Aurorarama (23 page)

But Brentford was not laughing or smiling at any of this. At all. With a shiver, he had recognized the Ghost Lady of his dream. It was Isabella Alexander, her hands in a muff of smoke, and a cold thrill ran through his spine as she turned toward him and shook her head, a gesture Handyside did not seem to notice, as his own gaze had remained fixed on the floor. This was no doubt part of the trick, and once again Brentford could not help feeling this was all addressed to him. But why the
Ghost Lady indicated “No,” as if refusing him something or warning him against some action, he could not tell. Maybe he was just misconstruing this. The Ghost Lady was now bowing, saluting the entranced spectators. Handyside acknowledged her presence and, walking toward her, passed his hands through her smoky silhouette without meeting any resistance. The spectre now dwindled again and disappeared back into Phoebe’s mouth. Cheers erupted as the curtain fell, only to open again on the last number of the show, “The Volunteer Vanishes.”

Handyside, in a sweat, was scanning the crowd for some “brave man or braver woman” when his eyes fell on Sybil, who did nothing to hide herself and looked, quite the contrary, rather eager to go. Brentford knew there was precious little he could do about it. It was Sybil’s nature to fly toward the limelight. She went down the stairs like a queen and climbed up to the stage, with the help of Handyside’s courteous yet, it seemed to Brentford, slightly quivering hand. Many people, recognizing her, applauded, and Brentford with them, though with less enthusiasm.

This was a most classical trick, and Brentford really wondered how Handyside would renovate it, beyond the fact, surprising in itself, that it was done with a volunteer instead of an accomplice. Two chairs were brought on stage and Sybil was asked to lay her head and shoulders on one and her legs on the other. “Magnetic” passes were made over her sequined dress, and the chairs of course were pulled away by stage hands while Sybil, in her mesmeric trance, levitated motionless above the stage. More passes raised her a little higher. This required some magic dust, announced Handyside, taking some from his pocket and sprinkling it over Sybil, while Brentford felt a nagging anguish building up in his stomach.

Now, Handyside removed his cape and covered Sybil with it. There were some more passes, a pregnant pause, and the cape was swiftly swept away. Sybil of course had disappeared as
promised, leaving just a few specks of golden magic dust where her body had been.

Handyside bowed, the audience roared, and the curtain fell. Wasn’t it part of the trick that Sybil should be restored? But no. The curtain opened again, the whole troupe saluted under a thundering volley of applause, but no Sybil was to be seen. Perhaps she would just pop back into her seat at the table. Nothing would astonish Brentford anymore this evening. But another salute had not brought her back, and Handyside’s nod to Brentford, just before the curtain closed one last time, was anything but reassuring. It suddenly clicked in his head. Brentford got up and ran down the stairs.

However, going backstage, as he intended, was impossible, for a thick crowd of spectators blocked the way, held enraptured, and offering a standing ovation that seemed to go on forever. Brentford forced his way through, as calmly as he could, which was less and less at each step, and under what seemed to him the ironic smiles and sniggers of the crowd, who recognized him as the tricked husband. His face flushed with anger and shame, he pushed and rushed through a scene that, in a nightmare, would have awakened him in a cold sweat.

He finally reached a door on the side of the stage, but there a large, fair Gentleman of the Night politely but firmly refused to admit him. Brentford, howling in his ear, declaimed his identity but as an answer the Gentleman merely took off his hat and bowed to him. Brentford had to explain, while the cheers continued all around, that his fiancée had just disappeared and should now be in the wings where he was supposed to meet her. He formulated this in a way that rendered difficult another refusal from the Gentleman of Night, who, visibly annoyed, shuffled aside to let Brentford in. Now he could hurry down the ill-lit corridor, crossing the dark shadows of stagehands and firemen, trying to read the names on the doors of the artists’ dressing rooms.

Such was Brentford’s good education that when he found a door marked A. H., he knocked on it instead of storming inside. Much to his surprise, he eventually heard someone say, “Come in.” But the room, full of trunks and props, was otherwise empty. Little Tommy Twaddle, though, was sitting on a sofa, upright and grinning, with a letter in his hand that Brentford supposed was addressed to him.

He approached, noticing that the dummy’s eyes were rolling, following him as he came closer. A five-year-old child would have fled in panic at the uncanniness of it; Brentford tried hard to convince himself that he had got beyond that stage. It was with a slightly trembling hand, though, that he picked up a corner of the letter and pulled. The dummy’s own hand resisted, and even, Brentford felt, pulled the letter back a little, while the creature kept on flashing this stupid grin that he would gladly have bashed in. Brentford pulled harder, but this time the damned thing lunged and bit his hand through his glove. Brentford tore the letter away and slapped the dummy on his articulated jaw. He jerked to one side, but quickly sprang back to its position on the sofa.

“It doesn’t even hurt,” he said, in a creaking, exasperating voice.

Brentford had torn open the envelope and was reading the letter, which simply said: “Two o’clock at your Botanical Building apartment. Sybil.”

Brentford crumpled the letter and threw it at the dummy, hitting his wooden head.

“You missed! You missed!” he croaked, as Brentford, massaging his hand, left the room in a hurry.

G
abriel thought he would never make it to the Midway and the Trilby Temple. The snowstorm was raging, pushing and shoving the few and stray pedestrians, blinding them, freezing them to the bone. More than once he almost renounced the effort, sheltering under archways or carriage doors, but he needed Stella more than anything else and did not want to miss her at any cost. As soon as he had left the Scavengers, he had forgotten the Seven Sleepers and had returned, as to a home and hearth, to his obsession with his star-studded sweetheart.

When he arrived on the deserted Midway, the Trilby Temple had already closed its door. His face rashing from the cold
wind, Gabriel went straight to the Artist’s entrance at the rear of the building, where he had waited for Stella two or three times before. But no sooner had he got there than he beheld, almost miragenous through the whirling snowflakes, four hooded shapes hurrying away down the back alley. One of them, judging by her rather small size, could well have been Stella. He had no fixed rendezvous with her and was therefore not surprised that she had not waited for him, but he still found it painful and somewhat suspect to see her leaving with other people. He instantly felt the green-eyed tapeworm moving in his bowels, and decided to follow the receding shapes before they disappeared from sight.

Unafraid of being heard, thanks to the howling wind and the thickening layer of snow that muffled his steps to a faint leathery crunch he himself barely perceived, he took to the alley, hugging the walls, crouching behind the garbage bins.

He must have overdone it, for when he emerged from the alley, the group had disappeared without a trace. There must have been a taxsleigh waiting for them, but it would be ridiculous to try and follow its tracks, with all this snow falling down. Gabriel sighed, desperate. The driven snow stung his cheeks and eyelids, ephemeral pins leaving a minute burn behind, but missing Stella hurt him more than the surrounding cold. He had no idea what to do, and trudged back toward the Artists’ entrance, not knowing exactly why.

But someone, indeed, was there: a girl, huddled against the door in her hooded mantle, an orphan of the snowstorm. As he approached, he saw she was shaking with cold, but she stood still, her eyes fixed and glassy, not even acknowledging his presence. He recognized her.

“Phoebe?”

He took her arm. She did not react, as if lost in some kind of trance.

“What are you doing here?”

She turned toward him but still did not seem to see him.

“Can you hear me?”

She tilted her head to one side, frowning slightly, as if concentrating on some remote call or memory. What had happened to her? What had
they
done to her? What the hell was going on in this place? But though he pitied her, first and foremost he wanted to hear about Stella. Maybe she could help.

“Did you see some people leaving? A few minutes ago?”

Phoebe opened her mouth, but nothing came out except a cloud of breath.

Gabriel sighed, but tried again.

“A girl called Stella. With men?”

Another cloud answered him. But this cloud, he noticed, behaved curiously, expanding and changing shape. He thought—that was how tired he was—that a face was forming in that blur. It had something like lips, which parted as if to speak. If he squinted, he could now see hovering in front of him a girl who looked a little bit like a younger Isabelle d’Ussonville, but made out of Phoebe’s breath and answering his question. He focused on the lips, and though he heard nothing he somehow knew what they’d said.

“The Ingersarvik,” he repeated to himself.

It was precisely the name that Gabriel had been afraid of hearing. Maybe that was why he had heard it. A chasm opened in his stomach and his heart sank into it. But suddenly the door rattled behind Phoebe and Gabriel had just time to squat behind a garbage bin.

An old man in a fur coat and bowler hat emerged from the Artists’ entrance, carrying over his shoulder a shape that looked like a child. The man took Phoebe by the arm and spoke with a husky voice.

“There, I found him. Trying to strip a string puppet in a tutu. You have been patient, my pretty. Sorry to have kept you waiting in the cold.”

“The bastard struck me,” complained a voice, probably the child’s, though it sounded unpleasant, like some creaky clockwork.

“So what?” said the man. “He probably hurt himself more than he hurt you, blockhead.”

He had taken Phoebe by the arm and was taking her with them.

“Now, we’re all going home, aren’t we?” said the man almost tenderly, and as Gabriel flattened himself against the wall, the little family walked away down the alley, fading into the snow as if they had never existed.

After long minutes of both moral and physical loneliness, Gabriel eventually found an electric taxsleigh going his way. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and, taking no chances, he let his money do most of the talking. The driver promised nothing, because visibility was poor and the streets were blocked by the snow, but he would do what he could to take him as close as possible to Venustown. The taxsleigh advanced slowly, but for Gabriel, tucked under the blanket on the seat, it was a welcome pause in spite of the icy wind, and an occasion to pack down his own whirling, drifting thoughts into a grid of solid banks and blocks.

What he had just seen did not retain his attention for long. They, whoever
they
were, had turned poor Phoebe into some sort of visionary vegetable, and were now, he supposed, exhibiting her at the Trilby Temple. He knew it was partly his fault, for having sent her as a messenger to Brentford, but he also knew that his responsibility was nothing compared to
theirs, and that they would have to pay for it sooner or later. Later would be fine, because he had other things on his mind right now.

The presence that had been “talking” to him he dismissed as an hallucination, born from his tiredness and the extreme conditions surrounding him. Still under the influence of his subterranean trip, he had just allowed some dim memory of Isabelle d’Ussonville, or of some photograph of her seen in his youth, to shape an intuition about Stella that was maybe just another illusion. This he would be checking soon.

But why he had had that intuition was still unclear to him. If he tried to reconstruct it, he had to admit it amounted to some inborn distrust of Stella’s faithfulness, though she had given him no particular cause for alarm in that respect. It was true that she disappeared all day long to rehearse and perform at the Trilby Temple. But she had explained to him that it was high-precision work, with no mistakes allowed, and so required painstaking practice, and he had no reason not to believe her.

He had not gone to see the show, though she had invited him, because he simply did not want to. From what he imagined, a magician’s assistant was a half-clad doll, offered to foreign, inquisitive looks and subjected to all kinds of sadistic outrages. She would be paraded, manipulated, locked up in tight boxes, sawed in half, decapitated, and the Devil knew what else. He simply did not wish to see his love treated that way in public.