"It's an old mill," said Aymon.
"So now you know where we are?"
He shrugged. "If you'd taken an interest, you'd know there are several of them on the property, all disused."
"Oh my God, look at that!" cried Viola.
But what she'd taken for an exquisite glass statue, a naked, transparent young woman crouching in the stream, was gone at a second glance. All she could see was a mass of iridescent, blue-green damselflies, demoiselles, darting over the surface. The cloud of wings suggesting, maybe, the turn of a girl's smooth shoulder, the waves of her hair—
"How perfectly lovely," she finished, uncertainly.
"Told you." Aymon beamed, striding along. I will make her happy, he thought. I will do one great deed before I die, and she'll be proud. "I told you. This place is a dream. It's going to be great, inspirational, relaxed: our people will love to work here."
He was somewhat piqued to discover that the "disused mill" seemed to be in use, as a shabby old-fashioned forest information point. They wandered the covered porches, looking at quaint, half-effaced pictureboards. Forest animals, birds, flowers—
"Did you know about this place, Ay?"
"I don't exactly remember."
He was looking for a map of the forest (a tourist guide place like this has to have a map, even if it's out of date). He couldn't find one, but he discovered that if he looked at the picture boards directly, with attention, they changed. The animals, birds and plants came alive, he couldn't put it any more clearly. As if something extra was passing from the vaguely suggested images directly through his eyes to his brain. They were more than alive, they were conscious, these images were the creatures themselves, looking back at him, wise and wicked, fun to know, but by no means entirely friendly—
He was fascinated, and passed from one array to another for several minutes (for time without measure) before he noticed how weird this was, and began to get scared. What the hell have I eaten, drunk, smoked today: without knowing it? Was there something in the slimy skin of those tiny frogs? Some hallucinogen that passed through my skin?
A door opened, and a young woman came out, smiling. She wore a full-sleeved, black, belted smock and cap, with a white bib and collar at the throat—like an old-fashioned nun; except that her slim brown legs and feet were bare. She greeted them in pretty French, which for once they found easy to understand, announced herself as the gardienne of this Centre, and ushered them inside. The room she showed them was a store, selling natural forest products: toiletries, herbal infusions, food and candy: not the usual tourist lines, but genuinely unusual, quirky products; Viola was charmed. Aymon followed her around, grinning loosely: feeling young again.
"Do you take cash or cards?" asked Viola, hoping she had enough euros. There was no sign of a PayPoint or a till, nothing to suggest the twenty-first century at all.
The little gardienne dipped her head. "We accept all the usual kinds of currency, or credit. Would Madame and Monsieur like to take something to drink? We have tables on the terrace."
She brought them eglantine tea in the souvenir forest china, which was pattered blue-green, iridescent as a damselfly's wings. They were the only customers on the rustic terrace above the weir. It was the kind of place, thought Viola, where you want to be the only customers, you want to have discovered a hidden treasure. But it was a little disquieting.
"I wonder what happens in the other buildings."
"I wonder where they've hidden the damn car park," growled Aymon, trying to frown, to mask his drug experience. "It's got to be around here somewhere. Hidden up in the canopy, maybe, with the big butterflies—"
Viola's attention had been caught by a frog on a lily pad, on the water right below the rail beside their table. He was bright green all over, and much larger than the minute creatures teeming on the forest floor, maybe the size of the palm of her hand. Or larger than that: it was hard to be sure of the scale of him, there was a trick of perspective—
The frog looked up, bright-eyed, beamed at her and began to sing.
"Dedans ma chaumière
Pour y vivre heureux
Combien faut-il être?
Il faut être deux . . ."
Or rather, he began to croak: but it wasn't a bad voice, not at all.
In my li-tel co-ttage,
what do I need there?
for to be so happy,
what I need is you!
The words, that turned to English in her head with no effort at all, seemed so charming. And his bright eyes, his lipless, toothless grin, were so lively, so funny; and, if this wasn't too ridiculous, decidedly sexual—
"Oui, ma chaumière,
Je la préfère!
Avec toi, oui avec moi
Avec toi, oui avec moi!
Au palais d'un roi . . .!"
"I think I'll take a little walk," said Viola, abruptly: very startled by the feelings she was getting about that frog—
She thought she was abrupt, but thankfully Aymon didn't seem to care. He seemed content with his own thoughts, his own daydreams, whatever was happening to him . . . She knew she should find the ladies' room, splash her face, recover her poise. Instead, on a whim, she walked by the stream. The tender grass that had never been mown was starred with secret flowers. She knelt and dug into it with her fingers. Even the dirt itself was jewelled complexity, shimmering and edgy with endless life. The deeper you looked the more you saw. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere tiny knowing eyes looked back at you . . .
Something gleaming on the ground attracted her attention. She followed the gleam and found a golden corpse, lying as if annealed into the earth, the limbs and trunk sealed together and shining, shining, the face half-hidden by polished waves of hair. Now she had found a dead body, no wonder the forest had felt spooky. She bent for a closer look, knowing she must touch nothing, because this was a murder mystery and she would destroy the evidence. But the golden corpse sat up, the glimmering girl fled, leaving only a forest boulder; and Viola had never seen her face. Even stone is alive, stone is the mineral matrix of all life. It was the queen, she thought.
"That was the queen—" croaked the frog.
He must have followed her from the terrace. Did he really have a tiny yellow Disneyfied crown perched on his head? Could that happen? He winked at her and began to dance, hopping from one webbed, splay-toed foot to the other, singing the chorus of his French folksong, English in Viola's head:
Oh yes, my little home!
I would prefer it,
For you and me,
for you and me
To the palace of a king!
This time she went with the feeling. She jumped into his arms, the frog grabbed her and held her tight. He became man-sized, and outrageously, unamphibianly male. They were swimming in the millpool now, and a wanton, winged companion, great-eyed, androgynous and slender, hovered over them, making its wishes plain. Viola and the frog kissed and parted, Viola passed happily to the other partner. They went zooming away, over the shining surface of the water, their wings shivering in delight, hooked up en soixante-neuf, never had an orgasm like it, excitement, innocence and delight such as she hadn't known since, since, since forever—
Life is wonderful.
"You have very old-fashioned minds," confided the gardienne, as she handed over several exquisitely wrapped packages, in a delightful raw raffia bag. "May I ask where are you from?"
"From the USA," confessed Viola, knowing this was not always a good answer in Europe. She had raided the store. The taste of eglantine tea was still on her lips. She hoped she'd remembered to buy a box of those relaxing tisanes: she was a little hazy about the last few minutes—
"Ah!" said the gardienne, dipping her round black head, as if this explained everything (although, Viola thought, in fact the little nun was completely mystified, something lost in translation again). "Many thanks for your visit. Please come again."
They followed the flashes Aymon had cut in tree bark, back to the "last
known position," without any trouble. Maybe their eyes were better accustomed to the veil of green now; or maybe there'd been a touch of needless panic earlier. They spotted the gun-metal Aston Martin immediately, parked in that clearing, no more than a couple of hundred yards away.
"You see," said Aymon. "We were never lost."
Viola stood on one foot and then the other, to shake scraps of leaf mould and bark out of her sandals. "We'd better hurry. There's going to be a thunderstorm, I can feel it."
Aymon took his best guesses at the route out, using the compass on the dash (there was still nothing but grey fuzz on their GPS). Eventually they saw an ochre-washed cottage standing by the track, though as yet no tyre marks, no vehicles, no signage, no human activity—
Aymon pulled up and jumped out, eagerly. "Civilisation! C'mon, you're the linguist, you do the talking—"
But the forest grew right up to the stained, derelict walls, swamping what had been a little railed yard. "I don't think so, Ay."
The cottage had been walled up. The bricked door and boarded windows stared at the intruders, somehow stirring inexpressible emotions . . . "There's a plaque on the wall," said Aymon.
Viola kept her distance, nervous as a wild animal. "It's an old forester's house," he reported. "It's been fitted out as a bat refuge, a kind of memorial thing, wait there's more, think I can find out where we are—"
Aymon knew that there was a village called Boucq around here. He'd never nailed the genealogy (people who check out their family legends often find things they wish they didn't know); but he believed the Bocks could have come from there, long ago. And here was the name itself, on this bat refuge plaque, but strangely, it came in the English spelling . . .
"Let's get back on the road. I don't need to know about bats."
"Did you find out where we are?"
"No. We'll find out by driving, we have to hit a real road soon."
She sighed, concluding that his ability to read French had betrayed him: better not press the point. They returned to the car. Aymon punched the button, at last (always reluctant to give up the freedom of the open-top). The roof performed its slick, robotic manoeuvre, and they looked at each other, sealed and safe. Soon after that, the GPS screen came back to life.
"Now do we know where we are?"
"Never in doubt," said Aymon.
He drove on. Almost immediately they reached a junction, and they were back in the world of traffic, of powerlines, of isolated farms and miles of corn; and the sky finally opened. But Viola felt—maybe it was the sudden attack of the rain—as if the country had changed, as if she had to start "being in France" all over again, in a much less confident key. She remembered her purchases, and couldn't think what she'd done with them. Nothing in her purse. Where was that pretty raffia bag? Her arms ached with emptiness.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing . . .really."
He kept his eyes on the streaming grey road. "Honey? Did you notice anything strange about that place we found?"
She'd have denied everything, doubting her sanity and/or the eglantine tea, but the tremor in his voice convinced her to speak. "I'm not sure. Tricks of the light, maybe. Or things I can't explain."
"Did you see the girl in black, the gardienne, turn into a water bird?"
"I didn't see that. Did you see the transparent girl in the stream?"
"No. But I saw those tall pink flowers, the rushes, come alive, and turn into, er, people. What happened to you? After you followed that dragonfly?"
"Damselfly." Viola shook her head, realising with a shock that she wanted to tell him all about it, but not right now, not in a moving car. "I don't want to say, not yet. Aymon, what happened to us, where have we been?"
"You mean what did we take?" he countered, with a tight grin.
The windscreen wipers fought with pounding grey battalions.
"I don't believe that. Oh, I know we took the eglantine tea, but we were in another world before that. You know it. You and that tiny frog, the way you were, you were communing with each other. Aymon, we should compare notes. We should do it right now, before we lose our nerve, before we stop believing."
The rain was so heavy he could see nothing but the starred red tail-lights of the truck ahead of him. The two-lane road was narrow, traffic heavy, no chance to overtake. Aymon's heart was racing, better maintain the speed of the traffic but it felt too fast, almost uncontrollable—
Viola pressed her hand to her mouth. "In another world, my God. I've heard of a story like this, Ay, it's famous . . . Two English women were visiting Versailles, in the nineteen twenties, no, earlier. They had a strange experience and published it, they called it An Adventure. They believed they'd been through a timeslip, back to 10 August 1792. They'd visited the Petit Trianon in the days of Marie-Antoinette, and seen the queen herself—"
"It wasn't Marie-Antoinette." Aymon gripped the wheel fiercely. "The queen of that forest was not Marie-Antoinette."
"That's not what I'm saying. The account the authors of An Adventure published didn't check out. It's famous as a hoax. But I think they'd added stuff, because something incredible had happened to them, and they wanted people to believe. That's why we have to get this straight, you and I, now. Pull over, next chance you get—"
"Did you see the animal images on those boards come alive? As if they were getting directly into your brain, and looking back at you?"
"No, but I . . . something like that. Did you see the singing frog?"
"I've got a better idea. I'm going to find somewhere to pull over, a quiet spot, maybe a bar tabac. We're going to call Piper, right now, tell her the whole thing, have her record it."
Bette Piper was Aymon's long-time personal assistant, a very smart woman whom they both trusted implicitly.
"Yeah, yeah! Great idea, let's do it!"
Viola felt twenty, thirty years younger. She felt as if something inside had shattered and been remade. She had a mission, a cause, this would be big, she had her own instincts, she could almost taste it. The natural world is alive, sexual, conscious, full of living spirits, I'll write a book, a bestseller—
"The nearest I can come," she exclaimed, imagining the tv audience, trying out her lines on him, "to putting a name on what happened to us, is to say that we visited Fairyland. That's not adequate, but it's the word people have used, traditionally, for the dimension we entered: where, where every flower is conscious, and nature spirits inhabit insects, animals—"
"Fairyland???" Aymon exploded, hands still locked on the wheel, eyes fixed on those blurred taillights. "What the fuck? You are shitting me, honey. That was a timeslip. That was my future we visited. That was the future. Shit, those noticeboards: I can almost figure it. Information coded in light, direct to the cortex, and hijacking the processes of consciousness, that's what causes that weird 'everything is looking at me' effect—"
"SHUT UP!" shouted Viola. "Shut up, shut up. You and your codes!"
He held the wheel, but inside he was shaking, reliving the moment when—spelling out that memorial plaque—he'd had the strangest conviction that if he read another word he'd discover the date of his own death. He knew he was right, oh God, he knew. But it was a crass error to shoot her down, far more important to get her to talk, get her experience on record: before vital clues to those unborn developments were lost—
"Okay, okay. I'm sorry, honey, calm down, didn't mean to offend."
"Maybe we're both right," whispered Viola, marvelling. "Maybe the future is a fairyland, and that's what we have glimpsed—"
A tiny voice in his ear brought Aymon up short. He gripped the wheel harder, his eyes bulging. He could see a little figure squirming up out of the walnut fascia, a tiny face, incredibly malevolent, made of polished wood grain, a flayed body—
"Think of the consequences!" it squeaked, waving its knobbly little arms. "Where is your evidence? What did you bring back? Nothing! No one will believe you. You'll be treated as cranks! You will be ridiculed!"
Hordes more of them, a different variety, came pouring out of the strengthened glass, and flew around their heads, jabbering urgently, flickering in and out of focus, liquid and abrasive.
"They will say you have ingested illegal substances, your trusted assistant will report you to the authorities, you will be ruined!"
Multicoloured creatures whose bodies were ever-shifting crowns and chains came out of the door panels and the floor, and cried out, passionately:
"We are not life, we were once life, deep in the ancient fern-forest time: we are naked chemicals, stripped and crucified now. Beware, beware, Viola! Our cousins in your brain have told us this: your happiness will vanish, if you betray your lovers."
"Don't betray us! Don't betray us! We never betrayed you! Cowards! Cowards!"
The Egyptian cotton fairies danced on Aymon's shoulder, pleading to be heard, telling him how they had been tortured into thread—
"And think, if you are believed," shouted the Parisian artisan leather spirits, crawling out of the sleek hide of Viola's purse. "If your visit can be detected as changes in your brain chemistry? What then? By interfering, by trying to make it happen, you may destroy the very salvation that you have glimpsed, that you so desire, and it may never come to be—!"
Viola had succumbed to hysterics, she was trying to open the passenger door, sobbing and batting at the glass-sprites.
Never come to be, never come to be, hissed the voices in Aymon's ear, not a single voice but a varied choir: in fact the voices of the different materials confined in his pacemaker. He struggled to go on driving, though his heart was jumping like a jack-hammer, convinced, like his wife, that there was hope in flight . . . But the rain kept raining madly, the taillights were too close, and a party of young male deer, inspired by who knows what diablerie, decided to bolt across the road ahead of that truck, bounding from the forest margin.
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