Aurorarama (39 page)

It was later that night, after a sumptuous dinner of fresh food served on the finest crystal dinner service had been finished, that the twins, in a perfectly executed duet, told their tale  …

The story begins in New Venice, where other stories end. Once upon a time, a woman—let us name her Isabelle, or as she was known later, Isabella—was forbidden by an unfair law to have any children. Her husband, Nixon-Knox, a respected doctor and a member of the Council of Seven, not only never touched her but also watched her very closely. But there came a time when she was required to have her official portrait painted. The painter was a young, gifted, ambitious, hotheaded artist called Alexander Harkness. Alexander fell in love with Isabella’s pale face and fine features, and the benevolent sadness she carried about her like an aura. Isabella fell in love with Alexander’s curly mane and bushy brows, and the way his look stripped her naked as he was painting her. Before the painting was even finished, she discovered she was pregnant.

Nixon-Knox learned about it, through, let us suppose, a treacherous maid. As a doctor, he suggested to the maid that she serve a pennyroyal infusion to her mistress. Isabella, indeed, felt so sick upon drinking it that both Nixon-Knox and the maid thought that they had succeeded in provoking a miscarriage. The maid, decidedly garrulous and malignant, informed Alexander Harkness of the success of Nixon-Knox’s plan. Harkness, desperate as only a young man can be, called the husband to a secret duel on the ice field, but having counted ten steps and turned toward his opponent, it was himself he shot in the head, for having dishonoured Isabella and lost their child.

But it turned out that Isabella was still pregnant. Nixon-Knox, shocked by Alexander’s suicide, or troubled by some religious scruples, eventually took pity on poor Isabella, and instead of forcing her to get rid of the child, made her swear
secrecy and sent her off to exile on distant Melville Island. After this, he seems to have fallen under the influence of a French religious fanatic, Father Calixte, who condemned with the utmost virulence any attempts to reach the pole as a sin against God and, dabbling in visions and prophecies, predicted that New Venice would be doomed because of these attempts. Nixon-Knox, from that point onward, is said to have busied himself with curious medical experiments that bordered on the unwholesome, until finally he was engaged, or so the story went, in stealing the corpses of dead explorers from the Gallery leading to the Boreal Grounds. He was eventually denounced by a young doctor named Douglas Norton, who had conducted his own strange experiments in the field of animal hybridization so far that Nixon-Knox, though he was a longstanding friend of the Norton family, had him expelled from the John Snow School of Surgery. On the grounds of Norton’s public accusations, the Council of Seven could no longer shield Nixon-Knox, and he finished his life as a miserable inmate of the dreaded Haslam Hospital.

But let us go back to Isabella Nixon-Knox, née d’Ussonville. As you remember, she was supposed to sail to Melville Island. But it happened that her small ship, blocked by the ice near Cape Turnback, had instead been forced northward, until after weeks of hardship she was rescued by chance by the inhabitants of our island, which was not yet known to explorers as Crocker Land, or more accurately, the Crocker Land Mirage. This island, which can mostly be seen from above, and only at certain times of the year, is known to those who inhabit it by a secret name that can only be pronounced when the Island is invisible to the outer world. Its people pretend, or believe, or pretend to believe, that they are descendants of the Irish Tuatha Dé Dannan, mixed with ancient Arctic Tunit people and, many many centuries later, with the remnants of the Norse colonies
of Greenland. Lost or wrecked Westerners, and whatever their cargo consists of, are traditionally welcomed, so much so in fact that the deliberate wrecking of foreign ships has been, at certain times, the tradition itself. Certain legends even mention, in that respect, a certain mysterious woman who used to mislead sailors and travellers toward the island. The inhabitants call her Oene, the fallen Queen of the Arctic.

Isabella’s rescue was, accordingly, regarded less as a duty than as a gift. There, upon her arrival, and while her husband considered her lost at sea, Isabella gave birth to a little girl, whom, to honour both the father and his death, she had baptized Myrtle Isabella Alexandra Harkness. Thanks to her kindness and distinction, Isabella quickly found her place in the community, so much so that she was chosen as the Lady of the Castle, a purely honorary but much respected title granted only to foreigners by the Island dwellers.

Myrtle grew up, educated by her mother and by the library that Isabella had brought with her in a trunk. But there was among those books one that especially fascinated the young Myrtle: a little octavo entitled
Snowdrift & Reliance
, written by the uncle of Douglas Norton, Edward Hilbert-Norton. The Hilbert-Nortons were on excellent terms with Isabella, and Douglas had offered a strange pet straight out his laboratory to keep Isabella company and “remain in contact” with her, while his uncle, an eccentric bachelor and Isabella’s longtime
séance
partner, had dedicated and offered this book of his to her just before her departure.

Part melodrama, part Elizabethan tragedy,
Snowdrift & Reliance
has little to recommend it to the reader’s benevolence, the bewildering intricacies of its plot being further shrouded by unfathomable esoteric symbolism, not to mention an amphigoric style whose only coherent trait is its consistent lack of taste. But on Myrtle, a self-taught, imaginative young girl growing
up isolated from the world on an invisible island, and not in the best position to distinguish myth from reality, its effect was devastating. She was especially struck by the fate of the heroine, Princess Ellesmere, who learns, through a prophecy imparted to her mother, the hermaphroditic Quing of Reliance, that her city will be destroyed when she loses her virginity. Somehow, Myrtle seems to have conceived the strange notion that in the same manner she could wreak her revenge on New Venice for killing her father and making a castaway of her mother.

This was probably more of a daydream than an actual scheme, until there arrived on the island, by accident, a young man named Jeremy Salmon. Jeremy, a promising steam engineer, had attempted, in what probably was a last desperate bid for funding through a publicity stunt, to drive his “pyschomotive” to the North Pole. But he lost his way and wandered through the frozen waste until he found himself, exhausted, finally reaching a mirage island he had been pursuing for hours. The islanders, of course, rescued him, and brought him to the castle. There he accepted, probably out of love, and unaware of her true intentions, the beautiful yellow-eyed Myrtle’s proposal that they elope together to New Venice. Depleted as he was by the return trip, he died on arrival, leaving Myrtle to her own dark devices.

A resourceful girl in spite of her inexperience, she soon found employment in the Circus of Carnal Knowledge, a theatrical institution that specialized in pornoperas, a then fashionable genre in the dissolute Pearl of the Arctic. It happened that this cornerstone of the local entertainment scene was rehearsing its own risqué adaptation of
Snowdrift & Reliance
. Myrtle, through her thorough knowledge of the text and her eerie familiarity with the main character, had little trouble convincing the director that she
was
the part. But, in spite of the efforts of all those involved, Myrtle’s virginity remained unyielding, and
the play flopped miserably at the premiere. It was by a twist of fate that on the very same evening that had seen her failure to avenge herself on New Venice, her fantasy almost came true when the mad painter Edouard de Couard, as part of the “Blue Wild” event he had organized, destroyed most of the city by placing tons of toxic blue pigment in the Air Architecture ventilation shafts.

In the devastating aftermath of the “Blue Wild,” strange things had happened to Myrtle. Driven mad by her unfulfilled desires, she drifted through the city in search of relief, offering herself to the hurrying shadows of strangers, who relentlessly passed her by. Amidst the general panic, however, one man did not resist her, as his state did not allow him to: Igor Plastisine, an empty-eyed muscular hunk in blue boxer shorts and a tartan plaid who under the enthralling influence of a powerful psychoactive principle known as Pineapples and Plums recited in a trance an endless series of letters and numbers. Their tryst took place, it is said, on the very soil of the Greenhouse, near which she had met him. But, whether from an explosion caused by the poisonous cobalt emanations or sparked by the uncertain consummation of their feverish act, the Greenhouse burst into flames, and crumbled in a chaos of red-hot iron girders and torch-like palm trees. One of those fell right onto the back of poor Igor, who quickly succumbed on top of Myrtle’s unconscious body, saving her life by his death.

But Myrtle had another lover who had been searching for her everywhere in that pale Pompeii of the Pole. This man was known to most people as Eddie Endlessex, the larger-than-life male star of the Circus of Carnal Knowledge, but to a few he was known as Edmund Elphinstone, the heir of a family of brilliant, if slightly oddball, New Venetian artists (his grandfather Samuel had engraved a map of New Venice renowned for being exact down to the very last stone, and his father, Ebenezer,
had completed a mammoth-sized myriorama of the Frozen Ocean whose thirty-two panels could be arranged in any order and create billions of combinations, though they were virtually indistinguishable from one another). Edmund’s gambling debts, diagnosed satyriasis, and well-known addiction to nitrous oxide, vulgarly known as laughing gas, had closed to him the doors of a respectable career in the Arts, and it was behind a large handlebar moustache and Parseval-type pudenda that the poor prodigal son concealed his notoriety. He had never fallen in love with anyone before Myrtle, the pure, unsoiled, incorruptible Myrtle. He had to rescue her or destroy himself. And he was the one who found her under the blackened remains of Igor Plastisine, and loaded her on his back.

Edmund took Myrtle to the useless blue ruins of the Heaven and Hell Hospital, where she was recognized by one of her servants, Olaf Jansen, who, following Isabella’s intuition and orders, as well as—allegedly—the telepathic promptings of the strange marsupial pet offered to her by Douglas Norton, had come to New Venice in the hope of fetching her back to Crocker Land. But the passionate Elphinstone would not leave her side, and in order to ensure a modicum of discretion from him, Jansen had no option but to bring Edmund to the island as well, before it was too late to save Myrtle. When they arrived at the crystal castle after a long, exhausting trip, Myrtle was so deeply comatose that most doctors would probably have declared her dead. But Elphinstone was not a doctor. He was a man in love and he believed in the power of his feelings to bring his sleeping beauty back to life. Isabella was too shocked and sad, and perhaps too steeped herself in the supernatural, to oppose Elphinstone’s commitment and single-mindedness. For days and weeks, he took care of Myrtle in a secluded tower of the castle, read books to her and played her heart-wrenching music on Isabella’s glasharmonica, bathed and oiled her and
shocked her with an electric generator the islanders had found on a wrecked whaler. Though she was not brought back to life by such dedication, she was eventually found to be pregnant, even though her pulse was imperceptible, and her breath left no blur on a mirror.

Isabella, learning the news, cast Elphinstone out of the castle, making him so desperate that she had to resort to the physical strength and firepower of the meek Crockerlanders to keep him away. Edmund lingered outside, lying in the snow and howling through the fog during the whole seven days of his endless agony. He never lived to see his premature orphans, two little mirror images of each other, being borne out of the womb of their motionless mother. At the sight of such a wonder, the Islanders knelt down in awe, and Isabella, who had a noble heart, gave the children the name of their father; a man, after all, whose love had been stronger than death.

“That was a sad story,” said Gabriel to the twins, as they walked in front of him down a narrow corridor, crystal candelabras in hand. Reginald shrugged his shoulders, forcing Geraldine to do the same. They reminded Gabriel of those little figures cut out of folded paper and then unfolded to show a string of gingerbread-man shapes.

“We have not lived it,” said the boy. “It is other people’s memories.”

“It was losing grandmother Isabella that was the real blow,” added Geraldine. “She took such wonderful care of us.”

“I hear she is still around and has quite a haunting presence,” said Gabriel.

Geraldine turned toward Gabriel and smiled, while Reginald explained.

“Oh, you must mean our mother, Myrtle. She is the one with that ability, not Grandmother. But she certainly resembled Grandmother Isabella when she was young.”