Yesterday Never Dies. Brian Stableford
for her ever since. Evidently, rumor had reached him that she was working with Chapelain again, and he had set someone to watch the physician’s home. He must have gone to the Opéra-Comique last night expecting to find her there, probably intending to follow her to her present lodgings after the performance. Obviously, the much-vaunted seers of the Harmonic Society had been unable to locate her by less conventional means.
“What is it that you want me to do for you, exactly?” I asked.
“I would like you to smooth things over between Dr. Chapelain and Monsieur Dupin, if you can—but most of all, I would like you to persuade Monsieur Dupin to see Mademoiselle Taglioni, as soon as possible. She is very insistent. For what it may be worth, I believe that Monsieur Dupin will be very interested in what she has to say. There is a mystery involved.”
“Which has something to do with the 1834 performance of Robert le Diable at the Comique, and Blaise Thibodeaux?” I queried.
“Of course,” she said. She seemed to be on the point of saying something more, but did not. She was not sure whether it would be politic to raise the question of the ghost just yet. I thought that I ought to try to put her at her ease.
“I doubt that any ‘smoothing over’ will be necessary,” I told her. “Chapelain and Dupin have always been on the best of terms, and I cannot imagine that Dupin will hold it against him that he’s working with you again. He’s not a man to bear grudges. As for Mademoiselle Taglioni, I’m certain that he will be interested in what she has to say, and that he will consider it a privilege to meet her, as soon as he is able to do so—my only reservation, I assure you, is that I cannot be sure when that will be.”
She smiled, albeit wanly. “Thank you, Monsieur Reynolds,” she said. “You really are very kind. Perhaps I should not have been intimidated by the thought of coming here, especially after what you said to me last night. After all, we do have something in common, do we not?”
“Do we?” I queried, genuinely puzzled.
“Yes,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to maintain her smile. “On that night when Dupin beat me at my own game, you saw what I saw, didn’t you? Dupin didn’t see it, because he was watching me. Saint-Germain didn’t see it, because he was outside, playing with the balloons that the two of them used as a trigger. Poor Falconer caught a glimpse of it, but immediately lost his head and shut his eyes, blasting away with that stupid pistol in the hope of keeping the Dweller with the Eyes of Fire at bay. But you didn’t close your eyes. You saw what the trick with the balloons triggered, in all its awful glory, just as I did. You saw my phantom, my demon.”
That seemed a roundabout way to introduce the topic of phantoms, but I was not unsympathetic to her desire for circumlocution. I felt, however, that I ought to correct her apparent misapprehension.
“I only saw it because you had put the suggestion in my mind,” I observed.
She looked at me, but she looked away again almost immediately. She really did not seem trying to mesmerize me...either that, or she was playing an exceedingly subtle game. But why should she try to mesmerize me, given that I had agreed to help her, and had even shown myself to be “chivalrous” in her regard?
“That’s not entirely true, Mr. Reynolds,” she said, in a tone of conscientiously mild reproach. “Yes, I had planted the suggestion in your head while you were asleep, just as I had planted in Dupin’s...and, of course, my own. But that suggestion only had the powerful effect that it did because it was reflected by something real. You have had experience enough by now, I think, to know how intricate the relationship is between suggestion and reality.”
Chapelain had obviously told her something about our adventure with the Cthulhu Encryption. And why should he not? Dupin and I were not his patients, after all. I had thought that the greater part of the adventure had slipped Chapelain’s mind, as extraordinary events often do flee into forgetfulness in the minds of all but a few extraordinary individuals—but I had no doubt, too, that he remembered it subconsciously, if not consciously, and that Jana Valdemar sometimes hypnotized him, just as he sometimes hypnotized her. The more intricate aspects of their relationship were not something I cared to think about too deeply.
“Does it really make a difference what I saw that night?” I asked, gruffly—although what was really on my mind was wondering what a difference my more recent ghost-sighting was going to make, when Dupin finally got around to explaining what was going on.
“It makes a difference to me,” she said, softly. “You were the only witness to what really happened—the others have nothing but conjecture and inference on which to draw. I’m not asking for your sympathy, but I am asking for your understanding, and I really do believe that you’re uniquely placed to understand.”
She was still looking at me, without quite looking. She was not trying to hypnotize me—at least, so it seemed—but she was still trying to exert an influence upon me. And it was working; I really did feel that I wanted to understand, and to sympathize, even though I knew that Dupin might think me weak for doing so. I even wondered whether I ought to fight it, or at least attempt some sort of protest.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Mademoiselle Valdemar?” The words just slipped out. I probably blushed crimson.
She laughed, but rather bleakly. “What would be the point of that?” she asked. “Since Saint-Germain put that curse on you, you’re one of the few men in the world that I would stand no chance of seducing, no matter what I did.”
“What curse?” I said, utterly bewildered.
“The curse of The Mad Trist, of course. But that’s not what concerns us now. My curse is a very different one, just as insidious, though not entirely without its advantages. Do you understand why I have been so determined not to let Saint-Germain find me, if I can avoid it?”
The turn that the conversation had taken was utterly unexpected. I tried to clear my thoughts and focus on the question she had asked.
“Yes, I think so,” I said. She wasn’t content with the mere affirmation. She wanted proof. “He was your first...partner,” I continued. “You were presumably aware that you had mediumistic skills before you met him, but he was the one who helped to develop them. He forged a bond...a bond that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t entirely break. You’re avoiding him because you fear that he might be able to hypnotize you in spite of all your efforts to avoid it. You’re afraid that he might be able to...take you under his influence again, even without your consent.”
“What a delicate way you have of putting things, Mr. Reynolds,” she said, with a slight sigh, attempting yet another faint smile, and not quite succeeding. “Yes, he was the first to magnetize me...and the first to rape me while I was magnetized. And even though he pimped me out thereafter to the Baron and Chapelain, in the hope of obtaining a kind of ascendancy over them, too, he retained the power of that violation. Yes, I fear that if he were able to hypnotize me again—and I do, indeed, fear that I might not be able to prevent him from doing so, by virtue of the residue of our former magnetic relationship—he would rape me again.”
I was speechless.
“I’ve shocked you,” she said. “But only by pronouncing the words, surely? You understood the situation, in spite of your circumlocutions. You know, do you not, that a person in a magnetic trance is a uniquely vulnerable position, all too easily manipulable? And you can see the logic of the situation in which the medium is a young woman and the mesmerist a man? Perhaps you think my use of the word ‘rape’ unjustified—and I dare say that others would agree with you and claim that nothing was or is ever done without consent—but do you really think that a medium in a trance is capable of consent?”
I was still virtually speechless, but I eventually managed to croak: “Chapelain...?”
“I have, as you can see, made an exception for Chapelain. With him, I am now...and perhaps always was, a willing...partner. Since it is a medium’s vocation...well, suffice it to say that I have made my choice, and that I have every confidence that I can stick to it, resisting all temptation except one,