City of Lost Dreams: A Novel
Page 28
“The armonica,” Sarah whispered. “You said you could use it to cure your daughter.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Portia’s illness could have been cured with antibiotics. Simple antibiotics. The armonica would only help the healing process. That is all. Your Pollina is going to die.”
Tears of rage and despair filled Sarah’s eyes. Science had failed her. Alchemy had failed her.
She forced herself to stand and look down at Elizabeth.
Why had Philippine given her the vial? Would it be helping Pols in some way, to let this suffering end?
She had no reason to show this freak, this monster, this sadist any mercy.
Pollina had talked to her once, about how Mozart’s early operas had shown ambition but not compassion. Pols believed in compassion.
Sarah would not comfort this woman, but she would help her find peace at last. She looked at Nico.
“The vial?” Nico asked. “There is enough, maybe, for the both of us? I am . . . I am a small man.”
Sarah looked at him. She was, she realized, crying.
How would it help Pollina, to give Nico the means to kill himself?
How could she lose him?
Nico had seen her strength, before she had seen it herself. Two summers ago he had saved her life in the tunnels under Prague Castle. He had shown her history all around her. Given her the gift of the past. He was a giant.
And now in return she was giving him what he had always sought. Death. A bitter gift. But, she knew, a welcome one. For him as for Elizabeth. As it would be for her when her time came. We live, we love, we die. Like the distant suns whose explosions sent the elements to the earth that form our bodies, we blaze and then fade, our energy repurposed to other forms. As above, so below.
“I think there is enough,” she said.
Elizabeth looked up. She looked at the vial. She looked at Nico.
“Do it,” said the little man. “There is nothing left for you here.”
“No. There is nothing left for us here.”
Elizabeth crossed herself and opened the vial. She swallowed, then handed it to Nicolas.
“Portia,” she said.
And then she fell forward. Nico swiftly moved to her side and took the vial from her hand. He held fingers to her neck, then her wrist. Hermes chittered loudly.
“Gone,” said Nico.
Sarah looked at him.
“Give me a kiss,” said the little man. “I want to go out with the taste of a beautiful woman on my lips. Then go quickly. Don’t say good-bye. No last words. Put it in your kiss.”
Sarah kissed him with everything she had. Then she ran up the stairs.
THIRTY-NINE
Max had found Pols in a small storeroom, curled up among stacks of boxes and tools. He wrapped her in his coat and was carrying her down the stairs. Pols was humming a tune under her breath. Max shook his head at Sarah. Tears were streaming down his face.
Pollina began coughing.
“It’s okay,” Sarah whispered. “Pols, it’s okay. It’s over. We’ll take you home now.”
“I’m sorry,” Pollina whispered. “But I’m just too tired. It will be soon, I think.”
Sarah looked into the girl’s face. She saw it written there, what Pols had said on the phone. Pols was ready to let go. She began coughing again.
“I want to be buried with Boris,” said Pols when she got her breath back. “And I’ve written a requiem mass. Don’t let the musicians play it too slowly. And I intended the Lachrymosa to be humorous.”
“Elizabeth?” Max asked Sarah.
“She’s dead. I gave her the antidote.”
“And . . . Nico?”
Sarah looked at Pols, who had her head buried in Max’s chest.
“There was enough for two.”
When they got to the ground floor, Sarah looked at the stairs leading down to the round room and the portal. The day crew was going to get a hell of a surprise. They could not leave Nico here. Alone. With a woman he hated.
“Stay here,” she said to Max. She ran down the staircase.
Nico was lying on the ground, eyes closed. The vial was next to him. Hermes, the rat, sat on Nico’s chest.
Max appeared, still carrying Pols.
“We wanted to say good-bye.”
“I think we should bring him with us.”
“Can you carry him?”
“I think so.”
Sarah tried to scoop up Nico’s small body.
“You got him?” Max asked.
“Yes. It’s just . . . it’s just he’s actually very heavy.”
“You take Pols.”
“No, I’ve got him.” Sarah tried a sort of fireman’s rescue posture. Nico’s pants slipped down.
“Got him?”
“Sort of. Crap. Wait.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Nico straightened up. “This is so undignified!”
Sarah dropped him.
Hermes the rat scampered up Nico’s leg and torso to his shoulder and stared at them, nose twitching. The rat appeared to be laughing.
“You’re . . .” Max said.
“Still here,” said Nico, standing up and brushing off his suit. “Yes. Don’t read too much into it. I prepaid for a year of Pilates.” He scooped the vial off the floor and put it in his pocket, then walked forward and held out his arms. Max leaned down and gave him Pols. The little girl looked big in the little man’s arms.
“I’m maybe not quite done,” Nico whispered into her ear. “And maybe neither are you. There is still music to be played. The opera isn’t finished.”
And that’s when Sarah heard it. She heard it in her mind the way she sometimes heard Beethoven’s voice. The way she had heard Philippine speak to her. The way—ever so faintly—she could sometimes remember the sound of her father calling her name, asking her to play him something.
She heard the five notes of Pollina’s opera.
“Pols,” said Sarah, “I want to try something. Will you trust me?”
FORTY
Sarah looked at all of them. Pollina, her thin shoulders hunched forward, her fair hair falling in strands about her face. Max, whitely tense and still beside her, expectant. Nicolas, with the rat Hermes scrabbling to stay on his shoulder, nodding at her. They had covered Elizabeth Weston’s body with her cloak.
Sarah had never really believed in Max’s Golden Fleece with its wonderfull and awfull truth. The wisdom and magic of the alchemists. Edward Kelley’s potions. Tycho Brahe’s meddling and the resulting immortality of Nicolas Pertusato. She couldn’t believe what she had seen tonight. Chalk symbols on the floor of a star-shaped palace in the Czech Republic. Powders and potions and chanted Latin. Hell portal doors. You strung a bunch of big-sounding words together and drew some nifty pictures and dressed up in robes and expected . . . what? God? Your dead daughter? Dracula? The white rabbit? The cure to everything? Keanu Reeves in The Matrix?
You could swallow a drug that allowed you to expand your brain’s narrow perceptions of time and see the past by following the emotional energy people left behind them.
Or you could merely think that you had. And maybe that was enough.
Dreams? Chanting? Drumming? Prayer? Visions?
Using belief to affect the body.
Using music.
Sarah could feel it within her, a kind of shuddering warmth, a loss of gravity in her bones, a humming in her blood. Everything in her life had led her to this point. Everything she had seen was just preparation for what was to come.
“Max,” Sarah said, “You’re going to have to help me. You too, Nico.”
She must not hold back. She must not hold on. She could only go further and further. Perhaps for one time only in her life would she have—not the courage to fight—but the will to surrender.
She moved to the armonica.
“Watch,” she said. “It’s five notes. E, B, C, A, G. I’ll show you.” She pressed the treadle of the instrument and the glasses began spinning. She showed Max how to to
uch the rims, and which ones he should use to get the proper notes. Nico joined them.
“I’ll press the pedal,” he said. “Max, you just concentrate on the notes.”
Max was not asking her why she wanted him to do this. He heard the certainty in her voice and he trusted it. Because he loved her, as she loved him.
“Just play,” she said. “Just keep playing.”
The notes filled the room. The theme from Pols’s opera. Pols had said Sarah would understand. And now she did.
Sarah gave herself to the sound. She scooped up the girl in her arms. Pollina was so light, so fragile. Sarah wrapped the girl’s long legs around her waist and Pollina snaked her arms around Sarah’s neck. Sarah held Pols tightly to her chest.
E, B, C, A, G.
Sarah moved deeper into the music. Deeper into the trance.
Music filled the room, filled her brain, her breath, her blood.
Sarah looked at the body of the woman in the corner.
Elizabeth Weston was standing now, clad in golden armor, her face set in a mask of resolution, a long golden sword at her side.
She looked at Nico and Max. Nico’s shadow on the floor, monstrously long and broad now. A giant. And Max’s wings were playing the armonica. Yes, wings. A dragon and a giant. She had dreamed this. She had dreamed this.
She looked down at her own hand, which was veined with gold. She was the knight from Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze.
She looked at Pols, who was holding Elizabeth’s hourglass in her hand.
E, B, C, A, G.
“It’s time,” she said to Pols.
Pollina raised the hourglass and threw it to the stone floor, where it shattered, the sands spilling in a mound at her feet.
“Hold on tight,” she whispered to Pollina. She felt the muscles of the thin arms and legs contract. Sarah listened. She heard Pollina’s heartbeat, faint but distinguishable.
Max touched the glass for E.
The sand of the hourglass began snaking across the floor, streaming into lines and patterns. A repeated series of perfect squares each containing a six-pointed star. The sands rose and fell, swooped and glided. Fully formed, the squares formed a kind of labyrinth, which led to a central and larger square. Sarah walked the path carefully until she reached the center. She took the last step into the center of the star.
In an instant, cold blackness enveloped her. No breath. The blackness was heavy, dense. There was nothing to equal this density. No air. Her lungs were crushed. Sarah felt them splintering into needle shards.
And then nothing. She was part of the heaviness, of the cold blackness. She could not move her hand because in this airless smothering void there could be no movement. But she could hear Pollina’s heartbeat, feel her arms and legs around her, and because of that she could think of her own hand, of the space where she used to have a hand. Which still existed somewhere, surely.
And from out of the darkness and the cold and the heaviness, the sound of the second glass: B.
Now there was light in the dark. A golden thread that floated and twisted and coiled in a sinuous dance. The thread was alive. Nearly alive. Now truly alive. The thread grew thicker, began to pulse. Features began to form on its surface, onyx eyes, a flickering ruby tongue. A snake. A snake with a white-gold tail. It floated before them, waiting. Breathing. Watching.
I am not afraid, thought Sarah. I am not afraid.
The snake opened its mouth and sang the third note. C.
The most beautiful C. The C at the center of all things. The snake swung its tail up and brought it to its mouth. It turned one black jeweled and lidless eye toward Sarah, then swallowed its tail, creating a perfect ring. An ouroboros. Sarah found that she could move, or at least imagine herself moving. She could float into the circle of the snake. Sarah, with Pols, moved into the ouroboros and as she did so she reached out her hand and stroked the golden skin of the snake, which rang.
The fourth note: A.
The snake released its tail and stretched, expanded. The golden scales fell away and Sarah could see veins with blood, glowing blue, then dark red. It was a column, a river of blood. Branches shot out of the river like tree limbs, reaching out, groping, feeling. Sarah could hear them singing to one another. Pols’s heartbeat was growing louder now, but Sarah no longer felt the girl around her.
She was inside. Sarah was inside Pollina. Like Nina had described the nanotubes, going inside her veins, her blood. And the blood was getting darker and closer and heavier. And the song of the tree limbs became harsh and discordant. Sarah felt as if she were in a tunnel now, and the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it was so narrow that Sarah could not move forward any more. The blood slowed, then stopped. She could not go forward. She could not turn around and go back. She could not move.
But the heartbeat was still there.
One more note.
The fifth note.
Please, Max.
Yes, there it was. G.
The tunnel immediately began to expand, fusing and forming a ladder that twisted and turned. The ladder ribboned around her, seemingly without end or beginning.
A double helix.
Somewhere in this chain was the thing that was killing Pollina.
So they needed to go beyond that. They needed to go farther.
Sarah took a deep breath; and as the last vibration of the last note faded into silence, the chain shattered.
FORTY-ONE
They had arrived back at the Star Summer Palace. Sarah stood in the center of the star, in a round white room.
A round white room with five doors. Exactly as in her dream. Pure white, polished to a high shine. Max and Nico and Elizabeth had all vanished. Sarah became aware of Pollina against her chest, grown suddenly very heavy. Sarah looked down at her and the girl drew back her head and raised her face toward Sarah.
Pollina’s eyes were open. They were almost all white, all iris, the pupils almost swallowed by the white. Pollina shut her eyes.
“Where are we?” the girl asked. Sarah set her gently on her feet and Pollina stretched out her hands.
“We’re at the Star Summer Palace, but it’s a little different. It’s all white now. I mean, empty. And we have five doors.”
Four of the doors had keyholes and looked quite ordinary.
The fifth door was different.
Sarah took a step away from it.
They should not open that door. It was not a hell portal. It was something else.
Pols snapped her fingers and they listened to the sound, which was not at all commensurate with the space. Pols might just as well have snapped her fingers in the Colosseum.
“Big room,” commented the girl.
“What do you think we should do?”
“It’s a classic scenario.” Pols shrugged. “The whole thing seems a bit obvious. Room-with-doors as metaphor. We must be in your brain, not mine.”
“I’m not sure about that,” said Sarah. “There is no color. Anyway, we have four choices.”
Technically they had five choices, but every cell in her body was telling her not to touch that fifth door.
Pollina was swaying. Sarah caught her just before she crashed to the floor. The girl’s lips were dry and cracked, but her forehead was beaded with perspiration.
“Sarah,” the girl whispered. “I think you should . . . hurry.”
Sarah took off her jacket and cradled it under Pollina’s head. The girl curled up in a ball, coughing weakly.
Sarah moved to the nearest door and sank to her knees, peering through the iron keyhole.
She saw a stream and a cluster of moss-covered rocks. The air was misty, and Sarah caught the scent of fir trees. The figure of a man sat on the largest of the rocks, singing in a flat, deep voice. Da-da-da, he rumbled, then paused. He tootled experimentally, like a trumpet, then honked a series of minor notes. Then sang again: Da-da-da . . . Pa! Pa! PA! He turned his head, keeping time in the air, as if he were conducting the water before him.
Was she hearing the rough beginnings of what would have been—had he lived long enough—the Tenth Symphony?
Sarah, who didn’t believe in God, whispered, Oh, God, God, God. To sit next to Beethoven by a stream, in nature, the place that had always replenished this genius’s perturbed spirit? To hear him compose? Maybe she had died, after all. One thing she knew for certain now, if she were to open this door and enter it, it wouldn’t be as a ghost. Beethoven might not be able to hear her, but he would see her. He would talk to her, and she to him. Luigi, it’s beautiful. Sarah, do you think so? Oh, God, God, God.
Pollina, behind her, coughed again. Beethoven would die soon. Pollina even sooner. Beethoven was already dead. Pols was still alive.
She moved to the next door and peered through the keyhole.
A bedroom lit by hundreds of candles. Sarah could see the full moon through a small casement window. And the wasted figure of a woman on a low bed. A man stooping over her.
“My darling,” said the man. “My love. My love, you must try.”
It was Ferdinand. And the woman on the bed was Philippine. She was dying. Sarah could feel it in her own body. The pain, and the fatigue.
“I can feel the moon on my face,” said Philippine. “I can feel the pull.”
Ferdinand crossed to the window and drew a curtain across it.
“No,” he said. “No. You must tell me how to help you. Your medicines—”
“There is no medicine for this—”
“There is one medicine,” said Ferdinand, heavily. “And you cast it upon stones. But I know you remember. You could tell me . . . you could tell me and I could make it . . . ”
Yes, thought Sarah. Tell him. She could listen. She could make the elixir of life for Pols. So what if it was a curse? She could keep Pollina with her for a little longer.