by Lee Carroll
Will, weary of Guy Liverpool’s portentous perspective, said a hasty farewell, slapped two shillings down on the tabletop for his drink, and sped off intoeluge. With a new chance at immortality, he felt as if he could walk between the hailstones and raindrops. And walk between them he nearly did.
13
Harlequin
The next day I caught a train for Fontainebleau.
“I have to go alone,” I’d told Madame La Pieuvre after we’d left the Luxembourg. “Sylvianne told me so.”
“What else did Sylvianne tell you?” She still looked puffed up, but the inky blotches on her face were fading.
“She told me that tomorrow night the Wild Hunt rides through the Forest of Fontainebleau, and that if I stopped in front of the head rider and demanded passage to the Summer Country, he would have to give it to me.”
“Oh, is that all?” Madame La Pieuvre asked, arching one eyebrow. “Why not tell you to stand in front of a speeding train while she’s at it?”
I recollected her words as I hurried toward my track at the Gare de Lyon. Surely Madame La Pieuvre had been exaggerating. She’d been angered by Sylvianne, but she herself had said that the tree folk’s treatment of humans was harmless. Mostly. And sure, Wild Hunt sounded scary, but when I’d looked it up last night on the Internet, I’d found out it was merely the name for a gathering of fairies. It was also sometimes called the Wild Host, Woden’s Ride, or, in Old North French, la Mesnée d’Hellequin, none of which sounded quite as ominous as Hunt. Hellequin turned out to be an ancestor of Harlequin, the masked and diamond-suited jester of commedia dell’arte. What could be more harmless than that?
Besides, I was going with a personal calling card from the Queen of the Forest. Sylvianne had given me a small twig from her “hair” to hold up in front of the riders and assured me that it would keep me safe. So I had nothing to worry about … unless the twig was a secret message like the death sentence borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet indicating that the bearer should be killed on the spot.
I shook my head free of these thoughts as I boarded the train, took a seat on the upper level, and tried to focus instead on the excitement of the trip. After all, what could be more evocative of adventure and romantic travel than these big, old European train stations? From the top level of the double-decker train I had a wonderful view of the great vaulted ceiling and the enormous clock hanging from it. Shields with the insignia of French provinces lined the walls. At the top of a great staircase was one of the last of the grand railway restaurants: Le Train Bleu. My mother had taken me there for ice cream during the summer I was sixteen, and she’d told me that she had gone there as a girl, first when she and her mother took the train from her little village in the south up to Paris. She’d told me it had been the last place she’d ever seen her mother, who had later sent her back into the country just weeks before the Germans marched into Paris.
Suddenly the bustling train station transformed before me. Instead of tourists rusng to catch their trains for their holidays in the Midi, I saw hordes of frightened families pushed by black-booted soldiers onto freight cars. I heard the cries of mothers calling to their children and the shrill commands in German. And standing in the center of it all was the man in the long coat and the broad-brimmed hat I’d seen five times now. And he was looking right at me.…
I startled out of my vision to find myself surrounded by three loud and boisterous teenagers crowding into the seat across from me. One of the girls was opening a window and shouting in English to hurry up, for fuck’s sake. She collapsed into her seat in a fit of giggles, hiding her face in her friend’s lap. Still half dazed by my vision—I’d been having quite a few of them lately, hadn’t I?—I stared at the girls wondering why they looked familiar. Then I realized they were the same girls I’d seen a few nights ago in the Square Viviani—the art students who’d rushed off to make their midnight curfew.
“Don’t mind Sarah,” one of the girls, a redhead, said when she noticed me staring. “She’s got Tourette’s.”
Sarah punched her friend in the arm and collapsed in another fit of giggles.
“I’ve heard worse,” I assured them. “Are you girls going to Fontainebleau to sketch?” I pointed at the portfolios they all carried.
“Yeah,” the redhead, apparently the designated speaker, answered. “Our art teacher says that Fontainebleau has been an inspiration to artists for centuries and we ought to ‘take our line for a walk’ there.”
Sarah dissolved into another fit of laughter. “We were going to spend the weekend in Nice, but Becca’s parents pitched a fit.”
The third girl, a gamine with black bangs and dark eyes, blushed. “They didn’t think it was safe. They’re freaked out by reports of missing students.”
“They think she’s going to end up like that boy they found this morning in the Seine,” Sarah said, her voice suddenly sober.
“What boy?” I asked.
“Do you still have the paper, Carrie?” Sarah asked the redhead.
Carrie handed me this morning’s Herald Tribune. On the front page was a photograph of nineteen-year-old Sam Smollett, a sophomore at Bard College, who had gone missing from his dormitory a week ago. He’d been found drowned in the Seine this morning.
Bard Boy, I thought, recognizing the boy I’d seen with Sylvianne last night. Had he broken away from her dominion last night and thrown himself into the river? Or had someone decided to deprive the Queen of the Forest of her special pet? I recalled the man in the overcoat and hat I’d seen vaulting into the park last night. That made twice that I’d seen him at the scene of a crime. And I’d just seen him standing in the station. Had he boarded our train?
I glanced around the car nervously, but therelk no sign of the man in the long coat and hat—although, if he took them off, would I recognize him? What if his next target was one of these three girls?
I tried to focus on the girls’ conversation again, if only to slip in some warning to them about staying out of dark, deserted parks at night. They were discussing the history of Fontainebleau.
“Our teacher says it’s the birthplace of plain air, or something,” Carrie was saying.
“En plein air,” I gently corrected. “And he’s right. Before the impressionists, painters came out to the woods of Fontainebleau to paint outdoors instead of in their studios. They were called the Barbizon school for one of the villages.” I gave a little lecture on the Barbizon school to the three girls, supplemented by details I’d learned on the Internet last night. They listened patiently and politely, like the three nice American high schoolers they were. I ended by stressing that the painters worked during the daylight. The woods could be dangerous at night.
“Are you an artist?” Carrie asked, ignoring my warning.
“A jeweler.” I showed them the watch I’d recently made and the swan ring and pendant I always wore and they immediately became more animated. Sarah had seen some of my pendants at Barneys, which instantly gave me more “cred” than all the art history knowledge in the world. We talked about different art schools in New York City and where the girls were thinking of going to college. Becca, who was from Texas, said her parents were against her going to art school in Manhattan; Sarah said her grandparents refused to let her use her college fund for anything less than an Ivy; while Carrie said her mom wanted her to go to art school but that she wanted a more general liberal arts college.
“I don’t think I can take four years of emo art kids,” she said.
The girls’ chatter made the trip fly by and distracted me briefly from my worries over the two drownings. We were heading away from Paris, where they’d occurred. Still, I was happy to learn we were all staying at the same hotel—the Aigle Noir—right across from the entrance to the château and park. I could keep an eye on the girls tonight.
I resisted the urge to follow when they ran off toward the park with their sketchbooks right away. It was full daylight, after all. And I’d be better off resting now
so I could be more alert tonight.
I checked in and was shown to a pretty toile-papered room overlooking the town square and the high walls of the château. The square was full of outdoor cafés, a carousel, and a stage being set up for some kind of evening theatrics. The bright, colorful scene full of tourists and day-trippers from Paris belied any dark activity behind the high walls. I’d imagined coming to Fontainebleau that I’d be plunged into a dark, trackless wilderness, not this bucolic scene as peaceful and harmless as the shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking across the tame toile landscape on the wall. I fell asleep lulled by the music of the carousel and the plump, smiling faces on the wallpaper.
My dreams started peaceful enough as well. I was in a green meadow. I could hear the bleat of sheep pahe distance and the sound of bells. I walked to the top of a hill and looked down on a valley dotted with quaint stone cottages and hedgerows. A giggling girl ran past me, her frilled petticoats frothing around her plump legs. A boy in striped trousers and loose shirt pursued her. A couple of sheep frolicked nearby. I walked a little farther on and another girl ran past me, also in frilly dress and low-cut bodice, and yet again a boy in peasant attire followed her, along with the same retinue of sheep. I had an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. When the scene repeated a third time, I spun around, annoyed that I seemed to be stuck in a repeating loop … and then I saw that the same scene—running shepherdess, following shepherd, bleating sheep—was repeated over and over again across the valley. I was stuck in the toile wallpaper; no matter how far I wandered, I kept encountering the same banal scene. I trudged on, looking desperately for a way out, but somehow knowing that I’d be stuck there forever.
I awoke in my room at the Aigle Noir, my heart pounding. The now maddening drone of the carousel and the voices of people in the square filled the room. In my confused half-asleep state I imagined the voices came from the figures in the wallpaper. The raucous laughter was from the leering shepherds—had they looked quite so lecherous before my nap?—the high-pitched squeals from the fleeing shepherdesses—had they looked quite so fearful before? But what was making those bleating sounds? They weren’t just in my dream—they were here in Fontainebleau.
I got up and went to the window. My first surprise was that it was full dark. The clock on the night table read 22:33—ten thirty-three, my sleep-addled brain deduced after a sluggish moment. I’d slept for over ten hours.
Ten hours stuck in that maddening wallpaper. No wonder I felt tired!
My second surprise was that I had apparently been transported to seventeenth-century France. Specifically a seventeenth-century performance of the Comédie-Italienne. The square was full of masked people dressed in elaborate costumes. I recognized the whitened face and loose white blouse and pantaloons of Pierrot, the tattered dress, heavy eye makeup and tambourine of Columbine, and the diamond-patterned costume and black-and-red mask of Harlequin. The actors were circulating among the crowd, drumming up enthusiasm for the coming performance, no doubt.
There was nothing sinister in that, I assured myself as I got dressed and went downstairs. I had time for a quick bite in a café before heading off for my meeting. I picked an outside table so I could watch the theatrics. There were jugglers and flame-eaters and a man in an owl mask doing magic tricks, but the main narrative thread consisted of the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine. Pierrot was forever mooning, his white face a perfect doleful moon, for his beloved, but whenever he seemed about to realize his dream of winning her, Harlequin would devise some way of keeping them apart. Then he would sweep in himself and whisk Columbine away in his arms.
“Poor Pierrot,” I heard someone say in English. “He never wins.”
I turned around and saw Sarah with her friends Carrie and Becca at a table behind me. They waved for me to join them and I went over to their table for a coffee and to see the sketches they’d done of the château and gardens. Their happy, sunburned faceers full sketchbooks left me feeling like a mole rat for sleeping the day away, but I enjoyed looking at each girl’s work—and I was relieved to see that no harm had come to them during the day. Carrie was clearly the most technically skilled of the three, but Becca had a nice lyrical touch for landscapes, and Sarah had a real flair for capturing gesture and expression—and she was the one who had drawn the most. Even as we spoke, she was sketching the figures in the crowd on her paper place mat. She was working on a portrait of Harlequin.
“You’ve really captured his devilish air,” I told her, admiring her sketch.
“He is a little devil, isn’t he?” Sarah said, furrowing her brows together. “But also … kind of handsome, don’t you think?”
I looked at the figure in his diamond-patterned tights and fitted jacket hewing closely to a slim but muscular form. A black-and-red mask concealed the top part of his face, but his eyes seemed to glitter behind it and his mouth seemed very red beneath it.
“Yes,” I agreed with a little shiver. “He’s both—devilish and handsome. I read somewhere that Harlequin originated in a figure from the French passion plays called Hellequin, and he’s supposed to be an emissary of the devil…” I trailed off, recalling something else I’d read last night when I’d googled the Wild Hunt. Hellequin had been identified as one of the traditional leaders of the hunt, and the pack of evil spirits he led were called la Mesnée d’Hellequin. Was it a coincidence that a Harlequin performed in the square on the same night the Wild Hunt rode through the Forest of Fontainebleau?
A strangled cry—like the ones I’d heard earlier during my nap—startled me out of my speculations.
“What is that?” I asked the girls.
Carrie and Becca laughed, but Sarah was intent on her sketch.
“Peacocks,” Carrie told me. “They’re in the Garden of Diana right through that gate. You can still go see them. They’re keeping the park open late tonight for the fête.”
“Oh, let’s go!” Sarah said suddenly, looking up from her sketch. “I bet the gardens are beautiful at night!”
Becca and Carrie said they were too tired and wanted to go to bed. Sarah looked as if she was about to argue, but she was distracted by the sudden appearance of Harlequin at the table. He’d popped up as quickly as a jack-in-the-box and grabbed the picture Sarah had done of him off the table. He looked at it, and then, holding it to his lips, bowed at Sarah. As he righted himself, I caught a glimpse of his eyes behind the mask … green eyes with glints of gold in them … definitely devilish and somehow familiar. Sarah blushed bright pink. I decided to use the moment to steal away for a quick turn around the garden. I didn’t want Sarah getting the idea to come along with me. I couldn’t bring anyone where I was going, and I didn’t want her wandering away from me in the dark forest by herself.
I approached the fountain at the center of the garden wondering how I could make everyone leave. A small group of tourists were gathered around the fountain taking pictures. As I got closer, I saw of what. A young woman, skin painted verdigris green and dressed in a belted stola of the same color, posed in front of the circular fountain. She was identical to the statue of Diana standing on top right down to the four hound dogs that surrounded her. The live dogs had also been painted verdigris green, hopefully with no damage to their skin, and sat as still as their bronze counterparts.
“Magnifique!” a woman in a stylish Breton fisherman’s shirt and capris murmured as she clicked her camera. It was impressive that the street performer had trained her dogs to remain so still; they even managed to mimic the doleful expressions of the hounds on the fountain, and they didn’t even flinch when a white peacock strolled by within an inch of their noses. I was so caught up in admiring them that I didn’t notice the time passing until the clock in the town hall began chiming midnight.
Damn, I thought, how will my escort appear with all these witnesses?
I needn’t have worried. As the bells tolled, the tourists and performers began to file out of the garden as if called away by the sound of the bells.
They moved robotically, their eyes strangely glazed. It reminded me creepily of a scene from The Time Machine, in which the gentle Eloi responded to a summons to sacrifice themselves to the cannibal Morlocks. I had an uneasy feeling, though, that they were being led to safety while I was being left alone like the goat tied up for T. rex’s snack in Jurassic Park.
When the clock had chimed twelve times, the only other living beings left in the garden were the Diana impersonator, her dogs, the peacocks, and myself. Perhaps the performer was my escort.
“Pardon moi,” I began. “Êtes-vous mon guide?”
She didn’t even blink. She was frozen in the perfect guise of a statue. I thought this was taking her act a bit too far and was going to tell her so when I felt something tug at my hand. I looked down into the amber eyes of a verdigris hound. It held my hand in its mouth gently, but when I tried to pull away, his jaws clamped down. There was a hound on either side of me, hemming me in, and one behind me. I could feel its hot breath on the small of my back.
“Okay,” I said, all of my 01C;you don’t have to ask twice. I’m ready to go.”
14
Euclid
Will’s unease began the moment he dismounted from the carriage in front of the crumbling ruins of what the Mortlake watchman had called the Cottage. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come. The cottage looked like a ruined miniature castle, heaps of stones along its flat, timbered roof resembling the remnants of turrets; slits instead of windows in the stone first-floor walls; and a huge pile of rubbled masonry to the side that exceeded the scale of the standing building. A gleaming scimitar moon floated over the roof to the east. The place looked like the frontier outpost of a medieval army for which the battle had gone badly, and Will even felt an empathetic twinge for how these soldiers might have fared. For a fleeting second he even thought he could smell the hint of still-burning, tortured flesh in the damp and darkening air. But the remaining timbers looked sturdy enough, so at least the roof was unlikely to collapse on his head during the hoped-for interview.
