New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Wolves, my dear,” d’Ussonville explained. “They have been following Amédée and the Major. So our idea for an appointment wasn’t as safe as we would have liked think.”

  “We?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes,” Blanche explained, still staring at the pile of bodies in horror. “The major asked me to arrange a meeting with my uncle. I thought it would be safe here. And then you called and I couldn’t say no. I’m sorry it all got mixed up together like this.”

  Brentford held back in shock, trying to make sense of a scene that featured skulls everywhere, an assortment of men lying on the floor in fur clothing, a half-mechanical British officer, an old tramp, and a founder of New Venice.

  “Why would the Wolves try to kill you?” he finally muttered, still examining the carnage.

  “They wanted to kill us both, I think. They were first of all after Monsieur de Bramentombes,” d’Ussonville explained patiently, pointing to the cowering old man. “Since he obviously isn’t as dead as they thought, the fortune he has bequeathed to his daughter could return to him. But if they killed him for good, they could then count on Blanche’s poor health to get the money back—through my subservient sister, who would inherit it on her daughter’s death. Likewise, Blanche is also my heiress. And of course, if they shorten my life, it would also solve some of their other problems—but of those I’m not at liberty to say more.”

  But Brentford wasn’t listening anymore, for his eyes had come to rest on something he did not want to believe. His voice barely a whisper, he uttered, “Tuluk?”

  “Yes,” Thomas nodded sadly. “They slit his throat. I shot the bastard that did it.”

  Brentford’s first thought was for the Colonel. His second thought was that he would have to tell him. He looked around him, at all the insane heaps of human bones, and an anger swelled in him: an anger at the universe for finding nothing better than death to make life lovable. It was then that Brentford made his decision.

  “Blanche, please,” he said, “would you go home and send Gabriel down to join us with the Colonel? He should be in the bathroom, and please make sure he doesn’t forget his cane. Thomas and I will carry Tuluk to the Colonel. Monsieur d’Ussonville, yesterday we talked about a certain object that is in my possession. I did not realize the danger you were in and will bring you this object tomorrow, to use as you please.”

  D’Ussonville gave him a long look, then bowed his head: “I would be immensely grateful. It will be put to good use, believe me.”

  Brentford nodded, biting his lip.

  It had better be, he said to himself.

  Brentford thought that he had been through hard times before—Helen’s death came to mind—but carrying the heavy, bloody corpse of his friend through these narrow, harrowing catacombs struck him as the hardest so far. And there was worse to come: he didn’t even want to think about facing the Colonel.

  But they trudged on until, from the centre of a curious miniature city, rose the back of Branwell’s head, the Wimshurst at its side—an image of utter serenity that Brentford would have to shatter.

  “Tuluk, is that you?” he asked. “You bloody son of a sled bitch! Leaving your old dad like that!”

  Setting down Tuluk’s body just out of sight, Brentford stepped before the Colonel and spoke as softly as possible. “Tuluk has been killed, Colonel. Fighting very bravely.”

  From his perch in front of the stone city the Colonel fell silent. He gave Brentford a puzzled look, then looked away. Eventually, however, he returned his gaze to Brentford, with steady but reddened eyes. “Can I see him?” he asked quietly.

  “Of course.” Brentford and Thomas brought Tuluk’s body into the circle and placed him in front of his father.

  “The bastard who did this is dead, I presume?” the Colonel asked.

  Brentford admired the Colonel’s effort to bite the bullet. But he also found it absurd.

  “I shot him myself,” Thomas said, realizing as he did not only that he had killed his first man, but also that it pleased him immensely.

  When Thomas’s words had finished echoing down the tunnels, the Colonel simply said, “Let’s call that ass of a wizard and be done with all this.”

  “Now?” Brentford asked.

  “Right now!”

  Brentford paused before explaining, “We have to wait for Gabriel. He has the Polar Kangaroo. Meanwhile, we should have some sort of ceremony for Tuluk.”

  “A ceremony? He’s better off where he is, believe me,” replied the Colonel. “Just bury him here, where he died.”

  “You mean …”

  “Aye! Right here! On the battlefield. Among these bones. There is no better place.”

  Brentford looked at Thomas and nodded his assent. Together they walked up to the nearest wall of bones, and began pulling it cautiously apart. Once they had overcome their initial reluctance, and their fear, there was something almost soothing in moving the bones about. They were light as husks, as if to suggest that they were not so serious, not so essential, after all, but just a waste product of something more luminous and worthwhile.

  Once Brentford and Thomas had cleared a deep, roughly human shape in the top layers of bones, they took Tuluk’s body and laid it down among his fellows, “white” as they were. After all, among skeletons, race looked like a rather uncertain and daft notion.

  But when it came time for a prayer, Brentford had no idea, although the Colonel did.

  “A prayer?” he said. “To Eskimos, Christian prayers are just magic formulas. They’d rather use their own—like that Inuk poem.”

  And, after clearing some oil from his throat, and in a voice no less steady than a phonograph’s, he recited:

  You earth

  Our great earth

  See, oh see,

  All those heaps of bleached bones.

  But only one thing

  Is great,

  Only one.

  It is

  In the hut by the path

  To see the day

  Coming out of its mother

  And the light filling the world.

  Without a word, Thomas and Brentford put the bones back over Tuluk’s body, one by one, watching him disappear under them, until once again there were nothing but bones where a man’s face had been.

  Brentford sighed and turned towards the Colonel.

  “Colonel,” he announced solemnly, “I promise that if we get back to New Venice, you’ll see Tuluk again.”

  These comings and goings had exhausted Blanche, not to mention the emotions she had felt. Her heart beat like a caged animal, and a chesty, acid cough tore holes in her lungs as if they were paper lanterns. She could feel her palate fill with blood and phlegm, and for a while she doubted she could make it to the top of the stairs that led into her mother’s house. She thought she might do what lost children did in fairy tales: leave some traces of her passage, for Mr. d’Allier to follow when he came down. She carried no pebbles or breadcrumbs that could be thrown behind her, but it did not take her long to find a solution. Putting down her lamp, she lifted up her evening dress and started tearing at the hem of her petticoat, which, thank God, came off easily. Every few steps she put a strip of white cloth behind her, until her petticoat was almost entirely shredded. The time came when she had to start tugging at her drawers as well, and the feeling of the subterranean air on her thighs woke her up a little. Finally, trailing a hem that was drenched and dirty from her roamings in the tunnels, and not caring a whit, Blanche made her entrance at her mother’s soirée. Impervious to the stares that followed her muddy tracks, she parted the crowd and headed to the bathroom in search of Gabriel.

  “Mr. d’Allier?” she called, knocking on the door. It was hardly a decorous way for a young woman to behave, but if she had ever cared about decorum, she certainly didn’t now.

  A faint grunt answered, but the door did not open. She knocked again, and all she heard this time were strange, unidentifiable sounds.

  Finally the door opened�
��on nothing. Or so she thought until she saw Gabriel d’Allier slumped on the floor, as if he had used up all his strength crawling to the door. She helped him up as well as she could. He was pale and sweaty, his bloodshot eyes peering from beneath swollen lids. Behind her, people were starting to gather to see what was happening. Only now was Blanche embarrassed.

  “The wax roll,” Gabriel was slurring into her ear. “Get the wax roll from the phonograph. Give it to your uncle.”

  “I will,” Blanche answered, although not sure at all what she’d understood. “Can we have a little fresh air here, please?” she asked the onlookers who had surrounded her.

  “Do you need a doctor?” someone asked.

  Blanche almost giggled at this. She had seen enough doctors in her life not to think much of them.

  “Leave us alone, please,” she pleaded, as she made her way through the crowd, her lungs on fire. “This man needs some rest.”

  Her arm around Gabriel’s shoulders, she slowly helped him out of the room, closing the door behind her. Once away from everyone’s sight, she swerved towards the broom cupboard, where the passage to the catacombs started. It seemed to take forever, but finally she propped him against the doorjamb and put in his unsteady hand the lamp she had taken from the floor. She whispered to a maid, who brought Gabriel’s hat, cloak, and cane.

  “There. You go ahead while I get the wax roll. Down the stairs and just follow the white—the white things.”

  “White … things,” Gabriel answered, nodding his heavy head.

  “And I’ll get the wax roll,” she repeated, as if talking to a child.

  “Wax roll,” Gabriel said.

  She steered him to the top of the stairs and closed the door behind him. She almost expected to hear him tumbling down, but no.

  Taking a deep breath that burned her chest, she made her way back to the library, pursued by whispers that sounded not a little like those you hear at funerals. She entered the library without even bothering to knock. Swell-in-the-Sack, still standing in the middle of the room, interrupted his explanations, and everyone from the whole cabal—the greasy policeman, the unpleasant cripple, the ridiculous magus, the lunatic officer, the scruffy priest, the pale widow—exchanged puzzled looks as she passed between them like a ghost.

  “Blanche! What …?” her mother gasped.

  But Blanche said nothing, walked up to the phonograph, and unfastened the roll. Without a word, she turned on her heel and walked back to the door through a thick curtain of flabbergasted silence.

  “Where are you going, Blanche?” her mother finally asked in a hushed voice.

  But Blanche was gone.

  Following women’s lingerie unto the empire of death—that’s the story of my life, Gabriel thought as he recognized the “white things” upon entering the catacombs, his lamp flickering on the bright silky rags strewn on the floor. Strangely, he was not bothered by the human remains that surrounded him. In the state he was in, reality remained optional, like the attention you either lend to or withhold from an obnoxious, sputtering stranger. In fact, these remains—the bones upon bones—were the only kind of crowd he could have tolerated at that moment. Inoffensive, trustworthy, and all equal, they had achieved something humankind had always dreamed about. Death wasn’t an empire, it was a republic.

  But then he stumbled upon a heap of corpses, a Valhalla of wolf-like berserkers that, unlike the bones that lined the walls, made him shiver through and through. Dripping blood, they were fresh, and he hurried past as quickly as he could, which was not very quickly, and stumbled on until he heard voices, and something like an Eskimo chant. Home, he thought.

  “Well, you took your time,” Brentford said when he stepped into the light. It was clear to Gabriel that, beyond the pile of bodies he’d just seen, there was something dreadfully wrong, but he wasn’t yet lucid enough to guess what it was, or even to bother to ask.

  So Brentford explained it to him. “Tuluk died while trying to save someone,” he said simply.

  Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. By the look of this place, many people had died, and, in his fuzzy mind, one more did not seem so important. Then the memory that Tuluk had once saved his life struggled to the surface of his mind, and he felt vaguely sorry for the debt that had to remain unpaid.

  Brentford, meanwhile, had moved on: “We don’t have a second to lose. Just put your cane near the Colonel’s rod. Thomas, if you would, crank that thing.”

  The three New Venetians encircled the Colonel in his sculpted city, and soon enough, violet sparks flew once again between the rod and the cane. As had happened in the hotel, the Colonel’s face froze and his mouth opened wide. A deafening voice echoed throughout the catacombs.

  “AT LAST! I WAS GETTING WORRIED!” Sson bellowed.

  Praying that there were no lurking Wolves or policemen, and suspecting grimly that they amounted to the same thing, Brentford tried to gather his wits. “We’ve had a few setbacks. It’s extremely urgent that we leave as soon as possible.”

  It was eerie, Brentford thought, and he shivered at the thought of his voice travelling to another time.

  “I’VE BEEN WORKING ON IT!” Sson answered, his voice filling the sculpted cave. “NOT AS EASY AS IT SEEMS, HEY? I AM SENDING A BLACK AURORA FOR YOU TO PASS THROUGH.”

  “You can do that?” Brentford said, wondering aloud more than really asking.

  “I’M A WIZARD, AM I NOT? BUT THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE.”

  “Which would be?” Brentford asked apprehensively. His greatest fear was being asked to choose, from among his fellow New Venetians, those who would be allowed to go back.

  “AS I TOLD YOU, YOUR BODIES HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED, BUT THE BAD NEWS IS, THE BODIES YOU ARE IN NOW CANNOT TRAVEL BACK IN THE SAME WAY. WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS SEND YOUR SOULS BACK TO THEIR ORIGINAL PLACE, BACK INTO THE BODIES THAT ARE STILL IN THE FIRST PSYCHOMOTIVE. ONE SOUL, ONE BODY, SEE?”

  “But how do we do that?”

  “WELL, THAT’S THE HARD PART. YOU HAVE TO GET RID OF THE EXTRA WEIGHT … AND THE BEST WAY TO DO THAT IS TO DIE.”

  “What?” Brentford looked at Gabriel and Thomas, who looked back in disbelief.

  “ONLY PHYSICALLY, OF COURSE,” Sson continued. “WHILE THE BLACK AURORA IS OPEN. PREFERABLY BY FALLING FROM A HIGH BUILDING OR TOWER, AND WELL APART FROM ONE ANOTHER, SO THAT I CAN GET A CLEAR SOUL SIGNAL WITHOUT GETTING YOU MIXED UP.”

  “You mean you want us to kill ourselves?” the stupefied Brentford asked, his eyes still on his friends.

  “KILL YOURSELF OR GET YOURSELF KILLED, WHICHEVER SUITS YOU BEST. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT AT THE VERY MOMENT OF YOUR DEATH, YOU HAVE TO HAVE A VERY CLEAR IMAGE OF NEW VENICE IN YOUR MIND. IT’S YOUR DESIRE TO SEE IT THAT WILL BRING YOU BACK.”

  “But we’ve almost forgotten it. It’s anything but clear.”

  “THAT’S WHAT I FEARED. BUT THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO. JUST TRY TO CONCENTRATE TOGETHER AND DO YOUR BEST. THIS PART IS ENTIRELY IN YOUR HANDS.”

  “As is the dying …” Brentford muttered.

  “SORRY, IT’S HARD TO HEAR YOU … IS EVERYTHING CLEAR? TOMORROW AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT, YOU’LL SEE A BLACK AURORA OVER PARIS. I THINK I CAN HOLD IT FOR A FEW HOURS, BUT NO MORE. IF YOU ALL DIE DURING THAT TIME, WITH A LITTLE LUCK, WE’LL MEET AGAIN IN THE PSYCHOMOTIVE ON THE VERY DAY WHERE YOU FORKED OUT IN TIME.”

  “A little luck?”

  “MAGIC IS NOTHING BUT LUCK, MR. ORSINI.”

  Brentford hung his head and thought. The promise he had made to the Colonel while standing over Tuluk’s corpse came back to him forcefully.

  “Listen, Dr. Sson. I have a request.”

  “YES …?”

  Brentford took a breath.

  “Could you bring us back to before the time we, as you say, forked out? To two or three days before Peterswarden’s Wedding with the Sea?”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the connection before Sson’s voice crepitated back.

  “I SUPPOSE IT COULD BE DONE
. BUT IT WOULD CREATE COMPLICATIONS. I COULD BRING YOU BACK TO YOUR BODIES IN THE PSYCHOMOTIVE A LITTLE EARLIER THAN PROPOSED, BUT ONCE YOU RESUME YOUR LIVES IN THE CITY, YOU WILL MEET YOUR SELVES AS THEY WERE IN THE DAYS BEFORE YOU LEFT. IT IS SOMEWHAT … HAZARDOUS.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” Brentford answered with determination.

  Sson was silent long enough for Brentford to find it unbearable. Then he said, “IF THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT, SO BE IT. I’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU TOMORROW NIGHT, TEN DAYS AGO. BEST OF LUCK.”

  The Colonel crackled, then his face went slack and he was silent, before fluttering his eyelids and seeming to regain consciousness—which he clearly, instantly regretted: the thought of Tuluk had almost stopped his clockwork heart.

  Brentford was speechless with compassion for a moment, before the Colonel finally seemed to cock his chin in redetermination and blurted out, “So, what happened?”

  The other three looked at each other with the eyes of men who know themselves to be condemned.

  “I promised you you’d see Tuluk again, Colonel. And you will. But you’ll have to sacrifice yourself first.” It was a promise that cost nothing, because if it didn’t work they would all be dead.

  The Colonel didn’t seem to need further explanation. “That’s hardly a problem,” he answered immediately. “I’m a soldier. Sacrifice is what we do …” Then he looked at them expectantly and said, “When do we start, gentlemen?” and Brentford leaned forward to put him in his leather bag.

  To be continued …

  I

  The “Hotel Rat”

  It was well past midnight when the four New Venetians stepped out of the empire cabinet and headed for the deserted avenue. They quickly discovered, however, that it was too late to get a coach and that they would have to walk in the pinching cold all the way back to the hotel. As they set off, Brentford did his best to feel alive, letting the sharp air fill his lungs, but did not derive much pleasure from what might possibly be his last night on earth. He thought of Tuluk, mostly, and the loneliness of the Colonel in his satchel. Gabriel lagged a few yards behind, sometimes stopping to lean against a lamppost or a wall. Thomas mulled over Blanche, furious with himself for not finding an opportunity to talk to her once more, perhaps for the last time. Together, they looked like a cortege behind a hearse, except that it was their own funeral.