Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [18]
A low whirling buzz sounded in his ears and he quickly fell asleep, vivid and ludicrous pictures circling around him at full speed. He disappeared for a while, but soon, as he recalled afterward, he emerged in a snowy landscape, a wilderness that extended as far the eye could blink. He was clad only in blue boxer shorts that he instantly knew were not his but had been borrowed, though he did not know from whom. He was cold, but tolerably so, much less than he would have expected in such surroundings. There were, not surprisingly, two moons in the sky that he thought were both made of green cheese. At this thought, he felt like retching. His stomach contracted, painfully, and he started spewing and spooling off a white, light, cheesecloth-like stuff that probably was some sort of ectoplasm. As it fell on the icy snow, its whiteness made it at first indiscernible, but as it started to pile up, it grew increasingly visible, appearing as a human shape trying to grow. After a long, nauseous while, it reached Brentford’s height and became the figure of a former acquaintance, Hector Liubin V, a musician of the pre-Blue Wild era, whose face he could see delineated almost clearly under the ectoplasm but whose words he could not make out, as if the stuff were smothering them. He tried to guess: “Sandy Lake?” Brentford heard himself asking. The shape shifted and a young woman was now facing Brentford, wearing a crinoline and with her hands in a fur muff. “No, I’m Isabella Alexander,” she said, “but my friends call me the Ghost Lady. The woman was now hovering slightly in front of Brentford and did not seem made of ectoplasm anymore but rather sculpted in some volatile, thin, cloudlike stuff like the blur on those ridiculously fake spirit photographs. Her eyes were made of sky and one could see through her mouth as she spoke. “Tell me, Mr. Osiris,” she said, “did you ever fly?” but as Brentford tried to answer that … yes … he did … once … the woman vanished. As if a rug were being swept out from under his feet, Brentford felt he was going to wake up. He tried to call the Ghost Lady back, but all he managed to say was a row of letters and numbers that he found carved in his mind.
Brentford opened his eyes and fumbled for the lamp, then, as quickly as he could, noted the numbers on the bedside note pad, though they did not make the slightest sense to him. He realized how frustrated he was that Helen had not come to his rescue, in one way or another, as he had secretly wished. It had been instead a short, disappointing dream that bore no clear relationship to his question or his desire—a string of reminiscences and associations that had seemed, as the figures themselves, flimsy and superficial. Only the numbers he was re-reading had, in their opacity, the slightly heavier weight of an apport, but for all he knew, they could just as well be nonsense.
There were, of course, Dream Interpreters in the Institute, but his sense of privacy, as well as his suspicion that the interpreters could well be linked to the Gentlemen of the Night, made it impossible for him to ask for an appointment. Naked, dripping on the floor, he felt cold and heavy-headed, a bit hung over from the dream, trying to remember what he meant when he said he had flown. But most of all, he just wanted to go home.
CHAPTER VI
Boreal Bohemia
… an unpretending-looking fungus or toadstool to stimulate the dormant energies of the dwellers in this region of ice and snow.
Mordecai Cubbit Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep, 1860
During the Wintering Weeks, those months of rocksolid night that enshroud the city in an impenetrable gloom, the Toadstool had become one of the favourite haunts of the self-styled Boreal Bohemians. Located right near the Yukiguni Gate and announced by human-sized mushrooms at its door, it offered in otherwise quiet surroundings the comforts of warmth, hot drinks, buffet snacks, live, amplified popular music, and a high-quality Sand