A Season In Carcosa Read online

  “What do you want, Valise? Why are you following me?”

  “Following you? I wasn’t doing anything of the sort. You know very well I lunch in the Dôme. I merely saw you while waiting for a friend of mine.”

  Henri twitched, his eyes dancing around the room and refusing to meet my gaze. It was clear he did not want me to ask about the script that lay between us.

  “What book is that?” I asked.

  He tensed, as though he feared I might swoop down and snatch it from him. Had I been closer, I might have.

  “It’s nothing at all,” he stammered.

  “Nothing, is it?” I leaned closer, daunting him. He winced, his eyes spinning into his head, and though I knew my unblinking stare would bore into Henri’s psyche given time, I was robbed of it by the Indian. I had not heard him approach, yet there he stood behind Henri. At first, yellow eyes were all I saw, giant and menacing, and them the pit of my stomach rebelled. Though his expression did not change, it felt as though he were snarling at me. I stepped away from Henri, hoping to keep some distance between me and the strange man. Henri, for the most part, remained in whatever half-trance I had found him in. I tried desperately to break it.

  “Come, Henri. I haven’t eaten. Join me.”

  “I’m a bit–”

  “Nonsense,” I swallowed, my gorge rising. “Join me at the Dôme. I’ll arrange for us a table on the patio.” Where the air is fresher, I neglected to add.

  Neither I nor Henri looked at the Indian, but it was clear Henri wanted to and only my presence stopped him. I made the mistake of letting my eyes drift to the script, laying face down upon the ground. I barely had time to notice the strange symbol printed on its lower read corner before Henri’s demeanour sharpened and his wits returned. Without hesitation, he bent down and picked up the book, then held it tight to his chest as though to hide it.

  “Just let me take care of this. I’ll join you in a moment.”

  “Please, allow me,” I said, graciously drawing my wallet from my pocket. I wanted to hurry him, but also see the play he had chosen. Part of me also hoped he might mention my offer to his sister. He would not accept any money, however.

  “I do not need your charity, Valise. Please wait for me at the café.”

  I looked at the yellow-eyed Indian, and acquiesced, eager to be out of his presence. I retreated to Le Dôme and ordered a tea as I awaited my friend’s arrival. It was unclear how long I sat there with my cigarettes burning, watching the warped door of that hidden paper shop. But I never saw Henri emerge, and I was forced eventually to lunch alone.

  Henri more or less vanished from my life afterward. On occasion I’d see him dashing madly across campus, always too far to catch, and I heard the whispers about him that were even then slowly spreading across campus, incredulous whispers I at once put out of mind. It was a lonely existence without Henri. Certainly, I had others to spend my time with – a gifted musician never suffers from the lack – but none were as dear to me as my friend Henri, none inspired in me the same amount of pride and love for all their foibles.

  After the first few weeks he was gone I found an excuse to visit the small flat he and Elyse shared, all in the hope that I might be invited in to see whether those rumours I refused to believe were true. Elyse answered the door when I knocked, but though she did not open the door all the way, still I could see Henri haunting the background, a frail gaunt spectre, eyes ringed dark and full of fire. Elyse smiled that smile that melted my heart and made me forget all others, but when I tried to step past her, let alone speak a word to the passing Henri, she rose a delicate hand to my chest. It was clear from her face that all she sought was comfort. I had no choice but to put my feelings for Henri aside and console her.

  She led me to the kitchen, far away from the room Henri was in. I imagined it was to ensure he could not hear what she had to say.

  “All he does is write,” she said. “Always working on his strange music. I wish he would stop, Valise. I hear him late into the night whispering, whispering. Sometimes, I worry it’s no longer his voice I hear but my own. Sometimes, it’s no voice I recognize at all. Maybe he’ll listen to you. Maybe you can break him of his obsession. I want my brother back.” She broke down and cried into my chest, and I closed my eyelids and soaked in her sorrow. It was good, finally, to be once more needed, and I would do all I could for her.

  “Henri!” I bellowed, storming into his room. I paused only long enough that I might grasp how disorganized and chaotic it was. “We must speak at once.”

  My gaunt friend stepped from behind his cluttered desk. His face was drained of colour, but I vowed not to let his appearance dissuade me.

  “You must cease this, friend. It is consuming you. I have never known you to be full of health, but this ...” I waved my hand over his willowed frame. He merely attempted a pale imitation of a smile.

  “It means nothing. None of it does. I am enraptured by this project.”

  “What do you mean? What project?”

  Here, his smile faltered.

  “I cannot tell you.”

  I sputtered. “Why on earth not?”

  He would not look at me, and behind me Elyse could not. Suddenly, I wondered if I had been played for a fool. Had anything Elyse told me been true? I could be sure of only one thing: that I’d had enough of their shenanigans. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be gone, but despite the betrayal my insatiable curiosity had not been allayed. I spotted amid the clutter a familiar jaundiced volume, open and overturned. Even across the room it filled me with ill.

  “What is that?” I ordered, but Henri stepped between me and it before I could get closer. He seemed strangely out of breath.

  “It’s not yours. Valise, please leave.”

  “I will do no such a thing. I demand you tell me what you are working on.”

  He sighed and looked to where I expected his sister to be. But when I turned I found she had vanished.

  “There is no one left to prove yourself to. Please, leave. I must finish my writing. I feel I am so very close.”

  “Close to what? To adapting that?” I pointed to the volume overturned on the table. I noticed his eyes would not go to it while I was in the room. “You think that will bring you what you need?”

  “I’m not sure what it will bring, Valise. I’m not sure at all.”

  “Then why do it? Look at yourself, Henri. The toll is too great. Forgive me, but you seem ill-equipped for the task. Here, I have an idea. Let me look at what you’ve done so far. Let me offer you my expertise.”

  I thought he might be choking on his own tongue, that the stress was so great he was about to collapse into seizure. But that strange gurgling emerged as something else. Something I had not expected. “Are – are you laughing?” He did not deign me with the answer, but it was clear my offer was rejected by the sound of his uproarious laughter. I did not care for that reaction. I did not care for it at all.

  How was I to know when I stormed out that I would not see Henri again for months? He and his sister disappeared from the circles we once travelled in, and if they had new circles I was blissfully kept ignorant. I did not appreciate the treatment I received from them, and had no interest in gracing them with a friendship that was so clearly unwelcome. I left them to their own devices as they left me to mine, and could not even find the interest to pay attention to the new rumours that were circulating about what Henri was doing with his sister’s help. There was talk. That was all I cared to know.

  But even I could not escape the gossip for long. It ran like chains across the campus, binding students together one by one, forging them into a single voice that rattled inside my head. Elyse, I was told, had all but retired from social life in order to take care of her brother as he composed his grand opus. Confidentially, all the talk of Henri and his mysterious work grated on me, made me think that I might too want to pen some grand statement on life through music, if only to show those fools mesmerized by his growing legend that i
t was no great accomplishment. Yet I never did. I tried more than once, but each attempt ended in despairing failure. I’d never failed at anything before, and yet there I sat, night after night, devoid of any inspiration that might turn cacophonic notes into sweet euphonies. It disconcerted me to say the least, and I knew I had only the lingering rumours of Henri to blame. Their echo seemed to follow me wherever I went.

  I did all I could to forget my former friend and his sibling, put my experiences with them behind me once and for all. I could not understand what had gone wrong, and wanted to spend no more time on it than I already had. As far as I was concerned, the pair was dead, and I was better off. But one does not put aside feelings quite so easily. During the day I might have spoken tall and feigned ignorance when either name came up, but at night? At night visions haunted me, my dreams overrun with music and their laughing faces. I dreamt of far away lands on lakes of shining gold, where kings and queens danced in opulent ballrooms while fools spied on from the wings. There, I saw Henri and Elyse dressed in the finest clothing, spinning across a shining floor, never once turning their heads my way.

  For all the above reasons, one can imagine my surprise when I received the invitation. The card was small and addressed to me in Henri’s shaking script, and on its rear face a time, an address in the Latin quarter, and the words: Your attendance is requested for an evening in Carcosa. Carcosa. Now why did that name sound at once both familiar and dreadful? At the time, I had no recall. And that, in the end, may have been my greatest folly.

  I had no intention of attending. Despite my curiosity at what Henri’s pedestrian mind might have conceived in its isolation, it was clear he did not fully appreciate the wealth of advice I had attempted to bestow. In fact, I took that invitation and threw it into the trash, trusting the lady who cleaned my rooms to rid me of it. And yet, what do you think happened when I returned from classes later that day? Only the discovery that she left behind a single scrap of paper, caught in the thin metallic rim of my waste basket. I need not tell you what that scrap of paper was.

  It seemed I was being summoned by a force far greater than myself, and I choose to comply lest it wreak havoc on my life. But of course superstition was not the only reason for my altered decision. In the time since receiving the card, my mind strayed repeatedly to the image of Elyse, and the thought of seeing her once again filled me with an unexpected longing.

  The day arrived for Henri’s now-infamous performance just as I was recovering from the sort of head cold that keeps one bed-bound for days on end. I was well enough to go out and beyond the point of contagion, but even the short walk to the Hall du Sainte-Geneviève winded me. I took a drink of ice water from the bar once inside and settled, but I did not feel myself, and the medicinal tonic I’d had before leaving only made my head feel disconnected from the rest of my body. I tell you this partially as an explanation for what I witnessed, and partially to vindicate myself for not interfering.

  I had heard the stories leading up to the day but hardly believed them. Had Henri really written the piece for merely a piano and string accompaniment? And was it true that none of those who auditioned for the quartet managed to make it through a single practice without quitting? It sounded bizarre, and when I causally asked my classmates for proof there was none to be found. How could Henri have auditioned that many musicians and not once seen someone I knew? It seemed impossible. And yet the stories persisted. It was baffling, and I refused to believe them. Which is why the sight of the Hall surprised me so. Perhaps my illness was again to blame, but I did not expect to find only a few rows of pews before a Grande piano, elevated on a platform before the hall’s triptych of large windows overlooking the Seine. If there was any accompaniment hired, they had not arrived, and as the seconds ticked away I began to realize this was to be a virtuoso performance, and I wondered how Henri would survive the pressure. Despite the way he had previously treated me, I had no interest in seeing him made a fool of so publicly.

  The crowd that had gathered for the spectacle was quite a bit larger than I had anticipated. Henri had been gone from the Conservatoire long enough that under any other circumstance he would have no longer been remembered, and yet it seemed as though every student of the Conservatoire was in attendance. And along with them, row after row of strangers I had never before seen either at school or at one of my own performances. I wondered how could that be. Could they simply be curious, lured in by the cryptic invitation? Surely the lot of them could not have been familiar with Henri’s work, or familiar with much well-performed music in general, if they were coming to hear him. I could see no other reason for the numbers, let alone for the general verve of excitement buzzing among those in attendance. Strangest of all was the presence of the man seated at the rear. I knew his face as once, though it took some time before those piercing yellow eyes told me how. Had the anticipation of Henri’s work been so grand that it bled out to the local merchants as well? I must admit: from my corner at the front of the room I laughed at the sheer folly of their soon-to-be crushed expectations.

  But I was laughing no longer when Elyse appeared. She swept in from the doorway behind me and all but floated toward the front row. She was even more beautiful than I had remembered, dressed in the finest silk and scarves, and though she did not turn her head when I called to her over the din of the crowd, I could see that behind her veil her skin was as wondrously porcelain as ever. My heart swelled at the sight and I became dizzy. No matter what I thought I remembered of her beautiful visage, it was a pale reflection of the truth.

  So enraptured with Elyse was I that I failed to notice a hush had fallen over the room. Henri had already arrived, and had done so without fanfare or accompaniment. Unlike his sister, he was frighteningly a shadow of his former self. Sallow-faced, skin pulled tight, he looked like Charon himself as he slowly navigated the aisles of the hall in hushed silence. At the front of the room his piano stood waiting. Henri held in his hand a pale unmarked folder, and when he reached the piano and sat it seemed to require all his energy to remain upright. I looked askance at those beside me, but instead of disbelief I saw rapture. I cannot express how bizarre I found it all.

  Henri’s eyelids were leaded, and it seemed to require a Herculean effort to keep them open. I became increasingly worried the longer he kept from speaking or moving, and soon forgot my grudge and stood to attend to him – only to be stopped by the words that finally creaked from his mouth. Elyse stared up in rapt attention.

  “Welcome, all of you this: the culmination of all my years at the Conservatorie de Paris, and all I’ve learned since being there.” I thought Henri might have looked at me then, but his glazed eyes were more apt to be looking through me. “The inspiration for this concerto was a play whose script I discovered at a nameless bookstore. I visited the place first in a dream, and it was only by chance I stumbled across it in the depths of Montparnasse. I knew the sight of it at once, and felt drawn inside, to its furthest corner, where I found amid the stacks a pale book marked like no other. The merest touch, and electricity stung my fingers, and without hesitation I began to read. By the second act, I knew nothing would be the same. I knew I had finally found my key.”

  But the key to what? I turned to gauge the audience’s reaction, but it appeared as though they heard nothing. Their faces were vacant, waiting for the performance to begin. I tried, too, to catch a glance of the Indian seated at the back of the room, but his face was obscured by fidgeting bodies. A sense of dread enveloped me, amplified by the effect of my illness. I worried I might sick, and closed my eyelids in hopes the disorientation and nausea would subside. If anything, it only made things worse.

  I opened them once Henri began to play. Or, at least, I believe I did. It’s difficult to be sure. Upon hearing those first few notes – those notes that, even now, have a hypnotic effect over all listeners – I realized everything I knew about my former friend was wrong. The way he played, it was as though each note caught the air and crystallized befo
re me, bright gems emitting an even brighter glow. I was bathed in the light of the absolute, and as its brilliance intensified it obscured everything in my sight. Henri played with a power I had never before known him to possess, and it transfixed me with blindness. That blindness did not dissipate until a subtle shift in chords indicated the second act of his concert had begun. Then, the void faded, and revealed a world not as I remembered it. I do not know how to otherwise describe what I witnessed. The walls of the Sainte-Geneviève had pulled back, and I found myself dressed in the strangest of eighteenth century garb. My face felt unusual, and as I reached to touch it I found it was not my own. I turned in confusion, the sound of Henri’s soothing playing calming the panic brewing in my centre, but not before I was struck by the audience and the similar masquerade disguises they wore. I looked immediately to the front of the room for Elyse, and saw someone impossibly more ravishing than before, dressed in wigs and gown, her face home to a delicate porcelain façade she held aloft with a single gloved hand.

  Then, down the centre aisle, strode a caped figure toward her, a figure I knew instinctively was the Indian from the paper shop despite his being disguised head-to-toe. He had grown taller in the vision, his suit transformed into a long yellow cape, his leggings white and ruffled. Over his face he wore a long-beaked black mask; and on his head, a large yellow hat. He danced particularly as he moved, as though his feet held not contact with the wooden floor beneath them, and compounded with his disguise I was reminded of some fanciful bird in the midst of courting. All eyes were on him, though behind the blank holes of his mask I knew his were only on one. Elyse must have known it too for she stood as he advanced, holding her porcelain countenance carefully to her face as she stepped toward the centre of the room and offered him a gloved hand. It was then the floor gave way to a larger area, like that of a ballroom, and the perch on which Henri continued to play rose up, higher into the air. The roof above us had gone, the black stars blinking in strange transformation around a pair of waning moons, while below the yellow man took Henri’s sister by the hand and led her to dance. It was, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing I have ever lived to see. And the most frightening. They moved in simpatico, two beings as one, circling the room over and over as Henri’s haunting music played, each step lighter than air.