Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Jean-Louis and Claude had put on their headbands. They mingled with the crowds of tourists and art lovers. They stopped in front of the Mona Lisa and surveyed the immortal woman who would soon belong to them, Claude looked at his watch and nodded to Jean-Louis, who was experiencing heavy palpitations. A dull throbbing wave started to pound on their skulls. The ultra-low frequency waves seemed to pass through their brain, but they didn't panic, as Alain had told them to expect the sensation. There was a short-lived outbreak of hysteria as tourists and guards started to feel faint. All over the Louvre and the museum's environs, people started to fall down. The sound of collapsing bodies echoed down the mile-long corridors and reverberated back and forth. Jean-Louis and Claude began the task of prising the Mona Lisa from her mountings. Removing the bullet-proof plexiglass was harder than the crooks imagined, but within the space of a minute the plastic pane was wrenched from its wall mountings, and the Louvre was filled with the rise and fall of a hysterical alarm siren. The most famous artwork in the world, painted on a humble poplar panel, was now bare to the atmosphere. As Claude removed the painting from the wall, Jean-Louis took out a rolled up plastic bag and began to unfurl it, ready to put the painting in it.

  Up in the garret at the Rue de Rivoli, Alain continued to aim the reflector at the Louvre, beaming out two kilowatts of sleep-inducing delta-waves. The cone of radiated energy from the machine also knocked out people who were unfortunate to be in close proximity to the Louvre. Traffic that came within the periphery of the radiated area behaved erratically as drivers inexplicably found themselves nodding off at the wheels of their vehicles. Cars stalled and were rammed by vehicles travelling behind, Mayhem broke out on the roads of Paris.

  Jean-Louis and Claude emerged from the Louvre and walked off through all this unprecedented urban chaos. Once they were safely out of the lethargy zone, they removed their headbands and hailed a cab to take them to Monique’s house.

  Alain turned off the delta-wave transmitter and was about to close the garret window when he suddenly halted with his hand on the window-handle.

  "What's wrong, Alain?" said Juliette, with an anxious expression.

  "Oh, so that's it. No. Oh no." Alain whispered, He staggered back and leaned against one of the dusty book chests.

  "Alain. What's wrong?" Juliette grabbed his arm and looked into his eyes. They seemed terrified of something.

  "I know the answer to why we're all here. What's behind all this. The answer is – “ Alain shook as he spoke, but Juliette interrupted him.

  "Cops!" Juliette listened to the approaching sirens and hurried to the window to catch sight of a convoy of police cars and vans threading towards the house.

  "Don't worry." said Alain, trembling. "They're the least of our troubles."

  "What?" said Juliette. She glared at him angrily. "What are we going to do?"

  Alain didn’t respond. He started to cry over a tremendous inner realisation he was experiencing.

  Juliette panicked, and she started screaming at him. "What are we going to do? Stop crying!"

  Alain hid his sobbing face in his hands and curled up on the floor like a baby.

  Juliette looked down from the window and saw La Sage thumping on the door with a crowd of policemen. She decided that a feasible means of escape would be to get out onto the window ledge where she could edge her way along a narrow ledge that led to a low rooftop next door.

  As Juliette stepped onto the window ledge, one of the policemen below happened to glance up, and spotted her.

  "Don't be a fool!" shouted the policeman. "There's no escape."

  Juliette was halfway along the ledge, holding onto the guttering, when Alain popped his head out of the window. After wiping his tears away, he told her about the awesome ultimate truth he had unravelled. When Juliette heard what it was, she halted her careful progression along the ledge, and after a short thoughtful pause, she began to scream. She let go of the guttering and fell backwards, and continued to scream until she hit the pointed railings below. She lay there, impaled, with a look of absolute horror in her bulging eyes.

  A confused Monique opened the door, and La Sage and the other officers stormed the house and raced up the stairs to the garret.

  Outside in the street, the taxi carrying Claude, Jean-Louis and the Mona Lisa pulled up near to the impaled, blood-soaked corpse of Juliette. The driver was something of a necrophiliac, and stared at the body of the dead woman as it trembled, twitched and urinated from post-death nerve activity. Feeling guilty because of his necrophilia, the taxi driver made the sign of the cross and said a prayer for the dead woman, without heeding the instructions from his frantic passengers, who were urging him to drive on. The two art thieves panicked and fled the taxi, leaving the Mona Lisa on the seat of the vehicle in the plastic carrier bag.

  La Sage burst into the garret brandishing a pistol and found Alain cowering in the corner.

  "So this is the great thinker?" La Sage stood over Alain with the gun aimed at his upper torso. "Get up."

  "The money I stole from the professor is in here." Alain stood up and walked over to the innocent-looking biscuit tin that housed the circuits of the sleep-inducing device.

  "Slowly now," La Sage warned him, and continued to aim the pistol at his chest.

  Alain picked up the reflector, flicked the toggle-switch that activated the delta-wave emitter, and made a swift sweeping movement with the reflector. There was a long succession of thuds as the seven policemen who had been standing behind La Sage hit the floor. Before Alain could swing the reflector to La Sage the policemen fired his pistol twice. Both shots hit Alain in the chest, and he fell to the floor, still clutching the reflector.

  La Sage fired two rounds at the reflector that shattered its element to smithereens. The lawman then discharged more rounds into the biscuit tin, causing the device inside it to crackle and emit a shower of sizzling sparks.

  "You’re a dead man now, Chabrol, " said La Sage, and he went over to one of the policemen who had been caught by the beam and felt his neck to take his pulse. He saw that the man was merely asleep. He examined the other men and found them to be sleeping too. "Ever wonder why you're here?" said Alain, without moving. He saw the ceiling was going out of focus, and knew he was dying.

  "What are you talking about?" La Sage walked over to Alain and knelt beside him, studying his agonized face.

  "I know what this reality thing's all about. But I won't tell you, because your mind won't be able to take it," Alain told him.

  "Tell me then, and we' ll see. Your mind is no more superior than mine. You were so smart you got caught didn’t you?" La Sage listened to the heavy-footed noise of more police coming up the stairs.

  Alain told La Sage the great secret, and then quietly died.

  La Sage staggered around the room in a dazed state, shaking his head. The newly-acquired revelation overwhelmed him so much, he found it impossible to speak. The three policemen who came into the garret saw the bodies of the sleeping gendarmes in a pile on the floor, and asked La Sage what had happened. When La Sage started screaming, they initially surmised he was experiencing the post-traumatic symptoms of a shootout. But when Professor Goldstein later got permission to examine the policeman shortly before he was taken to a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the capital, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the great ontological truth that had eluded philosophers for centuries had been revealed to the policeman's feeble mind. La Sage's eyes had that faraway look. That familiar detached look that Goldstein had seen before when he looked into the eyes of the chimpanzee who had been cruelly overexposed to his thinking cap.

  La Sage spent the rest of his days in a sound-proofed cell at a military hospital. Sometimes, the curious doctors and nurses would bravely ask their patient what he knew, but their requests were never answered, because La Sage would always start to scream.

  Epilogue

  The bedroom around Matthew and Christina came back into focus...
>
  Right away, Christina asked Rhiannon: ‘What is the ultimate answer? Why are we all here? I really need to know.’

  ‘If I told you I think you’d go insane,’ Rhiannon replied to the Goth in a sombre voice, and her eyes conveyed the graveness of some unspeakable truth that could destroy a mortal mind.

  ‘Oh that’s just lame, ‘ Christina complained. ‘I mean why tell us and then say you can’t reveal the answer, it’s not fair.’

  ‘I don’t think we should know,’ Matthew chipped in, ‘I mean if there was some possibility that both of us, or one of us could wind up insane through knowing the ultimate answer to everything, then I’d rather not know.’

  ‘But that’s lame; you should be brave and want to know and damn the consequences,’ Christina whined. Once curiosity got the better of her there was no turning back, and Matthew had notice that facet of her complex personality in the short time he had known Christina.

  Well, that week, something terrible happened. First of all, Christina suddenly decided she wanted to leave Matthew. This came about when the couple were sunbathing in a park, both facing the blue canopy of sky, when Christina spotted a tiny silver-white speck up there.

  ‘That’s where I want to be,’ she said, squinting skywards, and a worried Matthew had said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Up there in that plane,’ Christina had told him.

  ‘You mean an air stewardess?’ Matthew had assumed.

  Christina screamed at him. ‘Why do you assume I’d want to be some bubble-brained air stewardess?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Matthew apologised, sitting up in the noon-day heat. ‘So you mean you wished you were going away on your holidays?’

  ‘Um – no!’ Christina yelled at him.

  ‘Then what do you mean then?’

  ‘I want to be an airline pilot, and don’t even look at me like that. All guys look at girls like that when they say they want to do things that men usually do. Guys hog all the coolest jobs, and its pathetic.’

  ‘Well, you could be a pilot, I never said you couldn't,’ said Matthew, so afraid a split was in the offing.

  ‘I’m going home!’ Christina announced.

  ‘Why?’ Matthew started to get up off the hot grass.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ Christina told him as she picked up her towel and shook the grass from it, ‘I’m going home on my own.’

  And she stormed out of the park as a tiny solitary cloud blotted out the light and warmth of the sun.

  Matthew left the park soon afterwards, and felt a lump of sorrow rising in his throat. He passed the gasometer where he had first kissed Christina, and people passing by looked at him in a strange way because tears were rolling down his face. Then when he got home, he saw a police car parked outside of his house, and a two policemen standing on the drive, talking to his parents.

  Matthew opened the gate and walked down the path, and the police turned around and looked at him with stern expressions, but they said nothing.

  ‘Matthew,’ Maureen Brindley said to her son, ‘someone’s broken into the house. They’ve taken your computer and your Playstation.’

  ‘What?’ Matthew ran into the house and straight up the stairs to his bedroom. The Talking Picture had gone. Matthew looked everywhere for it, and when he couldn’t find it, he hoped the robbers had perhaps dropped it downstairs, but the beloved picture of Rhiannon was nowhere to be found. Matthew went into his garden shed with Larry his dog following close behind. He sat in a corner of the old shed with a morose-looking Larry beside him and sobbed with his face in his hands. If someone would have told him only this morning when he got up that he would lose the two most important people in his life within a matter of hours, he wouldn’t have believed them.