‘Verily, I beg thee with all my soul, Sister Florence, that thou should bustle. I am implored to bring thee to the bureau of the Abbé with all convenient speed.’
Florence refused to bustle. Bustle and you were just one short step from panic, and panic was the handmaiden of disaster. Better to proceed cautiously and deliberately; better and safer. She rose from her cot and arched her long, toned body, stretching to rid her muscles of sleep. This done, she selected her most ephemeral habit – it was the Abbé Niccolò she was to attend, after all, and hence it was appropriate that all her talents be on display – and slipped it over her nakedness.
‘Speak thou, gentle Sister Bella, wilt it be His Excellency the Abbé Niccolò alone I am to attend, or mayhap others are to be in assembly?’ It was an important question, and the answer would determine which mask Florence would wear.
‘Forgive me, Sister, I am much in error. I was bidden to advise thee that thou alone wouldst be in gracious attorney of His Excellency.’
Alone? Then dirty work is afoot.
‘I am beholden to thee for thy sage intelligence.’ She would wear her simplest and most alluring concealment; Abbé Niccolò warranted nothing less. So decided, she buttoned a white veil to her wimple and let it fall over her face. A veil was perfect for such a clandestine assignation, as it combined mystery with just a hint of the uncanny.
And all the while she dressed, Sister Bella prattled on. ‘I am informèd that there thou wilt make most conceal’d study of the Grand Inquisitor himself.’
The Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada. Sister Florence knew she would have to take care: the Dark Charismatic hated her above all Visual Virgins.
Sister Bella obviously took Florence’s silence for indifference. ‘Art thou not much afeared, Sister? My own soul shivers at the very uttering of the Grand Inquisitor’s name.’
‘Why should I be afeared, Sister?’
‘Why, good Sister Florence, because I have seen the cruel proofs of this man’s work, how he doth rend and ravage the SAE of those who stand against him in defiance of that most foul and misbegotten creed UnFunDaMentalism. It is said that the Lord Torquemada can look into the soul of a woman and see the darkness and the imprudent desires which dwell there.’
‘ABBA does this every moment of my life, Sister Bella, and if I am content to let ABBA do thus, and be not dismayed, then I can have little disquiet regarding the more mechanical enquiries of Lord Torquemada.’
Sister Bella peered at her in the flickering candlelight, obviously searching for connivance. ‘Thou must be right wary of thy tongue, Sister Florence. The Lord Torquemada is a man even the most devout would do well not to take lightly. He is ImPuritanism’s most fierce and unrelenting foe, and is merciless in his defence of the Deviationist Church and of the non-Sacred Catechisms of UnFunDaMentalism.’
Florence bowed her head to acknowledge her understanding of what Sister Bella said, but the truth was she wasn’t frightened of Torquemada; she was excited by the prospect of meeting him and besting him. ‘Fear not, good Sister, I will heed full well thy sage counsel and will strive to be submissive before both ABBA and the Lord Torquemada.’
She took a final glance in the mirror and then undid a button holding the neck of her habit. What did the old adage say? When a woman is intent on seduction she should undo every button she dares … and then one more.
Sister Bella led Florence deep into the private wing of the Convent, until she came to a large walnut door flanked by two heavily armed Guardian Angels, who cast a wary eye over the tall, slim figure of Sister Florence. She must have passed muster, as the Angel standing to the right of the entrance rapped twice on the door.
‘I must leave thee now, Sister,’ said Sister Bella quietly. ‘Fare thee well, and may the good angels guard thee from the Inquisitor’s annoyance.’
‘And may ABBA’s grace go with thee, Sister,’ intoned Florence as the door opened and a uniformed steward bowed her through into the room beyond.
The Abbé’s study was swathed in harsh light, and for a moment Florence had to stand blinking as her sensitive eyes adjusted to the glare.
‘Sister Florence?’ greeted a voice from behind the lamplight, a voice rich as mahogany and deep with solemnity.
By dipping her head to avoid the dazzling light, Florence was able to see the silhouette of the Abbé Niccolò seated behind a huge desk situated at the end of the room. ‘Verily I am Sister Florence, Your Grace, Senior Maiden of the Sacred and All-Seeing Convent of Visual Virgins, and bound by ImPuritan faith and conscience, and by vows of obedience, to do the work of ABBA in fair furtherance of the prosperity and tranquillity of the Holy See of Venice.’
‘ABBA bless you, my child. Would you come a little closer?’
Florence did as she was ordered, walking slowly over the white marble floor, all the while practising her skills in the amorous art of fiduciary sex. Like every Visual Virgin, she had been taught to employ her unsurpassed beauty to distract and disarm her prey and to provoke their auras into revealing their innermost secrets. Instinctively Florence shortened her steps so as to make her movement across the room graceful and languorous, announcing that she was a desirable woman – desirable but unattainable.
Visual Virgins never surrendered themselves to men or women; rather they permitted themselves to be conquered by their prey’s imagination. And as all Visual Virgins knew, the imagination was the most powerful aphrodisiac of them all, souls being more easily snared by a fantasy than by a net.
As she walked, she saw how the Abbé Niccolò was studying her both assiduously and appreciatively. She stifled a smile of triumph: few men truly appreciated how weak they were, how easily their will could be controlled by a woman.
She came to a halt in front of the desk and for a few silent moments the Abbé and Sister Florence examined one another. The Abbé was wearing a simple leather half-mask, allowing Florence to see that he wore his sixty-nine years lightly. His hair was still black, his teeth even and white, and his skin taut. Outwardly he seemed vital and energetic, but his aura was thin and ephemeral … the aura of a man weighed down by worries.
Florence bowed, indicating her submissiveness, feigned submission being a potent element in any seduction.
The Abbé smiled. ‘You have served ImPuritanism and the Holy See dutifully and well, Sister Florence. The Doge speaks very highly of you. Your powers as an Auralist, Sister, are of the first rank, and you have proven yourself to be a valuable weapon in the sacred struggle with the enemies of Venice and the disciples of Loki.’
Sister Florence bowed again. ‘I thank thee for thy most gracious flattery.’
‘But now I have a new and important duty for you, one of great importance in the True Church’s battle against the forces of UnFunDaMentalism.’
‘I stand ready to serve the True Church in any manner I am able, Your Grace.’
Machiavelli stood up from his desk and moved towards her. ‘You have been advised,’ he said in a low voice, ‘that the Inquisition has taken captive and intends to put to the question the Lady IMmanual, the girl that many claim is the Messiah.’
‘Claim?’ Sister Florence asked.
‘Indeed. She has been brought to the Bastille for interrogation. If this girl is the Messiah, then we must do everything in our power to free her from the grasp of Torquemada and his Inquisitors. But before we act we must know that she is truly the Messiah, and that necessitates the use of your esoteric powers.’
Without waiting for a reply, Machiavelli walked over to a wood-panelled wall, pressed one section, and immediately the panel folded back to reveal a secret passage. ‘This gives me entrance to the very centre of the world of the Dark Charismatics, to the very centre of the Bastille. If you would follow me, Sister, I will take you to where you can observe the Lady IMmanual’s interrogation by the Grand Inquisitor, and having seen the girl you will be able to pronounce upon the authenticity of her divinity.’
14
The Bastille: Paris
The
Demi-Monde: 13th Day of Spring, 1005
UnFunDaMentalist criticism of ImPuritanism was led by Otto Weininger, who claimed – correctly in my view – that ‘the perverse and unnatural philosophy that is called ImPuritanism seeks to transform and corrupt the ABBA-prescribed relationship women have with men’. Weininger goes on to observe that as women are devoid of any sexual appetites (William Acton, Dead from the Waist Down, an Objective Assessment of Female Sexuality), coercing them into performing erotic acts (as ImPuritanism does) compromises their reproductive potential and leads to them being rendered unfit for child-bearing. Moreover, female eroticism presupposes that women are possessed of an independent spirit. This is wrong: as Biological Essentialism teaches us, women are only happy when they are being commanded by men. My own view is that the happiness of man is encapsulated in the words ‘I Command’; the happiness of women in the words ‘I obey’.
A Student’s Guide to UnFunDaMentalism: Father
Friedrich Nietzsche, 4thRight Press
It was Vanka’s philosophy always to look on the bright side of life, to find hope in the darkest of moments, but even he had to admit that sitting in a squalid, cold, damp cell set under the eaves of the Bastille, there was precious little to be optimistic about. The one good thing he had going for him – other than that he was still alive – was that his guards were eminently bribable. Frozen and worried about Ella he might be, but he could still find comfort in cigarettes and Solution.
Which was just as well, because Vanka couldn’t sleep.
No, that was wrong. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep, rather he preferred not to sleep. Sleep, perchance to dream, and that indeed was the rub. In truth, he was frightened to sleep, frightened of dreaming, and of being lost once more in the mystic, mind-torturing mayhem that was the Dream.
And it was a very persistent dream. Vanka had it every night, with the result that every night he woke in the early hours swathed in sweat and with his head pounding with pain and confusion.
Hateful.
He called it his ‘Inside & Outside’ dream, where he found himself both inside himself looking out and outside himself looking in. At once he was the omnipotent outsider peering down from on high, observing the scurrying world below him, and simultaneously he was one of the objects of that observation, his every act scrutinised and assessed. Lost in his dream, he was both player and audience, fused in an impossible, mind-twisting duality. The impossible made real.
It was a strange and very, very disconcerting experience. Disconcerting because he had begun to wonder if he was suffering from the condition the JAD-based philosopher-scientist Eugen Bleuler called schizophrenia. Could it be, he wondered, that the troubles and the stresses he had endured since he had met Ella had finally – and understandably – driven him to madness? Could it be that he, Vanka Maykov, was now the proud possessor of a split mind, that he was beset by dementia praecox? It was a plausible explanation … too bloody plausible for comfort.
Every night two differing personalities, the macro and the micro, struggled for mastery of his mind, the pair only managing to occupy that single space by a sleight of hand that enabled them to avoid decoherence.
He paused in the act of bringing the cigarette he was enjoying to his lips. His hand shook.
Decoherence?
Where had that peculiarity sprung from? What in the Demi-Monde was decoherence?
He took a swig of Solution to try to calm himself.
Maybe this was the first sign of a crumbling personality, the conjuring from nothingness of whimsical words? Madness signalled by a lunatic lexicon. Maybe he was in the first stages of schizophrenia?
Somehow though he doubted it. Apart from this aberration of vocabulary, he still seemed reassuringly sane … well, as sane as anyone was in the Demi-Monde. He had experienced no daytime hallucinations, no dives into delirium and he was still as lucid and glib-tongued as ever.
But if incipient schizophrenia wasn’t the explanation, what was? Could his dreams be the consequence of too enthusiastic a liking for Solution? Was he on the downward slope to becoming a slave to dipsomania? It was a plausible answer: his consumption had risen prodigiously since he had met Ella.
Ella …
Now that was a thought that brought him up short.
Yes … the uncomfortable fact was that his dreams had begun when he had met Ella. Maybe she’d disturbed the balance of his mind. He gave a wry laugh: if ever there was a girl made to disturb a man’s mental faculties it was Ella Thomas. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever met, but more, her physical beauty was matched by the perfection of her soul. She was a good person who had persuaded him to abandon his usual suspicions about his fellow Demi-Mondians and rather than standing aloof and cynical – as was his wont – to become involved in their sordid affairs. It was because of her that he had worked to help the people of Warsaw and she was the reason why he had consented – much against his better judgement and his instinct for self-preservation – to help rescue Norma Williams from Crowley’s grasp. And he had done this because he loved her.
Loved her …
Another wry chuckle.
Until he had met Ella, love was something he had never experienced and had never wanted to experience. Just a few short months ago he would have laughed at the very idea of him treating a woman as anything other than a pleasant – and very temporary – diversion. But Ella had changed him. She had made the normally cocksure Vanka Maykov unsure and uncertain. Now he felt oddly vulnerable. His decidedly cynical and arm’s-length attitude to life had been disrupted.
And it was probably this disruption that was the root cause of his sleepless nights and his bizarre dreams. He loved Ella and he was tortured by the thought of losing her.
He just hoped she was safe. The distressing thought that she might not be safe persuaded him to recharge his glass.
What Ella had done, he mused, as he poured himself a generously over-large slug of Solution, was oblige him to stop being an inveterate observer of life in the Demi-Monde and engage. He had always prided himself on being the cat who walked by himself, a man with no friends and no lovers … just women who enthusiastically satisfied certain lusts he was bedevilled with. Throughout his life – what little he remembered of it – he had steadfastly refused to depend upon anyone and in turn had always been very keen to point out that it was foolish for anyone to rely on him. He was a bystander, mildly amused by the foibles of that peculiar species known as HumanKind.
Love had changed everything.
Despite being locked up in a filthy prison cell, for the first time since she had entered the Demi-Monde, Norma was at peace with herself. This new sanguinity was, she supposed, due to the realisation that now there would be no escape through the portal in NoirVille. Now that Aaliz Heydrich had commandeered her body in the Real World, she had no route home. Now the Demi-Monde was her home. It was a sobering thought that, after weeks of running for her life, she had finally come to terms with the place. Sure, she had had a pretty tough time, and her current situation, locked up in a grim prison cell in the Bastille, wasn’t terribly encouraging, but she was still alive and that was the important thing. She had survived all that the Demi-Monde could throw at her, and by surviving she still had hope …
Hope, but hope for what? The answer that came to her was surprisingly simple: hope for change. Hope that the Demi-Monde might be changed from being the frenziedly evil place it was to a world that was at peace with itself. That was the conclusion she’d arrived at after the ten days of enforced meditation she’d endured in the Bastille: that war was utterly stupid, and that intelligent people like her had an obligation to stop it happening. She might be in the Demi-Monde unwillingly, and becoming one of the Kept might have caused anguish to her mother and father and no end of trouble to other people, but she could at least try to learn from her ordeal and to do something worthwhile with her life.
She remembered the words of Shelley, the poet she’d met when she had first entered the D
emi-Monde: ‘War is the politician’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade and now, I have come to understand, ABBA’s cruel jape.’
ABBA’s cruel jape …
Romantic lunatic – dishy romantic lunatic – though Shelley was, he was more perceptive than he knew. Perceptive but ineffective. Shelley was just an armchair revolutionary, long on talking but short on doing.
She smiled to herself: just like her.
Oh, she’d always wanted to be a politician like her father, always wanted to try to do good things, to make people’s lives better, but good intentions were cheap. That was one of her father’s favourite sayings: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ And that was all she’d ever done: she’d wished to be the heroine, and ended up playing the victim. She’d been the victim of Aaliz Heydrich’s conniving when she was tricked into entering the Demi-Monde. She’d been the victim of Percy Shelley’s treachery when he’d betrayed her to Crowley. She’d been a victim of Fate when she had been washed away in the sewers during her abortive escape from Warsaw. She’d been a victim of Aleister Crowley when he had stolen her body in the Real World. And now, imprisoned in the Bastille, she was destined to be a victim of Tomas de Torquemada.
Always the victim and never the hero. It had to stop.
‘Vanka,’ she called out, in the direction of the cell to her left, ‘are you awake?’
‘No,’ came the gruff answer.
Norma ignored Vanka’s sarcasm. ‘Why am I always the victim, Vanka? Why don’t I ever get to be the hero?’
A groan from Vanka. ‘Because you act like a victim. Because you’re always bemoaning your fate but never trying to change your fate. Because you’re never willing to take responsibility for your life and the lives of those around you. Because when you act like a silly, petulant girl you give up on yourself and everybody gives up on you. And most of all, because you’re a natural-born pain in the arse.’
She ignored the gibe. ‘So what is a hero?’
Rod Rees - [The Demi-Monde 02] Page 14