Spectacle

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  Some leaves tumbled with the breeze over her feet. She picked up a few, making them into a cradle in her hand, and pulled out the paper by the clean edge. Blood droplets fell to the ground. Disgusting. She held it away from herself and placed it on the leaf cradle.

  The paper had something written on it. Even with the blood, the ink showed through clearly. Just one word.

  Inspiration.

  She crushed the leaf cradle over the paper and made a fist.

  Whose blood? Why? When? On the omnibus … no, she was far too aware of pickpockets and always held her satchel close in a crowd.

  The park? It could have happened while she was asleep. She tried to picture M. Gloves, strolling up to her sleeping body, whistling with his rat in his pocket. The image didn’t fit, and she couldn’t say why.

  Or …

  No.

  The thought was too much to bear and made her want to become water and seep into the dry earth. Like blood back into the wounds in her visions.

  Maybe she had encountered the Dark Artist and couldn’t remember.

  He might have approached her. Threatened her. Done something to her. And she couldn’t remember. Maybe the nap wasn’t a nap—the dream started out as a memory—but a new kind of memory gap prompted by … by what? Seeing the wax figures of the morgue, the argument with Simone, something else? Something might have happened. Or it might not have.

  She couldn’t say for sure.

  “Is that blood?”

  Nathalie looked up to see a young woman in a black habit, frilly white cap, and black veil. She recognized the garb as that of the Sisters of Bon Secours who tended to the sick.

  “It—it is,” said Nathalie.

  The nun glanced from the bottle Nathalie held in one hand to the fist she’d made in the other. Her inquisitive green eyes swept up to Nathalie’s face.

  “It isn’t mine.” She shrugged. “I don’t know whose it is. Someone … put it in my bag, I think.” I hope. Because as disturbing as that is, it’s better than forgetting that I met the killer. “I just discovered it.”

  The truth was absurd. She knew how she must have appeared, what she must have sounded like. But she couldn’t lie to a nun.

  The nun leaned in close. “Do you need help?” Her eyes searched Nathalie’s neck and arms, presumably for signs of physical harm.

  Nathalie shook her head.

  “I can bring you to a hospital,” the nun whispered. “I’ll stay with you until your family comes. Do you have family?”

  Her tone was compassionate, her expression caring. Yet also careful, the way Maman spoke to Aunt Brigitte when she wasn’t making sense.

  “I do have family, thank you. I’m on my way home right now. I—I don’t need to go to a hospital,” Nathalie said, glancing at the blood jar.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The nun, gazing at her with a mixture of sympathy and pity, patted Nathalie’s elbow. She closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again. “Very well.” With a bow, she walked away.

  “Pray for me, Sister,” Nathalie called after her.

  The nun turned and smiled faintly. “I already am.”

  * * *

  Nathalie dangled her feet over the Seine. Sitting on the cement was uncomfortable, and she was still too anxious to stay put for very long, but she needed to think.

  She hated her life. She wished that rather than touching the morgue glass that first time, she’d smashed it instead. If she could go back in time, that’s exactly what she’d do.

  The visions had ruined everything normal and good. Her sense of reality, and her imagination, blended together in the worst possible way. Her relationship with Maman. Her friendship with Simone. Her honesty in writing to Agnès. Her ability to sleep. To eat. To remember.

  And the Dark Artist, what did he care? He had no way of knowing about her ability. Who did he think he was tormenting? The girl at the morgue or the anonymous journalist responsible for the morgue report? He couldn’t know she was both.

  Could he?

  He could have been following her every move since that first vision. Or he could be playing a game like he did with the police and Le Petit Journal, sending in his stupid letters. He might know everything about her. Or nothing. Between falling asleep and her unreliable memory, she couldn’t trust herself.

  Now what?

  Inspiration. Obviously she didn’t understand what that meant. That was the point, no doubt. To confuse her and make her wonder what some deranged murderer intended with his ambiguous messages. But she wasn’t going to do that anymore.

  Why me? For all of this, why me?

  The blood served no purpose other than to taunt her. If she brought it to the police, they wouldn’t believe her, whether she claimed it was a stealthy deposit or an encounter about which she had no memory. Even if the police did, somehow, take her seriously, there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. They couldn’t tell if it was the blood of a Dark Artist victim or a rat from the sewers.

  Nathalie emptied the blood into the river and let go of the bottle. Then she threw in the lid, followed by the crumpled leaves holding the bloodstained paper. She watched the blood dissipate and the jar fill with water until the river swallowed it completely. The leaves and paper floated away a meter or so before starting to sink. She put her hands in the river, letting the current flow through her fingers. Then she stood up, wiped her hands on her dress, and walked home as quickly as her legs would take her.

  18

  The only solace Nathalie had for the rest of the day, aside from the comfort of Stanley at her feet, was a letter from Agnès.

  Dear Nata,

  Oh my. I have read those newspaper clippings again and again. Please send more. I want to know everything about the Dark Artist and these murders. What a tremendously exciting time to be in Paris. I dare say that my curiosity would outweigh my squeamishness and that I might be observing at the morgue right alongside you.

  Do you have any guesses? Are you hearing anything at the newspaper that hasn’t been published? How do you think he gathers his victims? You must be terrified to be alone on the streets. Be careful, my friend.

  We went to an apple orchard the other day. Although the apples are not yet in season, walking along the rows and rows of stout trees was a delight. They are all lined up like sturdy dominoes. Lush and fragrant. However, bees are quite fond of them and Roger got stung. It probably makes me an awful sister, but I told him to stop crying and that he deserved it anyway. Just a few minutes before, Maman had told him to stop running about so wildly. Of course he didn’t listen, knocked over my nearly full basket, and didn’t help pick up the apples. I threw one after him and missed. I am glad the bee had better aim.

  I thought of how to explain the smell of the ocean to you and still am not sure I have an adequate description. Salt and water, as you say, and life. Also death and rot—as with seaweed—but even then, it’s a welcome smell. If movement and strength and beauty have a scent, it is the ocean. I suppose that’s not entirely helpful, is it? You shall see for yourself next year, I hope. Adorned with your Viking hat perhaps.

  Bisous,

  Agnès

  She wasn’t sure how she was going to respond about the Dark Artist, nor did she want to think about that right now. For now she was just grateful for her friendship with Agnès and couldn’t wait for her to come home.

  * * *

  Tendrils of regret crept toward her during the night.

  Nathalie didn’t notice them at first. Not as she lay awake, proud of wresting control from this ability, from the Dark Artist, and from Simone’s misguided influence. They were there, in the shadows, but she was too defiant to see them.

  Then they reached for her in dreams about Simone—good, happy dreams reminiscent of good, happier days. The sorts of dreams that would fool her, upon waking, into thinking all was well between them and she could spring out of bed to tell Simone about the blood jar. As if things were still tha
t way.

  Those tendrils came closer yet the next morning, when she read about Mirabelle.

  An anonymous tip submitted at the morgue yesterday suggested that the victim’s name was Mirabelle. This was confirmed hours later when the victim’s cousin identified her as Mirabelle Gregoire, who’d quarreled with her husband and had left their home in Plaisir, nearly 30 km outside Paris, several days prior.

  Nathalie’s face grew itchy with heat. Simone. Who else would have given M. Gagnon the name?

  That wasn’t Simone’s vision. It wasn’t her detail to share.

  To her this is exciting. Stimulating. A thrill.

  Nathalie could trust no one. Aunt Brigitte, in all her delirium, was right about that.

  Then the first wisp of doubt seized her. If she couldn’t trust Simone to understand, then she couldn’t trust anyone to do so. Especially without evidence. Disposing of the blood and the note had been rewarding at the time, but now who would believe that the bottle of blood had existed at all? She wasn’t planning on telling anyone about it and had no reason to … not now, anyway. Someday she might. And then what? She’d be deemed hysterical or some such nonsense. Right back to where she started.

  She cut the tendril back. What was done was done. It didn’t matter.

  Did it?

  If the Dark Artist referenced “Inspiration” or blood in one of his taunting letters to the police, it might.

  No. Speculation is one of the reasons I put an end to this absurdity. I’m tired of fixating on answers.

  And wasn’t that why she’d become so preoccupied with M. Gloves? Not that he flawlessly matched her ideas of who a killer might be, how a killer might look and act. The man drew attention to himself and seemed oblivious about it, for goodness sake. But she’d wanted an answer. Any answer. Because any answer was better than what they had now, which was no suspects and no theories and no anything but ripped-up girls on a slab. Maybe M. Gloves was the killer, but for the first time, she gave weight to the idea that maybe he really wasn’t.

  She sheared that tendril, too.

  New regrets grew more quickly than Nathalie could keep up. It would take another two days for them to coil around her heart completely, a vine of doubt intertwined with other sentiments: anger and shame, uncertainty and fear. Relief. A longing to forget.

  Maybe those cracks in her memory weren’t such a bad thing. Maybe she needed more of them. Enough to forget all of this.

  She’d heard of one way to forget something once and for all. Every day she saw the advertisement in Le Petit Journal.

  Hypnosis.

  Yesterday she’d read an account in the newspaper about a woman’s experience with hypnotism. One day, she’d woken up convinced she’d taken a trip to London when in reality she’d never been. Lo and behold, the paper reported, her parents had made a voyage there when she was three. The memories were there, just buried. The hypnotist had made sense of it all.

  If hypnosis could uncover a memory, maybe it could cover one back up.

  The thought of ridding herself of this blessing-curse or curse-blessing once and for all suddenly called to her like a Siren. There was hope in the unknown, and it was worth a try.

  * * *

  An hour after reaching that decision, Nathalie was walking down a narrow alleyway on the Left Bank looking for Étienne Lebeau, Hypnotist & Phrenologist.

  Phrenology. That had to be the most absurd practice in existence. The belief that you could “read” a person’s character by studying the shape of his or her skull was preposterous.

  It was so preposterous that it wasn’t frightening. It was merely nonsense.

  Hypnosis, on the other hand, wasn’t nonsense. Nathalie believed it was quite the opposite. And, even though she felt apprehensive, hypnosis just might end this struggle.

  She didn’t have a precise address; the advertisement said Rue Xavier Privas and nothing more. The twisted cobblestone path sneered at her with fickle shadows and unexpected turns, obscuring all but the next few paces at a time. She walked past a wine shop, a dentist (she had never been and hoped never to go), a tanner, a milliner. Had she not pressed against the building a moment to step over a pair of cats, a chubby gray-and-white mother cat nursing her kittens and a tawny tomcat, she might have missed the small yellow, weather-worn placard altogether. No bigger than a book cover, M. Lebeau’s sign had an illustrated finger pointing up a dark stairwell that looked like it hadn’t seen a human in decades.

  Nathalie reached inside her bag for the vial of catacomb dirt and put it in her dress pocket. With a deep exhale, she placed her foot on the first step.

  “It will be fine.”

  She turned to the voice over her shoulder and saw a red-haired young man with a knowing grin.

  “Monsieur Carre,” she said, overly formal on purpose. She peeked over his shoulder to see if Simone was nearby. Thankfully not. “Fancy that we should meet here of all places.”

  “Oh,” he began, waving his hand. “I followed you.”

  “You what?”

  “Not like that.” Louis smoothed his crisp white shirt collar. “I work at The Quill, the bookshop back there. I saw you pass by and called to you, although I suppose you didn’t hear me…” His words ticked up the scale of uncertainty.

  Nathalie remembered passing a bookshop. She hadn’t heard anyone call after her, but then again, she’d been focused on her task. The area was raucous, with shop owners luring customers and women shouting conversations across the alley from one third-floor window to the next. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “The street can be noisy at times. I—I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment. Simone told me that the two of you—”

  “Please, Monsieur Carre—”

  “Louis.”

  “Louis. Please. I don’t wish to discuss Simone. And if you’ll excuse me, I have—I have something to tend to,” she said, glancing up the stairs.

  His smile slipped from knowing to wry. Simone hadn’t told him about the visions, had she?

  “I went to him once,” Louis said, in that conspiratorial way of his. “You’re somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness. The old man puffs opium but is harmless.”

  Opium? Nathalie gazed up the stairs and took her foot off the step. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. She’d heard stories of people smoking opium but didn’t know much about it other than what Papa had shared from a trip to China: People gathering in rooms, lounging about on pillows, puffing away until they talked about things like flowers that cackled and houses that cried.

  How could an opium smoker concentrate well enough to do hypnosis?

  “I apologize for startling you, Nathalie. Simone is upset by the rift, and—maybe you two can talk sometime, that’s all. Good luck with the hypnosis.” Louis nodded a farewell and strolled back the way they came. Nathalie watched his fiery hair bob through the crowd, down the first turn, and out of sight.

  A rat darted out from under the stairs, spooking her. It spotted the tawny cat and disappeared behind a sack.

  Go. If he can make you forget you ever had visions at the morgue, then it’s worth trying no matter what he smokes.

  She marched up the steps and knocked on the door.

  19

  “Hypnotism or phrenology?” came a high-pitched male voice from behind the door. Before Nathalie could answer, the door swung open and a slender, gray-haired man with glasses, rosy cheeks, and a brown suit that had seen better days smiled at her.

  “Uh, hypnotism,” she said, glancing back down the stairwell.

  “Excellent!” He invited her to enter. “I did three phrenology readings today and am ready for a good hypnosis. Étienne Lebeau, by the way, as you know from the sign.”

  Nathalie introduced herself and stepped into a cavernous room lined with columns of books. They resembled crooked little smokestacks, covering all but the windows. She glanced at the titles at the top of the piles closest to her. Neurypnology. Was that a word? Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on th
e Nature and Uses of Hypnotism. Boring. Enchanted Science or Science Enchanted? Sounded like a riddle. On the Origin of Species. At least that one she’d heard of.

  “Please, come sit,” said M. Lebeau, gesturing to a gold damask sofa. “Have you ever undergone hypnosis before?”

  “I have not.”

  “Splendid!” he said, clasping his hands. He then described the process: that he would guide her to a relaxing state of mind, that he would use the sound of his voice to reach her, and that she couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything that would violate her free will.

  A white-haired woman with bulging eyes and dozens of beaded necklaces stepped out of the back room. “I’m Madame Geneviève Lebeau,” she said, straightening out her floral dress. She then took Nathalie’s hand, warmly, and spoke in a near whisper. “May you find peace.”

  With that she beamed and shuffled over to the maroon drapes, closing them. Grayness swaddled the room like a blanket of mist. Sunlight crept around the edges of the drapes and created shadows where there hadn’t been any before. Mme. Lebeau slipped into one of them and disappeared into the back room.

  M. Lebeau took a seat across from her in a wooden chair and, placing his hands on his knees, leaned toward her. “Now for the most important question of all. What are you hoping to achieve in today’s session?”

  “I want to forget some events I experienced.” On the way here, she’d explored all the possible ways to answer this question. This response seemed the most careful while still allowing her to be truthful.

  “May I ask what kind of events?”

  She turned her head to the side as if he’d sneezed on her. This, too, was deliberate. “Violent, criminal things. Please understand that it’s difficult for me to discuss.”

  “Oh,” he said, lowering his voice. “I won’t pry. I should tell you, however, that forgetting an event doesn’t mean letting go of the fear of that event.”

  Nathalie frowned. “Why?”

  “Say you were afraid of snakes because you’d been bitten by one as a child. I could help you to forget that episode, but your mind would still fear snakes, though you wouldn’t understand why.”