“I KNOW THAT! I AM IN THE PSYCHOMOTIVE. I JUST FOUND YOUR BODIES.”
“What? We’re not dead!”
“I CAN HEAR THAT! I’M IN THE OTHER PSYCHOMOTIVE. THE ONE THAT DID NOT FORK OUT.”
Brentford looked at the others and they looked back, just as confused. “Sorry, Mr. Sson. I don’t understand.”
The Polar Kangaroo was now alight and the cane vibrated in Gabriel’s hand. A few furious knocks, coming from the floor below, were now distinctly audible. “Is there a way to turn this down a little?” Gabriel asked timidly.
“YOU FORKED OUT IN TIME WHILE CROSSING A BLACK AURORA. LIKE BILOCATION BUT IN TIME. BICHRONISM, IF YOU LIKE. THE PSYCHOMOTIVE AND YOUR BODIES WERE DUPLICATED IN THE PROCESS. EXCEPT TIME STOPPED FOR YOU IN THE FIRST PSYCHOMOTIVE AND WENT ON IN THE SECOND ONE.”
“How is that possible?” Brentford wondered aloud.
“DON’T ASK ME. I DIDN’T CREATE THE UNIVERSE! IT WOULD WORK MUCH BETTER IF I HAD, BELIEVE ME. WHERE AND WHEN ARE YOU, EXACTLY?”
“Paris! 1895!”
“PARIS? AH! AT LEAST WE GOT THAT PART RIGHT!” Sson bellowed with some satisfaction.
There was a hubbub in the corridor—a chorus of scandalized comments, the kind of complaints people make while hastily tying their dressing gowns and shoving their feet into the wrong slippers.
“What happened, for God’s sake?” Brentford inquired. Typical of his friend, Gabriel thought. The need to understand before doing anything.
“I’M NOT SURE. IT MAY BE THE MAGNETIC CROWN YOU TOOK ABOARD. THINGS THAT BELONG TO THE SAME AGE ARE CHARGED WITH THE SAME, SHALL WE CALL IT … CHRONOMAGNETIC FORCE! THEY ARE POWERFULLY ATTRACTED TO ONE ANOTHER. USUALLY MATTER IS RESISTANT TO CHRONOMAGNETISM, BUT WHEN THERE’S A TEAR IN THE FABRIC, LIKE A BLACK AURORA, THEY JUST GRAVITATE TOWARDS ONE ANOTHER.”
This was something Brentford could understand, as could anyone who had ever walked through a museum or among ruins … the strange air that you breathe there, that vibration, as if the objects were waiting to be made whole again, longing for their missing parts, attracting them by a low, relentless hum of desire. The sense of the past, almost palpable as it is, was nothing but this, then—a “chronomagnetic field.” And it was the most satisfying explanation of ghost sightings that he could think of.
Brentford was about to speak, but the hotel manager, a handkerchief pressed to his pale, sweaty forehead, now stood in the doorframe, staring at the scene. He pointed a shaky, indignant finger towards the Colonel.
“What …”
“If you don’t mind sodding off,” Gabriel invited him, as he strained to keep the Polar Kangaroo next to the rod strapped to the Colonel. “And don’t stop cranking, Tuluk!”
“That’s enough! I’m calling the police,” the manager huffed, with a little sulky nod.
The New Venetians exchanged a worried look, but no sooner did the manager storm out of the room than he flew back into it to collapse in a heap on the floor. Thomas appeared at the door, casually rubbing his fist. Though just out of bed, he had grasped the situation in a luminous flash and done the manly thing. Rapidly the hotel guests shuffled back to their rooms, muttering oaths under their morning breath.
“ARE YOU STILL THERE?” Sson was howling.
Brentford contemplated the shambles around them and realized that their situation was spiralling out of control. Obviously, they had outstayed a welcome in Paris that hadn’t exactly been warm to start with. Brentford felt nervous as he asked the next question.
“Mr. Sson. Could you get us back to New Venice?”
“I’M NOT SURE YET. CAN WE SPEAK LATER?”
“I hope so,” Brentford said, more to himself than to Sson.
“WHAT? JUST DO WHAT YOU DID THIS TIME AND I’LL BE HERE. IN ANY CASE, I’M GLAD THIS LITTLE DEVICE WORKS. I KNEW THE TELEPATHOPHONE WOULD COME IN HANDY.”
“It works very well, Mr. Sson. Very well indeed.” Brentford thought he’d broach the volume problem on a later occasion.
The transmission stopped and, with a flutter of the eyelids, the Colonel slowly came back to life.
“By Jove! What was that?” he asked, wishing he had elbows to push away Tuluk, who was so happy at his return that he’d started hugging him again. “And for God’s sake, Tuluk, untie that bloody wand!”
“It was Sson, Colonel,” Brentford explained, as Tuluk obeyed his father. “He was using you as a telephonic device.”
The Colonel waxed furious.
“What? Do you think he might have told me? Oh no, not him! After all, I’m just his plaything, eh?”
“We should look on the bright side, Colonel,” Brentford said dubiously, as he watched Thomas and Gabriel sit the unconscious manager on a nearby armchair. “He’s going to get us out of here.”
“I’m surprised that the device worked through time, though,” the Colonel mused.
“This is what worked through time,” Gabriel said, showing the knob of his cane. The Polar Kangaroo had reverted to its normal narwhal-ivory hue.
“It’s probably powerfully charged with chronomagnetism,” Brentford reflected aloud. “Like a time compass pointing to New Venice. Whatever it is, we’ll have to find a way to use it more discreetly.”
“Oh, I think I know a place,” Thomas said casually, as he stepped back and admired how well he had fixed the still-unconscious manager’s tie.
“That’s certainly a lot,” the manager admitted, now restored to his senses and swabbing at his cut lip with his bloodstained handkerchief. His eyes were clouded with that most prurient of French passions: other people’s money.
“And in gold,” Brentford insisted. “Give us two days to find another place and it’s yours. But remember: if you say anything to the police, you won’t need more than an ashtray to hold what will be left of your hotel.”
Brentford had no intention of carrying out this threat, but he felt it was the right kind of rhetoric to use on a man with a yellow liver and a price tag stamped on his forehead.
The manager mulled over this groundbreaking form of blackmail—which actually gave him money—and eventually nodded his assent. “Agreed, then,” he said.
Brentford nodded, then crossed to the door and held it open for him. The manager rose, crossed the room, and turned on the doorsill to offer his hand. Brentford looked at it as it if were a piece of old meat. “Oh, I don’t need that,” he said, before slamming the door in his face.
“Whew.” He sighed, turning back to the Most Serene Seven, as he still insisted on calling them, despite Jean-Klein’s accident and Blankbate’s horrendous death. It was one way, he supposed, of keeping those lost comrades alive. But nor was Lilian there, which was another kind of punch to the stomach. Cupido’s arrow—what a silly image! Everyone knew Cupido was no cherub, but a seven-foot-tall, grunting, drooling thug wielding a club.
But the sight of Tuluk helping the Colonel with his pipe revived him somewhat from his melancholy. As an emblem of the kind of collaboration between Inuk and qallunaaq that A Blast on the Barren Land had advocated, he liked it better than the repulsive Tiblit eloping with his ex-wife Sybil.
“So, Thomas,” he said, trying to revive the others, too. “What was your idea?”
Thomas shone like a transfigured saint, so happy with himself that Brentford wondered if he should try a shot of morphine himself.
“Blanche, the girl I told you about—”
“D’Ussonville’s niece, yes.”
“She invited me to one of her mother’s salons tonight and said I could bring some friends with me.”
“This must be the same function that d’Ussonville invited me to,” observed Brentford. “It would certainly liven up the party if we brought the Colonel.”
Thomas laughed. “No, no. My idea’s about her house—she told me it has a passage to the catacombs! We couldn’t be accused of bothering anyone there! And we’d be on hand to protect her if anything happens.”
Brentford was genuinely excited. “Excellent, Thomas, excellent!”
he exclaimed. “We’ll do just that. We’ll be safe from Tripotte there, and it will be the perfect place to continue our discussion with Mr. Sson on how to get out of here! I hope you can bear some more time with the Wimshurst machine, Colonel. We need to get back to Sson as soon as possible.” Then he remembered something. “Anyone want to send a pneu to Morgane’s place? I would like very much for Lilian to be there.”
The remaining four looked at each other.
“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” Brentford said, shrugging his shoulders. He shook off the last of his sadness, carved a smile into his face, and—with the pride of a ship’s captain marrying two passengers—announced, “Now, Colonel, let’s celebrate your reunion with your son. Champagne!”
II
The Subterranean City
The bronze Lion of Belfort was barely visible through the evening mist when the so-called Seven stepped out of the carriage that had taken them sluggishly to the deserted end of the avenue Denfert. The Colonel was sealed in his aerated Gladstone bag, and the Wimshurst was hidden in a trunk now being painstakingly unloaded from the roof of the cab along with the rest of their bags. The whole operation was unfolding not quite so discreetly as Brentford would have liked, but there had been no sign of Tripotte, so perhaps the manager was being true to his word. Meanwhile, he told himself he had learned to be content with what the circumstances allowed. Or at least, he thought he had: Lilian was nowhere to be seen, and he realized with a pang that there were still some things he hadn’t learned to be content with after all.
The carriage door to number 87 was open. Exactly as Thomas had described, an archway, flanked on each side by apartment buildings, opened onto a paved courtyard where, tucked out of sight behind its evergreen hedge, stood the house of Mme. de Bramentombes. Blanche, who had cajoled the concierge into remaining silent once he had opened the gate for them, was waiting under the archway, as arranged. At first she looked to Brentford like a lively, smallish girl dressed for a country excursion, but as he drew closer he saw the determination, and the fatigue, on her face. He couldn’t stop staring at her as Thomas, extraordinarily happy to see her, swept her up in his arms. Despite the fact that Brentford was still glowing from the Sunday-supplement reunion of Tuluk and the Colonel, he couldn’t help wondering whether the reunion of Blanche and Thomas would lead to a similarly happy ending. It was his mission, after all, to make that impossible, by taking Thomas back to New Venice. Unless—what if Thomas wanted to stay? Another dilemma that he could do without. But would it really be that much of a dilemma? For he had no right, of course, to stop Thomas from remaining in Paris, if that was what he wanted.
Brentford bowed to Blanche and thanked her for her help, while Gabriel’s eyes searched her face for a likeness to the Elphinstone twins, to whom, unless he was mistaken (family ties not being his strong suit), she was supposed to be some sort of distant great-aunt. He did not find anything in her features, however, except his own worry for the Twins.
“Nice to meet all of you,” she said, “whoever you are.”
“We’re ready,” Thomas announced.
“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll take all of you to the catacombs, except for you two—” She nodded at Brentford and Gabriel. “You two go to the party first. Then Thomas and I will slip back into the house, get changed, and fetch you there for whatever it is you have to do.”
The plan was for Gabriel and Brentford to put in an appearance at the salon to see if they could learn anything further about the Sleepers’ plans, or their foes’, before joining the others.
“This is where we separate, then,” Brentford told her. “Our deepest gratitude for your help.” Turning towards Thomas and the Branwells, he added, “And good luck to you three.”
Brentford and Gabriel headed across the courtyard to Mme. de Bramentombes’s, while Tuluk, carrying the Colonel in his satchel, and Thomas, carrying the trunk, followed Blanche. She crossed off to another door that led them down a rickety staircase to the interconnected cellars beneath the houses. At the foot of the stairs, doors to the individual basements stretched off in a line along a dirt-floored corridor, and in the light of a petrol lamp Blanche had taken from the wall at the top of the stairs, the rough-hewn wooden doors reminded Thomas of a prison row. What they were doing, he reflected, was not exactly legal, but he liked to think, as Brentford did, that their current status of diplomatic extra-temporality gave them a little leeway in regard to the law.
As if reading his mind, Blanche unbolted one of the doors with the easy swiftness of habit.
“I spent my childhood playing here,” she explained.
The cellar was dry and surprisingly warm, and full of spectral furniture hidden under dusty sheets, although some of it, half undraped, revealed in the moving lamplight Empire-style gilded mythological figures. A black ebony Empire cabinet, decorated with a faded laurel wreath, stood against the wall opposite them. When Blanche opened it with a small golden key, a gust of acrid darkness blew into the cellar.
“Here,” she said, stepping back to show them the black hole. Thomas put down the bag to lean through the door frame and found that the cabinet was bottomless. All he could make out behind it was a steep, narrow staircase made of stone that faded down into the depths. Dizzy, he stepped back and wondered whether their trunk would make it through the narrow opening, but Tuluk, as if reading his thoughts, had already opened it and taken out the Wimshurst machine. Wrapping it in a blanket with all the fastidious care that an Inuk can deploy, then fastening it on his back with straps torn from the blanket, he handed Thomas the Gladstone bag containing the Colonel and nodded to them that everything was all right. Thomas did not especially like the approving look that Blanche gave to Tuluk, however. He felt the urge to reassert himself.
“You’d better let me go first,” he said, extending his hand to take the lamp.
Blanche gave him the lamp and shrugged her shoulders, but took the lead all the same.
The slippery limestone stairs seemed to go on forever, but at least it was relatively warm down there, Thomas observed. Three hundred steps later, they reached a crunching layer of gravel, and a tunnel, barely six feet high and three feet wide, that led straight into more darkness.
“It’s not very far,” Blanche reassured them, “before we come to the part that’s open to tourists.”
“Should we worry about coming across guards?” Thomas whispered.
“Not at this time of night,” she replied, before moving off again silently.
So far, the place simply looked like the quarry that it had been for ages. In the echoing hush, Blanche, wavering like a flame under the lamp she held, swerved into a narrower passage, which led to a small door made of crude planks.
“The part that’s open to the public is just a few yards away,” she explained before releasing a cough that ripped the silence apart and made Thomas wince with unease. She took a pin from her hat and put it in the padlock.
“Here,” she said as it swung open.
They entered a place with more corridors, roomier spaces with arrows and stars painted on their walls. Then the tunnel widened further still, and the gates of the catacombs opened in front of them, two white rhombs on black pillars.
“Stop! Here is the Empire of Death,” Blanche said, and it took two seconds for Thomas to understand that she was translating from an angular inscription above their heads. She smiled weakly. “I’ll go first,” she said.
Not funny, thought Thomas as he followed her.
The place was a maze of walls constructed entirely of bones and skulls, as far as the trembling light could show. Tuluk found it repulsive at first. Coming as he did from a lonely race numbering only a few hundred people, the sheer number of these remains filled him with a disturbed awe, as if all the dead from all times and places had been crammed down into these walls. But, ever quick to adapt, he soon reconciled himself to an awe at the fastidiousness of the work, at the very idea of building a city of bones—all the remains, carefully
arranged as they were, came to seem like decorative patterns, making them less fearsome. Besides, the sheer number of them overwhelmed his sense that they had once belonged to a definite people. It was Death as a faceless force that was pictured here—Death as it blows like an ill wind through generations of men. In a sense, perhaps because the air was so warm, it felt curiously cosy, even pleasant, like a family reunion.
From time to time Blanche translated one of the numerous tablets that were affixed to pillars or mounted on the walls and inscribed with clichés that recalled how fleeting life was and how soon we would all be like these skeletons. Tuluk remained quiet, but Thomas felt that the messages were all the more depressing because they were so true—and ultimately so useless. It was the last thing he wanted to read about. “So you played in here when you were a little girl?” he whispered to Blanche.
“I did,” she replied dreamily. “Isn’t it a magic kingdom? If we had time, I’d show you where lies the embalmed heart of a particular officer—”
“I’d rather not see it, thank you very much.”
Thye trudged on, until after what seemed like miles of skulls—all Princess Blanche’s subjects, admiring her as her cortege passed by—she warned them that they were nearing their destination. “Port-Mahon,” she announced.
It was a most curious thing, and Tuluk joined Thomas in his awe: an engineer had sculpted a model of a fortress city in the limestone, a fortress in which, Blanche explained, he had been imprisoned during a war, although she wasn’t sure which one. It made for an imposing wall, bristling with turrets, and in front of it, a half-circular plateau that Thomas immediately thought was a perfect spot for the telepathophone.
“It’s astonishing,” he said. He was an enthusiast of forts and fortresses, and there were few things that he liked as much as patrolling the wards and parapets of Belknap Base. It had always made him feel heroic.
“I don’t know if it’s finished or not,” Blanche said. “The sculptor fell down a well and died not too far from here.”
New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos Page 40