by M. J. Rose
“Because they are brutes, Grigori,” Monsieur said wearily. “Because they are brutes. The Dowager is in exile, she has no money, she’s afraid for the lives of everyone in her family. The time for action might be upon us—”
“Opaline, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.” Anna came bustling in to greet me. She and I were soon out the door.
Outside, dusk settled over the city as we walked to the metro. After my experience at Père-Lachaise I’d told Anna that I was desperate and determined to find some way to control my powers now. I’d shown her the silver sheets I’d found at my great-grandmother’s house in hopes they might hold a clue, but she couldn’t make sense of them. In order to help, she said, she needed certain tools and potions she didn’t keep in the apartment. Even though Monsieur didn’t visit her secret chamber, he knew of it and tolerated it. But only because she promised him she’d never keep anything suspect there in case the police ever got wind of her abilities and forced an inspection.
So when necessary, she called on her cousin Galina Trevoda, who was, like Anna, a Russian mystic schooled in the occult, and borrowed her workspace.
The metro left us off at rue de Courcelles, and we walked two blocks before turning onto rue Daru. Halfway down the street, I saw the gold onion domes of the Cathédrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky afire in the setting sun.
“But this is a church,” I said to Anna. “I came here with my parents a few weeks ago for the wedding of my mother’s friend.”
“Picasso? The painter who married the Russian dancer?” Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, this is where Galina lives and works. She’s the cathedral’s caretaker.”
“Do they know?”
“That she’s a mystic?”
I nodded.
“The bishop is her brother, so no one delves too deeply or looks too closely. Yes, she must be careful, but really no more careful than any of us need to be these days.”
We entered the stone edifice and went into the narthex and past the holy water font.
“At the wedding, I saw people filling up jars from here. What were they doing?” I asked.
“We don’t bless ourselves with the water the way Catholics do; we take it home to drink.”
Our footsteps echoed as we crossed the foyer and stepped into the nave.
A whole golden universe opened up before me, glittering and glowing.
“It’s stunning,” I said, marveling at the opulent interior. “So different when it’s not crowded. I couldn’t see any of it during the wedding.”
“The church was built almost sixty years ago,” Anna said, “long before anyone dreamed so many Russians would emigrate to France. Its congregation far exceeds its space now.”
A mysterious atmosphere, redolent with incense, swirled around us. In the still silence, I heard a bird’s wings flapping and looked up into the golden mosaic of the high vaulted apse. Almost afraid to see if it was a crow, I watched for it to come swooping down, but it stayed invisible.
Like the ceiling, the walls were decorated with ornate gold and jewel tone mosaics. In every corner, golden shrines glittered in gilded niches. Icons graced every table. Not an inch of the interior was unadorned. I looked at Anna’s face, at my hands. The reflection bathed both of us. We too were turned to gold.
“It’s like being inside of a jewel box.”
“You don’t need to whisper,” Anna said as she hooked her arm in mine. “The service has been over for hours. Come, it’s this way.”
She led me behind the sacristy, through an arched gilt door. We entered a hallway. Gone were the mosaics and icons. Here the walls were bare stone. The only adornments, the clergy’s robes hanging on hooks and various religious objects sitting on utilitarian shelves.
We came to a narrow iron staircase. I dreaded taking the first step. Were there burial chambers here too? Would the voices reach out to me?
Anna had already started. “Opaline?”
“I’m coming.”
I followed her down the steps, which emptied into a crypt. Narrow, darkened passageways led to the right and left. The cooler temperature reminded me of our underground at the Palais, though far more damp.
“There’s a world beneath every building and street in Paris, isn’t there?” I asked.
Anna nodded. “When the architects found these particular grottoes, they were going to close them up, but the bishop asked for them to be connected to the church, because every soul requires secret places for contemplation as well as open spaces for celebration.”
“Are people buried down here?” I’d begun to hear far-off murmurs and feared the messaging had started up again in this dark, dank foreign place.
She shook her head. “No, those are flesh-and-blood voices you hear from up above, traveling via air shafts.”
As we continued on, the murmurs lessened and became inaudible and all was silent except for our footsteps. When it seemed we could go no farther, Anna turned right into one of the dark alcoves and stopped in front of a wooden door.
Before she could knock, it creaked open.
I froze. Too unsettling, the ambiance, like being inside of an Edgar Allan Poe poem or Leroux’s underground opera house, made me anxious. Letting out a shout, I jumped back just as a pale, luminous face appeared in the doorway.
“My dear, dear Anna. I’m so glad to see you,” a lyrical female voice with a heavy Russian accent greeted us.
In the darkness, the woman’s head seemed disembodied. Not hidden in the shadows, but part of them. Then she opened the door wider, and I saw how a trick of the light and Galina’s black hooded robe combined to create the frightening effect.
The two cousins embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks, and then Anna introduced us.
“Come in, come in.” Galina opened the door wider.
Following the women, I stepped over the cracked stone doorjamb into a small chamber lit with candles. The walls were covered with dozens of embroidered silk wall hangings. I recognized astrological signs I used on my talismans and the runes and symbols from my mother’s books and the silver sheets I’d taken from the bell tower. These were the keys to the portal where she practiced her dark arts, to the spirit world beyond what science has been able to explain.
My mother learned to be who she became in Paris twenty-four years ago, before I was born. In running away from her, I’d come to the same place, thinking I was escaping, but over and over again I kept running headlong into my own version of the same crisis she’d faced.
Coincidence, I thought, was merely the word we gave occurrences we couldn’t explain any other way.
“So you are Opaline,” Galina Trevoda said. “I’ve heard much about you.”
“And I you,” I responded.
While not as striking as her cousin, Galina looked more ethereal. Her parchment skin and pale lips set off black, glittering eyes that made me think of the jet I worked with. Anna told me she was in her seventies, but Galina didn’t appear any older than her fifty-five-year-old cousin.
“Welcome to my humble abode.” She smiled and gestured to the tiny cell. “So I will leave you to your work and get back to mine. I have chores upstairs. Just come find me when you are ready to leave, Anna.” She turned to me. “I hope your time here is productive.”
After Galina closed the door behind her, Anna offered me a seat at a small table in the corner of the room, already set with a tea service and more candles and covered with an embroidered silk cloth, a large pentagram in its center.
“Let’s get started and see if we can find you some relief. I know how frightening messaging is for you, especially since you think you’re under the power’s control instead of the other way around.”
“Yes, and the cries at the cemetery and down in the catacombs, they’ve intensified. I need to block them out, Anna.”
“The first thing you have to do is let go of being frightened. If the spirits feel unwelcome, they leave behind a residual psychic sludge. The universe has bestowed a marvelous gift upon you . . . the kind that should be treasured, but you don’t see it that way, do you?”
“No. You’ve said that before, but the messages . . . the voices . . . are so invasive. I don’t know where they come from or why they come to me at all.”
“I believe they derive from the unchallenged universe and the uncharted waters lying between our consciousness and the next realm.” Anna made broad expansive gestures as she spoke, her bracelets noisily orchestrating her words.
I was attempting to keep up, but I didn’t understand. Anna, sensing my confusion, explained.
“The lockets allow you the opportunity to give all of these souls a voice. The last gift the earth has for them—a way for them to comfort those they’ve left behind. When people pass on suddenly, especially when taken under unnatural circumstances, like wars, murders, or violent accidents, what’s been left undone and unsaid haunts them.
“We talk of ghosts haunting us, our homes, our graveyards, but it is the other way around. The souls of the departed are haunted by our grief. We need to give them solace and put them at peace so they can move on. More so for their sake than for our own. To help these departed souls be able to do that is truly a gift.”
My sudden tears surprised me. Reaching up, I brushed them away. When I replaced my hand on the table, Anna took it in her own.
“It’s hard, I know. It takes a toll. But you need to see it for the miracle it is.”
“It may be a miracle to you, but I can’t tolerate it. I need to be able to stop it.”
“I know, and I’m going to work to help you take control as much as possible.”
“Only as much as possible?”
“It’s not in my power. I’m only human. We believe there are spirits who assign abilities such as yours based on available candidates.”
“You mean some otherworldly spirit chose me to do this?”
“Yes.”
“God?”
Anna knew about my religious upbringing. Or lack of it. My father, a Christian turned atheist, believed only in the power of art. My mother, although born Jewish, eschewed all formal religion, but believed in both the power of art and of magick and claimed they were connected and that every true artist was part magician. Neither of my parents schooled me or my siblings in any faith other than faith in ourselves. I didn’t want to insult her by questioning her belief.
“It’s all right if you don’t believe,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “You’re not insulting me, Opaline. I’ve never judged you. You know that. Faith isn’t ever easy to embrace, especially in times like these. With so many millions of men being wounded and dying, of course one questions the validity and the justice of any being who would allow such atrocities to take place. Don’t worry. It’s not necessary to have faith in order to understand what’s happening to you and learn to control it better. Religion, spiritualism, magick, and alchemy are all aligned. I see it like a big kettle hanging over a fire. Everything that’s not of our plane, that’s not visible or tangible, has been thrown in and cooks. Some people take out a spoonful and taste a formal religion. Others a mystical or pagan tradition.”
“And you taste a little of each,” I said.
“I do.” She smiled. “My mother was a mystic. I learned from her until she died. Orphaned. The nuns took me in and taught me their religion while managing not to destroy mine. I became a composite of my mother’s knowledge and the church’s teachings. I stand in a unique corner of the room.”
I’d never heard her story before but understood her better now that I had.
“So, let us see what we can do for you. Even if you are a little heathen, can you keep an open mind to the idea of the spirit world? To the concept that there are powers beyond our ability to understand?”
I’d seen my mother accomplish strange feats. I’d heard objects speaking to me since childhood. Since coming to Paris and making my first locket, I’d heard voices, pitiful, searching, pained voices. I had no choice but to keep an open mind. I nodded.
“First we need to test the limitations and reach of your abilities. Then our goal will be to try to train you to lower a curtain—or shut a door—on the voices when they come unbidden and hopefully still allow you to focus on them when you need to.”
“We can do that right now?” Even though she’d couched her comments with maybes and uncertainty, I only heard her sliver of hope.
Anna laughed. “Always so impatient. We can start, but it might not happen all in one session.”
“How long?”
“I can’t tell. It might take several weeks, perhaps months. There’s no way to know how much training you need. How adept you are. Before we begin, though, we should talk first about the ramifications of this training. Opaline, I’m going to try to teach you to—”
“I opened the door, there has to be a way to shut it—” I interrupted her.
“Yes, there will be a way to shut it. The issue is that there’s a real possibility that if you shut it even once, it might stay shut.”
Picturing a large metal door like the one to the vault under the shop, I imagined shoving it closed.
“Forever? I might not be able to open it again for even one voice?”
She nodded.
If she was right, if I did close it forever and stopped hearing voices . . . if all the voices went away, Jean Luc would go away too. Was the risk worth the loss? I shivered. What did it mean that I could even ask myself that? What was Jean Luc really but an incorporeal dream?
“You still want me to try?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
Anna stood, went to the shelves, and began pulling down jars. As she opened one after the other, taking out pinches and handfuls of dried leaves and powders, the cavern became redolent with a strange, mysterious scent. Adding a few drops of oil to the mixture, she ground it in a mortar with a pestle and then poured it into a glass. In the candlelight it glittered gold, almost as if she’d ground down some of the mosaics from the walls of the cathedral above us.
Next, Anna uncorked a dark green bottle and poured some of its liquid into the glass. Suddenly I smelled apples—the scent that always accompanied my messaging. Usually it made me queasy, but there, in the cavern, it caused no ill effect.
Finally, Anna unscrewed a jar, dug in a spoon, scooped out honey, and stirred it into the concoction. An aura appeared around the mixture, as if it were lit from within. Or was it just the candlelight’s reflection?
“You’ve always said that when you make the lockets you smell apples.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why apples are connected to the talismans?”
I shook my head.
“Try to remember that very first time. Tell me about it.”
I closed my eyes and thought back. “I was in the studio . . .”
“Picture it in your mind. Do you see yourself there?”
I nodded.
“Look around . . .”
In my mind I glanced around the workshop.
“Do you see anything unusual? Pavel loves apples, was there one on his table?”
I shook my head.
“Look down at your workspace,” Anna said.
“Yes, yes. I can’t believe I forgot. You’d brought tea right before the customer arrived. Apples and little cakes.
“I put the plate of food away when I went to help Madame Maboussine. Her son had been killed at the front, she said. And she’d remembered how her grandmother had worn mourning jewelry and wanted to memorialize her son in that old-fashioned way. As soon as she handed me the lock of his hair, my head filled with noise initiating an avalanche of pain. Suddenly the scent of the apple—still on my fingers, I suppose�
��became overwhelming.”
I told Anna how the next day, while working on the design for the amulet, I incorporated the apple quarters into the design. I was basing the locket’s design on an ancient Etruscan rock crystal amulet I’d seen in the Louvre. An orb nestled in two bands of gold. One wrapping it horizontally, the other vertically, with a hook at the top for a cord. A lock of hair sandwiched between two halves of the crystal. I was drawing it when Anna came into the workshop with that afternoon’s tea. Once again bringing little cakes and apples cut into quarters. I’d stared at the fruit, the sections, the slices, suddenly getting the idea to cut the rock crystal into slices like the apple, then etch in the symbols for the soldier’s astrological sign along with his birth date and death date and decorate them with his birthstone. A commemoration of his being born and mourning of his being gone.
“So the apple was connected to the talisman twice.”
“Yes, the first time when Madame Maboussine came in and I’d been eating the apple . . . its odor still on my fingers. The second, while designing the piece. I hadn’t realized it.”
Anna nodded. “Let me see your palm.” Reaching out for my hand, she turned it over and studied the underside. She’d first done this a long time ago, when I was thirteen and we’d just met.
She pointed to the crescent-moon-shaped scar on the fleshy part of my thumb. “I don’t remember this from before.”
“While I was working on the talisman later that day. I cut myself with a carving tool. It slipped.”
“And bled?”
“Quite a bit. It made me sick to my stomach.”
“Was that the first time you became nauseated in relation to the talismans?”
“I hadn’t thought about that connection before, but yes . . .”
“So you’d been aware of the smell of the apples before, but the scent hadn’t made you sick. That only happened when you cut yourself?”