Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  The door swung open, and Sophie moved through the portal and found herself in the most amazing room she had ever seen. It was a glorious high atrium, like the nave of a cathedral, and everything—walls, floors, what little furniture there was—was made entirely of ice.

  “What on earth . . . ?” Sophie said to herself. To be alone in this enormous place . . . She felt like the last person alive.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  The voice came from behind her.

  At the far end of the room, a white column of a figure had appeared and was gliding toward Sophie. It was the Snow Queen, Elsa Blix herself, dressed in a sort of mantle of white fur and almost as beautiful as the gleaming ice around her, which was subtly lit with a blue and purple and pink radiance that reminded Sophie of the nighttime illuminations at the Tivoli Gardens.

  “Things have worked out better than I hoped,” said Elsa Blix, “and with a symmetry, even an inevitability, that I scarcely could have imagined.”

  “What do you mean?” Sophie asked, though she had an inkling.

  “I took your friend Mikael in nothing more or less than a fit of pique,” said Elsa Blix, sounding more meditative than Sophie had expected her to. “Little did I know that he would prove the perfect bait for the fish I really wanted to catch. . . .”

  Sophie’s heart began pounding, and she had to stop herself from turning and beginning to run. Suddenly she felt too cold and tired to be afraid. She was filled with the conviction that Mikael needed her now, not after a lot of palaver about Elsa Blix’s elaborate schemes and weapons and peace and whatever it was about Sophie’s personal history that had led to her getting caught up in this absurd narrative featuring world-historical players like Niels Bohr and Alfred Nobel and Elsa Blix herself.

  “Where is Mikael,” she said roundly, “and is he all right?”

  “Your friend is in grand health,” Elsa Blix said in that strange hoarse voice she had, “though you may find him a little colder than the last time you saw him—but he has come along very nicely, I think.”

  “Might I see him now?” Sophie asked.

  “You shall see him but not speak with him,” said Elsa Blix. “You and I have business to discuss before I will release him from his bonds.”

  The thought of Mikael in cuffs and chains filled Sophie with horror. What if Elsa Blix changed her mind about letting them both go?

  The Snow Queen showed no sign of moving, and Sophie said nervously, “Can we see him now?”

  Elsa Blix laughed. She was an outrageously beautiful woman—every slight gesture or turn of the head was arresting, and her charms made Sophie want to hit her.

  “The impatience of youth!” she said lightly, her words irksome in a way that paradoxically brought Sophie back to herself again. She could smell the wet wool of her jumper and feel the supreme itchiness of the skin on her calves, which over her weeks of northern travel had become dry and scaly to a potentially madness-inducing degree. She surreptitiously bent down and gave the left calf a good scratch through the layers of clothes, Trismegistus twining quietly through her ankles.

  It occurred to her that the pads of his paws must be very cold, but she did not want to draw attention to him by gathering him up in her arms.

  “Come,” said Elsa Blix, holding out a hand to Sophie.

  Sophie grimly kept her own hands at her side. She was not the hand-holding type, and of all people in the world the one she least wanted to hold hands with was Elsa Blix!

  The ice maiden let her hand drop after a moment; she seemed untroubled by Sophie’s rudeness, and Sophie thought again that one of the most sinister things about the woman was her ability to remain unruffled.

  They left the great ice chamber through an arched doorway of sorts and began climbing an elegant curved staircase, its individual risers made from blocks of ice glimmering with color; the overall effect was highly disorienting because of the lack of windows, which meant that one could not tell whether one were above- or belowground, in a cave or a mountain aerie.

  They passed along a corridor of ice—was the place built newly again every winter, Sophie suddenly wondered, or could it be maintained year-round?—and came to a chamber that seemed to be separated from the corridor only by a thin curtain of clear glass beads hanging on strings.

  “Go ahead,” said Elsa Blix as Sophie put forward a hand to push the strings apart and see what was on the other side. “Nothing will hurt you here.”

  With this encouragement, Sophie used both hands to pull apart the curtain of beads. There was no further physical barrier, and yet in every other respect, Sophie could not have been more certain that she was looking at a prison cell, and that the figure under the heap of furs on the bed in the corner—the bed, too, was made of ice!—was Mikael.

  “Mikael!” she called out, falling to her knees beside his bed and putting her hands on his cheeks.

  But he slumbered on, his chest rising and falling regularly, his face pale and his features more like marble than anything living.

  “He can’t hear you,” said Elsa Blix.

  “Have you drugged him?” Sophie asked, her heart pounding with outrage and worry.

  “He has been given a mild sedative,” Elsa Blix admitted. “Nothing serious—only what you might take yourself if you had trouble going to sleep.”

  “Why hasn’t he escaped from this room, then?” Sophie asked. “Those beads can’t be the only thing keeping him here!”

  “You’re not wrong, Sophie,” Elsa Blix said in that hoarse, gentle, infuriating voice. “It happens that the gas he inhaled during the attack at Niels Bohr’s party rendered him peculiarly susceptible to certain hypnotic techniques. Some people are far less vulnerable than others to the effects of that particular drug. You, for instance, do not seem to have suffered any ill effects, though I imagine you must have inhaled as much of it as Mikael did. To you, this curtain is nothing more or less than a wall of beads that can easily be brushed aside. But to Mikael, the fourth wall of this room is exactly like the other three: solid ice. No more would he imagine he could pass through it than you, Sophie, would think you could fly through the air under your own powers.”

  Sophie turned and stared at her.

  “Did you set off that bomb at the Mansion of Honor?” she asked incredulously.

  “I did not,” said Elsa Blix, “but I designed the weapon’s prototype, and sold it to the Germans, so I was not surprised when they used it as part of a preliminary preparation for the invasion.”

  Sophie pulled back the scratchy wool blanket covering Mikael’s body and felt his hands; they were as cold as one might expect, and she began chafing them between her own hands to try to warm them up.

  “Come, Sophie, you will have plenty of time with Mikael later,” Elsa Blix said briskly. “For now, I need you to prepare yourself to hear things of which your knowledge at present, I suspect, remains quite partial and imperfect.”

  “Things to do with my parents?” Sophie asked, feeling treacherous for allowing her desire for more information about them and their fate to overwhelm her scruples about communicating so freely with the person who had kidnapped her dearest friend.

  Elsa Blix smiled.

  “Yes, Sophie,” she said, “that and more—but we will have something to eat first, and a drink of cocoa—you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  In fact, Sophie was hungry and cold enough that she would have welcomed even a hard heel of moldy, stale bread and a cup of hot boiling water, let alone a cup of delicious cocoa. The story of Persephone was strong in her mind, though. Persephone was trapped in Hades for six months of every year for her whole life because of her own failure to withstand temptation in the form of the six pomegranate seeds whose consumption tied her forever to her captor. A woman who had developed the chemical compound that had transformed Mikael was a woman from whom one should not even consider accepting refreshments!

  “Nothing to eat or drink, thank you,” she said now, shaking her head. “The full st
ory, please!”

  “The full story—ah, Sophie, you are an idealist after all, not the funny little pragmatist I was led to expect. Can there even be such a thing as the full story?”

  “Who have you been talking to about me?” Sophie said suspiciously.

  Elsa Blix laughed. It sounded like the ringing of a bell, and Sophie hated her more than ever.

  The room they had now entered had a beautiful array of food spread out on a low round table set between two great chairs, to which Elsa Blix led them. The chairs, which almost deserved the name thrones, were made not from ice but from a fine-grained dense wood that felt as hard and cold as stone.

  Sophie planted her hands firmly on the armrests so that she would not accidentally reach out and eat something absentmindedly. There were beautiful berries of kinds that Sophie didn’t recognize, and biscuits that looked like a very delicate and delicious form of shortbread, and slabs of smoked fish and sliced cucumbers and rye bread covered with poppy seeds and a silver jug of cocoa next to a bowl of whipped cream with a pretty little silver spoon to serve it with. None of it had any smell, though, Sophie realized a moment later, and she hardened her mind and her stomach.

  “You’re sure you won’t have anything to eat?” Elsa Blix asked.

  She poured herself a cup of cocoa—the cups and saucers were made out of a delicate, almost translucent porcelain glazed with white-on-white snowflakes—and lavished a huge dollop of cream on it.

  Sophie’s stomach growled involuntarily, and the tiny twitch of a muscle in Elsa Blix’s cheek made Sophie suspect that the Snow Queen found Sophie’s stubbornness amusing. She hoped she would be able to get away from here before too much longer—she had some ship’s biscuit and dried fruit in her pocket, but she was not sure how long it would hold her.

  “No, thank you,” she said politely.

  Elsa Blix selected a chocolate from the tray of sweets on the table. It was decorated with a crystallized violet, and when she had taken a delicate nibble, it could be seen that the cream inside was a faint violet also, or perhaps it just reflected the light in the chamber.

  “It is long since time for Alfred Nobel to have departed this world,” she announced. “He knows it himself: he has been alive—if one can call it that—for over a hundred years, and he exists in a haze of guilt and self-reproach at the fact of his being temperamentally unable to cut the cords binding himself to life. But one thing must happen before he is ready to go. . . .”

  “The device,” Sophie said. “The weapon my father was working on producing—the one Nobel believed would be so powerful that it would put an end to war. The one for which you have the plans!”

  “Events are proceeding so quickly just now,” said Elsa Blix, “that your father’s device may soon be superseded, at least if the work Bohr and his colleagues are now pursuing comes to fruition. But the plans themselves still have more than ordinary interest, especially insofar as they may speed up progress toward actually building a bomb, detonation mechanism and all.”

  “Nuclear fission?” Sophie asked.

  “Is that what they have decided to call it?” Elsa Blix said with interest. “It has also been called splitting the atom.”

  She fell silent, and Sophie ventured the timid observation that she did not really understand why she was there.

  “I know you do not,” said Elsa Blix. “Where to start, though?”

  “I want to know what happened at the factory when my parents died,” Sophie said, a little more boldly.

  “Ah, yes,” said Elsa Blix, “well, you are certainly aware of the fundamental issues, Sophie. I am not sure how much you know already, but perhaps I will begin by telling you that you know far more than you think you do, but that there is also one very important thing you do not know.”

  “All right,” Sophie said impatiently, “tell me what that thing is, then.”

  “That is exactly what I intend to do,” said Elsa Blix. “Sophie, you believe that we are enemies, but I can assure you that we have more in common than not.”

  How could that be?

  Elsa Blix stood up and began pacing.

  “I have been following the revelations in the Scottish papers about your great-aunt—your grandmother, I should say.”

  “So you know about that,” Sophie said wretchedly. Gosh, how Tabitha would have hated the thought of Sophie having this particular conversation with someone like Elsa Blix! “I have not seen a Scottish newspaper for over a month; did they get hold of the story about Tabitha’s relationship with Alfred Nobel, and put it all out there for everyone to see?”

  “They did,” said Elsa Blix. “It is now widely known that she gave birth to Alan Hunter herself, that he was Alfred Nobel’s child, and that you, Sophie, are the grandchild and sole living heir not just of Tabitha Hunter but of Alfred Nobel.”

  “He did not have any children from his marriage?” Sophie asked.

  “No,” Elsa Blix said, sounding pained. “It happens he did have one other child, also outside of wedlock, but the fact of that child’s existence is not known to him.”

  “He had another child?” Sophie said, surprised.

  “First, a confession. Sophie, as soon as I began looking into this business of Tabitha Hunter and IRYLNS, I learned about your own visit there this past summer. You made your way in by a subterfuge—you had an appointment with a doctor next door and concealed yourself about the premises and then climbed over the wall to get into IRYLNS through the garden.”

  “Yes, that is correct,” Sophie said. “Why does it matter to you, though?”

  “It occurred to me that I might well be very interested in what you had said to that doctor.”

  “To Mr. Braid?” Sophie asked.

  “He is a neurohypnotist, Sophie; do you remember that he put you into a trance and asked you questions about what you remembered of the accident that killed your parents?”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I had one of my people infiltrate his office and recover the records of your visit. He asked you questions, and you wrote down your answers; my agent photographed the pages, and we have had them transcribed. Sophie, your penman-ship leaves much to be desired!”

  Sophie looked at her with outrage. To be criticized for messy handwriting by a woman presumably responsible for all sorts of atrocities! But curiosity got the better of her.

  “So what did I say?” she asked.

  “You provided a very full and clear account of the incident—your language was childish, perhaps because you were so young at the time of the explosion, but I must admit that my own puzzlement as to how you survived was relieved by these passages.”

  “You have to tell me!”

  “I will tell you, though you will likely be very angry with me indeed once you learn how it all happened.”

  “Were you directly responsible for the explosion?” Sophie asked. She did not know whether she would receive a straight answer, but she felt she might as well come out with the question.

  “Not directly,” said Elsa Blix, “but indirectly, yes, and morally you would certainly say I caused it.”

  “Did you pay that laborer to set the bomb, and then arrange for him to be killed afterward?” Sophie asked, thinking of what Nobel had told her about the Russian man who had fallen into a quarry.

  “I arranged for someone to blow the place up,” Elsa Blix said—how could she admit it so calmly? “But it was not a Russian laborer, Sophie, and it was not a matter of paying a bribe.”

  “So? Who was it, then?”

  “Your mother, Sophie, had been having great difficulty sleeping in the months after you were born. She had become virtually unable to rest, and I offered my talents as a hypnotist to see if I could help her with relaxation exercises.”

  “She let you hypnotize her?” Sophie said, bemused but getting a very bad feeling about where this might be going.

  “We had sessions two or three times a week for that whole autumn,” Elsa Blix said. “I would put her und
er, and then give her a set of instructions. I had known for some months that I would have to leave; Alan and I did not share the same notions as to what should be done with the weapon, and I had begun to find working for Nobel almost unbearably constraining.”

  “What did you do?” Sophie asked, working hard to keep her voice level and unemotional.

  “I gave your mother, while she was under hypnosis, a set of instructions that would be cued by the simplest set of words—all I had to do was put a telephone call through to her while she was on the spot at the factory, and say to her, ‘The snow is falling heavily now, Rose,’ and she would pass into the trance state. Once in that state, I could tell her exactly what I wanted her to do, and she would not question any part of my instructions. I telephoned that day, and she did just as I told her to—she went and found a stick of dynamite and set it up with a detonator and blew the place up.”

  Sophie stared. The woman must be a sociopath. How could she describe this to Sophie so calmly?

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how you survived, though, Sophie?” said Elsa Blix.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with you!” Sophie said, feeling quite sick.

  “You have no choice,” said Elsa Blix, sounding faintly confused.

  Sophie suddenly wondered whether the Snow Queen might not have much less firm a grip on reality than Sophie had previously supposed—one could become very odd, she guessed, living in this kind of isolation.

  “Your mother saved you, Sophie. This is what you described to Braid; your conscious self seemed to have no memory of it, but to your second self it was as clear and vivid as if you had seen the incidents earlier that day on a newsreel at the cinema. You described to Braid your mother picking you up but not responding at all to your cries and actually throwing you out of a window, with more strength than you imagined possible—and even as you landed on the ground outside the window, the thump of a massive explosion could be heard behind you. You had traveled just far enough from the building that you were quite safe, with only a broken leg; one of the workers in the outer area of the factory came and carried you away before the flames could reach you. The power of the maternal instinct had defeated even the most modern and scientific form of brainwashing in the world.”