Wild Talent (23 page)

Instead I moved to her side and whispered, “Alexandra, don't do this, you know it is dangerous.”

But when had Alexandra ever turned away from danger? There at the very threshold of the Beyond, the
Inconnu
, she stood in a waking trance. Her breath had become so faint that I could scarcely detect any movement of her bosom. And then she put out a hand, and gently but deliberately, touched the surface of the painting.

CHAPTER FORTY

W
hen Alexandra spoke of the Beyond, that other plane of existence so dangerously near our own — when she talked of astral counterparts and the Immaterial Realm —I had listened, and thought I understood. And yet I had not truly believed. Those experiences must be waking dreams, I thought, or opium-induced hallucinations. For better or worse, I could no longer deny my own wild talent; but this talk of astral travel put me too much in mind of Madame Rulenska's fraudulent spirits, or the Theosophists' fanciful beliefs.

Alexandra's hand had fallen limply to her side. Her eyes were open, but when I spoke to her she did not answer; nor did she seem aware of anything around her. After a moment someone brought a chair and when I placed a hand on her shoulder, she not so much sat down as subsided into it. It seemed she was sinking ever more deeply into unconsciousness.

Earlier, I had seen her drinking wine, and smoking a hashish cigarette. Surely, I told myself, this was the explanation: there was no magic here; she had merely fallen into a faint.

But then I glanced up at the painting, and my breath caught in my throat. There at the very edge of the canvas — where a moment before there had been nothing, only an empty stretch of wasteland — a small dark-clad figure had suddenly appeared, as though painted by an invisible hand.

The Alexandra of this world slept on, oblivious to that other self now setting out into uncharted country. But where was M. Verlaine, who should have accompanied her? I turned to see him staring at the painting. On his ravaged face was a look of anguish, and I guessed that in the end his courage, like his disease-ridden flesh, had failed him. His city of dreams, that he had sought so long to discover, must remain beyond his reach. He could only watch in despair as Alexandra went alone into the
Inconnu.

But who would be her companion on that strange and hazardous journey? Who would bring her safely back? I could not abandon her, as Verlaine had done.

I stretched out my hand and felt the rough texture of M. Villemain's painting beneath my palm. Like the woman in the Paris drawing room who had found herself in the place she called “Elsewhere”, like the woman who had wandered into an African landscape and left her handkerchief under a palm, I discovered how terrifyingly easy it can be to stumble over the edge of the known world.

Was it the “superabundance of psychic energy” that Alexandra had once told me I possessed, the same energy that had cursed me with my wild talent? Was it my frantic state of mind as I sought Alexandra through the dark Paris streets; or was it only the effect of hashish smoke and incense and overexcitement in that close hot room?

It took no more than a moment. I felt my vision blurring, my hearing muffled as though my ears were stuffed with cotton wool. I could not move. And then I felt a steady, insistent pull, that I knew was beyond my power to resist. So must a swimmer feel, caught up in an undertow and drawn helplessly out to sea. For an instant I saw myself — my other self, my spirit twin — as a vague shape rapidly fading into distance, and between us, thinning as it lengthened, a silvery, hazy cord.

THE BEYOND

To pursue the mysteries on our earth is not
without danger, but how much greater the risk
incurred by those whose imagination incites
them to wander in those domains they believe
are situated beyond our normal frontiers.

—Alexandra David-Néel
,
Le sortilège du mystère

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

W
hat I noticed first was the strangeness of the light — a shimmering luminescence that had the deceptive, distorting quality of moonlight. I had a sense of unseen presences — things that lurked in shadow, just beyond my vision. I could not pause to marvel at this place in which, inexplicably, I found myself; nor did I have time to be frightened. Some distance off I could see Alexandra's small, determined figure moving across the heath. I called out her name, and gathering up my skirt I raced after her.

She turned and caught sight of me. “Jeanne!” she cried out in dismay. “What have you done? I never meant you to follow me!”

“I know.” I was too hot and out of breath to explain, or to argue. “But I followed you all over Paris, and a fine chase you led me. And now I am here. And you must make the best of it.”

At that she smiled, and threw up her hands in a very Parisian shrug, and reached out to embrace me.
“Ma chère
Jeanne,” she said. “What a foolish thing you have done! You know that I never meant to lead you into danger — but how glad I am that you are here!”

She gestured across the heath to distant mauve-coloured peaks, half-shrouded in mist and crowned with snow. Her eyes alight with excitement, she said “There is where I mean to go.”

But I had already guessed our destination. Alexandra had always talked of finding her destiny in the mountains, in the high unvisited places of the world.

“And that is where this journey ends?” I asked.

“It is where the painting ends,” she said. I thought I heard a hesitation, a faint note of uncertainty in her voice, and I felt a chill, but it was too late to turn back, and so I walked with her in silence over the trackless ground.

“The trick is not to glance sidelong,” warned Alexandra; but in spite of myself I let my gaze wander towards the spiny thickets that grew here and there across the plain. I saw them, as I feared I would — those crouching, misshapen things that were neither animal nor human. Their sly, malicious faces wavered and dissolved like ghosts called up in a séance. Their malevolence, their mindless ill-intent, hung in the air like a foul smell.

By the time we reached the edge of the heath the sun was low on the horizon. Soon it slipped behind the peaks, and a brassy sunset, purplish-red and amethyst and saffron, spread across the sky. Bruise-coloured shadows gathered as we moved through the grey gloom. Presently we came to the reedy margins of a lake — the half-glimpsed lake of M. Villemain's painting. Mists writhed like serpents over the dark, oily water.

Footsore and exhausted, we knew we could go no further. Strangely we felt neither thirst nor hunger, only an aching heaviness of body and spirit. We lay down together on the sparse grass beside the lake, and eventually drifted into sleep. Once I woke in the black of the moonless night and thought I saw huge glowing faces, like silver masks, floating over the surface of the water. Trembling, I moved closer to Alexandra for comfort; but then I persuaded myself it was only a dream, and I fell back into uneasy slumber.

At dawn we set out along the lakeshore. Distances, like the light, were deceptive here, and it was afternoon by the time we reached the farther side. We made our way across an almost featureless ash-coloured plain, and came at last to bleak wind-scoured slopes, made treacherous by shifting scree. I followed Alexandra into the mouth of a gully, which grew narrow and deeper as it ascended, with grey, moss-streaked crags rising sheer on either side.

The sky was a thin streak of silvery blue far overhead; scarcely any light reached the floor of the ravine. For what seemed like hours we clambered in near-darkness over boulders and rotting logs.

The root-buttressed path grew steeper, and the gully gradually shallower, until we were once again on the bare mountainside. We came over a ridge between two peaks, and found that we had reached the top of a pass. Spread out below us was the shadowy, uncharted country that lay on the far side of M. Villemain's mountains. We had travelled beyond the edges of the canvas, into an elsewhere that perhaps the artist had not yet imagined; and now I felt real fear.

“Alexandra, it's time to turn back.”

I had seen the exhilaration, the eagerness in her face as she gazed across that mapless landscape, and I knew well enough how she would reply.

“But to leave off now in the midst of such an adventure . . .
quel dommage
!”

“But be sensible, Alexandra! You said this is where the adventure would end. If we go farther, surely every step will lead us into danger — and how shall we find our way home?”

“And yet . . . ” She was gazing into the far distance, where other higher mountains loomed against the darkening sky. Then she turned and looked back at the way we had come.

As I bent to tighten a bootlace, I heard Alexandra's sharp cry of dismay. I straightened and whirled round.

The path through the ravine that would lead us back down the mountain had vanished. The ravine itself, and the surrounding slopes, had ceased to exist. We were standing on the edge of a precipice, and below us was a black chasm, filled with swirling tendrils of mist

There
was
no way back.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I
n that that first moment, as I looked down into the abyss, I was too panic-stricken to speak. When Alexandra turned to face me I saw shock and confusion in her eyes, and a fear as great as my own.

In the midst of my terror I felt a sudden rush of anger — perhaps more at myself than at Alexandra. Why, when I understood the danger, had I followed her without a second thought?

Alexandra moved away from the cliff-edge and came to put her arms around me, as though seeking comfort, or forgiveness. She pressed her cold cheek to mine. “Jeanne, truly I am
désolé!
This was a journey I was meant to take alone.”

I found my voice. “But with no way to return?”

“How could I have known? Others have come back safely.”

But had she known, would she have turned back, I wondered? These past weeks she had seemed so wrongheaded, so heedless of danger.

She drew away then, and pointed towards the horizon. “Look over there, Jeanne. Are those not the spires of a city? And more mountains beyond?”

I followed her gaze. The valley beneath us was now lost in mist and shadow. But in the far distance dark towers rose, and behind them mountain ramparts, a black wall against the sky.

We could scarcely remain where we were. There was no choice but to go on.

It might have been dawn, or midday, or evening. As we wound our way down a narrow path into the valley I realized we had lost all sense of time. The sunless sky was the colour of pewter. Everything was bathed in a halflight that leached all the colour from the rocks, from the stony earth with its patches of lichen and dead grass, from the leafless, scraggly trees.

Presently we came to flat, marshy ground surrounding a stagnant pool overgrown with weeds. The air was rank with the stench of rotting vegetation. Hanging from the gnarled limbs of willow trees were what looked at first glance like pale round fruit; but when we drew closer we saw to our horror that they were human skulls. Roots snaked up through the dank earth, entwined with other bones. A bird with the head of a rat swooped past us; small scaled creatures scuttled among broken ribcages that shone with the phosphorescence of decay.

My teeth began to chatter. “Surely this is not how you imagined it, Alexandra — the Beyond, the
Inconnu
?”

“I did not know how to imagine it. But never like this.”

I search, I find. I wish to catch a glimpse of the sublime,
the perfect . . .
I recalled with bitter irony those passionate lines in Alexandra's journal. What a cruel joke — to go in search of the perfect and sublime, and find instead the country we visit in our darkest nightmares.

What words can convey the strangeness of our journey? The landscape through which we now travelled might well have been some desert place on earth — a flat dun-coloured wasteland crossed here and there with gullies and littered with broken stone. The low sky had darkened to a leaden grey; the air was close and heavy, with no breath of wind. But how to write of stunted trees with forked trunks that rattled their skeletal limbs as we passed, shrieking in distress? Or fields of leprous flowers, their thick, fleshy petals oozing blood?

And how shall I describe the creatures we encountered, part beast, part human, as grotesque as any portrayed in M. Moreau's painting? From a tumble of rocks a crouching sphinx with a woman's face regarded us with her flat unblinking gaze. A basilisk slithered across our path, its breath scorching the dry earth, its eyes like burning coals. Most frightening of all was a huge beast with a crimson lion's body and a human face, its jaws crowded with glittering rows of fangs. Catching sight of us he reared on his hind legs and that fearsome mouth yawned open — only to fill the air with a sweet, enticing music of pipes and trumpets.