The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia was obsessed by that train that had almost led her to the final answers, she yearned to get back on it, with Thorn this time, but she also feared not returning from its destination unscathed. She had already lost her mirror-visiting power; would she have to make more sacrifices?

  Once again, Ophelia dismissed the apocalyptic scene that had appeared to her at the glazing-and-mirror store and in the window at the columbarium, just as she dismissed Second’s drawing—the old woman, the monster, and her body scrawled in red pencil.

  We will smash the chessboard.

  “And afterwards?” she asked. “Once it’s smashed?”

  They had still never spoken about it.

  “Afterwards,” Thorn replied, without a second’s hesitation, “I will give myself up to seek justice. A true justice this time, with a real court and a real trial. I will settle my debt to our two families, and will proceed with the annulling of our marriage—its legal validity has become pretty dubious.”

  Ophelia had hoped for a slightly rosier picture of their future.

  “And afterwards?” she insisted.

  “Afterwards, that will be your decision. I will wait for you to make your request.”

  She let out a strangled cough. In the Chroniclers’ memory, there had never, historically, been any woman in the Pole who had got down on one knee, ring in hand.

  “Our decision,” she corrected.

  A particularly obscene refrain, wafting over from the village square, passed between them.

  “I haven’t yet said that I will accept it.”

  Ophelia stared wide-eyed behind her glasses. She didn’t dare move, for fear of triggering an involuntary claw attack, but she would have paid a lot to see the expression on this face that she had always known to be overly serious. Was that, as she struggled to believe, an authentic attempt at humor? Was Thorn really trying to put a smile back on her face? She considered how far they had both come since that grim meeting in the rain on Anima, him with his bearskin, her with her sparrow-like voice.

  “Then I’ll just have to be persuasive.”

  Thorn descended on her, replacing all the sky’s darkness with the even more intense darkness of his body. It was an awkward move, a little shaky, as if he were still embarrassed to impose his over-prominent bones on Ophelia.

  “When my aunt lost her children, I wasn’t enough for her.”

  In this abrupt confidence, there was a shift that Ophelia had already detected, on rare occasions, in Thorn. It resembled anger, but wasn’t.

  It was almost a challenge:

  “Will I be enough for you?”

  Ophelia contemplated this black hole that had swallowed up the very last stars. In reply, she gave him, unreservedly, all the tenderness she had. Thorn was, in more ways than one, an uncomfortable man, but she felt so alive with him! The Other had changed her, yes. He had made her the clumsiest of all the Animists. And it was because she was the clumsiest that she had endeavored to become the best reader of objects. And it was because she had become the best reader of objects that her path had crossed Thorn’s.

  She might have regrets, but that wasn’t one of them.

  It was, however, with some embarrassment that she emerged from the tall grasses, a little later, as the dawn was setting nature alight. There was a young girl at the foot of their hill, sitting on the bus-stop bench. Ophelia’s glasses turned crimson. How long had she been there? Had she heard them? The young girl was handling, very carefully, the bottle of disinfectant that had rolled down the hill the previous evening, which she had seemingly bothered to extricate from the stinging nettles. Ophelia was pretty sure she wasn’t one of the airship passengers. She was wearing soil-stained clothes and simple espadrilles, but her eyes were extraordinarily bright. They looked up at Ophelia, as soon as she discreetly straightened her gown, as though magnetized by her movement. The young girl then put the bottle down, got up from the bench, and started climbing the hill.

  “Thorn. Someone’s coming.”

  “I’ve seen,” he grumbled, re-buttoning his shirt up to the collar, and smoothing his messy hair with his palm. “And she’s not coming alone. A little more than that, even.”

  Indeed, men, women, children, older folk were all arriving along the road and across the fields. There were too many to count. Ophelia wondered how she hadn’t noticed them, until she observed their extreme discretion. They moved without making a sound and without haste, but with total determination. They had the same soil-stained clothes and sparkling eyes as the young girl.

  “Who are you?” Thorn asked them.

  Despite the authoritative tone of the question, the new arrivals didn’t answer him. They did, however, keep heading straight for him. The olive-tree hill would soon be swamped with people.

  Ophelia knew that she and Thorn were the strangers here, but she found all these country folk very invasive.

  “Let’s warn the others,” she muttered.

  They returned to the village by going down the other side of the hill, with this human tide, swelling by the second, hot on their heels. All they found on the square were bodies dozing in the shade of the plane trees, an unreasonable quantity of empty bottles, and a nauseating smell of alcohol. A large, dark mark had been scorched into the ground from the lighting of the firework. The only person awake was Ambrose, who, since one of his wheels had got stuck between two cobblestones, had been politely calling for help for what must have been some time. The scarf was tugging, with its every fiber, on his inverted leg to try to release the chair.

  He smiled with relief on seeing Ophelia and Thorn, and then his eyebrows shot up when he discovered the crowd stretching into the distance.

  “Are they the villagers?”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Ophelia, unblocking his wheel. “I can’t see us explaining to them how the wine cellars were looted. We must quickly wake everyone up.”

  Thorn threw buckets of water over those sleeping, heedless of the howls of protest erupting all around him. More considerately, Ambrose served fresh water to Blaise, who had got sick from just one gulp of alcohol, but when he tried to do the same for Professor Wolf, his necktie, contaminated by a particularly cantankerous animism, just slapped him.

  As for Ophelia, she had to shake Elizabeth’s shoulder for some time, after discovering her under a bench, curled up in the fetal position. Puffy eyelids half-opened onto a chink of bloodshot eye.

  “Oh, my head . . . The Brats forced me to drink. I’d never before . . . Hmm. I’ve got a feeling I called Lady Septima many, many forbidden words. It’ll make tons of sins to confess.”

  Ophelia helped her up.

  “Later. We’ve got visitors.”

  The country folk were now flooding in from streets and vineyards, until they encircled the village square, making any escape impossible. It was a shock to wake up to, for the Babelians. There was a long showdown, as the two groups stared at each other, the one unsteady and hungover, the other standing firm and alert.

  Bleary eyes against piercing eyes.

  Were the inhabitants of this ark waiting for explanations? Apologies? Would they send the outlaws back to where they came from, but without an airship this time? Ophelia exchanged a tense look with Thorn. She got the feeling that it would take just one word to trigger hostilities.

  “There really is no peace anywhere.”

  Professor Wolf’s voice had cut though the silence like a cleaver. He was biting a cigarette while struggling to light it with an old lighter. It wasn’t his usual sarcasm. He just seemed to be disappointed.

  “Peace is everywhere, and here more than anywhere! Come now, cher ami, when will you be cured of your lamentable pessimism?”

  Professor Wolf’s cigarette fell to his feet.

  Ophelia couldn’t believe her glasses when she saw Lazarus barging through the country folk. His fine white frock coat
was smeared in soil stains, and his silver hair sticky with sweat, but he was beaming with delight. The old man was certainly ever the magician, ready to pop up where least expected. His name circulated among the Babelians, across the village square: of all the powerless, he was the most famous, as an explorer and inventor. Indeed, Walter, his mechanical butler, was at his side, but moving so slowly that Lazarus got out a giant key to wind him up.

  “Father!”

  Ophelia turned to Ambrose, struck by the spontaneity of this exclamation. He might have a funerary urn that was forty years old, but he was sincere in his role of son. Lazarus was much less so in that of father. He dusted off his pink spectacles without a glance for Ambrose. On the contrary, he scanned all the faces around him, lingering, in a friendly way, at those of Blaise and Wolf, his former pupils, and then that of Thorn, whose ill-concealed mistrust seemed greatly to amuse him, before stopping, with a beaming smile, at Ophelia’s face, as though it was hers he was hoping to find.

  “Tiens, tiens, tiens, you, here? What a darling coincidence!”

  “Coincidence?” she repeated.

  She believed none of it. If Ambrose was an imposter, who, then, was he? He had spoken to her about the Deviations Observatory, but had omitted to specify that he had himself, long ago, been a boarder there.

  As if the scene wasn’t unreal enough, all the country folk approached Lazarus, irresistibly drawn to him, to touch his arms, his cheeks, his ears, his hair, without him seeming put out by it. Apparently, he was used to it.

  That wasn’t the case for the Babelians, who drew back at the approach of all those soil-blackened fingers.

  “Don’t let yourself be intimidated by my new friends,” said Lazarus. “They don’t have a sense of privacy, but they are tout à fait harmless. In fact, it’s the most fascinating civilization I have ever had the chance to study. I’ve been sharing their everyday life for days . . . unless it’s weeks?” he asked himself, rubbing his hairless chin. “I’ve lost count. They welcomed me into their midst with unparalleled hospitality. Their curiosity is as insatiable as my own! What serves as their camp is located beyond the fields. We were all gazing at the stars together when we spotted your firework. My friends immediately took to the road; I had to walk with them, or be left behind. I’ve parked the Lazaropter back at the camp. Walter!” he cried, as his voice became hoarse. “Some water!”

  Of all his automatons, Walter was at once the most faithful and the least accomplished: he pushed Lazarus into the fountain. The country folk had observed the scene without even trying to hold him back, despite their outstretched hands, but their eyes had widened. Ophelia found them downright peculiar.

  Blaise and Wolf combined forces to get Lazarus out of the fountain, and sit him on its edge.

  “Father,” said Ambrose, handing him his spectacles, which had fallen in the water with him, “you’ve been here all this time? I’m reassured to see you in good health. I was afraid a landslide might have swept you away.”

  “A landslide?” asked an astonished Lazarus, when he had finished spluttering and coughing. “There was a landslide in Babel?”

  “Two,” Professor Wolf corrected, bitterly. “It caused all of us, here present, to be expelled.”

  “That is très regrettable . . .”

  Lazarus had said that while drying his long hair, but Ophelia saw the lines on his forehead twitch when he noticed the empty bottles lying on the cobbles.

  The Babelians crowded around him.

  “Professor, where are we?”

  “Professor, who are these people?”

  “Professor, what is this ark?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea!” he exclaimed, jauntily. “On the evening of my departure, I got caught out by Nina’s Breath. It’s not the first time that happened to me, but it’s the first time I’ve been dragged to a new land, and one that’s inhabited, what’s more! At first I thought I had discovered, miraculeusement, the concealed location of LandmArk, the dream of every self-respecting explorer. I soon realized it was nothing of the sort. This, my children,” he declared, stretching his arms out wide as if wanting to embrace the entire village, “is officially the twenty-second major ark of our planet! An ark without a family spirit, populated by folk who have evolved cut off from our civilization since the Rupture, can you imagine? So, naturally, I stayed on, to deepen my anthropological knowledge.”

  From an inside pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out a notebook, which dripped all over his shoes. While he was pontificating from the edge of the fountain, the locals had moved in among the Babelians, to feel their clothes or stroke their skin. They were particularly intrigued by Ambrose’s inverted hands, Elizabeth’s swollen lips, Blaise’s pointed nose, and Professor Wolf’s neck brace. Thorn, whose scars fascinated them the most, was going to great lengths to keep them at a respectful distance from his claws.

  Ophelia was of most interest to the young girl she had seen at the bus stop. Her eyes were trained on her like the lenses of a telescope, and once Ophelia had got over the awkwardness of being stared at so blatantly, they made her feel, yes, important. It was the same wide-eyed look that Domitilla, Beatrice, Leonora, and Hector had all given her when she had leaned over the cradles of her sisters and brother when they were merely an observing presence, unable to translate the world into thoughts. Having said that, it was with that same look that they stared at the animated mobile endlessly turning above their heads.

  “Professor,” said Blaise, twisting his fingers guiltily, “we . . . we found this village deserted. Does it belong to these people?”

  Lazarus shook his head, vigorously, as if his own ignorance delighted him.

  “There again, I have no idea! There are other villages such as this one for kilometers around. I have visited several, and they had all been abandoned, but when I question my dear friends about them, they don’t answer me. They never answer. Since I’ve been around them, I have never heard them speak, or seen them write once. They are disarmingly simple! There’s no hierarchy among them, no one relies on the work of another. The servitude of man by man just simply doesn’t exist here. They feed themselves on whatever they come across—fruit, roots, insects—and spend their days . . . feeling,” decided Lazarus, seemingly searching for the appropriate term. “We have so much to learn from them.”

  Saying this last sentence, he had turned his spectacles toward Ophelia, in particular the letters “AP” on her arm. Right then, she glimpsed, behind the thick varnish of joviality coating everything he did, the real depth of his gravity. She then grasped the fact that had been under her nose all along: Lazarus wasn’t a mere supplier of automatons for the Deviations Observatory. Neither was he merely one former boarder among so many others.

  It was he who was the brains behind it.

  Thorn, who had reached the same conclusion, and probably well before her, limped over to the old man to say something into his ear. Ophelia could guess the words without hearing them. All three of us need to have a talk.

  To which Lazarus, smiling, agreed.

  “Without the shadow of a doubt, dear partners.”

  THE COUNT

  They left the square as discreetly as possible, no mean feat in such a crowd. Lazarus seemed to have unusual appeal. To Thorn’s exasperation, he kept answering numerous questions, getting lost in endless digressions, and embracing many people, before he could leave the two civilizations to get acquainted without needing to be an intermediary.

  He pointed out a building to Ophelia, all stone and tiles, different from the rest in only one respect: a flag, buffeted by an already torrid wind, flapped on its roof.

  “If this village is like those I’ve visited, that’s equivalent to a Familistery. We can chat comfortably there, without having to enter anyone’s home. And also because, I don’t know about you,” he said, walking more briskly, “but I wouldn’t mind finally using a bathroom worthy of
the name.”

  “Father? May I come with you?”

  Ambrose arrived in the narrow cobbled street they were just going down, clipping every doorstep with his wheelchair.

  “No, dear boy,” Lazarus replied to him. “Go back to our friends now, I won’t be long!”

  Ambrose opened and then closed his mouth. Lazarus’s flamboyance cast a shadow over him far more stifling than that between the stone facades, this early morning. He looked dully at Walter, still walking, jerkily, along the street alone, unaware that his master was no longer following him.

  “He goes everywhere with you. Why not me? Why never me?”

  “Walter, that’s different, come now! You are far more important. You always have been. I won’t be long,” repeated Lazarus, “wait for me.”

  Ophelia noticed how the scarf had tightened around Ambrose, as he laboriously reversed, head sunk between shoulders. She had seen this boy push away the limits of his own world and build real relationships with real people—people who weren’t automatons—but there was nothing for it: as soon as Lazarus was there, he no longer knew where his place was.

  Ophelia stopped herself from turning back to Ambrose, as she followed Lazarus and Thorn to the building with the flag. Given what was soon to be said between those walls, it was better that he not be with them.

  The door wasn’t locked. They entered a vast room that, if one ignored the dead plants, had a certain distinction, with its long meeting table, many chairs, and standard lamps. Time, in there, seemed to be suspended. Lazarus disappeared briefly behind a door, through which the sound of flushing could be heard. Ophelia paced up and down a little. Why did the inhabitants of this ark prefer to live in the fields rather than in the villages? There were no posters or notices here, either, but an impressive collection of pottery along the windowsills. She frowned on discovering, pressed to one of the windowpanes, the young girl from the bus stop. She had followed them, but her curiosity wasn’t enough to make her go inside.