She barely had time to utter “Listen, my boy” — the usual preamble to the monologues with which she brightened our evenings when we were not engaged on some adventure — before we were interrupted by a knock at the door. I felt a sharp pang of disappointment that I might be denied this evening’s words of wisdom. Her inspiration was capricious, and whatever thoughts possessed her at this precise moment might never again visit her wondrous mind.
I shouted: “One moment, please!” The Mistress found it more congenial for me to be in a partial state of undress when she relaxed at the end of the day, and also for me to be adorned with certain enhancements. Before I could open the door to this intrusion, I needed to make myself more presentable, lest I bring unwanted public attention to the Mistress’s private predilections.
It was a telegram.
“Well, what does it say?” Already, her mood had shifted from proud self-satisfaction to bristly irritation.
I tried to read the missive, but I had to admit defeat. The text was rendered in a rather childish and completely ungrammatical faux Italian, peppered with nonsense words. “It’s utter gibberish.” I approached her, knelt, and handed her the telegram.
Her eyes narrowed and then grew wide. She silently mouthed several syllables, and then addressed me: “We must take the next train across the continent, to New York, and from there board the first boat to Europe.”
“A new adventure, Mistress?”
“Perhaps, my boy, perhaps. We are summoned … to Venera!”
Few outsiders ever visited the fabled city-state of Venera. Mapmakers rarely agreed on where, exactly, to situate it. The general consensus was that it was somewhere in the Mediterranean, not far from the coast of Italy. The Mistress had, in the past, made oblique references to some sort of connection to the exotic archipelago, but I had never imagined we would actually travel there. The city-state did not encourage tourism. I knew of no commercial boats or ferries that boasted of Venera as a destination.
“Summoned …?” I asked, but she ignored my question. I knew better than to press her for information she was not yet ready to share. Without another word, the Mistress retired to her bedchamber, leaving me bereft of her company until sunrise.
A TRANSCONTINENTAL JOURNEY
The next morning we boarded the San Francisco train but changed lines north of Sacramento, where we took the transcontinental. We stayed on that line until Fremont, where we again changed trains, this time for Chicago. In Chicago, we boarded our final American conveyance, to New York.
I rush through this account of our railroad trip, although, it, too, was not devoid of adventure. The Mistress possessed a keen awareness of mischief, and so we were on this leg of our journey embroiled in minor cases — “The Affair of the Gilded Brassiere,” “The Unexpected Tunnel and the Unwelcome Visitor,” “The Case of the Duplicate Husbands,” and “The Capitalist’s Ethical Conundrum.” The Mistress profited nicely from these trifles, in both coin and repute.
THE ESPLENDOR CATALÀ
At the port of New York, we boarded the most luxurious and strange of all the transatlantic liners, the Esplendor Català, which was scheduled to deposit us in Barcelona six days later. The Mistress and I had, by this time, crossed the Atlantic a half-dozen times — see the previously documented “A Scandal across the Atlantic,” “The Adventure of the Aquatic League,” “The Case of the Identical Identities,” “A Veil of Mystery in Boston,” “The Peculiar Incident of the Five Fruits,” and “The Lips of the Woman” (all collected in The Transatlantic Adventures of the International Mistress of Mystery) — but never before as passengers of this otherworldly ship. Its designer was the Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí, whose peculiar imagination was ushering in a new aesthetic, a mystical sense of wonder, a transcendent celebration of nature and the divine; boarding this ship, with its confounding yet soothing geometry, its colourful and intricate adornments, its almost biological appearance, its ethereal strangeness, its childlike blend of veneration and playfulness, left the impression of having crossed into another world and stepping into the antechamber of a fantastical heaven.
I expected the bewildering environment to leave me overly stimulated, making sleep difficult and dreams nightmarish. Quite the contrary: on our first night aboard, I slept with serene calm at the foot of the Mistress’s bed, waking fully rested, even joyous, the next morning.
The voyage was not having the restorative effect on the Mistress that it was on me. The Mistress awoke scowling, pacing about like a caged animal. Throughout the day, she accosted other passengers and crew members, dispensing verbal abuse. By the time dinner was called, the captain — a tall, regal, commanding Easterner with dark skin and even darker eyes — confined her to a utility closet for the duration of the trip, lest she further disturb the quietude of the other passengers.
As her travelling companion, I was allowed to visit the Mistress in her confinement, but I asked the captain to refrain from sharing this information with her. He acquiesced, and I retired to our berth early, enjoying a rare moment of freedom and solitude. I dosed off quickly, having the bed to myself, my dreams filled with romance and wonder, inspired by the fantastical beauty of the Esplendor Català.
It was in the midst of one of these dreams that I was roused to wakefulness by the Mistress, who held an oil lantern next to my face. The dim light could not fully illuminate the cabin. It was still the middle of the night, as evidenced by the darkness outside the room’s tiny porthole. Nevertheless, I could discern that a tall heavy-set man stood next to her.
“Get dressed and gather all our things,” said the Mistress. “We’re leaving.”
Questions flooded my mind. How had the Mistress escaped her confinement? Who was her mysterious companion? Where were we going? What did she mean by “leaving”? Did she intend for us to abandon ship? Here, in the middle of the ocean? But I knew better than to ask, especially in the presence of a stranger.
“Hurry, young man!” The man’s thick American accent rolled out like a low growl. Looking more intently toward him, I caught a reflection of light off something metallic in his hand … a gun!
Hoping that the near darkness would allow me some decency — I was naked under the sheets — I rapidly slipped on yesterday’s clothes and quietly bustled about, assembling our luggage. Meanwhile, the Mistress and the armed man whispered to each other, paying no attention to me. Although I could only catch the occasional word, it was clear to me that they were allies and that they were conversing in a language other than English.
“We’re ready, Mistress,” I informed the conspiring pair.
In a low voice, she said: “Follow us, and be quiet. Trust no-one. The ship is compromised. The captain and at least some of the officers are agents of the Invisible Fingers!”
Through the years, the Invisible Fingers had been an elusive foe, the unseen force behind many of the Mistress’s escapades. This rivalry preceded my acquaintance with the Mistress. Was the armed man an ally in this conflict?
The corridor was lit by oil lamps along the walls, revealing the bodies of fallen men. I recoiled.
The armed man addressed me, in a surprisingly kind tone: “They’re not dead.” He raised his weapon, a bulky multi-chambered contraption unlike any gun I had ever seen. “Unless lethal action is unavoidable, I use miniature darts coated with a sedative of my own devising.”
I guessed him to be in his mid-fifties. His hair was close-cropped, but he sported a thick unruly beard. He exuded strength, and his eyes were stern and wary. He wore a brown and red uniform of military cut, although I did not identify it as the fashion of any nation. On his chest were pinned medals, but again I failed to recognize their design.
Before I could scrutinize him any further, he led us outside. The armed man went first, gun at the ready, followed by the Mistress once he gave the all-clear. I joined them and noticed yet more unconscious bodies on the deck.
The armed man raised a small device to his face and spoke into it. He looked sky
ward. I, too, peered up. The night was cloudy, obscuring the stars. I could not guess what he was trying to glimpse.
Keeping an eye to the sky, he approached me and said: “You cannot carry all this. You’ll need a free hand. Here, let me take these.” He relieved me of two of the Mistress’s bulkier bags. Then, turning to the Mistress, he commanded: “Grab one, too. Though I wonder why you require this much luggage.”
The Mistress bristled. She was not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner. Yet, she acquiesced. I was careful to hand her the lightest item among our baggage.
I silently wondered why I would need a free hand.
The armed man holstered his gun and wrapped his fist around something in the dark night air. I peered intently and saw that what he grasped was a rope dangling from the sky. There were three such ropes. Where did they lead to? I peered into the sky, and still all I could see was darkness. Were there helium balloons hidden up there? If so, how did they remain so steady instead of being borne off by the wind? The armed man tied the first rope around his waist, than another around the Mistress’s, and the last one around mine. He grabbed my free hand and placed it on the rope. “Hold tight!”
He tugged three times on his own rope, and after a pause I felt a tightening jerk where the rope was fastened around me … and I rose into the sky!
I had travelled upward some thirty feet when I felt a sharp sting in my leg. Another dart whizzed past my cheek. The shock made me drop our bags. The armed man, too, dropped the bags he’d taken from me. He aimed his weapon and shot at our attackers on the deck below.
Within seconds, though, we were out of reach of our enemies’ weapons.
Addressing the Mistress, our armed ally asked: “I trust there was nothing of potential use to the enemy in those bags?” But the Mistress remained silent. In the darkness, I could not make out her expression. The armed man grunted with obvious disgust. In a softer tone, he said: “We’ll get you help aboard the ship, young man.” As he addressed me, I realized that I felt very sickly indeed. He now spoke into his handheld device: “The Fingers used silent air guns with poisoned darts in lieu of firearms, so as to not alarm the innocent passengers of the Esplendor Català. The Mistress’s assistant is wounded. Alert the medic.”
Suddenly, I was aware of a gigantic airship above us. The vehicle was almost as large as the ocean liner we had just escaped from. How could such a machine exist? Any nation that had so solved the timeless enigma of flight would possess an insurmountable military advantage over all others. My ponderings were cut short. Another few seconds, and the three of us were pulled into the impossible airship. By that time, I was burning with fever, slipping in and out consciousness, dreams, and hallucinations.
Both the Mistress and our rugged ally stood by my bedside. The Mistress held my hand, which she squeezed to the point of pain when she realized I was once again fully conscious. Her eyes were moist with emotion, a rare public display of affection that filled me with devotion for her. The man, standing stiffly in a military manner, introduced himself. “Young man, my name is Brigadier Fox. I am told that your patron has yet to fully inform you of the specifics of your employment and of this voyage to Venera.” The two of them exchanged a glance. The Brigadier continued: “Your loyalty and bravery are not in question, and there is no reason to not fully initiate you into the secrets of the organization for which you have been unknowingly working these past nine years.”
The Mistress and the Brigadier exchanged a glance and nodded at each other.
“I had meant to explain everything myself under less dire circumstances, my boy, during our journey to Venera, but …” she trailed off, then assumed a solemn posture. “Welcome to the Vermilion Eye.”
The Brigadier joined her, and together they intoned: “May the Vermilion Eye be ever vigilant, and may it forever keep Venera safe!”
THE VERMILION EYE IS REVEALED
I was bursting with curiosity. The Mistress and the Brigadier answered many of my queries, although I could tell that they were both adroit in deflecting questions without seeming to. There were aspects of my newly discovered situation that neither of them was ready to reveal.
The flying vessel on which we were aboard was called the Occua inel Ciel — which, the Brigadier told me, was Veneran for Eye in the Sky — and it was the flagship of a fleet six strong. Venera had possessed this technology since the sixteenth century, and, according to the Brigadier, had only ever used these ships militarily as a deterrent toward nations who threatened to invade the archipelago of Venera. Venera had no interest in becoming an imperial power, but nor did she want to become a vassal state subject to another nation’s expansionist ambitions.
(Both the Brigadier and the Mistress kept referring to Venera in the feminine. It was not uncommon for people to so personalize their nation, yet I perceived the hint of something more profound in their use of the feminine pronoun, a near religious awe, an almost palpable capital H for Her and capital S for She — as if Venera were not a nation but a person, a great leader, a deity even.)
Centuries ago, in the wake of a devastating Viking invasion, and with memories of an earlier Roman conquest still a painful cultural heritage, a group formed in Venera with the goal of forever avoiding any such violation of Veneran autonomy: the Vermilion Eye. Venera was by then an ethnic soup, with no indigenous population — Turks, Jews, Italians, Scandinavians, Gauls, Iberians, Africans, Asiatics — but they all shared a profound loyalty to Venera, a desire to safeguard her from future violence.
The ethnic mix of Venera made it easy to dispatch a network of spies across the world, and thus the Vermilion Eye kept watch over all nations, doing its best to discourage foreign powers of any notion regarding military incursions into Venera.
Some agents operated in plain sight, like the International Mistress of Mystery, always careful, though, to keep silent regarding their allegiance to Venera. Others, like Brigadier Fox, operated in secret. Many of the Mistress’s cases were in fact indirectly in service to Venera, operating on several levels of intrigue beyond what I’d recorded in her published adventures.
During the seventeenth century, the Vermilion Eye became aware of an organization calling itself the Invisible Fingers. Its aims were, at best, obscure, but on more than one occasion it had showed itself to be hostile to Venera and to her isolationist goals. The Vermilion Eye was fighting blind, with no idea where their enemies were headquartered or what their full agenda might be. Recently, the conflict had become more open, more deadly, more urgent. And the Eye was losing.
I asked: “And what of our current mission to Venera?”
Again, the two of them spoke briefly to each other in what I assumed to be Veneran. The Mistress answered. “We were not told. Our summons included a code word that indicated the highest priority, but that’s all we know.”
I sensed truth in her statement, but I also gleaned there was another layer of truth to which I was not yet privy.
THE EYE’S MIND
We docked on the roof of a building the Mistress called “The Eye’s Mind,” explaining that it was the Vermilion Eye’s centre of operations. At night, all I could see of the legendary metropolis was an ethereal rust-red illumination. Before I could discern any shapes in this otherworldly light we were met by a retinue of anonymous female guards wearing reflective globes that covered their heads. These featureless agents of the Vermilion Eye were a most disquieting sight and not at all welcoming. Their attitude was even less so. We were immediately escorted inside, to our rooms. Both the Brigadier and Mistress asked anxious questions of them in that pseudo-Italian that I presumed to be Veneran, but they were answered with curt monosyllables that only increased their anxiety, and thus my own.
The inside was unlike any building I had ever seen. Working with the Mistress, I had long ago learned to shed my modesty regarding the human body and its sexual needs, but I was unprepared for the lasciviousness of the decor, for the ubiquitous architectural adornments of semi-human beasts engagi
ng in the most perverse activities. In addition, vegetation glowing with that same eerie rust-red tint I had espied outside grew in and out of the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Nor did I quite grasp the irregular arrangement of space, nooks, angles, open atria, arches, doorways, and stairs that divided the interior of the Eye’s Mind.
Eventually, we reached a portion of the building that was almost a conventional corridor. The Brigadier was ushered into one room, and then the Mistress and I were led to our own room, three doors farther down. Once inside, we discovered that our door was locked from the outside.
The Mistress said: “This is most irregular.”
But by then exhaustion overcame me. I was not yet fully recovered from the attack. Although the oil lamps were lit, revealing austere surroundings, I fell asleep in my chair.
GATHERED AT THE ROUND TABLE
The director of the Vermilion Eye was a masked man who introduced himself as Brother Nocturne, although it was clear that among all of us gathered here only I did not know him previously. He stood well over six feet and moved with the strong grace of a trained fighter but also with the arrogance of wealth and privilege. He dressed entirely in black, including a cloak that reached to his knees, and sported a walking stick that was almost certainly a disguised scabbard. Although his voice was muffled by the eyeless mask that covered his entire head, his accent was recognizably English, most certainly coastal and educated, most likely from Brighton or thereabouts. For my benefit, he led the meeting in English, although I offered him the additional options of Italian, German, Dutch, French, and Greek, to which he responded: “Your familiarity with these languages will speed your learning of Veneran. But English will do for now. We all speak it.”
Venera Dreams Page 12