Yesterday Never Dies. Brian Stableford
to see a performance inferior to hundreds that she must have seen from the wings.”
“Was it inferior?” Dupin could not help asking, even though he seemed to be impatient to be rid of me now that I had described the apparition in full. I had no intention of letting him get off so easily.
“Inferior to the previous one that I saw; I cannot speak for the one you saw in 1834, with Thibodeaux and Lucien Groix—who was also there tonight. Something strange happened that night, I assume.”
“Slightly strange,” Dupin admitted. “Strange enough to bring us all back, it seems—even poor Thibodeaux. Meyerbeer was there too you say?”
“And Scribe—not to mention the Comte de Saint-Germain.”
“Saint-Germain! How on earth did he find out about it?”
“If by it you mean the ghost, I don’t think he knew anything about that. I think he was there for quite a different reason, having obtained information from one of his spies—some street-urchin or member of the Society’s menial staff—that Chapelain had gone to the theater, and barged into my box purely in order to look into his. I suspect that he was hoping to see Jana Valdemar, but she was absent until the interval, and he might not have seen her. Saint-Germain definitely knows that something is afoot now, though, because Groix came into the box while he was there, and although he gave nothing away, the mere fact of his extreme reticence put ideas into Saint-Germain’s head. Now that his curiosity’s aroused, he won’t rest until he’s figured it out.”
Dupin shrugged. “He’ll lose interest soon enough when he finds that there’s no money to be made.”
I wasn’t sure that that was true, but I let it pass. “Groix seemed annoyed—more agitated that I have ever seen him before. I assumed at first that it was because we hadn’t invited him to share the box. I would have let him, since you weren’t there, but he went off in a huff. I think he might have watched from one of the upper galleries. Saint-Germain was up there too.”
“I’m surprised that Lucien bothered, considering how busy he must be. In his situation, I think I’d be making preparations to flee to England or Italy, if and when it becomes politic. François Raspail doesn’t want his blood, but there are plenty or Republican firebrands who do.”
“Saint-German made the same observation. You’ve seen Raspail recently, then?”
“We met by chance last week and had a brief conversation over a glass of wine. We’ve known one another for a long time, as you know.”
“And Groix knows that you’ve talked?”
“Obviously, since he’s having Raspail followed—but I’m not in any danger of being named in Lucien’s files or mistaken by Raspail himself as potential Revolutionary; they both know full well that I steer clear of politics...as clear as one can in times like these. Never mind that. Is that all?”
“No—Lucien wants you to go and see him tomorrow anyway, urgently.”
Dupin frowned again. “If Amélie takes a turn for the worst...,” he said, but then thought better of it. “But she’ll be fine now,” he added, presumably to boost his own morale. “She’s asleep.”
He seemed so confident of that that he did not turn round—but I could see past his shoulder by leaning slightly to the right, and I did so, reflexively.
“No, she’s not,” I said, taking that inference from the fact that her eyes were open—although I realized my mistake almost instantly.
Her eyes were open, but she was not awake, Indeed, it seemed to me that there might even have been a sense in which they were not her eyes, for the moment. Whoever or whatever appeared to using them was staring directly to me, and I had a strangely sickening sensation that it was not for the first time.
My own words echoed sardonically in the breached haven of my consciousness: Once touched by the Crawling Chaos, it seems—even as a mere innocent bystander—one is tainted forever.
When Thibodeaux’s ghost had met my gaze, there had been something else therein. Now it seemed to be in Amélie Lacuzon’s eyes: the eyes of the “old witch,” who was, I suspected, a magnetizer as powerful as Chapelain or Saint-Germain, or perhaps a medium as powerful as Jana Valdemar.
Dupin had turned in response to my remark, and I assumed that he could see the open eyes as clearly as I could, but they still seemed to be staring at me. Automatically, he moved within the frame of the inner door so as to block my view—or perhaps to intercept the stare.
“Don’t worry,” he said, after a few seconds. “It’s not uncommon for habitual somnambulists to open their eyes while they’re asleep. I don’t think she’s actually going to try to move.”
“I thought you preferred the term somniloquist,” I said, feigning laconism.
“I prefer both terms to be used accurately,” he said. “‘Somnambulist’ when someone moves in her sleep, ‘somniloquist’ when someone talks.”
I didn’t want to get into a pedantic discussion, although I could have argued that the concierge had not really moved, but only stared—ominously, it seemed to me.
By the time that Dupin had moved himself, however, sufficiently for me to obtain another glance at Madame Lacuzon’s face, her eyes were closed again. She was, as Dupin had claimed, still asleep.
“It really would be best if you went home now, my friend,” Dupin continued, “not just because of the threat of infection, assuming that whatever Amélie has is infectious, but because I’m very tired, although I mustn’t go to sleep.”
“But I’ve told you everything, and you haven’t told me anything!” I protested. “Who is this Professor Thibodeaux? Why did you expect to see his ghost tonight? Why, come to that, did you go to the theater with him in 1834—and to see one of the ‘devil operas’ of which you’re so scornful?”
Dupin was having none of it, though.
“I promise that I’ll come to see you tomorrow, my friend,” he assured me, “as soon as I’m sure that it’s safe for me to leave Amélie alone—but probably not before noon. If anyone comes looking for me in the meantime, having failed to get any answer here, please make my apologies. When I see you, I’ll gladly tell you everything—everything I know myself, that is—about Blaise Thibodeaux, the resonance of time, and why he once told me that he would do his very best to appear at the Opéra-Comique tonight, dead or alive.”
I saw no point in raising further objections, in the circumstances, and gave in gracefully. “I’ll tell Madame Bihan that her cousin is ill,” I said. “I’m sure that she’ll lend you all the assistance she can.” Madame Bihan was my housekeeper, supplied on her cousin’s recommendation.
“Thank you,” Dupin said. “And I’m sorry, once again, for disappointing you this evening.” I had never before heard him apologize three times in such a short span of time—and, even more remarkably, that was the second time that I actually believed his assertion.
I walked home without encountering any footpads, deep in thought—even though I had little real substance to fuel my ruminations.
I gave Madame Bihan the information about her cousin’s illness, including Dupin’s assertion that she seemed to be over the worst, and went to bed, hoping—in vain, as it turned out—that I would be able to sleep peacefully now that I had unburdened myself to Dupin.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE UNMASKED WOMAN
Perhaps I did sleep a little, but only fitfully, if so, and only between the hours of three and four o’clock, when my tiredness reached its inevitable extreme—a trough rather than a peak. By five, long before dawn, I was wide awake again, tossing and turning blearily. By the time I actually got out of bed at six-thirty, Madame Bihan had already set off to help Dupin care for her cousin, so it was her husband who made my breakfast.
That