Читать книгу Yesterday Never Dies - Brian Stableford - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Having seen me leave my box, and perhaps having deduced my reason for doing so, Chapelain was by no means as startled by my appearance as I had been by Saint-Germain’s or the Prefect’s—and unlike them, I had had the grace to knock and wait to be admitted.

Chapelain’s greeting, although polite enough, was more than a trifle frosty—perhaps because he had caught a glimpse of Saint-German in my company, although I remembered that he had seemed sulky even before then. He was obviously curious, though—perhaps almost as much as I was.

“Is Monsieur Dupin not with you?” he asked.

The question was in no way surprising in itself, but the fact that it had been asked before I had been introduced to the masked lady was. My surprise must have shown, because Chapelain blushed, thus revealing an honesty of expression that neither Saint-German nor the Prefect had condescended to do.

“My apologies,” he murmured, “but you will appreciate, I think, that as a physician, I have a duty of confidentiality to my patients, and I regret that I am unable to introduce you to my companion.”

I had, in expecting the introduction, reflexively turned toward the lady, who was studying me carefully from behind her mask. “You are a friend of Monsieur Dupin?” she asked. Her voice immediately dispelled any suspicion that she might be an American, although it was very difficult to identify an alternative place of origin from such a brief sentence

“Yes, I am,” I told her.

“And he was supposed to be here tonight?”

“Yes, he was—and still is, although he is very late. Do you know him, Madame?” That was slightly impertinent, but I thought that the circumstances permitted me a certain license.

“We met once, very briefly,” she said, “in 1834—here at the Comique, as it happens...or rather, in the old theater...in the Green Room.”

That surprised me; I had not thought Dupin the sort of person to visit the Green Rooms of theaters in order to socialize with the artistes after a performance. Lucien Groix, on the other hand, in his younger days....

I ventured a further impertinence. “I would be happy to remember you to him,” I said, “if I knew your name.”

“If even half of what Monsieur Chapelain has been telling me about him is true,” the lady said, with a slight chuckle, “he will be able to deduce my identity from what I have already told you. Monsieur Groix could not stay for the performance, I assume? Pierre tells me that he is now the Prefect of Police. And poor Professor Thibodeaux is dead, alas.”

It was not the first time I had heard the name of Thibodeaux mentioned, but I could not for the life of me remember when I had heard it before, or in what context. The calculus of probability suggested that it must have been Dupin who had mentioned it to me—but he mentioned so many names, while he was using me as a sounding-board in helping himself to organize his ideas.

My own powers of ratiocination were no match for Dupin’s, but my long acquaintance with him had taught me something of his methods, and perhaps even communicated a little of his ingenuity...or perhaps not.

“Perhaps it was in memory of Monsieur Thibodeaux’s death that Monsieur Dupin asked me to hire a three-seater box, but to leave one of the seats empty,” I suggested.

The lady’s surprise was half-masked, but Chapelain’s was not. “But what about Groix?” He said. “Was he not taking the third seat? I assumed that he was making his apologies to you, because he had been called away.”

I realized my mistake too late, but tried to gloss over it as best I could. “The plot thickens,” I remarked—in English, because the phrase has no exact equivalent in French. I switched back to French in order to explain my meaning, however, even though I had deduced by now from the lady’s indeterminate accent that it was probably not her first language. “Monsieur Dupin did not ask me to invite Monsieur Groix, and I had no idea that the two of them had seen the opera together thirteen years ago, or that there had been a third party present.”

“But surely Dupin told you...,” Chapelain began—and then shut up abruptly, not so much because it was obvious that Dupin had not told me what he thought I ought to know, but because he had realized that he could not tell me either; the information had evidently come from his patient, and was thus protected by the veil of confidentiality.

“Did you deliberately leave a seat in your own box empty?” I took the risk of asking.

The question was aimed at Chapelain, but it was the lady who answered.

“Our intended companion is slightly indisposed,” she said. There was a slight edge of sarcasm in her voice. The masked woman was not showing any obvious signs of physical illness, but there was definitely a certain strain in her attitude and her voice. I thought that she might perhaps be nervous, in spite of her determination to appear calm—more fearful than expectant, I guessed. I knew that I had taken impertinence far enough already, however, and could not possibly raise the subject of her possible anxiety. Chapelain was, in any case, eager to change the subject

“I assume that you did not invite Saint-Germain to your box either?” he said, bluntly.

“I certainly did not,” I replied, “and I apologize for having unwittingly permitted him to use it in order to spy on Madame. A braver man would have thrown him out on his ear.”

“A less polite man, perhaps,” said Chapelain. “I don’t blame you—but I would not like you to take the wrong inference. He was not spying on Madame.”

I stopped myself querying that statement just in time, as my fledgling talent for education caused me to glance at the empty chair. Saint-Germain had been disappointed because the person he had hoped to see in the box was not here. Who could it possibly have been? I had an inkling—but that was certainly not a question I could ask Chapelain.

I was tempted to fish for more information about the mysterious Thibodeaux, but it was neither the time nor the place—and, as if to confirm that, the bell rang to request the audience to take their seats again. I bowed to the lady, shook Chapelain’s hand, and apologized for having disturbed them. Neither made any reply, thus suggesting that I really had disturbed them, and that they would rather I had not done so. A glance across the auditorium told me that Dupin had not arrived. His unavoidable delay had obviously been more protracted than he had hoped.

As I opened the door to the box, however, I almost collided with someone coming in—a young woman wearing a domino identical to that of the woman who was still in her seat. In spite of the mask, I recognized her immediately; it was Jana Valdemar.

Because her head was down and the range was too close, she cannot have seen anything, to begin with, but my stereotypical black jacket, shirt-front, and cravat.

“I’m truly sorry, Pierre,” she said “But I feel a little bet...oh!”

She had looked up. Evidently, she had not only realized her error but had recognized my face. Her exposed cheeks were pink, and she froze, utterly nonplused.

Instinctively—we were, after all, in the corridor of a prestigious theater, where etiquette rules supreme—I bowed. “An understandable mistake, Mademoiselle,” I murmured—and, moved by an irresistible influence, continuing murmuring, with urgent rapidity: “Obviously, since you are masked, I have no idea who you are, but it might interest you to know that the Comte de Saint-Germain is in the house, sitting in the upper gallery on this side of the auditorium. He came into my box uninvited before the performance and stared into this box, but I doubt that he will do it again. If you are discreet, you should be able to remain invisible.”

Then I stepped aside, holding the door open for her. I caught a glimpse of Chapelain standing up inside and looking out, a picture of anguished embarrassment. I nodded to him again, closed the door behind Jana Valdemar, and hurried back to my seat.

As I passed the stairway leading up to the gallery in which I had glimpsed Saint-German, I looked up reflexively. I did not see Saint-Germain, but I did see Lucien Groix standing at the top peering into the gallery as if he were looking for someone. I could not believe that he really had been following the fake Comte, given that he did, indeed, have agents to do that sort of thing for him, but he was nevertheless there. Why? Clearly, in spite of the fact that the regime and the administration were falling apart, Monsieur Groix still had time to “waste” at the theater.

Perhaps, I thought, he doesn’t want to miss the dance of the nuns.

Neither did I, of course; it was the highlight of the opera.

Whether or not it was due to Meyerbeer’s presence, the music and the choreography of the third act seemed to me to be exactly as I remembered them. I knew that other versions of the opera had expanded the ballet, sometimes replacing Meyerbeer’s music with something more bacchanalian, but this one seemed strictly orthodox.

The idea of the piece is simple enough. When Robert and Bertram go into the ruined Convent of Saint Rosalia—named for the patron saint of Palermo—in order to search for the magic branch, their intrusion awakens the ghosts of long-dead nuns buried in the crypt, whose silent ballet recalls, not the sanctity and placidity of their convent life, but the supposed erotic adventures of their remoter youth.

To be perfectly honest, the version of the ballet featured in the present performance seemed a trifle tame by the standards of 1847, although I could imagine that it must have seemed considerably more risqué in 1831; the art of ballet had undergone a considerable evolution in the interim, and so had notions of the kinds of debauchery that could be accommodated on respectable stages like that of the Opéra-Comique. Romanticism had a lot to answer for—or to be congratulated on—in that respect.

In spite of the fact that he was an exceedingly staid and bourgeois king by comparison with the Bourbons, Louis-Philippe’s reign had seen a considerable relaxation of moral restraint in the theater. Perhaps it was because of his supposedly democratic credentials that outrageous behavior once confined to the private lives of courtiers—at least according to scurrilous rumor—was now considered entirely appropriate for representation on the popular stage. I had never actually been to Bobino, but reportage suggested that far worse debauchery could be seen there every night than was delicately suggested in Meyerbeer’s ballet, and attributing such behavior to nuns was now entirely typical of the anti-clerical sentiments that were loudly running riot in Republican ranks—not that there was anything unusual about the suggestions themselves, which were as old as convent life.

Even so, as I watched the ballet through my opera-glasses, I could not help feeling that, just as identifying Robert the Great as the legendary Robert the Devil, even while allowing him to remain fundamentally virtuous, was something of an insult, Scribe’s invention was an even more blatant insult to poor Saint Rosalia, who had allegedly been one of the relatively few female hermits, and highly unlikely to have participated in any orgies. So far as I could tell, she was only cited in the story because of her connection with Palermo, where the action was set, although I knew—as Scribe and Delavigne has presumably known—that she was descended from a Norman family. That had presumably been the hook on which the librettists had hung Duke Robert’s entirely imaginary romance. The actual Saint Rosalia had dated from at least a century later than Robert the Great, and could not possibly have had a convent named after her during his lifetime, let alone a ruined one.

As the ballet drew toward its close, knowing that the plot was about to return to the romantic entanglements of Robert and Alice, and Bertram’s doomed attempt to complete his diabolical bargain, I lowered my opera-glasses and sat back in my chair, expecting the opera to become even less interesting to me, given my confused state of mind. Had Dupin been there, the situation would have been different, but I was on my own, and feeling increasingly awkward in my isolation...except that, all of sudden, I realized that I was no longer isolated.

I honestly do not know how long the ghost had been there, and in a strange way, the fact that it might have been there throughout the ballet without my realizing it—perhaps without my ever realizing it, had I not sat back at that particular moment—was more alarming than the specter’s presence. I had been associated with Dupin for so long, and had seen so many bizarre things in consequence, that my awareness that I was looking at a ghost seemed almost run-of-the-mill; and what shot through my mind was neither terror nor amazement, but the thought that Dupin would never have forgiven me if I had not seen it. Not that either of us would ever have known, if I had let it pass unnoticed...but the principle remained the same.

Perhaps that thought was itself bizarre, but from the instant I caught sight of the ghost, I thought I knew why Dupin had instructed me to hire a three-seater box for an audience of two. He had surely known—or at least, suspected—that the ghost would appear, and that was why he had wanted to come.

But he had missed it.

He had been unavoidably detained.

The ghost was not phosphorescent, but nor was it entirely a creature of shadow. It reflected the distant lights of the stage just as an ordinary person would have done, in spite of the fact that it was not really solid, that it was the mere appearance of a person. I was not in doubt about that, and not merely because I had not heard anyone come into the box. There was something about the presence that was unmistakably spectral, although I could not pin down exactly what it was. It was not transparent any more than it was phosphorescent, but it was not truly present either; it had no mass; it did not belong.

There was, however, something odd even about the quality of its unbelonging. It did not seem out of place. It seemed, in fact, to be exactly where it ought to be, in the empty seat next to mine...but if it was not out of place, it was definitely out of time. It belonged to the past—perhaps not to a very distant past, but one that was definitely dead.

It was wearing spectral clothes, in a style that might still have passed muster even today, and there was nothing unusual about the cut of its black hair and beard, but there was something in its attitude and its gaze that spoke of displacement. Even before it turned to look directly at me, I could measure a peculiar puzzlement and disorientation in its perception, as if it could not quite understand why everything around it was different. When it did turn its head, the movement was slightly awkward—and it was then that I noticed that its hands, positioned on the handle of a wooden walking-stick wedged vertically between its knees, were gnarled by arthritis—an arthritis that probably affected its neck too.

Ghosts, I presumed, did not usually suffer from arthritis, so I deduced that this one must be more like some kind of strange echo of an arthritic person who really had sat in an equivalent chair in an equivalent box, perhaps in 1834. If the image really had been displaced in time, I thought, then of course everything looked different. This was still the Salle Favart, but it had been completely rebuilt after the fire of 1838. And Robert le Diable was still Robert le Diable, but this was not the same version of the opera that had been played here in 1834, if what Saint-Germain had said could be trusted. Not only were the dancers different, but so was the dance, and the music accompanying it.

The ghost was that of a man of about sixty, probably a little older than Meyerbeer and Scribe, but when he turned to look at me and I stared into his dark, ungleaming eyes, I had an impression of much greater antiquity than that. His overall appearance, I felt sure, dated from 1834—I was even convinced that I could guess the name of the man at whom I was looking—but there was something within and beyond that appearance that was much older, and much less human.

The Devil himself?

I thought not; the gaze did not seem particularly friendly, but it did not seem to be malevolent either—mischievous, perhaps, or at worst slyly malicious. Even so, I told myself, it might conceivably have been one of the many pale simulacra of the Christian Devil that haunted the interstices between our material world and what some people called the dream dimensions. There are, as Hamlet remarked, more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.

I almost contrived to unfreeze my throat in time to speak, although I have no idea what I would have said. Instead, the ghost spoke, perhaps thus proving that it had some small measure of material presence.

“Yesterday never dies,” it said, “but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing.”

There was a measure of melancholy in the words—as, I suppose, befitted their content—but there was also an odd note of satisfaction, of intellectual triumph. The latter was a note that I had heard before, in Auguste Dupin’s voice, when he had solved a puzzle of some sort.

“Can you see me?” I enquired, interestedly.

I could not see any sign in the phantom’s expression that it had heard what I said, but it did give the impression that it could see someone sitting where I was sitting...or had been sitting in a chair alongside his own, in 1834 or some other time: Auguste Dupin, I guessed, if this really was an echo of 1834 caught on the wing...with how many other undying yesterdays caught in its uncanny net?

Seized by a sudden intuition, I looked across the auditorium, wondering whether Chapelain, the mystery woman, and Jana Valdemar could also see the phantom. Chapelain was staring at the stage, his profile reflecting the distant limelight—but both masked women were ignoring the final steps of the ballet and looking across the auditorium. The combination of the masks and the angle of the feeble lighting made it impossible to judge their expressions, or to see where their gazes were focused, but I was immediately convinced that they could see that I was not alone, even if they did not know that my companion was not human.

I immediately looked back at the ghost again, in order to estimate how much they might be able to see of it by the light reflected from the phantom visage—at least, I tried to. As unobtrusively as it had appeared, the specter had vanished again.

Perhaps they didn’t see it, I thought. Perhaps they were merely looking at me. I did not believe it.

Strangely enough, even though I had not felt frightened—and ironically, in view of the observations I had earlier made of Lucien Groix—I found that my hand was convulsively closed on the pommel of my own walking-stick, although I had no memory of even having picked it up. Even though I had not yet shown any sign of arthritis in my knuckles, the grip was so tight and painful that I had difficulty relaxing the fingers in order to lie the cane down again—but I had no sensation of wielding it, even symbolically, as a weapon of defense; it was more a matter of clutching an amulet or a talisman: an echo of a time even more remote, I supposed, than the heroic age of swords and chivalry.

If the rest of the opera would have been an anticlimax after the dance of the nuns in any case, it was doubly or triply so after the manifestation of the ghost: the ghost, I presumed, of the mysterious and long-dead Professor Thibodeaux. I suppose it ought still have been possible for me to obtain a thrill of sorts from Bertram’s summons to Hell, if not from Robert’s marriage to Isabelle, all the more so having been given the glimpse of something even more enigmatic than the problematic overlap of 1834 and 1847 in the spectral eyes, but it was not.

I was by now, it seemed, too experienced a ghost-seer to be thrown off my stride by such a subtle hint of diabolism, and too seasoned a dealer with entities mistaken for and conflated with the imaginary devils of Christendom to find their occasional intrusion into our world anything more that a fact of life. I had been beyond the limits of the world, and had been possessed in my own flesh by an entity that most people would have identified as a demon. I was not a novice in such matters.

Indeed, I had sufficient second-hand expertise, by virtue of many long conversations with Dupin, to know that my sighting of the ghost was highly atypical in several respects. Most ghost-seers, according to Dupin, only see ghosts that they are half-expecting to see: ghosts of people that they knew in life, or ghosts of their ancestors, or anecdotal ghosts with whose stories they are familiar—because, of course, the experience of seeing a ghost is mostly, and often entirely, subjective. It was obvious to me now that the reason that Dupin had not breathed a word about what he half-expected to see tonight was his curiosity to know whether I would be able to see anything at all, given that I had never met Thibodeaux and had only heard his name in passing. He would doubtless be very interested to know that I had.

But where was Dupin? If he had half-expected to see a ghost tonight, that made it more than doubly surprising that he had missed the opportunity. Any number of things might have kept him away from a mere opera—especially one that he considered second-rate—but to keep him away from a manifestation that anyone but him would have considered supernatural...that was a different matter.

I could not help wondering whether his absence might have anything to do with the “slight indisposition” of the person originally intended to occupy the third seat in Chapelain’s box, although she had managed to arrive at the interval, even if he had not; but I knew that I had to be cautious about placing too much credence in any “deduction” in that regard. I had to remember that I was only a pupil, not a master, in Dupin’s arcane arts.

On the other hand....

Pierre Chapelain was a magnetizer: a physician who employed treatments based in the science of suggestion. He used magnetism—or hypnotism, as it was increasingly being called nowadays—as both an aid to diagnosis and an aid to make his patients feel better, whether to suppress dolor or to mobilize their innate resistance to disease. In objective terms, most of his prescriptions were elementary, with more emphasis on physical exercise than drugs; he was an opponent of sanguination, and was even suspicious of antisepsis—of which Dupin approved wholeheartedly, being a covert to François Raspail’s theory of disease. Chapelain’s opinion was that many ailments, not excepting the most familiar infectious diseases, were best treated by attempting to encourage the power of mind over body, although that was frustratingly difficult with many patients, whose habits, tastes, convictions, and petty manias were often unwittingly antithetical to that kind of natural self-defense.

Chapelain had the reputation of being a good physician, and what little I had seen of his treatments supported that contention, but he suffered from a certain lack of self-esteem, and was often frustrated by the imitations of his hypnotic technique. He had told me more than once that the best physicians of his sort worked in pairs, employing what modern parlance was beginning to call “mediums”—hypersensitive individuals who, when entranced themselves and guided by a magnetizer, sometimes had more far-reaching insight into a patient’s mental state than either could have achieved alone. He was as insistent as Dupin that there was nothing supernatural about such intuition, which was based in a capacity for sympathetic identification with others that most women, and even a few men, possessed to some degree.

In that respect, the doctor made no secret of the fact that he deeply regretted the loss of the best medium with whom he had ever had the opportunity to work: Jana Valdemar. At least, he made no secret of that to me—but he had not been nearly so ready to confess it to Dupin, who had once got into a contest of wits with the young woman in question, and did not approve of the manner in which she had attempted to deploy her undoubted talents. The Comte de Saint-Germain, I knew, also had a strong interest in her, having once been her mentor, and had been enthusiastic to renew that situation for some time. Now I knew that she was the person who should have been in Chapelain’s box when the fake Comte barged into my box, it explained why Saint-Germain had been so eager to spot the absentee, and so disappointed to find the seat empty. If Chapelain were associated with the medium again, that might also explain why he had been keeping us—or, more specifically, Dupin—at some distance of late, fearful of Dupin’s disapproval.

I took a certain pride in having worked all that out long before the fifth act came to an end, but I was still deeply frustrated by the questions into which I had no insight at all, however hazardous. Why was Chapelain’s patient here, along with Lucien Groix, both of whom had apparently seen the 1834 performance—and along with Thibodeaux, who had turned up in spirit, and Dupin, who should have turned up but had not? Something was, as Saint-Germain had readily observed, going on—something of which I had only scratched the surface thus far. And now that Saint-Germain’s curiosity had been piqued, presumably by virtue of a mere coincidence, how might his potential involvement complicate the situation?

Such preoccupations were still weighing upon me as I made my way out into the street. Convention demands that the first waves of fiacres parked outside the theater waiting for the sortie should go to ladies and their escorts. Many unaccompanied males dispersed to look for cabs a little further afield, but I always waited, knowing that once the first fleet of fiacres had taken off like a flock of startled birds, others would begin to arrive to pick up the stragglers. I moved some forty meters along the trottoir, in order to find a deserted spot, but I took up a station under a réverbère so that I would be clearly visible when I got the chance to flag a cab down. I knew that I would have at least ten minutes to wait, so I sank into an absent-minded reverie—or, rather, sank back into the same one that had possessed me ever since my sighting of the ghost.

After two minutes or so, a private carriage drew up alongside me and stopped. I recognized Pierre Chapelain’s carriage, but it was the older masked woman who put her head out of the portiere.

“May we offer you a lift, Monsieur Reynolds?” she asked. Obviously, Chapelain had told me her name, even though he had shirked the formal introduction. Chapelain and Jana Valdemar were presumably inside the carriage, but neither showed their face.

“Thank you, Madame, but no,” I said. “It would take Dr. Chapelain out of his way.”

The carriage did not draw away. “Forgive me for asking,” said the masked woman, “but are you feeling ill?”

I was slightly surprised by that, although it was easy enough to guess what she was getting at. Evidently, she had seen someone else in my box, briefly. She was curious.

“Quite well, thank you, Madame,” I assured her. Until she asked, I had not suspected otherwise, but I realized that I did feel a trifle queasy. We were still in the precincts of the Comique, however. Etiquette still ruled.

Still the carriage did not pull away, although more fiacres were now beginning to arrive, and it would soon be causing an obstruction.

“Forgive me again,” the lady persisted, “but you really do look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

The game was obviously up. Even etiquette could not excuse a blatant and transparent lie.

“As a matter of fact, Madame,” I said, “I have—but the experience was transient, and the phantom did not appear to mean me any harm.” I looked her in the face then, almost challenging her to find a permissible conversational countermove.

“In that case,” she said seemingly quite unperturbed, and probably having obtained the conformation she wanted, “I’ll wish you bonsoir. Sleep well, Monsieur Reynolds.”

The masked face disappeared from the portière. I heard Chaplain rap twice on the wall of the carriage’s compartment with his cane, and the coachman, meekly obedient, flicked the horses lightly with his whip, instructing them to move off. They obeyed.

I was, however, in no mood to go meekly home to my bed, to sleep—if I could—and then to wait for Dupin to call on me at his leisure. I wanted to see him, and I wanted to see him right away, if I could find him. I was not so certain of my powers of deduction as to take it for granted that I could find him, but there was only one place I could think of to look, and I certainly intended to try it before admitting defeat.

When the fiacre finally collected me, I told the coachman to take me to the Rue Dunot, where Dupin’s lodgings were. I did not expect to find him at home, in the strict sense of the term, but I did think that he would be in the house, and that he would open up to me, even if he would not do so to anyone else.