“Yvette! Darling!”
There he is, running to re-join her. The promise is fulfilled. Before she can say anything he embraces her in a way she has never known, like a grateful child, his kiss the sweetest wine.
“Will you marry me?”
“You asked me already when we rode on the wheel!”
“I ask again. Will you be mine forever?”
He’s been acting so strangely, but now there’s joy in his voice, a relief she shares. “Yes, Pierre, I’m yours. Only tell me the second thing you spoke of. What is it, this secret knowledge?”
They walk hand in hand as he explains about his friends and their strange ideas of multiple worlds.
“Nonsense!” Yvette laughs. She thought there must be another woman; all that threatens her is philosophy.
“It’s real science,” he says earnestly. “One of them, a physicist, says it has to do with radioactivity, the way atoms break into fragments. Think of all that living energy, if only it could be released!”
She’d rather hoped that when he came back from his brief absence he would have brought a bunch of flowers. He said it was a test, but it appears to have been a trial of nothing more than her patience. “I love your crazy notions, Pierre. I want you to keep dreaming. But you have to stop seeing these people.”
“I shall.”
His readiness is unexpected.
“You won’t contact them again? What about your musical piece?”
“I renounce it.”
She brings out the key he gave her. “You’d better have this, then.”
Pierre takes it, twirls the small, dull metal object in his fingers, then hurls it away onto the lawn beside them, its arc a gesture of triumph. “It’s over. All is well.”
They reach a pavilion where drinks are being served and choose a shaded table; people chat while in a corner a photographer adjusts his camera on a tripod, ready to preserve the scene. A waiter takes their order, then after he has departed, Pierre says to her, “They wanted me… to do something. That was the test.”
“And did you do it?”
“I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Yvette, they say a man who stakes his life on a game of chance must always arrive in a world where he survives, even if in another he leaves grieving friends.”
“What madness!”
“This is how they purify themselves, by constantly risking death, creating worlds where they’ve died, seeing only ones where they’re alive.”
“My God, did they suggest you…?”
“It goes further. They want to put innocent people to this insane test. Bombs detonated at random, trains derailed by the roll of a dice, chemicals that might be harmless or lethal, spread in food. They envisage a world filled only with the survivors of such outrages, and call it paradise.”
“We have to tell the police.”
“It’s too dangerous, these are powerful men. Their organisation is arranged like the alphabet, a sort of living lexicon. They call it Rosier’s Encyclopaedia. They want to find a way of transmitting their atrocities, perhaps using telephones or wireless telegraphy. They seek immortality through death. Their plan is global suicide.”
She clasps his hands. “They’re lunatics.”
“They speak of the Radiance, when all mankind will have been made to play the deadly game and a single world will survive whose rays shine back through time upon all other outcomes, filling them with erasing Endness. A signal heard through every history, the unlocking of the Great Code. My music was meant to announce its arrival.”
“Forget these lies.”
He looks uneasy. “I still have the Book of Rules.”
“What are you talking about?”
“An old bound manuscript, written in a language I don’t understand. They told me how to turn it into musical themes.”
“Who told you?”
“Carreau, Oeillet, Verrier, Verrine… not their real names, I’m sure, more like passwords that get carried from one generation to the next. Yvette, they don’t know I took it, but they’ll guess and come after me…”
“Their only power comes from your own fear and imagination. None of this is real, Pierre. You’re free of them now.”
The waiter brings their drinks; Yvette takes a sip of lemonade while music drifts on the warm air from a distant band. And for an instant she feels it, the tremor, the flash, a warning from the world’s far edge.
“You’re right, Yvette, we shall live for the future, not the past. We shall rejoice forever in the contemplation of beauty and eternal love. You are my angel, my life, my immortal beloved.”
But Yvette has seen the future. The days have passed, the children to be born are older than expired time. In this sepia moment we are already ghosts.