Aurorarama (13 page)

“Nice little icecap you got there,” he said in a hoarse voice, unable to believe that he had just said this: but there’s nothing like Letheon to turn a decent fellow into a hopelessly depraved cad. “Gives some perspective on the Hollow Earth theory,” he added, wishing he were dead.

The girl turned toward him, and he could make out a small pale face and two eyes like black holes that sucked out his spinning planet of a heart.

“If you want to plant your flagpole,” said the brunette with a lighthearted, musical vulgarity that was the sweetest melody Gabriel had ever heard, “you’d better help me first.”

She plunged back under the bed and soon dragged out a pair of high-cut, thick-soled boots that made Gabriel’s heart leap even higher. He approached and knelt down beside her.

“Those bastards took my clothes away. They must be under the bed,” she whispered.

Thrilling from this intimacy, he groped around and quickly felt a soft bundle under his fingers. The girl was rather small and her arms were not long enough to reach it.

“I think I got them,” he said, triumphally.

“Okay, just be on the lookout and we leave as soon as I’m ready.”

Gabriel did as he was told, very happy to do so, almost not noticing that he was pulling at the cork again and pushing the phial back up his nose.

“You know a way out?” asked the girl as she stepped into the hallway, slipping on a kind of black hooded cloak.

“You’re the little black riding hood, aren’t you?”

“You’re an old satyr, aren’t you?” she answered playfully.

She was, he was almost sure of it, the girl he had glimpsed earlier at the Toadstool. He could now see her features. They had nothing frail or delicate about them, but even the baby fat was alive with currents of sparking astuteness that put the
cute
back in
electrocute
.

“You care for some?” asked Gabriel, handing her his phial. “It’s on the house.”

“I’m going to know your thoughts,” she said.

She took it and sniffed quickly.

“You should be ashamed,” she smiled, her eyes boring straight into his as she gave him back the phial. “So, how do we scram?”

“Hmm …” said Gabriel, his head whirling slightly. “The doors are rather busy. We should try the window. It’s only the first floor, after all.”

The girl went straight back into the room, and Gabriel heard her opening the double window. Before he could react she had jumped through it, and he followed her, as he would have anywhere. There was a little cornice that made the whole affair easier, and with bones made out of Letheon draughts, he felt there was little chance that he would sprain or break anything. He landed on the stone ledge and took another spring that sent him onto a welcome and welcoming layer of powdery snow. From there, there were a few yards to cross and iron railings that were not much of a challenge. She laughed as she saw Gabriel overplay his ease in climbing them and then somehow get tangled in their unexpected reality.

“I’m Stella, by the way.”

“I’m Gabriel. I hope I’m not seeing you shining from a too distant past,” Gabriel said, panting a little.

“You’re funnier when you talk dirty,” she said with a flattered smile.

“Ah. Dimple,” he noticed, pointing accusingly at her right cheek. “And just on one side. You have decided to kill me, haven’t you?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Would you care for a drink of something strong before I do?”

Compared to the Toadstool, the John Dee was a notch lower in the underground. Owned by the now retired members of the amplified Elizabethan cult band Lord Strange’s Men, it was a rather dark place, lit with a few braziers around which huddled a more sombre and possibly more dangerous species of Boreal Bohemian. Under this wavering, uncertain light, the cabalistic figures that decorated the walls were glimpsed more than really seen, which only made them more evocative. The Sun Dogs had started their career here and the band now on the stage was the Mock Moons, who obviously followed their traces, though their music was more upbeat and grating. The song that they played could not have been better attuned to Gabriel’s feelings:

Music knows more about you than any humbug hypnotizer, thought Gabriel.

He had gone to the toilets for that “very last” sniff of Letheon, and as he came back he could see that some sort of huge black-coated, Viking-looking hunk was pestering Miss Stella Black. He walked up, his uncertain legs pedalling over the evasive ground toward the cask that served as a table, and as soon as he sat down, Stella sprang to her feet and glued her mouth to his. It was as fresh a draught as if someone had opened a door
in the back of his skull. The Viking, who seemed more than a bit inebriated, frowned and tried to accommodate the scene to his disobedient eyeballs, and finally retired with slurred apologies.

Stella stepped back.

“Whoa,” she said. “One could get high on your breath.”

“That’s the best definition of love I have ever heard,” Gabriel said to the girl, who receded, wavering like Northern lights. He thought he might have preferred a different first kiss, but then he decided that no, everything was good, and would be from now on. Just because it had happened, it was good. That was his second-best definition of love.

They had ordered two Wormwood Star absinthes, and had just a few sips to go. Absinthe and Letheon were a daring blend that reduced everything to bi-dimensional pictures, which floated here and there to the point where it became uncomfortable.

“I think I’d like to get some fresh air,” Gabriel said.

“We could go skyskating,” Stella suggested casually.

The part of Gabriel that could discuss the pertinence of this idea had long been dead, buried, and forgotten. He did not miss it at all.

“And then we’ll test your Hollow Earth theory,” she added, dimpling like the devil.

“I promise we’ll use that little pot of butter,” said Gabriel, always a gentleman.

They walked for a long time along a deeply embanked small canal that often disappeared under smelly bridges, and during these eclipses, they kissed slobberingly and caressed each other, as far as their thick clothes allowed. And after another clumsy stunt from Gabriel climbing over a fence, they eventually looked down on the Ringnes Speed Skating Rink.

The moon that hung overhead looked strange, as if a quarter of it had been neatly cut and thrown away. The ice spread below, dark grey and scratched with entangled traces no angel
could unravel. It was like life itself, thought Gabriel, a born allegorician: bodies had come and gone, met or avoided each other, retraced their steps or someone else’s, been found by and lost one another.

Stella took a pillbox from her pocket and gave him some purple heart-shaped “boilers,” before taking some herself. The glycine-and-ephedrine blend made one feel warm, caused one’s heart to beat faster, and pumped blood to the body’s extremities, three things Gabriel did not feel he needed more of. His good education, however, forbade him to refuse a drug.

Then Stella went down the slope and started to take her clothes off over her head, quickly, keeping on only her boots, whose skates she liberated with a little gesture that was a bit of a ballet, or bullet, to Gabriel’s heart. Coming closer, he watched her ecstatically, as if he had never seen a young woman before. He had more or less the same reaction every time (he believed that nude girls came from the same realm or region as dreams, from the same eternal inexhaustible fountain at the spring of time and yet out of time), but a girl like this one—no, he had never seen and never would see again. It was not only, as some bad poem put it, the “dimpled fullness of her form,” nor “the midnight blackness of her plentiful hair,” and neither was it—he could be as bad a poet as anyone else—the opal teardrops of her breasts. What held him mesmerized was the circular starmap tattoo that ran all around her shoulders and which, as she started gliding on the moonlit ice, was the music of the spheres made visible to his eye. He stared at the dark inky stars and figures on her pale skin and how they reflected, as a negative print, the sparkles that sprinkled the Heavens. Rapture and Terror seized his heart and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Hey!” she cried, “move or you’ll freeze.”

Once he was stark naked but for gloves, boots, and Elsinore cap, he switched on his skates and, shod with steel, launched himself on the tinkling ice, dizzy and weak as he was, happy not
to have taken the Fly Fantasia Flint he had bought earlier at the Toadstool. He scraped his warm body against the coldness of the night and it felt like a rash all over his skin.

He tried—his legs barely responsive—to skid toward her but tripped and fell forward, hearing her laughter and feeling the burn of the ice through his gloves as he caught himself just in time. He stood up and looked around in panic, as if afraid he had lost her. But there she was, whirling round him, a comely comet whose hand he tried to grasp: she always took it back at the last moment, her laughter echoing in his head like crumbling crystal stalactites.

He launched himself again. With the hiss of a giant hand, the wind slapped him about, forcing a crown of cold steel around his burning head. He strove to move toward her, the
lodestar of desire
, going faster and faster, cutting across her ellipses, but as soon as he came closer, she would take a sharp turn and speed up again, gleaming on the glassy plain, tattooed stars tangled in her hair, her bubbly buttocks a Milky Way in the moonlight. He realized that to hold her naked brilliance, he would be willing to give all.

After a dreamlike while, as he was still pursuing her in vain, she suddenly turned toward him and waited for him to bump against her, which he tried to do as softly as he could. They clasped each other and almost fell over, but eventually stood firmly on the ground, his head spinning still as the world wheeled by them. He kissed her, his hands full of constellations, for a long time, or so it seemed, until the universe came to a standstill around them. Slowly, he took her back to the slope, where their clothes were waiting, and he laid upon them her heavenly body. She laughed and overthrew him, went on top, a cascade of steamy black hair erasing the night; then the stars fell down on him and covered him, so close now, as if he had died and been turned into one.

Book Two

Magic & Mayhem