Spectacle(42)
Agnès
She wasn’t sure how she was going to respond about the Dark Artist, nor did she want to think about that right now. For now she was just grateful for her friendship with Agnès and couldn’t wait for her to come home.
* * *
Tendrils of regret crept toward her during the night.
Nathalie didn’t notice them at first. Not as she lay awake, proud of wresting control from this ability, from the Dark Artist, and from Simone’s misguided influence. They were there, in the shadows, but she was too defiant to see them.
Then they reached for her in dreams about Simone—good, happy dreams reminiscent of good, happier days. The sorts of dreams that would fool her, upon waking, into thinking all was well between them and she could spring out of bed to tell Simone about the blood jar. As if things were still that way.
Those tendrils came closer yet the next morning, when she read about Mirabelle.
An anonymous tip submitted at the morgue yesterday suggested that the victim’s name was Mirabelle. This was confirmed hours later when the victim’s cousin identified her as Mirabelle Gregoire, who’d quarreled with her husband and had left their home in Plaisir, nearly 30 km outside Paris, several days prior.
Nathalie’s face grew itchy with heat. Simone. Who else would have given M. Gagnon the name?
That wasn’t Simone’s vision. It wasn’t her detail to share.
To her this is exciting. Stimulating. A thrill.
Nathalie could trust no one. Aunt Brigitte, in all her delirium, was right about that.
Then the first wisp of doubt seized her. If she couldn’t trust Simone to understand, then she couldn’t trust anyone to do so. Especially without evidence. Disposing of the blood and the note had been rewarding at the time, but now who would believe that the bottle of blood had existed at all? She wasn’t planning on telling anyone about it and had no reason to … not now, anyway. Someday she might. And then what? She’d be deemed hysterical or some such nonsense. Right back to where she started.
She cut the tendril back. What was done was done. It didn’t matter.
Did it?
If the Dark Artist referenced “Inspiration” or blood in one of his taunting letters to the police, it might.
No. Speculation is one of the reasons I put an end to this absurdity. I’m tired of fixating on answers.
And wasn’t that why she’d become so preoccupied with M. Gloves? Not that he flawlessly matched her ideas of who a killer might be, how a killer might look and act. The man drew attention to himself and seemed oblivious about it, for goodness sake. But she’d wanted an answer. Any answer. Because any answer was better than what they had now, which was no suspects and no theories and no anything but ripped-up girls on a slab. Maybe M. Gloves was the killer, but for the first time, she gave weight to the idea that maybe he really wasn’t.
She sheared that tendril, too.
New regrets grew more quickly than Nathalie could keep up. It would take another two days for them to coil around her heart completely, a vine of doubt intertwined with other sentiments: anger and shame, uncertainty and fear. Relief. A longing to forget.
Maybe those cracks in her memory weren’t such a bad thing. Maybe she needed more of them. Enough to forget all of this.
She’d heard of one way to forget something once and for all. Every day she saw the advertisement in Le Petit Journal.
Hypnosis.
Yesterday she’d read an account in the newspaper about a woman’s experience with hypnotism. One day, she’d woken up convinced she’d taken a trip to London when in reality she’d never been. Lo and behold, the paper reported, her parents had made a voyage there when she was three. The memories were there, just buried. The hypnotist had made sense of it all.
If hypnosis could uncover a memory, maybe it could cover one back up.
The thought of ridding herself of this blessing-curse or curse-blessing once and for all suddenly called to her like a Siren. There was hope in the unknown, and it was worth a try.
* * *
An hour after reaching that decision, Nathalie was walking down a narrow alleyway on the Left Bank looking for étienne Lebeau, Hypnotist & Phrenologist.
Phrenology. That had to be the most absurd practice in existence. The belief that you could “read” a person’s character by studying the shape of his or her skull was preposterous.
It was so preposterous that it wasn’t frightening. It was merely nonsense.
Hypnosis, on the other hand, wasn’t nonsense. Nathalie believed it was quite the opposite. And, even though she felt apprehensive, hypnosis just might end this struggle.
She didn’t have a precise address; the advertisement said Rue Xavier Privas and nothing more. The twisted cobblestone path sneered at her with fickle shadows and unexpected turns, obscuring all but the next few paces at a time. She walked past a wine shop, a dentist (she had never been and hoped never to go), a tanner, a milliner. Had she not pressed against the building a moment to step over a pair of cats, a chubby gray-and-white mother cat nursing her kittens and a tawny tomcat, she might have missed the small yellow, weather-worn placard altogether. No bigger than a book cover, M. Lebeau’s sign had an illustrated finger pointing up a dark stairwell that looked like it hadn’t seen a human in decades.
Nathalie reached inside her bag for the vial of catacomb dirt and put it in her dress pocket. With a deep exhale, she placed her foot on the first step.