Camera Obscura Read online

  "Across space we travelled for aeons untold…"

  The lights picked out others like her in the background, dressed in fantastical uniforms – a strange, multi-legged creature hiding in one corner–

  "For a world to call our own–"

  "A world like yours–"

  Boos, hisses from the crowd–

  "To take for ours–"

  A beat – the crowd expectant – the lizard girl turning faceon to the audience–

  "But we took a wrong turn, and of all the nations of the Earth, we got the English!"

  Cheers. Laughter. And now the lights came on, bright and many-coloured, the rocket shot off into space – a loud explosion – a burst of stars – and the dancers filled the stage, the sound of pistons filling up the air–

  "Let's hear it for the fabulous lizard girls!"

  And the can-can started, green legs flashing naked in the lights. Lady de Winter finished her drink and stood up.

  Outside the night was ordinary and for a moment she was tempted to go back and see the show. She had heard the story being told – some said the lizards were not native-born to Earth, had come from an unimaginable distance, from outer space, had fallen down and slept on Caliban's Island for untold centuries before Vespucci found them–

  But these were stories, nothing more. The lizards were not her concern.

  The silent coachman was waiting for her. She climbed into the coach and said, "The thirteenth arrondissement."

  TWENTY-TWO

  Toulouse-Lautrec

  There was a multitude of alphabets on the shop fronts, signs she couldn't read, lanterns, the smell of cooking unfamiliar, soy and rice vinegar, frying ginger, frying garlic, chilli – men and women sitting outside eating noodles from large bowls of soup, the strong smell of dried fish everywhere, in the windows dark-red pork and ducks on hooks, on a street corner a juggler playing with fire. Barbershops, tea houses, a bathhouse, dogs, cats, children, scrolls of elaborate calligraphy, bamboo baskets with chickens inside, a woman selling dried roots, bodies pressing against bodies, Milady de Winter striding through the crowd a head taller than most, searching for the Speckled Band.

  She found it down a narrow avenue – a dark front, a sicklysweet smell wafting from the open doorway, a woman made up in the front, bowing as Milady approached, the eyes checking her out – expertly. "Madame, please welcome," the woman said. Her eyes said she knew exactly what Milady was – not missing the gun, the posture. Her eyes said Milady was a problem she wished would just go away. Milady smiled and showed white teeth, the woman nodded and the smile remained fixed. Tried, nevertheless – "We pay already."

  "I'm looking for one of your customers."

  "We don't want trouble."

  How many times had she heard that before? She said, "Then don't make any," and strode past, and into the Speckled Band.

  A low-ceilinged dark room, low couches, girls gliding between patrons who lay comatose, long pipes held in lifeless fingers. The girls lit the pipes, dark resin releasing vapours that travelled through the pipe into the patrons' mouths. Opium, that great export of the East – though most of it came from the lizards' colonies in India, stamped with the lizardine government's seal. She scanned the room, saw him–

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec lay on a divan, a pipe resting beside him, a glass of absinthe on the low table before him. His eyes closed, his little chest rising and falling steadily. She went over to him.

  "Wake up," she said.

  There was no answer. The woman from the entrance materialised beside her. The other girls – and patrons – did a good job of not seeing her there. "He is deep into the dream," the woman said.

  "What does he dream?" Milady said, and the woman shrugged. "This," she said, throwing her hand in an arc, taking in the walls. Milady looked.

  The walls were covered in paintings.

  They began conventionally – the paintings she had seen before – can-can girls in vibrant colours, caught in motion, lively and alive. Changing, gradually, as the colours muted, and she saw women/machine hybrids, gears and pipes protruding from an abdomen, a belly, eyes on stalks, arms of metal, becoming gradually less and less human even in shape, until the wall had become a chart of bizarre unsettling machines, cogs and wheels and gears and moving pistons, all the while the suggestion of sex, not man, not woman, but there all the same, machines mating with other machines.

  She followed it further, past a corner and to the next wall where the colours muted again, even metal rusting, and the wall was grey, the machines disappeared, and the paintings depicted a world as seen beyond a mist, a blackness where alien stars shone in strange configurations, where giant machines floated in space, in a ring around a bloated red sun…. "He sees beyond, now," the woman said.

  "Beyond what?"

  The woman shrugged. "Beyond this world," she said. "Into another."

  She felt uneasy and didn't know why, exactly. "Is it the opium?" she asked. The woman said, "It helps, but no. It is him."

  "Can you wake him up?"

  "You shall have to wait. Would you like a cup of tea?"

  Flawless Parisian French, all of a sudden. Milady grinned. "Sure."

  She waited as two of the girls came and lifted the minute artist, carrying him away to an adjacent room.

  She followed them there, drank tea, grimaced, watched the little artist come around. It took less time than she had expected.

  He sat up – so rapidly it startled her. His eyes opened, and he said, "Let me back!"

  She waited. His eyes were still unseeing. The artist's hands closed into fists. "My pencils!"

  The girls hurried back to him, already carrying his equipment, no doubt used to this ritual. Henri took a sketch pad and selected a pencil. His hand moved rapidly over the paper. A crazy sense of scale – enormous structures floating in space? She watched. She had few doubts now. The artist's face was contorted. His eyes were staring elsewhere, beyond the room. He still hadn't noticed her. He finished the sketch with one last savage line and collapsed on the seat. "More," he said. Then, his eyes flickered, opened truly for the first time, and he looked around him in confusion. "Where is my pipe?" he said, his voice that of a reedy child.

  Milady had brought the artist's opium pipe with her into the room and now held it before her, the artist's eyes drawn to it, to her. "There is no pipe," she said.

  "Wha–"

  She held the pipe in both hands and as he watched she broke it in half.

  "Tell me about your friend," she said.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  But he looked frightened now. "We saw each other last night, didn't we?" she said. "I want to know what else you saw."

  "I see nothing."

  She snatched the paper from his lap. "And this?"

  He shrugged, but looked uneasy. "Dreams, nightmares. Nothing more."

  She smiled, and he flinched. "Tell me about Yong Li."

  "I've got nothing to say to you."

  She smiled. She went out of the room and returned with a fresh pipe and a ball of opium and she put them the other side of the room from him and then went and sat down again. She watched him watching the pipe. She watched him thinking about it. When he did move it was surprisingly fast but she was ready for it and a bullet travelled faster than a man and the pipe exploded in his face and he howled. She kept the gun in her hand, not quite aiming it at him.

  "I'll get you a new one," she promised. "Sit down."

  He hesitated, standing there like a caught animal. "Sit!"

  He went back and sat down. He looked at her and there was naked hunger in his face.

  "Tell me about your friend," she said again, soothingly. The gun was in her lap but she didn't need it. "Tell me everything, and they'll make you a new pipe."

  His eyes burned, but he slowly nodded.

  "I met him at Thumb's," he said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Yong Li

  When he began talking it was in a rush, the words tumbling over e
ach other. The first thing he said surprised her. She said, "At the tobacco shop?"

  "Yes."

  He was a friend of Tom Thumb's. Two little men with big appetites. He knew Tom was dealing with Indochina, because sometimes Tom gave him back gifts – "A little opium here and there. For medicinal purposes. I am not a well man–"

  She waited.

  "So then, about a month ago, I went into the shop and Tom introduced me to his new friend. Yong Li. He was a nice guy–"

  The same words Tom had used. And the girl.

  "So… I don't know how to tell it. There was just something about him. An aura. I could sense it but couldn't see it though I knew it was there. I knew I had to paint him. Do you know of the Eastern religions? He was like the Buddha, with his glistening large belly, his smile. His eyes saw further than humans can see. He was a man deeply changed by some experience in his past. And that scar down his belly – I was fascinated by it. I was attracted – not to him, exactly, but to what he – what he had inside him. A difference. I didn't know how to describe it. I drew and sketched and painted him, trying to capture that essence. It was a thing of no discernible colour. A grey metallic – but not metallic, either, not exactly – it was as if his essence was hidden behind mist, and try as I might I couldn't penetrate it."

  He sighed, his eyes clearing, and called for one of the girls and asked for his drink. The girl looked at Milady, who nodded. The girl went and fetched Henri his drink.

  "Tom is supposed to meet me here," he said suddenly.

  She turned sharply, looked at him. "Tom?"

  "We sometimes get together–" He blinked, said, "I think, maybe, not tonight. I was mistaken."

  She filed it away. The artist blinked again, focused on her. "You look like the girl in the poster on Tom's wall," he said suddenly. "The girl from the circus. I could paint you."

  "And I could shoot you," she said, "so why don't we table both for the moment and concentrate?"

  He shrugged, a small smile appearing for the first time on his face. He was getting some of his energy back, she thought. He was almost bouncy. "It would be a pleasure to paint you."

  She smiled too, and said, "It would be a pleasure to shoot you–" watching him lose the smile. She nodded. "Tell me about Yong Li," she said.

  He was drawn to the Asian man. But when he returned to the shop Yong Li was no longer there. He had gone – "To a safe place, Tom said. He had an… appointment in Paris, but not yet, and Tom had to keep him safe until then."

  "So what did you do?"

  "I was disconsolate! I had to find him!"

  Softly: "And did you find him?"

  Henri did. He had asked Tom, but Tom refused to divulge Yong Li's location. So he watched. He saw Mademoiselle L'Espanaye go into the shop – he knew her vaguely, one of those faces you see around – but his suspicions were aroused. He listened outside and heard the Asian man discussed. He followed her, to her work and then to her home. He came to the Rue Morgue. He watched the windows in the night, watching for a sign of the man who gave him glimpses of another world.

  "What do you mean, another world?"

  Another world, he said. An alien world, just out of reach, yet so close he could almost touch it. He needed to see it, sense it, feel it… He wanted to draw it, but could not see it clearly. Only glimpses, flashes in the mind. "It was after I met him that I began to take the opium with some intent," he said. "It allowed my mind to relax enough for the glimpses to become more than glimpses. A vast endless space where great shapes floated, moved – but with intent! They were aware, they were watching, and they were coming closer all the while. It was as if Yong Li's wound, his scar, was the closed door to another world, but things slipped through – like a keyhole where you put your eye to it you could see to another room."

  He engineered a meeting with the man. He knew he had to go outside sometime, if only for his foul rolling tobacco. He bumped into him by chance, and Yong Li was delighted to see him.

  "He did not enjoy being cooped up in that place," Henri said. "He said the women were not clean. That Europeans were filthy and did not wash, and their smell was bad. He was quite rude, really, but I guess you have to make allowances. I think he was just in a bad humour, from being held there all this time. He was very glad to see me."

  "So what did you do?"

  Henri looked surprised. "We got drunk," he said, as if the answer was obvious.

  "Oh."

  "And then I painted him."

  "I see."

  "He wouldn't discuss it with me," Henri said. "But I think he was glad because I could see what he saw. I think it was very hard for him. He would touch his stomach and grimace, as if he were in pain. But it was not a physical pain. It was the pain of seeing that you did not wish to see."

  But Henri wished to see. He found that by touching the man's naked stomach the visions in his mind became clearer. He became obsessed with trying to capture more clearly what he was seeing. He sensed a great presence there, and a great danger too, beyond the wall of mist. They met in secret, he and Yong Li, when the two women were away. Once he came up to the apartment, but Yong Li did not like that. So they met in a bar, and talked, and drank – "He didn't like the opium. Alcohol helped him not see, but opium had the opposite effect –" and Henri drew.

  "Then he told me his time was near, and he could unburden himself and go home. And then he told me we could not see each other again – it was becoming too dangerous. I was disconsolate!"

  "Disconsolate," she said.

  "Yes! I did not know what to do. I was mad! But I promised him I will stay away."

  "Did you kill him?" she said. The artist opened wide, shocked eyes. "Kill him? How could I kill him?"

  She thought of the body ripped open, as if someone had reached inside… "To open the door he was keeping locked," she said.

  "Never!" He looked flustered and she knew she had something.

  "You thought about it, didn't you?" she said.

  "I… that is not… I would never!"

  "What did you do?"

  "I waited. I stood outside all night, but he never came down. I came here and took much opium, but my link was fading, it was becoming harder to see."

  She waited. "The Clockwork Room," she said.

  Yes. There came a night when he saw Yong Li go out. He was accompanied by the younger L'Espanaye woman.

  "So I followed them," he said, shrugging. "What else could I do?"

  "You followed them to the Clockwork Room?"

  He used to be a regular there, he explained. He loved the place, the smell of oil, the hum of the machinery. There was something about it, he realised later, that was a little bit close to the other world he could – almost – see. He couldn't quite say what it was… When he saw that was their destination he went ahead, came inside through the back entrance, and was already at the bar when they came in. If Yong Li noticed him he gave no sign. But he knew that he did.

  "What was he doing there?"

  He described the evening – the girl looking overwhelmed by the place – Yong Li at the bar – the girl going upstairs to the private rooms. He watched Yong Li all the while, waiting for the man to come to him, but he never did.

  And now she sat forward, waiting, for this witness, this drug-addled, short-legged artist who could fill in for her the missing time at the Clockwork Room.

  "Tell me," she said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Taken

  They were waiting for her when she left the Speckled Band. Dark-clad shapes moving in the street outside, ringing her – onlookers studiously not looking.

  They were Asian, and that came as no surprise. They stood in their semi-circle and regarded her. She looked at their faces. Only a couple were unscarred. She said, "Black never goes out of fashion."

  One of the men, older than the others, stepped forward. "You are to come with us, please," he said.

  "Or else?" she said.

  For a moment, the man looked confused. "Or else what?"
he said.

  "You're supposed to say or else," she said, "and then tell me what you'll do if I don't come with you."

  "Oh," he said, nodding. "Thank you, yes. Come with us or else we'll kill you and throw your body into the river, please," he said.

  "Well, since you put it so nicely," she said. She looked back at the door of the Speckled Band. It was shut.

  "I can't say I'm that surprised to see you," she said, speaking to the one who seemed to be their leader. "Whoever you are."