Forever (68 page)

They had barely got themselves seated when a
young man-servant went around, snapping napkins open and placing
them on everyone's lap.

Quail eggs in aspic with Beluga caviar were
served first. One egg to a plate with a scant teaspoon of caviar
each for Ernesto and Zarah; four to a plate along with a generous
heaping tablespoon of caviar for the rest of them.

'Eduardo tells me you are working out
extremely well at the office, Ms Williams,' said Ernesto, ignoring
his appetiser and sipping from a glass of mineral water. 'This
morning, he filled me in on your proposed advertising campaigns. I
must confess: I find your ideas fascinating. I did not realise you
were so talented.'

Stephanie searched his eyes for mockery, but
found none. 'I'm afraid it isn't so much a matter of talent,' she
said, spooning up some caviar and eating it. it's more the knack of
... of being able to identify what is wrong with the existing
ads.'

'That in itself requires a certain talent, I
should think.'

'You're very kind, but I'd much rather you
reserved judgement until the ads have proven themselves.' Stephanie
was on her second spoon of Beluga.

'Talent and humility,' observed Ernesto,
toying with the stem of his goblet and frowning at the intricate
patterns cut into the heavy crystal, 'are unusual qualities by
themselves, let alone as a pair.' He raised his eyes and looked at
Stephanie with respect.

'I'll take that as a compliment,' she said
graciously, and laughed lightly as she added: 'But you might want
to add frugality to the rest of my virtues. After all, I'm a firm
believer in getting maximum effect for minimum costs.' She picked
up her champagne flute and sipped.

He said, 'Then you really believe we can
actually get better publicity even if we cut -'

'Oh, do let's change this dreary subject!'
Zarah interrupted testily.

They all looked at her.

'I find business discussions over dinner to
be endlessly tedious!' she gloomed, and made a moue.

Ernesto snapped to. 'Then we mustn't bore
you any further, my dear,' he said gallantly. 'We bow to your
wishes.' And he decreed: 'There will be no further talk of business
while at this table!'

They finished their appetisers without
speaking, and then the plates were cleared away by a silent young
man and an equally silent middle-aged woman.

Carrot coriander soup was the next course. A
cup each for Ernesto and Zarah; large soup bowls for the rest of
them.

Now Ernesto enquired how Stephanie liked
Rio. He himself, he admitted, found the tourist aspect of the city
quite tiresome, although culturally he preferred it to Sao Paulo.
'Because of the opera, ballet, and museums,' he said, 'we maintain
an apartment in Rio, although we use it only on very rare occasions
these days.'

'I'm finding Rio quite enjoyable,' Stephanie
said, it has so much energy and vitality that it reminds me of New
York. But the poverty! It's distressing how much there is. I've
never seen quite such a disparity between the wealthy and the
poor.'

'Poverty is very visible in Rio, yes.'
Ernesto nodded, it is an enormous problem, and not only for the
poor. Did you know, the
favelitos
there have actually begun
invading luxury buildings under construction, and have simply taken
them over? Imagine! Our engineering companies have had to resort to
hiring armed patrols just to guard the construction sites!'

'Perhaps,' Stephanie suggested, 'the poor
can't get decent housing any other way?'

'But what they are doing is criminal! And
they are not invading "decent" housing, as you put it. Oh, no. It
is the luxury projects they are after!'

The servers whisked away the empty soup
dishes and brought the main course. There were tournedos of beef
saut6ed with duck foie gras P£rigourdine. Individual galettes of
potatoes. Artichokes in a port sauce.

They had just begun eating when a bright
flash of blue lit up the dark windows.

Zarah dropped her fork with a clatter. 'What
was that!'

As if to reply, the rumble of nearby thunder
filled the room, and a powerful gust of wind blasted in through the
open windows, extinguishing the candles, causing the lace curtains
to flap like sails, and sending heavy, smacking raindrops inside.
The servers switched on the electric sconces and hurried from
window to window, pulling the shutters to and fastening them.

Zarah looked down the table. 'Ernesto!' she
whispered, her voice suddenly filled with fear.

He smiled, it is only a short tropical
downpour,' he soothed. 'Otherwise, we would surely have been
warned. Go on. Eat.' He gestured with his knife and fork. 'These
tournedos are scrump -'

Another fork of lightning lit up the spaces
between the shutter slats, making them look like hundreds of strips
of flickering blue neon: another rumble, like a sonic boom, seemed
to shake the house to its foundations.

Zarah put down her knife. 'I am not hungry,'
she announced. She scraped back her chair, rose to her feet, and
stood there, momentarily gnawing on a cocked knuckle. After a
moment, her eyes grew huge and she lowered her hand. 'Ernesto!' she
said in horror. 'What if this storm lasts through tomorrow, and the
helicopter cannot -' She broke off in mid-sentence and stared down
the table at him.

Ernesto was unfazed. it will surely clear up
tonight,' he said, cutting himself another morsel of meat. 'By
tomorrow morning at the very latest.'

But Zarah was not convinced. She turned,
knocking over her chair, and ran out of the room, the clacking of
her footsteps receding on the tiles. The younger of the two servers
picked up her chair, pushed it back in, and cleared away her
plates.

Now Dr Vassiltchikov pushed back her chair,
dropped her napkin on her plate, and got to her feet. She looked at
Ernesto. 'I will call Si'tto da Veiga and have them fax us the
weather satellite pictures,' she said crisply, speaking her first
words all evening. And with that, she marched briskly from the
room.

Ernesto left immediately after. 'Please
excuse us,' he said to Stephanie on his way out.

Stephanie sat there quietly, pushing her
food around on her plate. She knew that Zarah's obvious panic at
the storm and Dr Vassiltchikov's concern with the weather pictures
could only mean one thing. They were worried that their medication
might be delayed. And she thought: I wonder what would happen if it
is?

'As there are only the three of us,' Zaza
sighed, 'I might as well go, also, and leave you two alone.
Goodnight, my children.' She held up her cheek for their kisses,
put her chair in reverse, and turned around, riding out of the room
with her customary stateliness.

'Well, it looks like we're alone,' Stephanie
said, sitting back down.

'You must excuse my parents,' Eduardo said
apologetically. 'This sort of thing happens very rarely.'

'What's to excuse? It's their house.
Besides, I wasn't very hungry anyway.'

He smiled. 'Neither am I.' He gave her a
peculiar look and then said, 'Do you mind being outdoors in a storm
like this?'

'Not as long as I'm not carrying a lightning
rod or flying a kite.'

'Good. We can borrow flashlights, rain gear,
and galoshes from the mudroom.'

'Where are we going?'

He smiled secretively. 'To a very, very
special place,' he said. 'But to get there, we have to go on
foot.'

A few minutes later, appropriately
weatherproofed, they left the house.

Ilha da Borboleta, Brazil

There was something Gothic and terrifyingly
beautiful, almost supernatural, about being out in that storm. To
Stephanie, it seemed Wagnerian, as if the gods were locked in
battle. Amid this elemental chaos, with the wind shrieking like
Valkyries, and the rain lashing at their heavy oiled coats, it
seemed appropriate that Eduardo should lead them away from the
manicured part of the island to a muddy, overgrown path which
twisted and turned through thick jungle shrubbery.

It was a menacing path, crowded with
monstrous, Rousseaulike growth. Giant rubbery leaves, serrated
spikes of green, and the tortured, skeletal arms of dead trees,
choked with nameless vines, reaching out with clawlike fingers as
though from some living nightmare. His flashlight and hers,
piercing the blackness with their cones of light, seemed wholly
inadequate, and what they lit up seemed to play cruel tricks upon
the imagination, creating the monstrous out of the normal: rotted
logs were ghastly creatures, leafless branches became giant
spiders, and thick-coiled vines, poisonous snakes.

Eduardo turned around regularly to make sure
she hadn't got lost. At one point, he stopped and played his
flashlight on a paint-daubed stone, half hidden by the overgrown
path.

'When I was a child, I marked the way.' He
shouted to make himself heard above the drumming of the rain on the
leaves and the incessant cracks of thunder. 'In case you get lost,
you can follow them back to the house.'

She nodded. 'But aren't we going to set off
alarms or something?' she shouted back at him.

He shook his head. 'Motion detectors and
cameras are mounted all around the beach and the house, but not in
this area. It is too overgrown, and falling branches or small
animals would set them off continuously.'

On they went, forks of lightning splitting
the sky asunder and illuminating the boiling, rapidly moving storm
clouds which seemed so low that they gave the impression of
actually scraping the vault of green overhead. It was, thought
Stephanie, truly a night for the
Gotterdammerung
.

And, as she soon discovered, the appropriate
sets were all on hand,too.

The first indication of the bizarre was the
ruins of a rough stone wall. Rising unexpectedly out of that
foliage-choked wilderness to her right, and lit as it was - first
caught in the sweeping beam of Stephanie's flashlight, and then in
the flashes of lightning - she let out a cry.

For from the centre of that wall protruded a
face ... a monstrous, three-dimensional face ... a live face which
moved, and which drooled water from the sides of its contorted
mouth!

Eduardo had stopped to look back at her, and
saw her standing there, hand to her throat, staring at that hideous
face in horror.

'It's only a sculpture,' he shouted, 'a
fountain.'

Only a fountain, she thought shakily, only a
grotesque fountain. The illusion that the face was alive had merely
been a trick of light and shadow compounded by the strobelike
flashes of lightning.

Her heart slowed its rapid thumping. Indeed,
now she could see the obvious artifice, the stone crudely carved to
give the effect of having been weathered and monstrously deformed
over time.

Still, there was something so acutely
unsettling and so profoundly foreboding about such intentionally
contrived ugliness, that she was relieved when they moved on and
left the fountain behind, the barely visible paint-daubed stones
leading the way.

And suddenly, the thick foliage cleared, and
for fifty yards or so, the path was hemmed in on both sides by
towering walls of rock. Eduardo stopped at midpoint to wash his
flashlight beam first over one wall, and the other, his head tilted
back to look up.

Stephanie did the same, squinting against
the cold rain and brushing her drenched hair away from her
face.

And then she saw it. No, not it -

- them!

Oh, God! Other unpleasant surprises were in
store along this path. But this!

This was far more ghastly, more powerful and
nightmare- inducing than the fountain! For these two facing walls
of rock portrayed not purgatory but surely hell itself. And, like
souls in torment, a multitude of grimacing stone heads, hellish and
frightening, cried out in silent three-dimensional agony from among
the protruding rocks. The expressions were so horrific they seemed
like real petrified people, and the rivulets of rainwater, gushing
like tears down the rock faces, seemed somehow appropriate.

Eduardo came up beside her. 'I know it's not
pretty,' he shouted, 'but it is quite dramatic. I call this place
"the Walls of Sighs". What do you think?'

She lowered the flashlight and looked at
him. 'They are . . . terrifying!'

He caught the tremor in her voice. 'Would
you rather we turned back?'

'No.' She shook her head. 'After coming this
far, I might as well see what's at the end of the line.'

Again they walked on, until finally, as
though on cue, lightning zig-zagged in the sky above and there it
was, right in front of them. Yet another folly, this one the
contrived ruins of a corniced stone wall built directly across the
path. A central Gothic archway, flanked by the ruins - the
contrived ruins - of monstrous caryatids, pierced it, and the path
led through to the other side.

For those few strobelike blue seconds, it
looked enchantingly beautiful, like something from a wondrous,
half-remembered dream. Here and there, streams of water, like thin
silver waterfalls, cascaded down from cracks on top of it, and even
the caryatids were benignly monstrous, not hideously threatening
and fearsome like the tormented faces in the Walls of Sighs.

And then the darkness took possession of it
once again and the deep voice of thunder rumbled from all
directions.

She followed Eduardo through the arch, to a
kind of courtyard. Walled-in on three sides, the fourth wall was
comprised of the steep, overgrown hillside before them, and set
directly into it, like a mouth, was a small iron-reinforced door
shrouded with vines. Above it, two Gothic-style windows, spaced
widely apart, were like watchful black eyes.