Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [23]
The crowd had started to wake up and was voicing, though in a rather muted fashion, its disapproval. But it was too late. The Poshclothes Police had started, politely but firmly, and with “if-you-pleases” that had a certain “if-you-don’t-please” ring to them, to tow the reluctant boreal bohemians toward the exit where the sled ambulances were “advanced.” Nicholas, Gabriel noticed, was slumped on the bar, sobbing with his head in his hands, and he truly felt sorry for him. As to himself, he was, for the third time today, full of an impotent anger for which—the impotency, not the anger—he hated himself as much as he hated this police force of foppish oafs. Sealtiel Wynne walked up to him and bowed slightly.
“How strange it is to meet you again, Mr. d’Allier! But it is always a pleasure.”
“Yes, isn’t it. It’s quite a scream, actually,” Gabriel said, with all the detachment he could muster. “What a coincidence, indeed.”
“Coincidences! In New Venice!” said Wynne, sincerely amused. “Maybe our presence is a coincidence, but yours is certainly not,” he added, a little more seriously, pointing a white-gloved index finger at the breast pocket where Gabriel had put the sand packet. “Now would you mind joining our little party? I am sure it will not take long. After you, Mr. d’Allier … unless you wish to fly.”
CHAPTER VII
An Appointment At The Pole
There’s a ginral wish among the crew to no whether the north pole is a pole or a dot. Mizzle sais it’s a dot, and O’Riley swears (no, he don’t do that, for we’ve gin up swearin in the fog-sail); but he sais that it’s a real post, bout as thick again as the mainmast, an nine or ten times as hy. Grim sais it’s nother wun thing nor anuther, but a hydeear that is sumhow or other a fact, but yit don’t exist at all. Tom Green wants to no if there’s any conexshun between it an the pole that’s conected with elections.
R. M. Ballantyne, The World of Ice
Brentford did not go back home straightaway. He had decided to walk the mile that separated the Dunne Institute from the Botanical Building, and while doing so he replayed his dream in his mind, stumbling on some connections he had so far neglected.
The appearance of Hector Liubin V, whose stage name was Ekto Liouven, may have been triggered by the sheer idea of ectoplasm. Sandy Lake had been Ekto’s former sweetheart, when she fronted the Sandmovers in the heyday of “polar pop.” Brentford may have inquired about her because in his dream he was searching for a female interlocutor rather than a male one, and had eventually managed to conjure one. “Isabella Alexander” was, of course—how could that have escaped his attention?—made up of the names of Ross’s two famous ships—now the names of two famous capes—which had been under his command on his first encounter with the “Arctic Highlanders,” or Eskimos. Ross was a Scot, as Brentford partly was, and there was a time when Orsinis had been Rossinis, so his identification with Ross was in both respects more likely than otherwise. Then too, the whole thing may indeed have been a reference to Brentford’s own meeting with the Inuit earlier in the day, which had provoked the need for the incubation, and his presence on the ice field may have been tied to his idle remembrances about polar explorations on his way back from that meeting.
Let us be more precise, he thought. He had wanted to speak to Helen or for Helen to speak to him—the woman (and a lot more than that) whose dead body he had left on the ice field a few years before, after her magic had saved the city. Vomiting ectoplasm on the ice field may have been merely a consequence of his desire to communicate with the dead Helen. And so must have been the Ghost Lady, for a spectre was more or less the form he would have expected Helen to take if she appeared. “Mr. Osiris” was another clue. After Helen had saved the city