Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 52 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
‘Not now,’ Emerelda insisted. ‘I’ll come in a few moments.’
‘I’ve just been describing the screens,’ I explained.
‘So I gather, Mr Golding,’ he rejoined evenly. ‘Miss Emerelda,’ he called.
For a moment they appeared to have reached deadlock. Emerelda, the jewelled insects at her feet, stood beside me, her hand on my arm, while her guardian waited, the same thin smile on his lips. More footsteps approached. The remaining screens were pushed back and the plump, well-talcumed figure of Charles Van Stratten appeared, his urbane voice raised in greeting.
‘What’s this – a story conference?’ he asked jocularly. He broke off when he saw Emerelda and her guardian. ‘Dr Gruber? What’s going – Emerelda my dear?’
Smoothly, Dr Gruber interjected. ‘Good afternoon, sir. Miss Garland is about to return to her room.’
‘Good, good,’ Charles exclaimed. For the first time I had known him he seemed unsure of himself. He made a tentative approach to Emerelda, who was staring at him fixedly. She drew her robe around her and stepped quickly through the screens. Charles moved forwards, uncertain whether to follow her.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ he muttered. There was a flash of patent leather heels, and Charles and I were alone among the screens. On the floor at our feet was a single jewelled mantis. Without thinking, Charles bent down to pick it up, but the insect snapped at him. He withdrew his fingers with a wan smile, as if accepting the finality of Emerelda’s departure.
Recognizing me with an effort, Charles pulled himself together. ‘Well, Paul, I’m glad you and Emerelda were getting on so well. I knew you’d make an excellent job of the screens.’
We walked out into the sunlight. After a pause he said, ‘That is Emerelda Garland; she’s lived here since mother died. It was a tragic experience, Dr Gruber thinks she may never recover.’
‘He’s her doctor?’
Charles nodded. ‘One of the best I could find. For some reason Emerelda feels herself responsible for mother’s death. She’s refused to leave here.’
I pointed to the screens. ‘Do you think they help?’
‘Of course. Why do you suppose we’re here at all?’ He lowered his voice, although Lagoon West was deserted. ‘Don’t tell Kanin yet, but you’ve just met the star of Aphrodite 80.’
‘What?’ Incredulously, I stopped. ‘Emerelda? Do you mean that she’s going to play—?’
‘Eurydice.’ Charles nodded. ‘Who better?’
‘But Charles, she’s…’ I searched for a discreet term.
‘That’s exactly the point. Believe me, Paul,’ – here Charles smiled at me with an expression of surprising canniness ‘this film is not as abstract as Kanin thinks. In fact, its sole purpose is therapeutic. You see, Emerelda was once a minor film actress, I’m convinced the camera crews and sets will help to carry her back to the past, to the period before her appalling shock. It’s the only way left, a sort of total psychodrama. The choice of theme, the Orpheus legend and its associations, fit the situation exactly I see myself as a latter-day Orpheus trying to rescue my Eurydice from Dr Gruber’s hell.’ He smiled bleakly, as if aware of the slenderness of the analogy and its faint hopes. ‘Emerelda’s withdrawn completely into her private world, spends all her time inlaying these insects with her jewels. With luck the screens will lead her out into the rest of this synthetic landscape. After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.’
‘But can’t you simply move her physically from Lagoon West?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps Gruber is the wrong doctor for her. I can’t understand why you’ve kept her here all these years.’
‘I haven’t kept her, Paul,’ he said earnestly. ‘She’s clung to this place and its nightmare memories. Now she even refuses to let me come near her.’
We parted and he walked away among the deserted dunes. In the background the great hoardings I had designed shut out the distant reefs and mesas. Huge blocks of colour had been sprayed on to the designs, superimposing a new landscape upon the desert. The geometric forms loomed and wavered in the haze, like the shifting symbols of a beckoning dream.
As I watched Charles disappear, I felt a sudden sense of pity for his subtle but naive determination. Wondering whether to warn him of his almost certain failure, I rubbed the raw bruises on my arm. While she started at him, Emerelda’s fingers had clasped my arm with unmistakable fierceness, her sharp nails locked together like a clamp of daggers.
So, each afternoon, we began to play the screen game, moving the zodiacal emblems to and fro across the terrace. As I sat on the balustrade and watched Emerelda Garland’s first tentative approaches, I wondered how far all of us were becoming ensnared by Charles Van Stratten, by the painted desert and the sculpture singing from the aerial terraces of the summer-house. Into all this Emerelda Garland had now emerged, like a beautiful but nervous wraith. First she would slip among the screens as they gathered below her balcony, and then, hidden behind the large Virgo at their centre, would move across the floor towards the lake, enclosed by the shifting pattern of screens.
Once I left my seat beside Charles and joined the game. Gradually I manoeuvred my screen, , a small Sagittarius, into the centre of the maze where I found Emerelda in a narrow shifting cubicle, swaying from side to side as if entranced by the rhythm of the game, the insects scattered at her feet. When I approached she clasped my hand and ran away down a corridor, her gown falling loosely around her bare shoulders. As the screens once more reached the summerhouse, she gathered her train in one hand and disappeared among the columns of the loggia.
Walking back to Charles, I found a jewelled mantis nestling like a brooch on the lapel of my jacket, its crown of amethyst melting in the fading sunlight.
‘She’s coming out, Paul,’ Charles said. ‘Already she’s accepted the screens, soon she’ll be able to leave them.’ He frowned at the jewelled mantis on my palm. ‘A present from Emerelda. Rather twoedged, I think, those stings are dangerous. Still, she’s grateful to you, Paul, as I am. Now I know that only the artist can create an absolute reality. Perhaps you should paint a few more screens.’
‘Gladly, Charles, if you’re sure that..
But Charles merely nodded to himself and walked away towards the film crew.
During the next days I painted several new screens, duplicating the zodiacal emblems, so that each afternoon the game became progressively slower and more intricate, the thirty screens forming a multiple labyrinth. For a few minutes, at the climax of the game, I would find Emerelda in the dark centre with the screens jostling and tilting around her, the sculpture on the roof hooting in the narrow interval of open sky.
‘Why don’t you join the game?’ I asked Charles. After his earlier elation he was becoming impatient. Each evening as he drove back to Ciraquito the plume of dust behind his speeding Maserati would rise progressively higher into the pale air. He had lost interest in Aphrodite 80. Fortunately Kanin had found that the painted desert of Lagoon West could not be reproduced by any existing colour process, and the film was now being shot from models in a rented studio at Red Beach. ‘Perhaps if Emerelda saw you in the maze…’
‘No, no.’ Charles shook his head categorically, then stood up and paced about. ‘Paul, I’m less sure of this now.’
Unknown to him, I had painted a dozen more screens. Early that morning I had hidden them among the others on the terrace.
Three nights later, tired of conducting my courtship of Emerelda Garland within a painted maze, I drove out to Lagoon West, climbing through the darkened hills whose contorted forms reared in the swinging headlamps like the smoke clouds of some sunken hell. In the distance, beside the lake, the angular terraces of the summer-house hung in the grey opaque air, as if suspended by invisible wires from the indigo clouds which stretched like velvet towards the few faint lights along the beach two miles away.
The sculptures on the upper balconies were almost silent, and I moved past them carefully, drawing only a few muted chords from them, the faint sounds carried from one statue to the next to the roof of the summer-house and then lost on the midnight air.
From the loggia I looked down at the labyrinth of screens, and at the jewelled insects scattered across the terrace, sparkling on the dark marble like the reflection of a star field.
I found Emerelda Garland among the screens, her white face an oval halo in the shadows, almost naked in a silk gown like a veil of moonlight. She was leaning against a huge Taurus with her pale arms outstretched at her sides, like Europa supplicant before the bull, the luminous spectres of the zodiac guard surrounding her. Without moving her head, she watched me approach and take her hands. Her blue hair swirled in the dark wind as we moved through the screens and crossed the staircase into the summer-house. The expression on her face, whose porcelain planes reflected the turquoise light of her eyes, was one of almost terrifying calm, as if she were moving through some inner dreamscape of the psyche with the confidence of a sleepwalker. My arm around her waist, I guided her up the steps to her suite, realizing that I was less her lover than the architect of her fantasies. For a moment the ambiguous nature of my role, and the questionable morality of abducting a beautiful but insane woman, made me hesitate.
We had reached the inner balcony which ringed the central hall of the summer-house. Below us a large sonicsculpture emitted a tense nervous pulse, as if roused from its midnight silence by my hesitant step.
‘Wait!’ I pulled Emerelda back from the next flight of stairs, rousing her from her self-hypnotic torpor. ‘Up there!’
A silent figure in a dark suit stood at the rail outside the door of Emerelda’s suite, the downward inclination of his head clearly perceptible.
‘Oh, my God!’ With both hands Emerelda clung tightly to my arm, her smooth face seized by a rictus of horror and anticipation. ‘She’s there for heaven’s sake, Paul, take me—’
‘It’s Gruber!’ I snapped. ‘Dr Gruber! Emerelda!’
As we recrossed the entrance the train of Emerelda’s gown drew a discordant wail from the statue. In the moonlight the insects still flickered like a carpet of diamonds. I held her shoulders, trying to revive her.
‘Emerelda! We’ll leave here – take you away from Lagoon West and this insane place.’ I pointed to my car, parked by the beach among the dunes. ‘We’ll go to Vermilion Sands or Red Beach, you’ll be able to forget Dr Gruber for ever.’
We hurried towards the car, Emerelda’s gown gathering up the insects as we swept past them. I heard her short cry in the moonlight and she tore away from me. I stumbled among the flickering insects. From my knees I saw her disappear into the screens.
For the next ten minutes, as I watched from the darkness by the beach, the jewelled insects moved towards her across the terrace, their last light fading like a vanishing night river.
I walked back to my car, and a quiet, white-suited figure appeared among the dunes and waited for me in the cool amber air, hands deep in his jacket pockets.
‘You’re a better painter than you know,’ Charles said when I took my seat behind the wheel. ‘On the last two nights she has made the same escape from me.’
He stared reflectively from the window as we drove back to Ciraquito, the sculptures in the canyon keening behind us like banshees.
The next afternoon, as I guessed, Charles Van Stratten at last played the screen game. He arrived shortly after the game had begun, walking through the throng of extras and cameramen near the car park, hands still thrust deep into the pockets of his white suit as if his sudden appearance among the dunes the previous night and his present arrival were continuous in time. He stopped by the balustrade on the opposite side of the terrace, where I sat with Tony Sapphire and Raymond Mayo, and stared pensively at the slow shuttling movements of the game, his grey eyes hidden below their blond brows.
By now there were so many screens in the game – over forty (I had secretly added more in an attempt to save Emerelda) – that most of the movement was confined to the centre of the group, as if emphasizing the selfimmolated nature of the ritual. What had begun as a pleasant divertimento, a picturesque introduction to Aphrodite 80, had degenerated into a macabre charade, transforming the terrace into the exercise area of a nightmare.
Discouraged or bored by the slowness of the game, one by one the extras taking part began to drop out, sitting down on the balustrade beside Charles. Eventually only Emerelda was left – in my mind I could see her gliding in and out of the nexus of corridors, protected by the zodiacal deities I had painted – and now and then one of the screens in the centre would tilt slightly.
‘You’ve designed a wonderful trap for her, Paul,’ Raymond Mayo mused. ‘A cardboard asylum.’
‘It was Van Stratten’s suggestion. We thought they might help her.’
Somewhere, down by the beach, a sculpture had begun to play, and its plaintive voice echoed over our heads. Several of the older sculptures whose sonic cores had corroded had been broken up and left on the beach, where they had taken root again. When the heat gradients roused them to life they would emit a brief strangled music, fractured parodies of their former song.
‘Paul!’ Tony Sapphire pointed across the terrace. ‘What’s going on? There’s something—’
Fifty yards from us, Charles Van Stratten had stepped over the balustrade, and now stood out on one of the black marble squares, hands loosely at his sides, like a single chess piece opposing the massed array of the screens. Everyone else had gone, and the three of us were now alone with Charles and the hidden occupant of the screens.
The harsh song of the rogue sculpture still pierced the air. Two miles away, through the haze which partly obscured the distant shore, the beach-houses jutted among the dunes, and the fused surface of the lake, in which so many objects were embedded, seams of jade and obsidian, was like a segment of embalmed time, from which the music of the sculpture was a slowly expiring leak. The heat over the vermilion surface was like molten quartz, stirring sluggishly to reveal the distant mesas and reefs.
The haze cleared and the spires of the sand reefs seemed to loom forward, their red barbs clawing towards us through the air. The light drove through the opaque surface of the lake, illuminating its fossilized veins, and the threnody of the dying sculpture lifted to a climax.
‘Emerelda!’
As we stood up, roused by his shout, Charles Van Stratten was running across the terrace. ‘Emerelda!’
Before we could move he began to pull back the screens. toppling them backwards on to the ground. Within a few moments the terrace was a mle of tearing canvas and collapsing trestles, the huge emblems flung left and right out of his path like disintegrating floats at the end of a carnival.
Only when the original nucleus of half a dozen screens was left did he pause, hands on hips.
‘Emerelda!’ he shouted thickly.
Raymond turned to me. ‘Paul, stop him, for heaven’s sake!’
Striding forward, Charles pulled back the last of the screens. We had a sudden glimpse of Emerelda Garland retreating from the inrush of sunlight, her white gown flared around her like the broken wings of some enormous bird. Then, with an explosive flash, a brilliant vortex of light erupted from the floor at Emerelda’s feet, a cloud of jewelled spiders and scorpions rose through the air and engulfed Charles Van Stratten.
Hands raised helplessly to shield his head, he raced across the terrace, the armada of jewelled insects pursuing him, spinning and diving on to his head. Just before he disappeared among the dunes by the beach, we saw him for a last terrifying moment, clawing helplessly at the jewelled helmet stitched into his face and shoulders. His voice rang out, a sustained cry on the note of the dying sculptures, lost on the stinging flight of the insects.
We found him among the sculptures, face downwards in the hot sand, the fabric of his white suit lacerated by a hundred punctures. Around him were scattered the jewels and crushed bodies of the insects he had killed, their knotted legs and mandibles like abstract ideograms, the sapphires and zircons dissolving in the light.
His swollen hands were filled with the jewels. The cloud of insects returned to the summer-house, where Dr Gruber’s blacksuited figure was silhouetted against the sky, poised on the white ledge like some minatory bird of nightmare. The only sounds came from the sculptures, which had picked up Charles Van Stratten’s last cry and incorporated it into their own selfrequiem.
‘…"She… killed"…’ Raymond stopped, shaking his head in amazement. ‘Paul, can you hear them, the words are unmistakable.’
Stepping through the metal barbs of the sculpture, I knelt beside Charles, watching as one of the jewelled scorpions crawled from below his chin and scuttled away across the sand.
‘Not him,’ I said. ‘What he was shouting was "She killed – Mrs Van Stratten." The old dowager, his mother. That’s the real clue to this fantastic menage. Last night, when we saw Gruber by the rail outside her room – I realize now that was where the old harridan was standing when Emerelda pushed her. For years Charles kept her alone with her guilt here, probably afraid that he might be incriminated if the truth emerged – perhaps he was more responsible than we imagine. What he failed to realize was that Emerelda had lived so long with her guilt that she’d confused it with the person of Charles himself. Killing him was her only release—’
I broke off to find that Raymond and Tony had gone and were already half way back to the terrace. There was the distant sound of raised voices as members of the film company approached, and whistles shrilled above the exhaust of cars.
The bulky figure of Kanin came through the dunes, flanked by a trio of assistant producers. Their incredulous faces gaped at the prostrate body. The voices of the sculptures faded for the last time, carrying with them into the depths of the fossil lake the final plaintive cry of Charles Van Stratten.
A year later, after Orpheus Productions had left Lagoon West and the scandal surrounding Charles’s death had subsided, we drove out again to the summer-house. It was one of those dull featureless afternoons when the desert is without lustre, the distant hills illuminated by brief flashes of light, and the great summer-house seemed drab and lifeless. The servants and Dr Gruber had left, and the estate was beginning to run down. Sand covered long stretches of the roadway, and the dunes rolled across the open terraces, toppling the sculptures. These were silent now, and the sepulchral emptiness was only broken by the hidden presence of Emerelda Garland.
We found the screens where they had been left, and on an impulse spent the first afternoon digging them out of the sand. Those that had rotted in the sunlight we burned in a pyre on the beach, and perhaps the ascending plumes of purple and carmine smoke first brought our presence to Emerelda. The next afternoon, as we played the screen game, I was conscious of her watching us, and saw a gleam of her blue gown among the shadows.
However, although we played each afternoon throughout the summer, she never joined us, despite the new screens I painted and added to the group. Only on the night I visited Lagoon West alone did she come down, but I could hear the voices of the sculptures calling again and fled at the sight of her white face.
By some acoustic freak, the dead sculptures along the beach had revived themselves, and once again I heard the faint haunted echoes of Charles Van Stratten’s last cry before he was killed by the jewelled insects. All over the deserted summer-house the low refrain was taken up by the statues, echoing through the empty galleries and across the moonlit terraces, carried away to the mouths of the sand reefs, the last dark music of the painted night.
1963
