Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [71]
But someone, indeed, was there: a girl, huddled against the door in her hooded mantle, an orphan of the snowstorm. As he approached, he saw she was shaking with cold, but she stood still, her eyes fixed and glassy, not even acknowledging his presence. He recognized her.
“Phoebe?”
He took her arm. She did not react, as if lost in some kind of trance.
“What are you doing here?”
She turned toward him but still did not seem to see him.
“Can you hear me?”
She tilted her head to one side, frowning slightly, as if concentrating on some remote call or memory. What had happened to her? What had they done to her? What the hell was going on in this place? But though he pitied her, first and foremost he wanted to hear about Stella. Maybe she could help.
“Did you see some people leaving? A few minutes ago?”
Phoebe opened her mouth, but nothing came out except a cloud of breath.
Gabriel sighed, but tried again.
“A girl called Stella. With men?”
Another cloud answered him. But this cloud, he noticed, behaved curiously, expanding and changing shape. He thought—that was how tired he was—that a face was forming in that blur. It had something like lips, which parted as if to speak. If he squinted, he could now see hovering in front of him a girl who looked a little bit like a younger Isabelle d’Ussonville, but made out of Phoebe’s breath and answering his question. He focused on the lips, and though he heard nothing he somehow knew what they’d said.
“The Ingersarvik,” he repeated to himself.
It was precisely the name that Gabriel had been afraid of hearing. Maybe that was why he had heard it. A chasm opened in his stomach and his heart sank into it. But suddenly the door rattled behind Phoebe and Gabriel had just time to squat behind a garbage bin.
An old man in a fur coat and bowler hat emerged from the Artists’ entrance, carrying over his shoulder a shape that looked like a child. The man took Phoebe by the arm and spoke with a husky voice.
“There, I found him. Trying to strip a string puppet in a tutu. You have been patient, my pretty. Sorry to have kept you waiting in the cold.”
“The bastard struck me,” complained a voice, probably the child’s, though it sounded unpleasant, like some creaky clockwork.
“So what?” said the man. “He probably hurt himself more than he hurt you, blockhead.”
He had taken Phoebe by the arm and was taking her with them.
“Now, we’re all going home, aren’t we?” said the man almost tenderly, and as Gabriel flattened himself against the wall, the little family walked away down the alley, fading into the snow as if they had never existed.
After long minutes of both moral and physical loneliness, Gabriel eventually found an electric taxsleigh going his way. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and, taking no chances, he let his money do most of the talking. The driver promised nothing, because visibility was poor and the streets were blocked by the snow, but he would do what he could to take him as close as possible to Venustown. The taxsleigh advanced slowly, but for Gabriel, tucked under the blanket on the seat, it was a welcome pause in spite of the icy wind, and an occasion to pack down his own whirling, drifting thoughts into a grid of solid banks and blocks.
What he had just seen did not retain his attention for long. They, whoever they were, had turned poor Phoebe into some sort of visionary vegetable, and were now, he supposed, exhibiting her at the Trilby Temple. He knew it was partly his fault, for having sent her as a messenger to Brentford, but he also knew that his responsibility was nothing compared to theirs, and that they would have to pay for it sooner or later. Later would be fine, because he had other things on his mind right now.
The presence that had been “talking” to him he dismissed as an hallucination, born from his tiredness and the extreme conditions surrounding him. Still under the influence of his subterranean trip, he had just allowed some dim memory of Isabelle d’Ussonville, or of some photograph of her seen in his youth, to shape an intuition about Stella