II
Le Miserable1An obvious reference to Victor Hugo's book ^^ nya
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The worst things were the storefront hanging signs. Butcheries, bakeries, apothecaries, restaurants, and bars. On every corner of the street, there was a shop. And above the shop hanged a metallic sign -- suspended on just two flimsy-looking chains.
Jean-Paul gave a wide berth to those, but even then, it was nearly impossible not to find one directly overhead when he thought he was being careful. He blanched and jolted away, only to bump into people. None of whom reacted to his stumbling around.
In fact, most everyone he met as he dashed down the streets seemed oddly... numb. Blank-eyed and uninvolved wherever Jean-Paul looked. Pasty faces like smears of paint, black suits and dresses, black umbrellas. Everything covered with a fine sheen of Parisian grime.
Even the people's voices dimmed when they talked. All of a sudden, Jean-Paul had trouble hearing all the many conversations on the street or the background noise of horse traffic. Everything sounded duller as if coming from inside a tin bucket.
What was happening? Was his mind so addled? Why?
He hadn't done anything. He hadn't drunk, hadn't smoked, hadn't eaten anything hallucinogenic as some of his peers did daily.
His hand to his forehead, Jean-Paul stopped to feel his temperature. But no. Everything seemed fine. His skin was clammy, yes, but not fevered.
Yet it still felt like a fever. He was shaking, he was agitated. It felt like he was going insane just with his overactive imagination. Something needed to stop it, at once.
Andre, was his brightest thought. His best friend. Of course. Company and some light entertainment could dispel all the grisly figments of one's paranoia.
He even knew where to find Andre so late in the afternoon -- not far from here. Just keep away from the hanging signs and maybe the trams. It would be a pity to spend all his time avoiding dangers from the above only to fall onto the railtracks and be sliced up by a metallic wheel.
Damn, his neck-ache was only getting worse. Figured he was getting so riled up for nothing when his neck was so tense it felt like it was killing him.
The cafe Andre was frequenting at this time of day greeted Jean-Paul with the green glow of its lamps in the swerving tobacco smoke and the glare of its many mirrors plating the walls. Jean-Paul gave the mirrors a wary glance but pushed forward. As long as he didn't come close to any of the mirrors, even if one of them came crashing down, he imagined he was safe.
How stale and suffocating this place was...
A tinge of disgust clutched him when he realized that the music in the cafe was out of tune. He suppressed a cringe and made his way through the tables to get to the one Andre and his fellow drinkers liked. But when he reached it, Andre wasn't there.
Really, nobody Jean-Paul knew was here. Not even the barmaid or the waiters.
How odd. On a weekday, no familiar faces?
Twitchy, Jean-Paul studied the cafe's main room. Agh, this had been a bad idea from the start. The place was so tight, so congested with its smoke and the untraceable stench of mildew as though seeping into it from the old floorboards and wall panels. The musician's playing pressed on him further, and Jean-Paul snapped toward the exit to flee.
But then --
"Jean-Paul?" Andre's voice called to him from the exact spot Jean-Paul had just been standing searching for him in. Back by Andre's usual table, surrounded by a loud flock of his mates. "Decided to come out of your monkhood after all? Here, grab a drink! You look like you've been hit in the face with a brick, ha!"
Relief blanketed him when he turned to the voice's owner.
But what he saw made Jean-Paul's throat dry up.
He didn't see Andre.
Which was madness.
He could clearly hear the man's voice but not see his face?
Then, as one of the people gathered around the table raised a glass with a green liquid inside, Jean-Paul understood.
He was seeing Andre. Right before his eyes.
Only Andre's face was... nothing more than a featureless mound of dough. Something slapped up hastily and without reason. Two round holes for the eyes deepened in that hideous face, but everything else was only a suggestion of a human appearance.
The other people, too. Everyone's faces were like this!
He now knew why he couldn't recognize anyone he met. Everyone had become a mere smear of flesh and dark urban clothes. Not people.
Hot breaths erupted out of his throat as he backed away.
Everyone's faces...? His own, too?!
His fingers trembled when Jean-Paul lifted his hands to touch his own cheeks and nose. It was normal, at least. As it had always been. And yet...
The rest of the world was coming undone around him.
Everything was wrong.
Wrong!
Andre spoke again, visibly baffled. "Jean-Paul. Is something wrong? Wait, Jean-Paul! Where are you going?!"
Jean-Paul didn't hear the rest. Swaying, coughing in tense bouts, tripping, he ran out of the cafe and into the streets swaddled with even more greenish fog than before.
Crazed, Jean-Paul lifted his eyes to the sky to gauge what time it was. What time?
Impossible to tell. Everything was blurred out in the fog. People came in waves of black clothes and rustling fabrics -- as if diving from out the milky pall and vanishing into it a moment later.
Jean-Paul recoiled from all, his heaves already sounding more like sobs than actual breathing.
Why was this happening?
And what was even happening? And when?
Was it midnight soon? God, please make it not so. Please give him a sign of what time it was and where he could go...
He still had a chance to save himself from this insanity! From this horror!
Abruptly, out of the gloomy tide of the fog, a mournful toll of the bell came like a balm on Jean-Paul's panicked soul. It tolled the time of the vesper mass and Jean-Paul wanted to weep, so relieved he felt when he heard it.
It was a bell of the church. A heavenly grace. Salvation.
Of course, he prayed. Of course...
Notre-Dame de Paris. The church. This was where he needed to go. To the church. It would protect him. The saints and the holy family.
They would save him.
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Hours trickled by in the choral singing in the great nave of the cathedral. Jean-Paul sat on his pew row, afraid to raise his face and see something he didn't care to see. He was praying, sweat cascading down his face, slicking his chilly fingers.
Please Lady of Sorrow, spare this useless son of yours.
Please hear me.
Please help.
His mind was unraveling but his perceptions were still painfully intact. His neck was scalding hot under his fingers, burning when his swear crept around his top vertebra, right where his the nape of his neck began.
Why? Didn't matter.
Pray, pray, pray...
So aware he was of his surroundings that he heard when someone slowly walked under the great rose window at the entrance and into the main aisle of the cathedral.
Jean-Paul didn't open his eyes, but he couldn't help turn toward the sound of clear, even footsteps echoing so forcefully through the hollow nave.
The footsteps fell.
One, then the other.
And one more.
At last, when they reached Jean-Paul's side, they shuffled to a halt.
A deep void of sound crept from over where the footstep's owner stood. Even knowing he shouldn't, Jean-Paul dragged his eyelids open and skewed his eyes toward the aisle.
Two slender feet in elegant, polished black laced boots stood beside him, their pointy tips turned toward the choral. But slowly, as Jean-Paul kept watching them, the boots scraped against the floor tiles and turned toward him.
Jean-Paul knew who these boots belonged to.
He had seen this person today already.
Just above the shin area, the crimson tulle and frills of a long skirt began.
Resentment tangled with pain and confusion inside him, and Jean-Paul raised his bloodshot, teary eyes at the girl before him.
He wondered if he'd see triumph on her face, or maybe dark glee, or maybe even pity? But no. There was no face.
Only the black veil in a puffy cloud descending from the top of her head to her waist. A horrid, undiluted black cloud.
Jean-Paul's lips cracked in a maddened grin. Tears prickled his eyes.
"You are horrible," he told her. His voice wavered. "Like a picture of cruelty. Did you know that?"
A few seconds of heavenly choir singing passed by.
"There's nothing I can do," the girl said at last in a monotonous, albeit gentle voice. "All art is suffering. You knew what you were getting into, becoming an artist."
"But this is not art!" Jean-Paul roared.
The echo of his voice spooked the pigeons high in the bell tower of Notre-Dame and gave a pause to the distant choir.
"This is real life! My life!" he raged on, getting to his feet to grab this stupid, aggravating girl. "Not fiction! Not a damn picture!"
The girl hardly evaded him.
She didn't have to. Jean-Paul's arms simply went through her -- no more solid than mist itself.
"I'm sorry, but this is art," the girl told him when Jean-Paul froze, staring at his hands in horrid disbelief.
"And you are a picture."
"A portrait I made," Adalie added, even softer.
She wanted him to understand, even if it would hurt him immeasurably.
"And your portrait has a very specific premise to it." Though Jean-Paul couldn't see her eyes, he could tell the direction her face turned to.
The girl turned toward the great rose window of Notre-Dame behind Jean-Paul. As though in an echo of the lucid choral notes in the cathedral, the fine stained glass in the window chimed melodically, too.
As though its metal frame was flimsy and might fail to hold in all these glass shards. Any moment now.
Adalie took no pleasure in telling the poor guy the truth. But as it tended to happen with some art pieces -- she simply had no choice but to go through with it.
"No doubt you know which premise this portrait has," she said.
