Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 25

There is no light. I follow him by smell.

Amazing! I am used to civilized odors, and here I am tracking him like a hound. I almost laugh out loud, save he has enjoined silence.

My self has shrunk into an avid witness inside this irritating coc.o.o.n of itchy wool. I know not where I am or what will happen when we arrive there. It is delicious! What a find my winter werewolf is! If only Tiger could see me now, piercing such wilderness at the heart and soul of that most civilized of cities, Paris, mon amour.

I must keep myself from laughing like a hyena scenting prey.

The dark and the closeness and the mystery are intoxicating.

The steps end, and I pause.

He grabs my sleeve, pulls me forward a few steps, then thrusts me into a niche of rock.

Stones s.h.i.+ft, tumble, and click as brittle as castanets at my feet.

"Stay!" his harsh whisper orders. "You are a statue. You are a saint. Saint . . . Eyebright."

The fact that I watch has excited him as much as it has me.

There are words for this in forbidden books, but I prefer to read the great hidebound Book of Life and Death.

I hear a bottle break, gla.s.s scattering like tinkling chimes.

A match flares in the blackness. Candle wax takes fire and melts into a holy odor. Holy order.

I am back again in the chapels of my childhood, dark-visaged madonnas seeming to change expression in a hundred dancing candle flames.

Dancing. There will be dancing.

I hear the shuffle of crude wooden soles along the path he and I have trod.

Matches spit sulphur, and flare. A Milky Way of thick, misshapen candles reveals a grotto.

I look down. The stones at my feet are skulls and leg bones.

I am crammed into an ossuary. Into a niche in an ancient catacomb. My feet trample Roman bones. No wonder he laughed and named me a saint.

I stand on the remnants of another time, deep enough into the sarcophagus of earth that I shall not be seen except as a shadow of the dead.

Around me, they a.s.semble from who knows where? Gypsies, wanderers, peasant nomads, thousands of miles from home, from the crude bunkers dug deep into the soil of the home villages that he has told me of.

Here the earth has been moved centuries before. Here they nestle into an ancient amphitheater, a chapel where G.o.ds Roman and Christian have been wors.h.i.+ped in whatever way suits.

A strange sour odor of raw power fills the s.p.a.ce.

By the many ill-smelling candles I can see that each man has brought a bottle. Bottles of all sizes and colors, crude bottles of pottery. My beast has been busy. He has jammed a tin grater into an ancient wooden pillar holding back the stone like a tree.

The men crowd around to sc.r.a.pe off the wax sealing their bottles on the grater edge.

And what men! Bearded and barefoot, many of them, like beasts. Clothed in shreds of denim trousers and torn s.h.i.+rts, their skin showing through like filthy parchment, strange shoes tied to some of their feet with mere strings.

They mob the grater, sc.r.a.ping their bottle tops at it, rutting stags. Red wax seals the bottles and soon coats the grater like coagulating blood.

Then one man pulls his bottle away, strikes the bottom with a single mighty blow as if he were slapping a newborn into squalling life.

A cork shoots out like a bullet, hitting the low rock ceiling.

The man's head is already tilted straight back as pure liquid fire slakes his throat and a strangely narcotic, sickly-sweet smell fills the rocky grotto.

I must grasp at the stone and bones to keep myself from swooning.

Somehow, in the excitement of opening the bottles, I had failed to notice that women had entered the dark chapel under Notre Dame.

They wear white, which they must have donned after entering the narrow shaft into the crypt.

These are gowns with wide sleeves, almost Druidic, although these people are mountains removed from the Druids of Ireland. Colored girdles wrap their waists, and, as they circle and dance, right to left, singing, I feel as if I am watching some subterranean reflection of the Ballet Russe. There is meaning in their motion.

The men have squatted on their heels in a circle against the crudely piled stones. They drink, slap their knees, huskily cheer the dancers on.

The virginal white gowns snap back and forth as the women gyrate faster. One moment I am watching nuns, the next, nymphs. One instant vestal virgins, the next, temple prost.i.tutes.

The men at the edges are suffering the same subdivision of the mind and perceptions.

They rise, twine amongst the whirling women, tearing off their s.h.i.+rts to lash them into greater speed and spinning and frenzy with fabric whips. Their heads tip up to their rampant bottles like babies' mouths to their mothers' b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The air grows steamy with breath and body heat. I suffocate within my monk's robe, but dare not shed it.

The candlelight warms the women's glistening faces, which glow with fever spots.

The men dance freely among them now, my protege everywhere, every woman's eyes and hands upon him as if he were the center of the universe.

There is no denying the frantic ecstasy of the dance. Voices lift in strange syllables. Men and women begin trembling, falling down.

On the rock-strewn floor they writhe like snakes, and like snakes bare limbs emerge . . . arms, legs, the male organ. And merge. Speaking in tongues has become speaking with tongues. They fall upon each other like wolves. It is a Roman orgy as Romans had never the imagination to mount. The air reeks with the scent of sin and salvation, liquor and burning beeswax. Ecstasy sensual and religious.

I stand in my hidden niche, behind my veil of wet wool, unseen, unsensed, untouched.

This is a dance both greater and more debased than the Gypsies'. It is a ballet of the primitive soul. The meaningless syllables echo off the bones of dead martyrs. One man stands aloof from the rest.

But he watches with fevered eyes and suddenly rips apart his trousers at the crotch.

Gaping wounds make a mask of tragedy where his s.e.xual organs should be.

"Ecce h.o.m.o!" someone cries in badly accented Latin, only one of the Babel of languages I have heard s.n.a.t.c.hes of during this mad ceremony.

Behold the man. Behold the unmanned, I think as I view the castratus. I cannot help shuddering.

The sight of his mutilation and pride in it spurs the congregation to further orgiastic fever. I hear the snap of a whip and close my eyes.

I had thought nothing was too much for me, but I have been proven wrong.

My beast has outdone himself, and me.

Anything is possible.

I grit my teeth against the sounds, the moans, the blood, the reeking fluids of all kinds, the excess, the insanity, the power, the glory.

I will wait until all is done and my beast comes to lead me home.

Then I may let myself do with him what I will.

Or not.

I am still the master, even if I only rule madness.

La Mort Double

Women were the foremost in pus.h.i.+ng to the front.

-THE LONDON MORNING ADVERTISER

FROM A JOURNAL.

Luckily, I sleep very lightly.

When I heard a creak in the main room, I rose from my bed and crept out, drawing the privacy curtains gently open so that the rings didn't sc.r.a.pe the rods.

Imagine my fright to glimpse a dark-trousered figure moving stealthily through the chamber in the dim light from the windows.

Though we had retired early upon Irene's suggestion, I had been restless and far from ready for sleep. The report she and Nell made on the Paris Morgue drove me to distraction and frustration. How unkind of them to exclude me from such a fascinating expedition! No amount of Nell's bemoaning the dreadful pathos of the scene could quench my curiosity. I was beginning to regret joining them, and was ready to bolt. I am used to being on my own. I am used to leading, rather than following.

Now I might have to take the lead in confronting a burglar, with no weapon to hand but my own wits.

Usually I relied upon those innocuous modern accessories which the wise woman realizes are also her best defense: an umbrella and a hatpin.

One may walk the streets in any quarter of the world so accoutered and be ready for all that circ.u.mstance and the minds of evil men may throw at her.

Alas, one's nightclothes do not call for either accessory, so my mind rummaged wildly for a domestic equivalent. The only item that sprang to mind, and hand, was a bronze lamp on a nearby end table.

This I seized, prepared to do battle, and accidentally disturbed some knickknack on the table beside it, causing a sharp sc.r.a.pe across the marble top.

The figure became a statue. While my eyes were still trying to realign its position in the room, a leather-gloved hand tightened like a manacle around my wrist that held the lamp.

"Shhh!" a voice ordered my ear. "You will wake Nell."

The hand that had custody of my wrist reversed my direction and dragged me back into the privacy of my sleeping alcove. Once there, the unlit lamp was removed from my grip and placed atop a bureau.

My curtains were not drawn so tight as those in the outer room so I could plainly recognize Irene Adler Norton despite the men's dress she wore.

"Mrs. Norton! Irene."

She moved to draw the curtains behind us shut, then put her arms akimbo on her hips to regard me as a French nanny might a misbehaving child or an errant poodle.

"What am I to do with you, Miss Pink?" she demanded.

"Where are you going?" I demanded back in the same urgent, hushed tone.

"None of your business."

"I'm afraid it is, now that I've caught you sneaking out of your own rooms at some dreadful hour."

"It is only eleven o'clock."

"Where are you going?"

"Perhaps I have an a.s.signation."

"Not to hear Nell tell of your devotion to the devilishly attractive yet sainted G.o.dfrey. I am most eager to meet such a paradox."

"When did you have occasion to hear of G.o.dfrey?"

"When I spared a moment to listen to your friend, who is not a bit shy in praising her a.s.sociates and d.a.m.ning mine."

"Really." Silence stepped between us. Finally, she said, "You are not who you pretend to be."

"I suppose so. But you often masquerade as who you are not. What is the difference?"

"The difference is that I have worked as a private inquiry agent, and you have not."