The Mysterious Force

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

  He did not dare smile, the beating of his heart increasing as if to burst his arteries, while his masculine mind—more curious about causation than his wife’s—tried to imagine what magnetism, what extraterrestrial polarities, were working upon this corner of the globe, and whether it was the same in the valley of the Iaraze.

  Outside the plateau, however, since the commencement of the phenomenon—and Sévère had gone down to the river again that very day—no one had perceived the unfamiliar symptoms. The animals and people there were living tranquilly. Life preserved its normal form there. Why, though? What correlation was there between the sky and the plateau, what cycle of phenomena—for the prophecy of the peasants of Tornadre implied a cycle—regulated this great Drama?

  A misfortune occurred: a triumphant assault by the animals against the old stable door. The Corne’s three horses appeared, bucking and foaming at the mouth beneath the pale rays of the sinking Moon,

  “Here, Clairon!” called Sévère.

  One of the horses approached, the others following. Never had there been a scene as phantasmagoric as the three long heads hollowed out in the light and shadow, in front of the window, their large eyes bulging, sniffing Luce and Sévère, visibly questioning, with a return of vague confidence in the master, a troubled idea of the power of the person who fed them. Then, for no obvious reason—perhaps an increase in the meteor shower—with absolute terror in the depths of their large eyes, their nostrils more cavernous, the mad panic of their race took hold, and they tore themselves away from the window whinnying, and fled.

  “Oh, how they’re leaping!” said Luce.

  They were, in truth, running with an amazing gait, in enormous bounds. Suddenly, at the far end of the garden, confronted by the iron gate, the most impetuous rose up like a winged creature, and cleared the obstacle.

  “You see! You see!” cried Luce. “He too has no more weight!”

  “Nor the two others,” he added, involuntarily.

  Indeed the other two black shadows, rising up, without even brushing the bars, leapt more than four meters high. Their agile silhouettes, carried vertiginously across the fields, diminished, evaporated and disappeared. At the same time, a manservant appeared outside, alone and timid, hardly daring to come forward with the fearful step of a little child.

  Sévère felt an infinite pity for the poor devil, realizing that everyone else at the Corne must have shut themselves up in their rooms, prey to the same increase in terror as the Masters.

  “Let them go, Victor!” he called. “We’ll find them later.”

  Victor came closer, holding on to trees, then the wall, and the shutter. “Is it true, Master,” he asked, “that the roge aigue has come back?”

  Sévère hesitated, preserving the modesty of his intelligence and his doubt in the midst of the sinister events, but Luce could not be silent.

  “Yes, Victor.”

  A bleak silence fell, the three individuals equalized by the sensation of the supernatural—but Sévère was still examining, questioning himself about the connection between the phenomenon and the meteorites. He studied the increasing rain of stars, the stream of supreme beauty from the depths of the Imponderable. A new observation alarmed him: that the sad fragment of the Moon sinking toward the horizon could not be providing the light that persisted over the landscape. Looking westwards, he watched the satellite disappearing, its convexity ready to collapse, adjacent to the western horizon.

  A few minutes more, and then it was gone—but the light over the Tornadre plateau persisted, as if emanating from the zenith: only a few degrees to the north, according to the indication of its shadow. Was it from the zenith, then, that the phenomenon was coming? He turned his face to it, slowly. There, an amethyst glow, a lenticular glimmer, was thinly displayed like a slender cloud, with a maximum radiance toward the north.

  Sévère thought that these things would have been a delight to behold, without the creeping of the flesh, the sepulchral threat and the presentiment of death falling from the Heavens upon the Earth.

  III. The Appearance of the Aigue

  “Look!” said Luce. She had perceived the light in her turn; more affected than Lestang, she was pointing at it.

  Victor, clinging to the window on the outside, was shivering with fever, as if he were drunk, occasionally coming round with a sigh, and ever-increasing horror.

  Up above, the light was increasing. As it did so, the whispering voices of the firmament faded away, and an enormous silence weighed upon the Tornadre plateau. Then, faint at first, a light from below appeared to reply to the other, light fringes floating over the treetops and over all the plants. It was delicately and wildly heart-rending. On the three people, so dissimilar, it made an almost identical impression, of funerary lamps or a pyre, an immense conflagration that was about to engulf Tornadre and all its inhabitants.

  Luce moaned, almost unconsciously, and uttered a desperate plaint: “Oh, I’m thirsty!”

  Sévère turned toward her; the tenderness of his heart, his love for the Celtic mountain woman, gave him strength. He fought against his desire not to move, to end his existence there, at the window, with the bottom frame in his clenched hands. Swaying, he went to fetch a glass of water—but he continued questioning himself, astonished that the atmosphere was cool, almost cold, in spite of all the subtle fire in the heavens and on Earth.

  He had great difficulty bringing back the water; the glass in his hand was so light that he had no sensation of holding anything, and had to grip its base with all his might. He lost half the liquid en route.

  Luce took a gulp, and spat it out, nauseated. “It tastes like iron filings…like rust!”

  Sévère sipped the water, and had to spit it out in his turn; it was metallic and powdery. They both looked at one another for a long time, desperately. The veils of memory lifted, across so many charming years, on the moment when they had glimpsed one another for the first time in the Real World, the appeal of their nervous systems, amorous thereafter. Delicate and indefatigable periods of adoration. (Oh, what long, elevated, immense hours, woven of divinity, revive beneath the nebulous portico of the past!) And their gazes embraced, in an infinite pity for one another. Was this truly the death-agony? Would they have to leave their young lives behind like this, dying of asphyxia, thirst and that hideous impression of antigravity, that non-contact with matter. Oh Lord!

  Personally, Sévère, so full of vital force, did not want to admit it, in spite of everything. Curiosity subsisted in his skull through the knell, making it attentive to the exterior again. The marvelous and lamentable drama continued to evolve; an opera of subtle fires, colossal corposants, lit up the distant landscape; at the summits of the tall trees, slender and flickering at first, and displaying the infinite scale of the spectrum, flames multiplied, trembling on every twig and the tip of every leaf, and then spread to the lower vegetation, the bushes, the grass, the stubble.

  Every protrusion of vegetation thus had its glow, directed upwards at the sky.

  Above the dream-like glimmers of that fiery landscape, birds were flying in flocks. They had finally decided to flee. Super-electric creatures, they had initially resisted these phenomena, which were doubtless less antipathetic to their organisms than those of terrestrial animals. Crows, with somber cries; sparse but infinite flocks of sparrows, goldfinches, chaffinches and warblers; intelligent groups of magpies, swifts, swallows, in traveling formation; and raptors in ones or twos, all headed southwards with an excited chirping and twittering that was almost speech.

  Again, Sévère concentrated on the innumerable flames, which were neither fusing with one another nor giving out any appreciable heat; they were also, as he looked at them so directly, elongating into fine strips, building towers and Gothic monuments with billions of dazzling spires.

  He was interrupted by a raucous cry, emitted by Luce.

  “Hold me down! Hold me down…I’m being carried away!” />
  He saw his companion delirious, livid and cramped, her breast rising in a pitiful attempt to breathe. His own heart became weak; he was overcome by an absolute and infinite desperation, while he held on to Luce with a mechanical gesture. Shivering, she gazed at the shining plateau, and spoke confusedly:

  “It’s the other world, Sévère—it’s the immaterial world…the Earth is about to die…”

  “No, no,” he whispered, aware of the vanity of his words, “it’s a Force…a magnetism…a transformation of movement.”

  A lower voice made him start: that of the hypnotized Victor, who had woken up: “the Roge Aigue!”

  Sévère leaned out. Less than 20 degrees from the north he saw a large rectangle the color of rust, with an irregular border, as if excavated from abysms of sulfur. Gradually, it became brighter, as transparent as a wave, a veritable lake extended over the north, over which ran wrinkles of a paler red, similar to waves. And around the red lake, over the entire sky, a green darkness appeared, which turned blue and darkened, casting a profound jade shadow over the southern extremity.

  The stars had died away. Nothing remained by that sky of red water and green water, of green gem and jade darkness.

  What was it? Where had it come from? And why this enormous influence on the Tornadre? What power of special induction, and what affinities, were prowling around the firmament? These questions racked Sévère’s brain, but did not spare him at all from the stupor that had taken hold of Luce and Victor on seeing the peasant prophecy fulfilled. He no longer doubted that death would come swiftly, that the heart which was galloping so terribly in his breast was about to burst and shut down forever…

  Meanwhile, her dying face raised toward the heavens, Luce began to recite, with a poignant solemnity:

  “When the Silver goes green,

  “The Roge Aigue will come

  “Devouring the Moon and stars…”

  Releasing a heavy sigh, she collapsed against the window-sill, rigid, with her eyes closed.

  IV. Toward the Iaraze

  Motionless at first, devoid of strength, Sévère drew his wife toward him. Was she dead? Had she vanished forever? Black laughter—the laughter of unavoidable destiny—rose to his lips, and the word “forever” circulated in his skull in an ironic manner—that “forever” which, so far as his own existence was concerned, might not extend beyond the next hour.

  His grip on Luce grew tighter then, becoming unhealthy. He lifted the poor woman up, holding her across his chest…

  Then, suddenly, bizarrely and delightfully, a kind of relief overwhelmed his entire body: firmness on the ground, weight, had returned!

  What! Chance must have told him to do it; he had not arrived theoretically at the idea of combining someone else’s weight with his in order to recover a sense of material security.

  Reanimated and solidified, in spite of the oppression in his breast, a flood of courage and hope ran through him now, which further augmented the consequences of the event, including the singular ease with which he was holding Luce in his arms like a little child. Then, his heart skipping a beat, his memory reverted to the catastrophe, forgotten in the shock of glad emotion. Was Luce dead?

  He listened carefully, with his ear upon the young woman’s breast; the inconvenient sound of his own arteries prevented him from hearing anything. She was not stiff, though—but she was so pale! Her eyelids opened upon unmoving eyes.

  “Luce! My darling Luce!”

  A sigh; a slight movement of the head. He discerned a very faint breath—of life! His will-power was reinforced; he resolved to make every effort to save her.

  He stood there for a few minutes, thinking, then shrugged his shoulders. What good was calculation? It was necessary to act like a brute, the least of organized beings, and flee straight ahead until he reached the banks of the Iazare. And with no further hesitation, taking the shortest route, he climbed on to the window and leapt through it nimbly, shouting to Victor:

  “Get hold of something heavy. Release the dog and go to warn your comrades. See how I’m carrying my burden. That’s how anyone might save himself. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Monsieur.”

  And Sévère ran off at a trot, his tread steady but oppressed, his breath whistling, troubled by the electricity, which was livelier and more debilitating outside. He went out of the garden gate, and found himself in open country. In its prodigious majesty, the red lake seemed to magnify the stellar abysses even further. Its glory, at its palpitating edges, with the softness of stained glass, delicate and resplendent, terminating in lace, orange cinders and dendrites, almost overwhelmed the zenith. No other stars could be seen any longer. Here and there, a fine serpentine line—a streak of fire—ran from the extreme north to the extreme south. On the ground, on the flat surface of the Tornadre plateau, the fires persevered everywhere, a taciturn inferno: an inferno without heat, or even consumption.

  The colossal candles of large trees and the torches—infinite in number—of the short grass, the steep ascensions, the great never-ending polychromatic bows devoured by the neutralization of forces and indefatigably recomposed, filled Space with a terrible and beautiful life. Sévère marched on, going through it, closing his eyes periodically when he had to cross excessively flamboyant zones. Luce’s hair emitted a torrent of sparks which dazzled and blinded Sévère. Instinct guided him south-westwards.

  Every few minutes, a farm appeared, which served him as a landmark, but one in which he had no great confidence, so uncertain were appearances rendered by the infernal transfiguration.

  A moment came when he thought he had gone astray; in front of him there was a pool, with reeds rising up like avenging blades, and willows with pale emerald leaves. Fireflies were moving continually over the surface. There was a suffocating odor of phosphorus and ozone. He felt the soft ground beneath his feet, the confused attraction of hidden water. He tried to get his bearings, but in vain. He knew, however, that it was Cilleuses pond, less than 500 meters from the edge of the plateau. He went around it and marched for ten minutes—and found himself back at his point of departure.

  If he remained there miserably, his great effort would be wasted.

  “Come on, Sévère!”

  He gets under way again, striving to recognize some landmark, some familiar sight, but weakening in that research, convinced that he will fall unconscious within an hour, to die in the open countryside.

  Suddenly, he makes a discovery: a sharp little promontory, the only one on the pond, from which he can deduce which direction to take. From then on, it seems that he has wings, progressing in a straight line, and ending up finding a little path that he knows well, which he never leaves thereafter. He cannot estimate the duration of the journey—perhaps half an hour, perhaps ten minutes, or even five—but he has come to a halt, overwhelmed amazement, before a black gulf parallel with the blazing Tornadre: an abyss of darkness beneath his feet, which something separates from the phosphorescent outpouring flooding the plateau.

  “The slope! The slope!” He repeats the word; full of strength, he begins to go down a sinuous path at a run.

  Already, he feels a physical well-being; the induction is decreasing, the lights are becoming steadily sparser, as gentle as will-o’-the-wisps, and the moist and tepid air is more breathable. On the other hand, Luce’s weight is becoming harder to bear. It is breaking his arms and slowing him down.

  He falls down, collapsing on the slope without the interposition of any root or branch. Then, as he resumes his course, out of breath, indomitable instinct masters his nerves.

  Eventually, to his immense joy, he hears the running of the Iazare, and perceives imminent salvation through his every pore. Only a few more steps! Already, the peril can scarcely reach him in this environment, where, the mysterious influence having been reduced to a minimum, there is already the healthy, vital terrestrial nature of old, hospitable to humankind.

  He does not stop, sweating and haggard but full of strength. Fin
ally, the vale arrives, with the river sobbing in the darkness. With a loud cry, a violent and dolorous delight, he lets himself go.

  Luce is lying across his knees. Momentarily, he turns his head to look back and upwards, irresistibly. A vague glimmer is wandering over the slope, brighter toward the edge of the plateau; that is all he can see of the vast conflagration, which is little enough compared with the glare of the nocturnal sea in the era of its fecundation. The firmament is especially astonishing, the Aigue having vanished, leaving only the redness—a kind of aurora borealis. The shower of bolides continues to fall.

  “What’s going on?” he wonders. “Why that enormous dissimilarity between the Tornadre and the Iazare?”

  Eventually, he leans over Luce. She is still pale and motionless, but her breath is perceptible—the breath of sleep rather than unconsciousness. He calls out to her, raising his voice: “Luce! Luce!”

  She shivers, and moves her head gently. That is an infinite joy amid the gloom, and, with sobs of happiness, he embraces her, and continues calling out to her. He murmurs a few tender words.

  Finally, the eyelids open and the young woman’s gaze, full of dreams and darkness, falls upon Sévère.

  “Ah!” he cries. “We’re finally victorious. The Tornadre has not devoured you.”

  Standing up, with his arms folded, he conceives a desire—the promise of climbing up again, alone, toward the south-west, to follow the story of the cataclysm. Voices are raised on the slope however, and the sound of barking.

  Understanding that it is the Corne’s servants, Luce and Sévère wait for them, embracing one another, in a bliss so great that tears are streaming down their cheeks.