The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  So it was possible to change. And Peter recognized the busyness of an old priestess in a temple, whose forms and gestures also had a valedictory quality, as if this might be the last time Princess Clara Brancoveanu plumped up her daughter’s pillows, wiped away her sweat, fed her with a wooden spoon while Peter watched. But he also recognized another kind of busyness as Inez de Rougemont assembled her scientific and alchemical instruments into a pile that rose three feet high in some places. There was to be some process of distilling, Peter guessed.

  He was conscious, now, of a terrible anxiety. And he was reassured only when he was watching Princess Clara. She seemed joyful, almost, the way she wiped the sweat from Miranda’s face, as if each trip to the altar of Persephone might be her last. So maybe there was something else he didn’t understand. And maybe there was something between her and Madame de Graz and Madame de Rougemont, some agreement they were hiding from Ana Cassian, and Miranda, and him.

  Again he found himself remembering Crasnaru in the Buftea tent. What had he said? They didn’t teach these sciences where he had gone to school. Witches and warlocks with their secret plans—it wasn’t fair to be manipulated in ways you couldn’t understand. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” Peter said to Madame de Graz. “Tell me what is happening.”

  But she didn’t. Instead she told him a little story about an alchemist or conjurer who had locked a spirit or an animal inside a prison cell. “Yes, there is a hidden knowledge,” she said, peering at him out of her white eyes. “But would it be more fair if the God were free?”

  And for the first time she smiled at him. So—another type of wordless intimacy. It was as if she’d answered Crasnaru’s unspoken question, as if she also were some kind of conjurer or sybil. Exasperated, he looked away, counting the moments until the tower of bottles and glass tubes was finished, and Inez de Rougemont stood poring over the diagrams and notes that were laid out over the tabletop.

  It was time. The princess took from beside the little altar a notebook of pencil sketches, all of the same face. She leafed through them, aware that Peter was examining them, too. The ones of Miranda sleeping, as she was now, had a clarity and expressiveness that Peter could not but contrast to other sketches, the hurried and uncertain views of Miranda talking, moving acting, living. Doubtless it was harder to capture those things.

  She shut the notebook, placed it by Miranda’s pillow. “Adieu,” she said, and leaned down over her daughter to embrace her. But then she grimaced, looked up at Peter, smiled. “Come,” she said gesturing. And he imagined words in the wordless conversation he’d been sharing with the princess all afternoon, an intimation that even here he was not unwelcome, and his presence might be something of a relief.

  So he knelt down, and Inez de Rougemont put her hand over his shoulder, almost touching him. She whispered in his ear. “You must hold her if she struggles. If she resists.”

  Then she bent to light the incense and the petroleum burners, siphon in the measured liquids while the pendulum marked time. Ana Cassian peered in at the door, her thin, plain face full of misgivings. So maybe she knew something. Maybe she knew something of what might happen. There was something hidden in the language of Princess Clara’s body as she curled up next to Miranda’s inert form.

  In time, at what seemed to be a signal from Inez de Rougemont, she bent over her to kiss her daughter on the lips.

  21

  The Exorcism

  AEGYPTA SCHENCK SAT in the rock pile below Kepler’s tower. She had barked her shin, ripped her stocking when she fell. Now she sat nursing her split knee. Her clothes were torn and dirty, and her fox-head stole had ripped, revealing the mark of the rope on her withered neck. She glared up at Miranda with her pillbox hat, her veil awry. There was no pity or self-pity in her yellow eyes. “Ungrateful child!”

  Miranda stood above her with the tourmaline in her hand. This is what I must do, she thought. Also: You made me do this. But she didn’t say either of these things. She found she didn’t want to explain herself, didn’t think she could have if she’d tried. Nor did she want to tell comforting lies. I’ll be back. I’ll see you again.

  And so she took a few steps downhill in the evening sunlight. The sky was clear above her head. There was ice in the high passes and on the rock spires. The hidden world lay behind her and she turned away from it, turned toward the rock chute.

  “Oh child, don’t leave me,” said Aegypta Schenck. Miranda raised her head, raised the tourmaline in a kind of salutation. Then she climbed down through the rocks and her aunt did not follow her. When Miranda looked back, finally, from the bottom of the slope, she saw the patch of her velvet dress against the rocks below the tower.

  And in the waning light she climbed down through the pine forest, where there were martens and wombats and squirrels among the dead trunks. And they were quiet as she approached. They cowered in their burrows as she passed. She climbed down into the high meadow where there were wildflowers.

  She gave the tourmaline a squeeze. It yielded in her hand, more and more like a ripe piece of fruit and not a stone, or like a tough little pouch of meat.

  * * *

  IN THE FOURTH-FLOOR apartment in the Bulevardul Republicii, light came from the candle on Demeter’s altar. The petroleum lamps were lit, and colored fluids were bubbling in the beakers and alembics as the Condesa de Rougemont performed her alchemy.

  In the hot, airless evening, the Princess Clara Brancoveanu lay with her daughter on the straw pallet. Isaac Newton’s black book was open on the table. Beside it were the three glass balls in a line, and General Schenck von Schenck’s big revolver. Inez de Rougemont murmured incantations while Madame de Graz leaned on her cane. Ana Cassian lingered in the doorway.

  Peter sat beside Miranda on the pallet. But he had turned away from her, wanting to give her mother some small privacy as she bent over Miranda, touched her lips. He was staring at Ana Cassian, and it was in her expression that Peter first became aware that some terrible was happening. He saw the doubt in her thin face change into something else, some more violent emotion—he looked down toward Miranda. Clara Brancoveanu had raised herself on her right elbow, and in her right hand she held a beaker of some distillate that smelled like Vicks VapoRub. And with her left hand she was rubbing her mouth and lips with it, and then she bent down over Miranda and kissed her again.

  This time it wasn’t a little touch. She cried out, grunted through her nose, and her eyes started open—Miranda was still asleep. But now she was waking up, and she was coughing a little bit, and her mouth had something in it, maybe some new bile or vomit. Peter slid down next to her on the other side of the pallet. He grabbed hold of her hand. He leaned over her, so close that he could see, as the princess pulled away, the black eel like a rotten tongue protrude out of her mouth.

  Now in an instant Peter understood Clara Brancoveanu’s mood, the tender resolve of these last offices around her daughter’s bed. Too late he realized as fact what he had half dismissed as metaphor, and what, if he’d been paying a different kind of attention, he might have been able to prevent. Horrified, he stretched out the stump of his right hand.

  He could see the princess also had belated second thoughts, and her courage failed her. Eyes wide, desperate, she pulled away. But the eel was long enough to span the gap, a fat, blind, sucking fish that pushed its head into her mouth.

  No one spoke. But Peter heard a soft, tearing hiss. He thought at first it was the sound the creature made, conjured from its refuge in Miranda’s body. But then he realized the noise was in his own mouth as he twisted his hand from her clenched fingers, fell over her, grabbed hold of the black, fringed, slippery tail as it disappeared down the princess’s throat. He coiled it between his fingers. And as the princess pulled away, he rose to his knees. The creature almost slid out of his hand. But he dug his fingernails into its tough hide. He squeezed with all his strength and dragged the eel backward inch by inch.

  The hissing sound was louder now, mix
ed with the princess’s grunt of pain. She was bleeding from the corners of her lips. The eel, sleek and slippery in one direction, was stubborn the other way. It had raised its circles of frilled spines. Peter’s hand was bleeding, and he could not adjust his grip. He pressed the stump of his arm into the princess’s face, and as she choked and screamed he pulled the eel out of her throat, then staggered up into the center of the room.

  “Stupid fool,” said Inez de Rougemont. She raised her hands as if she might strike him, while at the same time Madame de Graz glowered at him as if he were guilty of some mistake in etiquette—he had to get away from these women. He had to get Miranda away from them.

  He backed away toward the door. The old ladies watched him as the eel turned in his hand, its mouth searching for purchase. He held its body at arm’s length, but already it seemed to him as if the creature were distending, swelling under his fingers. What should he do now? He had acted on instinct. Nor had he asked himself whether he had the strength to kill this creature—what had Madame de Graz said? He could not let it loose into the world. It might cause a war.

  “Fool,” said Inez de Rougemont. “What are you doing?” Lines of sweat disturbed the powder on her cheeks; he could expect no help from her. Desperate, he turned back toward the bed, where Clara Brancoveanu lay gasping and choking.

  He watched Miranda come awake. Her hand was fumbling for his, and when she didn’t find it, she opened her eyes.

  She sat up in the bed among the tangled sheets. “Peter,” she said, and looked at him, and for a moment everything was still.

  There was blood on Miranda’s lips, and she spat. There was color in her famished cheeks as she looked around the room; the princess had collapsed away from her. She had fallen back on the pillows, straining for breath, her eyes wide and shot with blood. Drops of blood fell from her eyelids and her nose.

  “Peter,” Miranda said, and turned away from him. She bent down over her mother, and he could not see her face. He stood in the center of the room, the eel twisting up his forearm, the old ladies fussing and clucking; Peter raised the stump of his right arm to block them away. He felt a momentary gust of happiness, because he saw the exorcism had been successful. This was no wicked spirit, no ghost of a dead conjurer. But this was Miranda herself. He recognized her voice and the movement of her body as she crouched over her mother. He had not seen her since Cismigiu Park.

  Now Madame de Graz clumped toward him, leaning on her cane. She stood in front of Peter with one hand held out. She let go of the cane, which clattered to the floor.

  “My son,” she said, “give it to me.” She reached out her other hand. Her face was soft with acceptance and surrender; she opened her lips wide. The monster turned toward her, as if it smelt her with its sucking mouth.

  Inez de Rougemont stood behind her with her hand on her shoulder. “It can be sequestered,” she murmured. “Magister Newton says…”

  But now Miranda got to her feet. Gasping and choking, her mother reached out to her, but she pushed her hands away. Then she stepped from the pallet to the floor. “You shut up,” she said to the condesa. “You just shut up.”

  * * *

  ON THE BORDER to the hidden world, in the high meadow below the pass, Miranda stood among the wildflowers. She had the tourmaline in her hand. She looked down, and she was happy to recognize the little ape or monkey in a flattened circle of grass, where there’d been a struggle, perhaps, or a larger animal had lain down.

  And because she also could feel the white tyger inside of her, and when she looked down she could see the beast scarcely restrained by her human skin, she was aware of Peter Gross in the dark apartment lit with oil lamps, where her mother lay on the pallet and reached out her hands. Miranda was aware of Peter Gross and the scarlet beetle, but in the hidden world she squatted down and put her hand on the ape’s head. And his right arm ended in a stump, and in the wrinkled palm of his left hand he held some kind of worm or little viper that had twisted back to bite him. The expression on his small brown face was hopeful, as if he had a problem that was urgent but it could be solved—she was so glad to see him! And she reached out with her hand that nevertheless had the heavy claws of the tyger inside of it.

  * * *

  THE DEMON TWISTED in Peter’s hand so he could scarcely keep hold of it. Madame de Graz stood in front of him with her arms held out. She had made her decision. “My son,” she said. “My son.” But Miranda pushed by her and she might have fallen if Inez de Rougemont hadn’t held her by the shoulder.

  Miranda reached out toward the eel’s head; it bit at her. “No,” Peter told her. He tried to pull it away. But he could feel it swelling and shifting, and he could feel his grip loosening, and he knew he couldn’t keep hold of it forever. Miranda reached under the turning neck; she grabbed the eel behind its mouth.

  She locked her fingers below its gills, which spread out in a slimy black ruff—she’d seen these things before, Peter decided. She knew about these things. She had lived with this demon inside of her. She knew what to do. “Hold it away,” Peter said. “Both hands.”

  They stood close together now, and they looked at each other without saying anything more. He dug his fingers into the creature’s wet hide, while Miranda squeezed and throttled it. “They are weak at the beginning,” said Inez de Rougemont. “But they grow in strength.” What did she know? She was rubbing her thin hands together while Madame de Graz stood with her mouth gaping wide—what did either of them know? In fact the creature seemed weaker now than it had a minute before, its movements slower and less furious. Maybe it could not live in the open air, Peter thought. Inez de Rougemont was wrong about it, maybe. Why did it search immediately for human hosts? Even now it tried to bite and suck at Miranda’s hands.

  “Keep it away,” Peter said. He was with Miranda in the middle of the room. Miranda’s mother lay on her back, gasping on the bed. Peter slid his hand up the length of the black eel, ripping his fingers on its outstretched spines, until his hand was with Miranda’s hands. They looked at each other, and they held it as it throbbed and flailed and starved.

  “You must…,” said Inez de Rougemont. “You must…,” and she told them what to do. But Peter wasn’t listening, and he closed his hand around the creature’s gills, and he could feel it weakening. In time they dropped it, weakened and diminished, to the floor. It wallowed on the floorboards until Inez de Rougemont pounced on it. Triumphant, she held it up in pair of tongs.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Miranda pressed her face into Peter’s shoulder, and he could feel her body against his body. He tried to imagine what she must be feeling, waking up into this chaos, not knowing where she was.

  “Andromeda,” she murmured. “Peter—Andromeda.”

  Madame de Graz clumped back to the pallet, where she sat down. Inez de Rougemont brought the eel to the table, and dropped it into some kind of chemical bath, where it rose to the surface, turned onto its back. She clapped her hands together. “Magister Newton…,” she continued, but Peter wasn’t listening. He stood with Miranda in the middle of the room.

  “Andromeda is dead,” she told him, and he hugged her as best he could with his one bleeding hand. “How did I get here?” she asked him. He drew her away into a corner of the room, and he put his arm around her bare shoulder. Dressed in her nightgown, she stood beside him, and he told her a few bits and pieces of what he knew. He told her what he knew about Bocu’s masquerade, and how she had come here. She was quiet, listening. Madame de Graz had flopped down on the pallet beside the Princess Brancoveanu. Ana Cassian had disappeared.

  The condesa, her gray hair disheveled, bowed her head over the table, clasped her hands as if in supplication. In the light from Demeter’s candle, circles of red shone on her cheeks under her spectacles. This was not the same woman, Peter decided, who had come into the light of his fire beside the Hoosick River in the snow. She had been different then, younger, dressed in Gypsy clothes. A powerful
, compelling figure—not like this frail old woman, painted like a clown. Now she turned toward them, turned around. “Child, is it a crime that I looked over you,” she murmured, “took you in and your mother, too? Is it a crime I followed you and tried to protect you for your father’s sake? Yes, I made compromises. Ratisbon, Ceausescu—no one has harmed you.”

  Miranda wasn’t listening, Peter thought. Miranda didn’t care. The old woman continued, because she could not help herself: “My child, I am so happy you’ve come back. I have such questions to ask you—where you have traveled. Questions … Questions.… All of us have questions.”

  Miranda wasn’t paying attention. She looked at her mother on the bed. Inez de Rougemont put her hand out, turned back toward the table, fumbled with her glass spheres. “Oh,” she said, “oh, oh,” her face so full of defeat that Peter took a few steps toward her.

  Now suddenly the condesa was in tears, and her long hands were trembling. And it wasn’t because some half-remembered scheme had been uncovered. But she had grabbed up one of the glass balls, the one Nicola Ceausescu had knocked down. The others were in their little nests of cloth, still full of smoke, and Peter also could see the little shapes sprawled and collapsed inside—a creature with a fish’s head, a coiled octopus.

  But the third ball was empty. The condesa held it up. There was no smoke in it. There was a crack in the glass where the tar had been disturbed. There was a hole in the black, soft patch of tar.

  “Oh,” said the condesa—“oh.” She was weeping, overcome. Madame de Graz sat on the bed with the Princess Brancoveanu; neither of them moved. Miranda went to them while Peter joined the condesa at the table. In the airless room, stinking of tar and sweat and conjuring, she pressed her hand down the page of the black book. “Which one?” she said. “Flimsie. Oh, please no.”