Wild Talent (24 page)

“Don't listen,” cried Alexandra. “That creature is a manticore, and he has a taste for human flesh.” Pursued by that eerie, seductive music, we hurried on.

The paintings I had seen these past months in Paris were filled with disturbing, otherworldly visions; the poems I had heard seemed inspired by fever dreams or opium. Those artists, those poets, surely had explored this same hallucinatory landscape, and had returned to record their visions.

But some, I think, it had driven mad. I trudged after Alexandra, who forged onward with her usual stubborn resolution, never losing sight of the far-off city and the mountains beyond — and I wondered, was that the fate awaiting us?

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

A
long the sides of the valley stood a row of statues carved from immense blocks of black stone. Those silent presences, with their hollow, staring eye sockets, seemed as menacing as anything we had yet encountered.

This place, now, was our reality; the Paris drawing room where my other self lay senseless in her chair had faded to a dream.

As we went on the landscape altered, became green and lush; the air was rich with flowery scents. Trees arched overhead, dripping with wisteria and tropical vines. Rank jungle vegetation crept across the path. Then the land rose sharply, and as we crested a rise, Alexandra, walking a little ahead, gave a cry of astonished joy.

There in the near distance rose a city of out of fairytale. Slender white spires glittered against a sky no longer grey, but azure. As we approached, the city revealed itself in a gorgeous confusion of turrets and cupolas and campaniles, gilded domes and steeples, jeweled mosaic walls and gates of shining metal. Could this be some fabled city of antiquity — Byzantium, or Samarkand , or Xanadu?

“The city of dreams,” breathed Alexandra, breaking our awestruck silence.

“Poor M'sieu Verlaine,” I said. “How sad that he will never see it.”

We passed through gates of gilded bronze and climbed a flight of marble stairs. At the top was a pillared colonnade lit by hanging lamps of silver filigree. It opened onto a broad plaza lined on both sides by arcades, their columns and archways sheathed in mother-of-pearl. The floor was paved (marvelled Alexandra) with sardonyx and malachite and rose-quartz. But there were no shops or cafés or market booths, no musicians or chestnut sellers or children playing.

We saw no one, heard not a single human voice. We held our breath, not daring to look away for an instant, for fear this miraculous city would vanish, as the road behind us had vanished, and we would find ourselves once again on the edge of an abyss. And so we stood for a long while gazing at tapestries embroidered with gold thread and stitched with pearls; rows of alabaster statues; wall panels of delicate green and silver cloisonné; waterlilies like scraps of moonlight floating on a lapis lazuli pool.

And yet, there was wrongness here. It was like a faint whiff of mildew and decay, not quite disguised by the fragrance of sandalwood and jasmine, an effluvium that somehow seeped from the iridescent columns, the gleaming marquetry.

And where were the people who should have inhabited this enchanted place?

At the end of the plaza was an archway set in a wall of ice-white crystal. I looked at Alexandra, saw my own fearful uncertainty reflected in her face. What lay beyond? Would we discover palaces and pleasure-gardens? Lords and ladies in cloth-of-gold and peacock feather masks? Or would we find only hushed and echoing courtyards, deserted streets?

There was another question neither of us wished to ask aloud. Beyond that glimmering archway, would we find our way home?

We stepped through. And everything changed.

We looked out across a dismal ash-grey cityscape, an endless vista of black columns and featureless granite walls. A bitter wind scattered dead leaves along the cobbled street, chased dark clouds across a waning moon.

At first we heard only voices: a thin, wordless chorus of lamentation, a sound filled with such inexpressible misery that we wanted to stop our ears. And then we saw what had made those cries. They were everywhere, circling all about us: faceless things made of dusk and shadow, ribbons of blackness swirling around the basalt pillars, scarves of smoke blown across the cobbles and congealing into clots of darkness. Now and again there was the suggestion of a blind dead eye, a skeletal limb, a mouth gaping in a howl of fury or despair.

And I knew them at once for what they were.

“ . . . I have seen a monstrous bodiless creature seizing
hold of someone. It wraps itself around its victim like
a black shroud, and slowly disappears as if drawn
into his body through his living pores.”
Thus Madame Blavatsky had spoken of disembodied spirits, soulless reanimated shadows desperate to regain a human form. I saw Alexandra cross herself, saw her lips move in a silent, terror-stricken appeal to her childhood God, and I knew that she remembered those words as well as I.

A creature made of shadow was taking hideous shape. Eyes burned like coals in its cadaverous face. It was the face I had tried all these months to forget, the one that still haunted my dreams. How well I knew that mocking grin, though it was infinitely more vengeful and malevolent now than it had been in life.

It wraps itself around its victim like a black shroud,
and slowly disappears as if drawn into his body through
his living pores . . .

George had come for his revenge.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

T
his is how horror feels,
I thought
: horror is to have
your flesh crawl, icy hands clutch your spine, your
mind cringe away and shrink in upon itself, recoiling in
disbelief.

It was their relentless greed that gave these soulless shadow-things their power — their singleminded lust to inhabit a human form. This would be George's vengeance — that in the end he should possess not only my body, but my soul.

I could hear the murmur of Alexandra's voice, a quavering sound more chant than prayer, and no longer I think to our Christian God but to some eastern deity. Shuddering, half-fainting, my mouth filled with the bitter taste of bile, I thought, there are no gods that can save us now.

There was a time when I had power over George. It was not shame or disgust that had rescued me that long-ago day in the byre. It was a power born of rage and fear, of an instinct for self-preservation, a stubborn refusal to submit. I had not given in to George that day, for all that it was to cost me later. Whatever the price might be, I would not give in to him now.

When he was still solid flesh and blood I had managed to do him a grievous harm, though I had not meant to. How much easier now, I thought, to destroy this phantasm, held together by greed and blind desire and malice. I felt the familiar power rising in me, sweeping away my terror and guilt.

But then darkness wrapped itself around me, fell across my face in heavy, stifling folds. Something damp and loathsome pressed itself against my mouth and nose. I could not breathe, could not cry out. Under my clawing hands the stuff gave way like rotting cloth, yet still I could feel strands of it searching like fingers across my skin, . . .

a black shroud . . . drawn in through the living
pores . . .
As I clutched at my face and gasped for air, revulsion gave way to panic — and with panic came anger. Dimly I thought,
I do not deserve this
. I seized in both hands the thing that had once been George, the ghastly thing that still wished to possess me. In a fury I tore it from my flesh and ripped it into tattered shreds.

I was consumed, now, by my anger: a heart-pounding rage against what George had done, against what he had made me do—and what we had both become. It is a genie, this wild talent of mine, that I have learned to raise at will; but once released, I have no means by which to control it.

A great gust of wind shrieked across the cobbles, buffeted the granite walls, snatched up the last of the shadow-creatures and sent them howling into the night. There were sounds of rending and shattering, an immense ground-shaking roar as though a railway train were thundering overhead.

The pavement buckled under our feet. Grey dust, fragments of brick and stone, then heavier granite chunks rained down as walls and columns crumbled and collapsed around us.

Alexandra seized me by the arm and half-dragged me in a daze back through the archway into the plaza. But here too the destruction I had set in motion had begun. Cracks had begun to spread across the gleaming pavement. Gilt paint was flaking, strips of torn fabric hung from the tapestries; there were bare patches on the walls where the cloisonné had chipped and fallen away.

I was shuddering from shock and weakness — icy spasms that gripped me from head to foot. All I felt now was sadness, that I had destroyed not only what was evil in this place, but what was beautiful.

And in the Beyond that lies so near and yet so distant from our own, that was my last conscious thought.

I remember a sense of weightlessness, of dissolution. I imagined myself as insubstantial as a wreath of smoke, adrift in some dark space between two worlds. And then I felt a painful, insistent tugging, as of a cord tightening. For an instant there was a horrible sensation that my spirit, or consciousness — my very soul, perhaps — was split in two, so that in some strange fashion I existed in two places at once.

And then, weak, dizzy, my stomach churning and my heart racing, I came to myself.

I was in the drawing room on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. There were people gathered around me, curious and concerned; and in the chair beside me, a bewildered Alexandra was waking from her own unnatural sleep.

Someone held a vial of smelling salts under my nose; a bearded man in Turkish costume, a doctor perhaps, was solemnly taking Alexandra's pulse.

“What time is it?” I murmured, emerging out of my daze. How heavy my limbs felt! I almost asked, “What day is it” — for it seemed that a vast amount of time had passed.

“Just gone eleven,” someone said, consulting his pocket watch. “It seems that you young ladies have suffered a fainting spell. Fortunately it lasted for only a few minutes. There's no damage done, I expect.”

Was that possible? In the world from which we had returned, did real time not exist?

With that thought, I glanced up at the painting. I saw that Alexandra's figure had vanished from the landscape, and though the canvas should have been ripped and shredded beyond repair, it seemed quite undamaged. “We've called for a cab,” someone said. And someone else, a woman, said encouragingly: “A good night's sleep should set things aright.”

I was grateful for their kindness, grateful too for how ordinary they all seemed, in spite of their costumes and their strange beliefs. I was grateful for the solid reality of this Paris drawing room. But life for me could never again be ordinary. Would I ever have a night's sleep that was not haunted by guilty dreams?

I had murdered George for a second time.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

September 15

I
have existed these weeks of early autumn in a kind of dream. I wander the streets and sit with Alexandra in the cafés of the
Rive Gauche
, and I try to plan for a future that seems no more real to me now than our wanderings in the Beyond.

In spite of all that has happened, Alexandra seems in excellent spirits. She has made up her mind to use her inheritance for travel in the Orient — first Ceylon, then India and the Himalayas. To that end she is working hard to improve her knowledge of Sanskrit and Tibetan. There are more than enough mysteries in our own world to be explored, she says.

But my own thoughts weigh heavily upon me. I realize now that in some corner of my mind I had clung to the possibility that George was still alive. But even that faint hope is shattered now.

And what havoc have I wrought, in the worlds above and beyond our own? Have I forever destroyed M. Verlaine's city of dreams?

Alexandra says no, and I try to take some comfort in her words. “This is what I think,
chère
Jeanne — that with every poem, every painting, a city of dreams is created, and so there are as many Elsewheres as there are artists who have dreamt of them.”

I would like to think that M. Verlaine will someday find his magical city, but Alexandra says that a poet has only the courage of paper and pen, and that to travel in the Beyond you must be prepared to risk everything, perhaps even your life.

One smaller mystery puzzles us. What has become of the expected visit from Madame Blavatsky? By now we had thought to entertain that large and glowering presence. Secretly, I hoped to confess to her our adventures in the Otherworld. Though I knew she would call us something much worse than flapdoodles, I knew she would neither judge nor disbelieve us.

September 22

How suddenly life can change! Sometimes as I know to my cost it is disaster that unexpectedly descends, and alters everything for the worse. But sometimes, too, there can come an unlooked for, unimagined joy.