Yesterday never dies, p.1
Yesterday Never Dies, page 1
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2012 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For the mysterious Tom Dean,
with thanks for his assiduousness in maintaining my public image.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this story is complete in itself, frequent reference is made to earlier stories in the series to which it belongs, whose substance has inevitably come to account for a gradually increasingly part of the characters’ personal histories and relationships. The earlier stories, in order of the series’ internal chronology, are: The Legacy of Erich Zann (first published in the Perilous Press volume The Womb of Time, reprinted in the Borgo Press collection The Legacy of Erich Zann and other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos); Valdemar’s Daughter and The Mad Trist (published as complementary halves of a Borgo Press Double); The Quintessence of August; The Cthulhu Encryption; and Journey to the Core Of Creation (issued as Borgo Press novels).
OPENING QUOTATION
“All which I bid you remember (for I will have no such Reader as I can teach) is, that the Pythagorean doctrine doth not only carry one soul from man to man, nor man to beast, but indifferently to plants also, and therefore you must not grudge to find the same soul in an Emperor, in a Post-horse, and in a mushroom.... And therefore though this soul could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell me, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d. And though it could not speak, when it was a spider, yet it can remember, and now tell me, who used it for poison to attain dignity. However the bodies have dull’d her other faculties, her memory hath ever been her own, which makes me so seriously deliver you by her relation all her passages from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat, to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book.
—John Donne, “Epistle” to Metempsychosis
(dated 16 August 1601 by the author)
“The parasitism of the infinitely small is the cause of nine-tenths of our diseases. It is against this cause, more especially, that our new method of treatment is directed, and, we are happy to add, with the most perfect success.”
—François-Vincent Raspail,
Histoire naturelle de la santé et de la maladie (1845)
Oberon the Fay. A humpty dwarf only three feet high, but of angelic face, lord and king of Mommur. He told Sir Huon his pedigree, which certainly is very romantic. The lady of the Hidden Isle (Cephalonia) married Neptanebus, King of Egypt, by whom she had a son called Alexander the Great. Seven hundred years later, Julius Caesar, on his way to Thessaly, stopped in Cephalonia, and the same lady, falling in love with him, had in time another son, and that son was Oberon. At his birth the fairies bestowed their gifts—one was insight into men’s thoughts, and another was the power of transporting himself to any place instantaneously. He became a friend to Huon, whom he made his successor in the kingdom of Mommur. In the fullness of time, falling asleep in death, legions of angels carried his soul to Paradise. (Huon de Bordeaux, a romance.)
—E. Cobham Brewer,
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
(Revised and Updated Edition, 1890)
CHAPTER ONE
ROBERT LE DIABLE
I had been to the “new” Salle Favart several times before the evening of the thirty-first of October 1847, when I went there to see the première of the latest revival of Robert le Diable. Indeed, I had gone to see Hector Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust there the previous year, whose relative failure had been one of the factors determining the Opéra-Comique’s recent policy of favoring known crowd-pleasers rather than risking too many new productions. Anxiety about the political situation played a part in that too; in turbulent times, esthetes often develop an exaggerated nostalgia for relatively recent pasts that have taken on a golden edge in retrospect.
I must admit that I felt a trifle embarrassed settling into one of the three seats in the box on my own, and could not help feeling a trifle resentful of Auguste Dupin, who had insisted on my reserving the three seats while leaving one of them unfilled, and had then sent me a note on the very afternoon of the performance, saying that he had been “unavoidably delayed,” but that he hoped to get to the theater by the interval—which was scheduled to take place after the second act.
I felt even less comfortable when, on glancing around the auditorium, I saw Pierre Chapelain sitting in the middle seat of the similar box directly opposite. Dupin and I had not seen much of Chapelain of late, but I would certainly have invited him to take the third seat in our box had Dupin not forbidden me to do so. It was not much consolation to observe that there was an empty seat in his box too, to the physician’s left. Strangely enough, the seat to his right was occupied by a woman wearing a domino, complete with half-mask.
It was by no means unknown for Parisiennes to wear dominoes as fashion accessories on other occasions than masked balls, in the days before the 1848 Revolution, although I associated the habit more with spring than autumn, because Shrove Tuesday and Mid-Lent were the peak times for such indulgences. I wondered momentarily whether the woman might possibly be an American, for All Hallows’ Eve tends to be a more important occasion there than the following day—Toussaint, in France—because of the customs imported by poor Irish and Scottish immigrants. Having been taken up by the general populace and Americanized in its social democracy, its celebration was now often associated with costuming and the wearing of masks.
There was no way to know who the woman was, however, although I took note that the lower part of her face, as seen by means of a rapid peep through my opera-glasses, suggested that she must be in her forties: much the same age as Chapelain. That, coupled with their appearance together in a box at the Opéra-Comique, always a popular exhibition-hall for relationships on the brink of formality, inevitably led me to wonder whether the physician might be thinking of marrying again, perhaps to some prosperous widow. If that were so, it would have helped to explain his recent neglect of the company of Dupin and myself, which had been such an important aspect of his social life a year before. On the other hand, it still left the empty seat to Chapelain’s left unexplained.
Chapelain saw me too, of course, and we exchanged polite nods of the head, although his expression seemed to me to be a trifle distracted, almost bordering on the sullen.
There was still some ten minutes to go before the curtain was due to go up when the door of my box suddenly opened, and someone came in. I turned my head gratefully, expecting to see Dupin, his unavoidable delay happily terminated, but it was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain.
He did not sit down in either of the vacant chairs. Indeed, he plastered himself against the far partition of the box, seemingly concealing himself behind the curtain—which had not been drawn back to ensure maximum visibility to a hypothetical observer sitting in the right-hand chair, because there was no one in the chair in question—at least until he moved it slightly across to give him better cover.
“What the devil do you think you’re doing, Saint-Germain?” I said. “This is a private box.”
He did not even look at me, being too busy peering surreptitiously out into the auditorium. “I know,” he said, “but we’re friends, are we not? What is more natural than friends dropping into one another’s boxes before a performance to say bonjour? Except that Chapelain is all the way over the far side of the hall—why is that?”
“No,” I said, coldly, deciding to focus on his first question. “I don’t believe that we are friends.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “It’s only a matter of months since I saved your life—that’s a bond that lasts a lifetime. Pass me those opera-glasses, would you?”
So ingrained are habits of politeness that I actually reached across to hand him my opera-glasses, even as I replied to him, in an even colder tone: “As I remember it, Monsieur de Saint-Germain, it was the Breton who called himself Oberon Breisz who saved my life in Saint-Sulpice—after you had endangered it, by enticing me there.”
Still hiding behind the curtain, but still peering out clandestinely, he put the opera-glasses to his eyes and focused them on the opposite box. I could not believe that he was using them to study Chapelain, and drew the natural conclusion.
A distinct grimace of disappointment crossed his face
“Let’s not quibble,” he said, by way of a response to my objection. “Do you know who that woman is in Chapelain’s box, perchance?”
“No,” I said, shortly—but I looked at her again, automatically, and saw her turn to greet someone who had just stepped through the door of her own box: two people, in fact, both men who would presumably have preferred to think of themselves as still just about in the prime of life rather than merely old.
With four people temporarily crammed into a three-chair box, the small space seemed crowded, but the occupants did their best to exchange polite formal greetings while maintaining a respectable distance between them. My impression was that Chapelain had not met either of the older men before, but that the lady knew them well.
“That’s odd,” Saint-Germain murmured.
“What’s odd?” I asked, reflexively, still in a state of some confusion as to how to put an end to the importunate visitation.
“Meyerbeer and Scribe obviously know who she is,” he said. “Meyerbeer must have come all the way back from Vienna to see the performance. Maybe’s he’s come to make sure that there are no unauthoriz
He was cut off abruptly when the door opened again, and this time we both turned, presumably both expecting to see Auguste Dupin appear.
Again, it was not Dupin. It was Lucien Groix, the Prefect of Police. He seemed even less pleased to see Saint-Germain than Saint-German was to see him, and I sensed a flare of mutual hostility, although I thought it possible that both men were merely disappointed that the other was not Dupin. At any rate, the fake Comte’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he blurted out—unwittingly, I’m sure: “Are you following me?”
Groix collected himself with the rapidity that one would expect of a man in his position. “Don’t be absurd, Monsieur Falleroux,” he said with deliberate disdain. “I have people to do that sort of thing for me.”
I could see that the comment stung, and not merely because the Prefect had used the charlatan’s real name. Saint-Germain/Falleroux had no time for a reply, though, for Groix had immediately turned to me.
“Where’s Dupin?” he asked bluntly. His customary urbanity seemed to have gone missing.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “He sent me a note saying that he’d been unavoidably delayed and couldn’t get here before the interval. I’d rather assumed that it was you who had detained him.” That had been my natural assumption, although the Prefect, like Chapelain, had been conspicuous by his absence from Dupin’s life of late.
Groix evidently wanted to ask more questions, but was obviously inhibited by Saint-German’s presence. I could not help noticing the way that the prefect was clutching his walking-stick with his gloved hand, almost as if it were a weapon, although it was a light and slender black-lacquered affair, far less use than ornament. Probably without realizing it, Saint-Germain had raised his own cane slightly, although it was a similarly elegant model, made of Chinese bamboo, as useless for sturdy defense as for reckless aggression.
I reflected that all our standard masculine accoutrements had become useless, in spite of their stubborn survival. Canes no longer function as swords, hats as helmets, or gloves as gauntlets, but we cling to them nevertheless, as symbolic residues of the past, reluctant to let go of them in spite of their redundancy—almost as if they still had potency as talismans, if not as instruments. Saint-German was not clutching his own stick as convulsively as Groix was gripping his, but even he seemed unusually tense, and I judged that their present fit of animosity had been generated on the back of an existing ill-humor in each case.
“Monsieur de Saint-German was just leaving,” I said, hoping that the Comte would take the hint. “He just stopped in to say bonjour, even though we are not really friends.”
Saint-Germain showed not the slightest sign of retreating, however; he obviously wanted to get back at the Prefect for the casual slight.
“I’m surprised that you have time to visit the theater, Monsieur Groix,” he said, snidely, “with the regime and the administration tottering around you. Shouldn’t you be busy making preparations to emigrate? Or do you imagine that your bulging files contain enough blackmail material on Monsieur Raspail and his friends to allow you to survive a Republican revolution?”
I was shocked by his rudeness, but Groix seemed unsurprised. He was probably all too keenly aware of the precariousness of his position, and well used to the diminution of respect that had been suffered by the court and the administration alike. It had always seemed to me that Lucien Groix was more interested in the criminal aspects of the prefecture’s work, in which he often employed Dupin as an unofficial consultant, but as Prefect, he had responsibility for the political police too, and the Republican orators of Paris had every reason to detest as well as to fear him. If Louis-Philippe were toppled—and there were few people in Paris who thought him capable of clinging to the throne for another year—then Groix would surely have to leave Paris, and perhaps France, if he were not to run the risk of ending up in one of the prisons to which his agents had sent so many others.
“Are you sure that your own organization will survive, Monsieur Falleroux?” Groix countered. “You might be a man devoid of faith yourself, but the majority of your members are royalist through and through.”
“The Harmonic Society is above politics,” Saint-Germain stated, airily. “We are seers and sages, and we are irreplaceable. This time next year, I shall still be here, while you are in hiding in London.”
Groix must have been under a great deal of pressure, for I saw him snap then, as I had never seen him snap before. It was his turn to let his mouth get ahead of his mind. “What makes you think that?” he said, his voice almost reduced to a hiss as he fought to control his wrath. “Have you cast my horoscope?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Monsieur Groix,” Saint-German retorted, with a smile of smug self-satisfaction. “I have people to do that sort of thing for me.”
Groix’s eyes glittered, but his face did not turn red. He made no explicit threats, but I had the distinct feeling that if he were still in place this time next year, Saint-Germain might be the one hiding in London, for fear of being sent to the bagne.
The Prefect turned back to me. “Would you be so kind as to ask Monsieur Dupin to come to see me tomorrow morning, without fail, Monsieur Reynolds,” he said. And with that, he stalked out. He did not slam the door, but I believe that it was a testament to his powers of self-restraint that he did not.
Saint-Germain let out his breath and sat down in the right-hand chair. He reached out across the empty chair to hand my opera-glasses back. He no longer seemed anxious about the possibility of being seen, although I could not imagine that it was the Prefect from whom he had been hiding in the first place.
“Something’s going on,” he said, with a hint of malicious delight in his voice. “Where’s Dupin?”
I hesitated over giving him an explicit order to leave, because I was not sure what I could do if he simply refused. The idea of a public quarrel in the quality section of the Opéra-Comique, which would immediately attract the attention of the hoi polloi and journalists in the stalls, was distinctly unattractive.
“The curtain will be going up in two minutes,” I told him, feeling like a coward for settling for such a weak-kneed hint.
“No it won’t,” he said. “It’s always late on the first night—and Meyerbeer’s still chatting to the mystery woman. They won’t dare to start before he’s back in his own box. The director would doubtless have rather he’d stayed in Vienna, but since he’s here...he is the composer, after all.”
I glanced across at the other box. The two men—the composer and one of the librettists, I now knew—were, indeed, still conversing with the woman in the domino. Chapelain, however, was looking across the space of the auditorium at our box, and frowning, He had seen Saint-Germain now that the President of the Harmonic Society was no longer lurking behind the curtain, and obviously found his presence no less welcome than I did.
Saint-Germain was obviously right—something was going on; but I had not the slightest idea what it might be.
When he saw that I was not about to give him any more information, Saint-Germain continued talking, as was ever his wont. “If the Prefect had simply wanted Dupin to visit him tomorrow,” the charlatan said, “he would have sent a messenger. If he wanted to see him on Prefecture business, he would not have come to the theater to do so. When he first came in, I assumed that the third seat must have been reserved for him, but that was obviously mistaken. Besides which, he really cannot afford to be wasting time at the opera with things falling apart around him...unless he has a very strong personal reason. Was it your idea to come here tonight, or Dupin’s?”
I had to clench my teeth to avoid polite reflex giving him the answer. Eventually, I managed to say: “That really is none of your business, Monsieur Saint-Germain.”
