New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  But before the ruffians could make the move that would turn harassment into assault, Lodestone seized a whip from a sleeping coachman, and kept on walking straight down the middle of the street, his arms slightly apart, flicking the whip around like a lion tamer entering a cage. Lilian and Morgane followed in his shadow, and, from the corners of their eyes, could see that the silhouettes, though they muttered slurred insults, were not advancing anymore. One by one, they stepped back reluctantly, waiting for some easier prey.

  Lilian had to remind herself that she despised such shows of strength—because for a moment, this one had rather impressed her.

  X

  An Invisible Visitor

  Once alone in his room, Gabriel discovered that he could not use the influence machine on his own simply by holding an end of each wand. It left him exhausted, his temple pulsing barbed waves through his head. Still, after long minutes of useless exertions and much twisting of the sheets, he discovered that something in him adamantly refused to consider sleep an option. And as he well knew, struggling would only make his insomnia worse.

  After a long moment of immobile brooding, he decided it was time for some action. He turned on the bedside light and fetched the Music Box. Rummaging through its secret drawers, he picked out a random packet of Psylicates. The Diviner. It would have to do.

  Opening the drawers had immediately triggered the music box, and its tiny twin figures started dancing to “The Magic Flute.” The little buggers, Gabriel thought with nostalgia. Through his tears, their dance became a blurry whirl. That was the trouble with these synthetic sands—they always made your eyes sting and water.

  But they hit quickly. Gabriel closed his eyes, and already had the feeling he was retreating—or advancing?—into his mind, like a phantascopic camera gliding on a gondola. His luminous chaos—since that was, apparently, the name for it—shimmered and sparkled, the dots crowding madly, like the stars on a very clear summer night. Meanwhile, he began to feel the first bodily effects, which were not especially pleasant: it was like being kneaded, pressured, elongated, and softly disarticulated as if to be fit into a mechanism of which he was to become a cog. Then air began to whistle through his bones in gusts of unbearable pleasure, and bolts of silent black lightning flashed through his brain to the point at which he thought it would split in half.

  His eyes still closed, Gabriel watched his luminous chaos grow brighter and still more primeval. It had expanded into a universe, deepening immensely and perpetually gushing from some invisible well. Storms of scintillating dots whirled like mad galaxies amongst explosions of pure darkness fringed by bristling diamond haloes. Dim waves of light pulsed nervously, as if heaving to bloom into recognizable shapes. Clusters of shadows flocked into grotesque profiles and grimacing faces as wide as the night sky.

  Gabriel, or some better part of him that was being moulded anew, floated for a while, then started to tremble, feeling cold to the bone, as the vision seemed to get darker. A picture slowly slid into view, varnished and neatly delineated, like a miniature, meticulous oil painting. It was a depiction of a white city on the seaside, frothy specks of slanting light gleaming on its angles and domes. It seemed motionless at first, but from what seemed an embankment or pier, a white shape hurtled towards him at full speed, though it never came any closer, as if it were running in place.

  But then it was in his brain, as if a cloud of white butterflies had been violently sucked down a black plughole. His mind sank down in a pool of slimy black water. Only his temple, still throbbing painfully, gave him a vague sense of time receding farther and farther away, until he forgot about it and about himself.

  Hours passed unnoticed.

  He woke with a terrible headache, and whiplashed by icy shivers.

  Something had just touched his foot.

  He remained on his belly, motionless, half-conscious, a small maelstrom of fear swirling in his stomach. It must have been a dream, he thought. He tried to calm down, and, with difficulty, found within himself the levers to raise his limbs, and slowly extended his foot. With a flash of horror he experienced the same feeling of cold contact. It wasn’t a dream—but perhaps he’d left something between the sheets? He didn’t have the courage to check again. He turned sideways, knees up, trying to curl into a ball of oblivion, but fear had taken hold of him now, and he was trembling in chilly electric bursts, while a cold sweat drenched his back.

  Then, something moved at his side, almost imperceptibly, giving off the faintest whiff of ether. Gabriel nearly jumped out of his skin, when what felt like a cold hand lightly touched his shoulder. Trembling like a leaf, barely holding back an urge to scream, he told himself that this was just an hallucination, from too much drugs or electricity or pain, but the thought changed nothing; he sensed that the presence was still there, like a barely perceptible draught of chilly air, turning the marrow of his bones into a solid core of ice. Face it, he thought. That will dispel it. And abruptly, he flipped onto his back with wide-open eyes. It was dark in the room, and no thing—or no one—was immediately visible. But still, there was the strong sense of something—a darker shade of dark, a slow breath in the air, the slightest weight upon the bed.

  Then he heard a voice very near to his throbbing temple.

  “Be still,” said the voice—a woman’s.

  Something strange and confusing was happening in his soul. He had never wanted anything as much as he wanted to obey—no, to please, the voice. It felt full of tenderness, and he could feel a sense of love building up inside him. But, equally violently, his mind protested. No, he shouldn’t listen to the voice. This voice didn’t exist. And if it did, it was dangerously seductive, like the voice of a siren.

  And yet he loved this voice. The thought of refusing her anything made him miserable. He despised himself for this, but there was no way that he could go to her. He had to stay with the others, find a path back to New Venice. That was his life.

  “Sorry,” he sobbed, “I’m so sorry.”

  The voice sighed, as if disappointed, and the sigh pierced Gabriel’s heart. But his fear was stronger than love. He closed his eyes again, blocked his ears. He desperately wanted to get up but knew his muscles would mutiny. Thrills of anguish ran like blue flames along his nerves. There was a motion close to him, and, very distinctly, he felt a kiss falling like a petal upon his forehead. He sat up then with a jerk, icy sweat pouring off him like water from a melting snowman. He turned and grasped a notebook: writing down the dream would prove that it was nothing more than that. Still trembling with fear, he wrote illegibly, tracing signs that were not so much letters as the curve of his panicked heartbeat.

  XI

  The Steam Guillotine

  It was the cold that brought Blankbate back to his senses. He realized he was outside, blindfolded amidst what sounded like a bustle of people, his breath reeking of chloroform, his hands tied so tightly together that his wrists hurt, and with the dull, cold pressure of a gun’s muzzle pressed hard against the nape of his neck. His could feel that his false beard and tinted glasses had been torn away, and he found that painful and humiliating, after all these years—to have his real face exposed, even to strangers. The scene at the Red Castle came back to his mind in hazy flashes. He could not believe he had been so naïve.

  The pressure of the gun muzzle relaxed a little, long enough for someone to unknot the blindfold. Blankbate flexed his muscles, ready to react, but what he saw stopped him dead. He found himself standing amidst the roofless, charred ruins of some immense palace, the night visible above him and through the rows of chipped arches that circled the building at every level. Through one of the arches the moon shone, bulbous and pale, like a blind man’s eye. The ground was snow-covered, scattered with broken stones, weeds, and dry shrubs, and dark, snakelike ivy crept up along the remains of the walls. About twenty men surrounded him, all of them wearing wolf masks and fur coats with carnations in their lapels, some carrying torches that sent bulky shadows slowly pulsing across the
ruins. A rectangular shape that seemed two stories tall, covered with a black drape, stood on a flat stone. In front of Blankbate, a fat man with a long white beard, his face unmasked, sat in a spiral-wheeled chair, a fur blanket on his knees. He spoke softly, but with an ominous hiss.

  “It has come to my attention that you were interested in meeting the owner of the Blackamoor. At the moment, that happens to be me. What is it I can do for you?”

  “Let me go,” Blankbate answered, straightening his aching spine. He had been beaten, and now his body effloresced with vivid patches of pain.

  “Ah, this I cannot do, unfortunately. Neither can I offer you the Blackamoor, of which I am only the keeper, and which it is my duty to protect. But I can assure you that you will see it tonight.”

  “Where are we? What are you going to do to me?” Blankbate shouted, his voice laden with anger.

  “Where? The former Court of Accounts, which was burned down during the Commune. But, as you can see, it is still a Court. And of course, what we are going to do is settle some accounts.”

  “Is this some kind of trial?”

  “It is more than that, I am afraid. It is an execution.” He made a slight move of his plump hand, and two Wolf-men stepped up onto the flat stone, and pulled the black drape off the large structure.

  The guillotine appeared, vertiginous, its oblique blade gleaming in the torchlight. Its posts were laced with vines or ivy and topped with bunches of mistletoe. Two metallic horns darted from the upper mantle, fastened to curved tubes of steel that were themselves inserted into mechanical contraptions on either side of the legs. The heavy “mutton” that held and weighed the blade was not suspended by a rope but fixed to a pair of telescopic pistons, which were in turn connected to some sort of engine. It was, in short, a steam guillotine.

  All of the Wolf-men had dropped to their knees, heads down, as soon as the death machine had appeared, and now they slowly got back on their feet.

  Blankbate knew this was the end. He stood fascinated, for a while unable to summon the strength to fight.

  “Meet our Queen, the Widow, the Mother of Men and Eternal Maiden, She who turns Life into Death and Death into Life. She demands blood to bring spring back to our accursed land,” the man in the wheelchair declaimed, encompassing the snowy ruins with a wide swipe of his arm. “It is our great honour to offer a sacrifice to her, and a great privilege for you to have been chosen as her consort.”

  “Why me?” Blankbate howled. He felt the anger building up in him, streams of strength flowing to his aching muscles. But there was nothing he could do.

  The man in the wheelchair gave a smile that the torchlight twisted into a grimace.

  “It is well known that a stranger brings either trouble or abundance. In both cases, sacrifice is required. And, as a benefit, we get rid of strangers—all these Jews and Dagoes, all the vermin that invade France these days. It used to be a land of Plenty, but it has been abused and defiled, and it is our mission to purify it from its waste, so that it can grow again, back to the full splendour of its past abundance.”

  Reasoning with these men, Blankbate realized in a drench of cold sweat, was as useless as fighting them. The word “waste,” though, struck him. This man was not only an enemy but also a colleague, a garbage collector. That was why he had the Blackamoor. But he had committed the most basic mistake and, in Blankbate’s eyes, the ultimate sin: that of thinking that the mess should or could be cleaned, that it was not part of some mysterious balance. And of course, that mistake had made him crazy.

  But it was too late for understanding. Another wave of the man’s hand sent one of the Wolf-men over to the Widow. With careful, solemn gestures, the screw that blocked the spring of the lunette was undone. A fat piece of rope from a figure-eight-shaped ring was unfastened and hooked to the blade. Pulling the rope, the Wolf-man lifted the mutton up to the crossbar mantle, then coiled the cord around a hook on the left post.

  Another Wolf-man had joined him, feeding charcoal to the firebox of the steam engine. The glow was reflected on his feral head, and embers flickered in his black, opaque eyes.

  “I made two journeys: one through the forest, one through the fire,” the bearded man in the wheelchair suddenly declaimed. The engine started to puff and purr in the silent night. From time to time, the Wolf-men spoke among themselves in a language that sounded like twisted, inverted French, but Blankbate could not understand them. He tried to focus, dispel his fears, find a way out, but his mind, too, seemed bound in tight chains.

  He watched hopelessly as the dressing of the Bride continued. A large wicker trunk, padded with vine leaves, was brought alongside the platform. A zinc pail was hung over the lunette, and another Wolf-man, perhaps the tall one who had framed him, stood near the Widow, a crude curvaceous metal vase in his hand.

  Blankbate knew what it was before the man in the wheelchair had time to tell him.

  “The Blackamoor. Your blood will be the wine of our harvest. We’ll feed the earth with it.”

  “Let an impure blood water our furrows!” the Wolf-men chanted, as, with a hiss of pressure, wraithlike smoke from the engine rose around the guillotine.

  Blankbate closed his eyes. He suddenly understood that his mistake at the Red Castle had only been the outcome of another, earlier, bigger blunder. His dream of the Blackamoor had been a dream of his own death. He had come to Paris not to prevail, but to meet his fate. Some part of him, he realized, had known it all along. This was why he had walked into the Hall of the Dead. The grail was to be filled with his blood.

  He took a deep breath, summoning courage. Hands seized him and pushed him towards the stone. He elbowed them back and straightened his spine.

  “I’ll walk,” he spat out at them.

  The man in the wheelchair nodded.

  “Actually, the ritual demands a fight,” he decreed.

  And the Wolf-men grasped Blankbate again and he fought back in despair, twisted, kicked their shins, but they were strong and they were many and they dragged him up to the stone. The time came for them to tear off his collar, and he faced the guillotine rising darkly against the night sky, and he looked for the Great Bear to say his prayers. But before he could find it, he was toppled, face down, over the teeter. Someone tried to pull his hair to pass it through the lunette, but it was too short-cropped, and the hands had to take purchase below the neck, strangling Blankbate as they pulled him forward. He had lived most of his life as a pariah; couldn’t he die with dignity? His head was forced into the lunette and its upper half-moon was lowered to hold him in place, and locked. He felt he was going crazy as multiple hands held him down on the teeter and a large, masked man advanced towards him, holding a spiked hammer.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that we are not barbarians,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Unlike the unclean Jews and Musselmans, we are merciful enough to kill the offering before we cut its throat. Proceed, please.”

  The hammer was lifted, passing against the face of the moon.

  “Long live the Widow, Mother of the Universe!” the Wolf-men shouted.

  Blankbate held his last breath, and watched the hammer as it fell.

  To be continued …

  I

  A Morning at the Morgue

  When Gabriel woke up, his brain like a sponge full of cold gravy, the first thing he did was to check the hasty squiggle on his bedside table.

  Boy meets girls, it read.

  With a sigh, he noticed that another piece of paper had been slid under his door. Shivering, he got out of bed and picked it up. It was from Brentford: “Meet me at Notre-Dame at eleven o’clock.”

  Outside, it was sunny, but awfully cold, with a near-gale-force wind blowing from the north that went through his bones like an X-ray. Brentford was waiting for him on the Pont-au-Double with a paper bag in his hand, and greeted him as if he hadn’t seen him in months.

  “Holy Cod!” he exclaimed. “Your eyes are in the middle of your cheeks. Too much static or some
thing?”

  Gabriel almost confessed his nightmare, but fought the impulse. “I have an intense inner life, I suppose.”

  “Well, I’ve never doubted that.”

  “What have you got there?” Gabriel asked, pointing to the paper bag, hoping to change the topic.

  “Why, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the famous Lunchpack of Notre-Dame.”

  Gabriel stifled his laughter and frowned instead. “You’ve got to get this interpherence fixed, Brentford,” he said. “It’s becoming a bit like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  “All right, sorry.”

  “That was funny, actually. Your best so far. But I doubt you made me come here just for these fireworks of wit.”

  “Just a little laughter before a hard day’s work. Next, we’re supposed to meet Tripotte. I got another téléphonage this morning, but he was very elusive about why he wanted to meet. Ah, quand on parle du loup … Here’s Tripotte.”

  The commissaire was approaching from the nearby prefecture, his bulk made more portentous by the fur-lined greatcoat he wore. He licked his lips before saluting Brentford, and he, too, pointed his pudgy finger at the paper bag.

  “You’d better eat now, Mr. Orsini,” he intoned, “because I’m taking you to the morgue.”

  The morgue was located in the shadow of Notre-Dame, at the stern of the Île de la Cité, in an austere, single-story building. Its large, central gate was closed, but a long queue twisted out of a small gate on one side, while a few people trickled out of another gate on the other. Along the fence surrounding the building, muffled street peddlers proposed coffee, roasted chestnuts, apples, gingerbread, and whatever “morgue paté” was. Showing his police card, Tripotte hurried the apprehensive Brentford and Gabriel past the queue and inside. It was as busy as a theatre lobby just before the play. Inside, people of all ages and walks of life pressed themselves against two notice boards, one with photographs of corpses, the other with lists of distinguishing marks. The anguish building in Brentford’s gut started to crystallize into something angular and piercing.