“Sorry to have mistaken you for Sandy Lake,” he said, with, he hoped, more complicity than indiscretion.
“Oh. No offence. I am even a little flattered that you recognized her. Miss Lake has been a long time gone. Who’d have thought anyone would remember her?”
“Musical memories are not easily forgotten. Nor is someone who wore luminous garlands in her hair. And so, if I may ask, what happened to Sandy Lake that she became Lilian Lenton?”
There was a little pause before Lilian answered, which she did with a gravity Gabriel had not expected.
“Sandy was a bit of a shallow, superficial girl, wasn’t she? She needed to grow up and to grow old. In a foreign country, she met someone very courageous, and she wanted to become like her, or if not, to pay homage to her. And then she had the inspiration that this admiration would be better directed if she could put it to use in her own hometown. She just took her friend’s name so that her spirit might accompany her on her way back. Or I should rather say, might accompany us.”
“Us? Your new band?”
“The band is just an advertisement for another us. The U.S. of Us, if you like. Your best enemies and your best friends,” she added, lightening a little.
“It seems a bit cryptic to me,” admitted Gabriel.
“I’m afraid it has to remain so for a little while,” she said, her slightly husky voice now striking an amused note, as they reached the other end of the tunnel. There, they stepped onto a wider side platform, whose cast-iron pillars and Gothic arches reminded Gabriel of a deserted church. Ignoring a staircase that must have led to street level, they crossed the platform toward another door.
“It’s rather cold in there,” warned Blankbate as he opened the lock with a jangling of keys.
It looked like a fabric shop, with long tables and shelves up to the ceiling, but it had been used, Blankbate explained, as a storeroom and workshop for maintenance purposes. It was now something else entirely: a cave of wonders or, rather, the den of the Forty Thieves. This was where, Gabriel understood, the Scavengers piled up their “loot” of outmoded, discarded objects. Strange machines with forgotten or absurd functions, baby cribs, sleighs, skis and snowshoes, stuffed animals, worn-out hides and moth-eaten furs, ships in bottles, sextants and other Navy paraphernalia, Eskimo objects and weapons, and faded paintings and mutilated statues from all places and periods rose up from the floor, flooded the tables, and scaled the shelves, appearing and disappearing with the passing of the lamplight like the exhibits of a spectral World’s Fair.
“We call this place the Arcaves,” said Blankbate, just as Gabriel wondered if there really was a profit to be made from these second-hand or last-chance objects. It was, then, in its own, dusty, stifling, desperate way, a Memory palace, a crumbling and frail monument to all the anonymous lives that the city had forgotten about. It was preserved there, smelling of shipwreck and ruin, patient and melancholy, crouching in the dark, biding its time, perhaps.
“Of course, if someone ever wants something we’ll retrieve it.”
“For a profit?” asked Lilian, who was much less shy than Gabriel.
Blankbate turned his beak toward her.
“Depends on who asks for what. The less you need it, the more it’s going to cost you.”
Somehow, that seemed logical to Gabriel.
The door at the other end led to a cold-storage room. It chilled Gabriel to the bone as he entered it, and the lamp that Blankbate held, trembling as it did, did not make the place any cosier. The mysterious sled Brentford had told Gabriel about was in the middle of the room under an oiled tarp that Blankbate lifted up with one swift, powerful gesture of his black-gloved hand, revealing the glass top of the copper cylinder. The lady’s face, that of an almost old woman, was not unknown to Gabriel, but he could not quite pin it down.
“So?” asked Blankbate, who seemed now to be in a hurry to be done with it all.
“No means of identification whatsoever?”
“There is one thing,” said Chipp. “There. At the back.”
Blankbate moved the lamp down, revealing a coat of arms. Very simple. Gabriel had never been much of a heraldry fiend, but he knew he knew this one, and then recognized it for good. Sable three snowflakes argent. He remembered the motto by heart. Nix super Nox. This was incredible.
“Nixon-Knox,” he said. “Isabella Nixon-Knox.”
“Like the former Councillor?” asked Lilian.
“His wife. Her maiden name was Isabelle d’Ussonville.”
“Like … the Sleeper?” Lilian whispered.
“His daughter.”
“But the Sleepers weren’t supposed to have children,” she said.
Gabriel knew the story from his father, from the time when he had been Portcullis Pursuivant of the City’s Civil Registry Records at the House of Honours and Heraldry. It was a story that his father liked to tell a little bit too often and it was he who had started spreading the rumour around various bars and shebeens until he had been deemed a nuisance and “put on ice.”
“They were not supposed to. It was part of their oath. So that there would not be any dynastic complications to their promised collective ‘return’ from cryogenic sleep. But, even if d’Ussonville learned it too late, his wife was pregnant before the oath and could not be persuaded to go away from the city. She was to be the only exception to the rule. The daughter would be married to a councillor and that councillor would make sure that she did not bear children, so that the family line would stop there. At some point, Nixon-Knox got tired of watching her, and when he was sure she could no longer become a mother, he sent her into exile, nobody ever knew where.”
“Why did she come back?” asked Lilian.
Gabriel shrugged.
“It’s her city, after all.”
“And why was Lancelot written on the mirror?” asked Blankbate, who now seemed less impatient and even interested in the matter, as far, that is, as his mask allowed Gabriel to guess.
Gabriel spread his hands, clueless. Flummoxed, that was his middle name, not Lancelot, he thought.
“How would I know?”
The idea that it might have something to do with the fact that he happened to be one of the few people to know her story crossed his mind. But if it pointed toward some responsibility, well, thank you, he certainly wasn’t going to pursue the matter further.
“Can I show you something?” asked Blankbate. “It’s not too pretty, though.”
“If you wish,” said Gabriel, checking his fob watch so as to be sure he would not miss Stella when she came out of her damn show at the Trilby Temple.
“It’s fine with me,” said Lilian.
“You have been warned,” said Blankbate, walking toward a large tarpaulin that covered and outlined some bulky vertical shapes lined up against the wall.
“Help me with this, Chipp.”
Each took an end of the tarpaulin and pulled it down firmly.
Lilian let out a little cry.
Gabriel fought not to vomit.
Seven silvery cylinders appeared in the trembling light, revealing, under their crystal lids, the mortal remains of seven old men dressed in black frocks and starched white shirts, wearing sashes and livery collars around their necks. Their swollen, blackened faces were grinning from unfinished putrefaction.
Gabriel had never believed the Seven Sleepers would ever come back from their sleep as the legend promised, and it was well known that their Claude Cryogenic Coffins had been damaged during the Blue Wild, but facing the bare truth still tore away for him some piece of persistent childhood.
Blankbate and Chipp quickly put back the tarpaulin.
“Where did you find these?” Gabriel managed to ask, while a pale Lilian held her gloved hands to her mouth.
“In a canal in Lotus Eaters. With cast-iron weights tied to the coffins. All of them swaying straight up. They must have been dumped before the winter, but the ice has limited the damage.”
“The Council did it?�
� asked Lilian.
“It’s cold in here,” said Blankbate. “Maybe we should go back.”
CHAPTER XVII
The Ghost Walks
“That which makes conjuring an art of deception is not its technical appliances, but its psychological kernel. The working out in the realm of the senses of certain capacities of the soul is something incomparably more difficult than any finger-skill machinery.”
Max Dessoir, The Psychology of Legerdemain, 1893
Brentford turned off the faucet and took a towel from the tray. As he bowed down to throw it in the basket, he checked in it to see if the answer he was waiting for had already arrived. Yes. It was there. This “waste” network really worked. He picked up the folded paper and deciphered the code. Lilian had been exfiltrated out of the Kane Clinic and was safe somewhere. He tore up the paper and threw the towel away on top of it.
Was it a good idea to have started this? He could not really tell. Barely out of the Blazing Building, he had felt an urge to take his revenge on the Council in one way or another. He had scribbled a hasty note and thrown it, not far from the Blazing Building, into one of the special garbage cans that the Scavengers used as post boxes and where he knew it would be collected quickly. They had acted swiftly and, as usual, efficiently. Now he owed them another debt, but he felt there would be plenty of occasions to repay them. Or to beg them for help again.
He went back to the theatre, if the Trilby Temple could be called that. It was more like a music hall, actually, and typical of the Midway. Behind its neoclassical facade it hid what was allegedly a replica of the Place St-Anatole-des-Arts in a fantasy of Bohemian Paris. The mock-leprous walls were decorated with false windows and panes and some hanging laundry, and stylized slate roofs with crooked chimneys reached up to the crudely painted starry ceiling. The floor was painted to simulate cobblestones, and rusty light-green metal chairs surrounded small, round, overcrowded tables. Brentford, however, had a table on a mezzanine disguised as a balcony. As he walked up the corkscrew staircase, Sybil waved, her face lighting up as if she had not seen him for years.
“Spencer the Clumsy Conjuror” was, thank God, finishing his routine to polite applause. Brentford had seen the act before, maybe done by the same man (the name Spencer conjured something in his mind that he could not exactly place), and felt rather impatient with it all. He knew it was now a standard feature in magic shows to let a supposedly incompetent assistant drop things and show the ropes, the better to amaze the spectators with the performance to come, but nevertheless the sight of an old man bungling his tricks on purpose saddened Brentford more than it amused him.
Perhaps he was simply unhappy about being there; perhaps he did not like the idea of having a magician at his wedding, as if the ceremony were just another vaudeville act; perhaps he had other things on his mind right now that no amount of magic dust could dispel. Tonight, what he appreciated the most, by far, was being with Sybil and warming to her fire. She was as usual a show in herself, as if a spotlight were perpetually pursuing her moves whatever she did. Like a silent film star just lifted from the screen, she glittered on her own plane of existence. He could not imagine anything else flowing through her veins than the champagne she was drinking.
Below them, the curtain had fallen and expectation was rising among the spectators. Many of them, judging by their animation and commentaries, had come before to see the show, but still hadn’t grasped what they had been gasping at. Handy-side’s performances, since the beginning of his residence at the Trilby Temple Theatre, had been, according to rumours and reviews, nothing less than astounding, even to jaded tastes and stage-magic connoisseurs.
Brentford belonged to neither category, but looking at the programme propped on their table he saw nothing unexpected in the titles of the tricks. He knew that Handyside would not do—as if it were beneath him—any card or coin tricks, but just enough legerdemain to prove that he was not a mere button-pusher, and also knew that he would not work with animals. What remained, however, seemed to consist of the usual fare of disappearance, restoration, transportation and so on. If Magic was about pushing the limits, it was obviously about doing so inside a very definite frame, almost a folklore unto itself and mostly made, or so it seemed to Brentford, of references and repetitions: they, were literally, doing it with mirrors.
The curtain opened and Handyside appeared, walking slowly to and fro on the stage, probably selecting in his mind some “volunteers” for the tricks to come. He looked up, rather intently, toward Sybil and Brentford. Toward Sybil, more likely. Brentford had expected more charisma from a man who dubbed himself magnetic. But the magician, clad in a black cutaway and white waistcoat, was of an uncommanding appearance, with a pock-marked face that his stage makeup did not quite smooth and a quiff that was sprouting from the top of his head in a rather clownish way. Brentford watched him pulling his right glove with his teeth, and could not help smiling when the hand came off, neatly cut at the sleeve.
“Oh, no!” said Handyside, as if sincerely dismayed. “Not again.”
The crowd laughed.
Handyside screwed the hand back in place with a frown and, after having shown his palms with his fingers splayed apart, put his hands in front of his eyes, twisted them quickly and now held between index and thumb two little spheres the size of eyeballs, while his orbits looked empty. Then, apparently blind, he juggled the eyeballs, multiplying them as they went up and down. A third gloved hand joined them, and another, alternating with the balls as they passed through Handyside’s hands. The crowd was motionless, mouths open, breath taken away. Then, as he kept on juggling, the hands and eyes vanished one by one, until all that remained was two eyeballs. Handyside clapped his hand and the eyeballs stood frozen in midair. He walked up to them, picked one, and swallowed it, apparently gulping. Then the other. He put his hands over his eye sockets and when he took them away, of course, his eyes were back in their orbits. The crowd applauded, delirious, as Handyside bowed.
This was, considered Brentford, what magic was about. When the fact that is a trick is even more astonishing than the same thing really happening. When human ingenuity is as admirable as any supernatural power. When it is in itself a supernatural power.
A movie screen was then rolled onto the stage. This, too, was standard nowadays. Objects disappeared from the screen and reappeared in Handyside’s hands, or the other way around. But Handyside had given this an extra twist. The movie showed a table with a vase on it. The magician, his back to the audience, picked out the flowers from the vase, while the editing made them disappear from the screen. He then turned toward the crowd holding the flowers that were—Brentford liked the detail—still a gauzy black-and-white. Once he had finished his bouquet, he asked a lady to come up on the stage. As he offered her the flowers, she realized, as her hands passed through them, that the bouquet was as insubstantial as it was transparent. Then Handyside went back behind the screen and appeared in the movie, black-and-white himself, bouquet in hand. Simultaneously the real Handyside emerged from behind the screen. Exchanging looks with his own greyish image, who was putting the flowers back in the vase, the magician turned the corner of the screen one more time, entering the movie as a colourized version of himself, pushing out of the screen his black-and-white doppelgänger, who carried away the vase. The image now floated on the stage, ghostlike and grey, and, though this version of Handyside looked rather too immaterial to hold them, the vase in his hands was full of red roses. It was so eerie Brentford found that his spine was tingling. The two images, the one on the screen and the one on the stage, bowed down and saluted as the curtain fell down under raging applause and cheers.
Sybil turned toward Brentford with enthusiasm.
“Isn’t he wonderful?”
“Hmm …” said Brentford, who was as jealous as he was impressed.
Then an assistant appeared, with paste moon and sun adorning her jet-black hair. Stars painted or tattooed around her shoulders were visible through the
flimsy gauze dress she wore, as the night sky would be through a thin veil of clouds. This must be Stella, thought Brentford, as he took a kind of cylinder from his breast pocket and with a twist turned it into opera glasses. He wasn’t surprised. She was very much what he had expected from Gabriel’s description. Less beauty than charm, not the finest features but irresistible animation, a bit of the girl next door, a bit of a diamond in the rough. Compared with her, Sybil was pretty much the polished and perfect product, the gilded work of art. But then, it is hard to find glamorous a girl who is riding a monocycle, isn’t it?
Stella de Sable, as she was advertised, also held a cornucopia, identifying her as an allegory of Fortune. While she cycled around Handyside, he took the cornucopia from her hands as she passed and showed the audience that it was empty before giving it back to her. He then took a banknote from his vest and, lighting a lucifer match, started to burn the banknote, which he put in the cornucopia as Stella passed in front of him again. Still cycling, she overturned the horn, and an avalanche of banknotes and little tinkling golden coins poured forth, continuing to do so as she circled Handyman another three or four times. The sight of so much money seemed to elate the audience beyond words, and Brentford felt it as a pleasant relief from his constant public money–saving schemes. Handyside soon had money piled up almost to his ankles. Untying his cape, he slowly placed it over the scattered fortune, performed some passes over it, and then swept the cape away, to reveal that everything had of course disappeared. From the audience came oohs and ahhs of wonder and disappointment. Handyside tied his cape back across his shoulders and saluted the crowd.
The next trick, however, “A Poll at the Pole, or the Enchanted Election” entertained Brentford a little less. A gang of scene-shifters had positioned a voting booth and a ballot-box, two pieces of furniture that were virtually unknown in those latitudes, except between the pages, if not between the lines, of A Blast on the Barren Land. Using the curtain and the box as props for a magic trick struck Brentford as both a clever but also a somewhat malignant idea.
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