteen . . . an ancient worn leather-bound book opened before us. La Lune’s grimoire—my mother explained how the spells were encrypted in the text. My mother said there is a quarto of missing pages that were believed to contain a poem, each canto holding a secret of the universe. Each, an enigma revealing a power. To ensure the poem never went missing, La Lune wrote out each canto separately and hid them somewhere else. My mother discovered the blood stanza when she was just about my age, in her grandmother’s house. The others, she told me, were still lost. But I think I might have found them.”

  I fingered the ring I wore on my right hand. The ruby floret given to me by my mother when I first got my menses. Part of the La Lune legacy, she’d said, and told me it would protect me and never to take it off.

  Anna nodded at my hand. “The crescent on your thumb . . . is it the only one on your body?”

  “No, I have a birthmark on my back in a similar shape.”

  “The sign of every Daughter of La Lune.”

  “My mother only uses that name to sign her paintings. The real La Lune died in the sixteen hundreds.”

  “And all her female descendants are called Daughters of La Lune. If you’d let your mother school you in their rituals, you’d be able to use them to quiet the voices.”

  “But I didn’t want to learn. I’d grown to hate what made her different. What kept me and my sisters separate from everyone else. I just wanted to be normal.”

  What did I even know about a normal life? Did I have a taste of it with Timur? Maybe for a moment, but my powers hadn’t even allowed me to enjoy a normal relationship with him.

  “All right. Let’s see what we can do about it now. The German philosopher Nietzsche said if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. This is a dangerous journey we are undertaking. You must be prepared. First, I’d like you to drink this . . .” Anna handed me the glass of golden liquid she’d concocted while we’d talked.

  “What is it?”

  “A combination of herbs, honey, and juice to make you less nervous and more receptive.”

  “It’s safe?”

  “Of course.” She took the glass from me, tipped it to her lips, and sipped. Then she handed it back to me and I drank it down, surprised at its deliciousness, relieved the fermented apples didn’t nauseate me.

  The chanting I’d heard before started up again, more loudly this time. The sonorous ensemble of men using their voices as instruments seemed to be coming through the walls and the ceilings to surround me like a cloak, cosseting me, seeping through my skin, entering me. I closed my eyes and the gold and jewel-toned mosaics from the cathedral swam in the darkness, a kaleidoscope of rubelites, peridots, wine-colored rubies, midnight sapphires, royal amethysts, citrines, sea green emeralds—fractured facets of gems—brilliant and blinding.

  “Open your eyes,” Anna whispered.

  She looked like a portrait in stained glass. Her face and clothes turned into prismatic designs pulsing in time to the chants. I floated on the sounds, lifted up in invisible arms.

  “Opaline, can you hear me?”

  I responded but too softly, and she asked a second time. I made a greater effort. “Yes.” The word sounded loud and harsh in my ears. As if the entire world coalesced in my voice.

  “All right. You can close your eyes again. Just listen and relax.”

  I sensed a light pressure on my forehead in between my eyebrows. Then heat. Her finger pressing warmth into me.

  “Can you feel this? This is the spot we need to focus on . . .” She took my hand and replaced her finger with mine. The heat dissipated. “This is your third eye . . . In Hinduism it’s called the eye of clairvoyance; in Buddhism it’s called Urna . . . in Egypt, the Eye of Osiris . . . in Hebrew they say it is the eye of the soul.” She took my hand away and replaced my finger with hers. The heat returned. “Once I’ve taught you to open your third eye, you will be able to use this portal and reach inside yourself and access all your abilities. You will be able to speak to the voices through your third eye.”

  Her pronouncements merged with the chanting until they were one and the same. Her words, their rhythm. Their cadence, her phrases. Her finger burned my skin. Setting me on fire. All calm left. Anxiety took over. Raged. Nightmare images filled my mind. A black smoking field . . . smoldering trees . . . the bitter stench of hair on fire . . . my hair?

  Reaching up, I tried to push her hand away, but she held fast. I wanted to rise . . . run . . . get away from her . . . from the chant . . . from the fire. Around my neck the talisman felt hot . . . heat increasing every second . . . heat devouring me . . . Suddenly faces swam into my mind. Unfamiliar. Each in uniform . . . tattered . . . dirty . . . torn . . . Each face—younger, older, fair, swarthy—each in agony . . . suffering, in pain . . .

  One by one, I saw them, suffered with them, then watched as their misery seemed to melt through and each face lost all its color and settled into a peaceful black mask.

  Who were these men? I didn’t understand my own vision. Until I saw one I did recognize. Madame Maboussine’s son. She’d shown me his picture. Twenty-one years old. His face contorted. Screaming mouth hole. The shout no less frightening for its silence. His expression exploded, distorting, finally settling into a pale, sad smile.

  And then I knew I was seeing the men I’d messaged. In the process, they became part of me and I them. And while their final peaceful visages should have comforted me, they didn’t. Their terror was imprinted on me. I was reliving it.

  I started to scream—at least I thought I was screaming—but it was their collective voices I heard, their horrible, terrified shrieks and openmouthed bleeding cries.

  Anna’s pressure on the spot between my eyebrows increased. Their voices and my screamin
g softened, lowered, turned into bells, large bronze bells, clanging over and over, and even though they were no longer hideous, they were still clamoring, still disturbing.

  I couldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t watch. I needed to quiet them, to silence them, to stop the pictures and the sounds, and I pushed myself away from the table and stood up and then there was nothing but blackness and blessed calm.

  Chapter 15

  Once I’d recovered from my fainting spell, Anna made me tea laced with cognac and lavender honey and served me little Russian tea cakes her cousin had left for us and insisted I try to eat. But I couldn’t. She sat with me and encouraged me, but all I could do was cry. My tears of frustration flowed freely, and she tried her best to comfort me, but I was inconsolable. I’d put so much faith into our session. I’d expected to walk away with the ability to be in control. Instead, nothing had changed. I’d only learned that if I tried to close the portal, I might never be able to open it again.

  “It’s a gift,” Anna said, smoothing down my hair. “And you need to embrace it and trust we will find a way to help you live with it.”

  “It’s not a gift,” I insisted. “It’s a nightmare.”

  “Part of the secret to being able to control it is not being so frightened of it . . . not hating this ability quite so much.”

  “Anna, the war is right inside my mind. I hear these men who have died. Some are still caught up in their pain, haven’t forgotten it yet, are traumatized by it. Others are so worried about those they are leaving behind, they can’t sever the connection. Lost, missing their families, they are in some terrible limbo.”

  “But they don’t stay there, do they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s agree you are receiving messages the soldiers leave in the passage vortex between life and death. That these final thoughts linger in some kind of psychic tunnel waiting for you to retrieve them so the soldiers can take their last step out of this realm.”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “And once you listen to the messages and pass them on, the soldiers move on?”

  I nodded.

  “So if you focused on that, maybe you would be more accepting. After all, none of them stay with you, do they? Once you give a mother or sister or wife her talisman, that soldier’s voice is gone, isn’t it?”

  “Yes . . .” I wanted to tell her about Jean Luc, but something stopped me.

  She didn’t notice my hesitation.

  “So your actions relieve them of all their pain and suffering. You unhaunt them, if you will. Do you see?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s why it’s a gift. You give them the permission they need to move past the pain and step into the light.”

  “And if I were to keep hearing a voice, what would that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Has that happened?”

  If I told her about Jean Luc, would she think there was in fact something wrong with my mind? That I was making him up? What if she called my mother in Cannes and my parents came to get me? Would Jean Luc come with me? What of my work at the shop? The help I was giving the women who came to see me? Could I abandon them?

  “No, it hasn’t,” I lied.

  “So if you look at the process this way, wouldn’t the burden feel less onerous?”

  “I suppose. I just wish . . .” I shrugged. “I still wish I didn’t need to bear witness to their agony.”

  Once again, she smoothed down my unruly hair, and then bent down and kissed me.

  “Let’s go home. We won’t give up, Opaline. We’ll work it out.”

  I lay in bed after Anna left, my hand creeping up to my chest, cupping the talisman. I kept thinking about the ramifications of what I’d undertaken. If I closed the door and couldn’t open it again, I would be letting go of Jean Luc.

  The gold began to heat against my skin. I turned on the light, and I pulled out the book of Jean Luc’s columns I’d borrowed from Madame Alouette and opened it to where I’d left off. The next column after the one about Héloïse and Abelard.

  Don’t read that one.

  Jean Luc’s voice.

  “Why?”

  It’s too sad and you’re already so very sad.

  “How do you know?”

  I was with you today.

  “How does this work?” Suddenly shy, I put my hand up to my chest. I hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea of him being able to see me without me realizing.

  I’m not totally sure myself. I’m not always cognizant of you. But when I am, I have a feeling I’m warm. Which isn’t how I feel the rest of the time.

  “Do you try to see me or does it happen without you making an effort?”

  I have to make an effort.

  “Can you hear me too? What I’m thinking?”

  If you direct a question to me in your thoughts, but it’s far easier for me if you do speak out loud.

  “How do you do it?”

  I don’t know.

  “How does my voice sound to you when I’m just thinking?”

  The same. As if we are connected by hollow threads that allow sound to travel back and forth. But I’ll always let you know I’m there. I won’t spy on you.

  “How?”

  The warmth.

  “Where are you the rest of the time?” I asked.

  I don’t know. My awareness isn’t constant. But when I am with you, I’m in the least amount of discomfort. Not that I’m ever in acute pain. Oh damn, I’ve spent my life using words precisely and now I can barely figure out my state of being.

  I laughed. Then thought how odd—either I was laughing at an invention of my own mind or at a ghost. And if he was an invention of my mind, then I was ill, wasn’t I?

  You aren’t.

  He’d read my thoughts.

  I may not be quite real the way people in your life are, but I’m myself and not someone you invented. Just think, Opaline, if you were to invent a fantasy lover, wouldn’t you make him much more exotic than me? I’m just a bourgeois journalist who can’t even dance well.

  And then he laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. A joyful sound, it reminded me of the time before the war when young men drank champagne with women in cafés and bought them violet posies and the sound of cabaret music lingered in the air, mixing with the perfume women wore, all making the very streets of Paris, like the lives lived there, seductive and delightful.

  I loved the sound of Jean Luc’s laughter and tried to memorize it, for I feared this strange experience would not last. The dead do not linger for long. Jean Luc would do what he must and move on.

  I’d been sitting up in bed, my back against the pillows. It seemed one of them had slipped down and I reached to prop it back up. But the pillow sat in place. What was I feeling?

  “Jean Luc?”

  Yes.

  “Is that you?”

  Yes, I’m trying to get the hang of this. So you can feel that, can you?

  “I can.”

  I heard a soft chuckle.

  And this?

  He’d moved his hand to my shoulder and stroked it. Though I wasn’t quite feeling a hand. The warm breeze seemed to have coalesced into a form.

  “Yes. Do you feel anything?”

  No. I don’t seem to be whole. I don’t get hungry or thirsty either. But I have emotions.

  “You’re upset about your men.”

  More than upset. If I’d been smarter, I would have realized we were walking into a trap. I would have—

  “Stop. Please. It’s pointless. Regret isn’t like grief; it never lessens, just stays the same. A little hard ball in the pit of your stomach.”

  What do you have to regret?

  So he hadn’t listened to the whole story I’d told Anna.

  “A boy went off to war, and all he wanted was my
promise to wait for him.”

  You didn’t give it?

  “No.”

  Why?

  “I should have, even if I didn’t love him. Realized he needed me and it wouldn’t hurt me to just tell him. But I didn’t love him. Not the way you wrote about love in your column. A grand love, you wrote. Did you have a love that grand?” I asked him.

  No. I never did. Did you?

  “No, and I wouldn’t want to. It would be too painful if it failed.”

  But to experience it once—even if it is painful—don’t you think it would be worth it? Wouldn’t you want to know what that kind of intensity is like? Wouldn’t you want to feel that deeply?

  “I don’t think most people can. Not the way I imagine it.”

  Tell me what you imagine.

  Leaning over, I shut off the light. If we were going to have a complete conversation, it wouldn’t be as peculiar in the darkness. I’d be less conscious of the empty room.

  “I wouldn’t think it happens easily or often. Never for some people. I imagine a love like that is like a fire . . . starting with a spark and growing into a blaze . . . becoming an engulfing passion too hot for most people to withstand.”

  But don’t you think a passion that strong would last? Even as glowing embers. Always illuminating the blackness. Always giving some warmth in the cold.

  “It seems so tragic to me, but you make it sound wonderful.”

  And it would be . . . to always possess the memory of what was possible. Of what could be. Tell me, what do you think it takes to make that first spark?

  “What does it take to make a grain of sand become a pearl? They say the sand is an irritant. Maybe love starts that way too. You’re alone in yourself and then meet someone who upsets your balance, who you can’t quite explain away or put in a comfortable place. Someone who shakes your very soul. Who has ideas that jar you and make you think. Who does more than understand you, who understands what you need.”

  Who shakes your soul. That’s lovely.

  The warmth around my shoulders slipped down my back. Encircled my waist. I’d been kissed before, often enough by Timur, by Grigori, but Jean Luc’s kiss wasn’t like theirs. It began dancing on my lips, pressing on my mouth, and at the same time on my breasts and then at the same time between my legs. Creating sensations all over my body in the one instant. I became the spark about to combust. I smelled his scent of pungent limes, verbena, and myrrh. So intoxicating, at once forbidden and teasing. Like the ghost who now lay on top of me, beckoning me to slide into his dark embrace and get lost within sensation.