The Face of Days
“A nice woman,” said Henri after Jacqueline left, when he took her glass.
“The wife of a friend.” I refilled mine from the bottle. “But you’re right.”
“Bring her here again tonight, eh, Mr. Elwin. Musicians will be here at the Bellond. We have a lively time.”
“It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I’m already having a lively time.”
“You do have good times for an old man.”
“If you weren’t an old man too you wouldn’t say such things. I suspect you of having good times too.”
We laughed. It felt good not taking offense. I once did, in my forties. By my fifties, I felt the youthfulness implied by being called old.
Or it may have been the air in Talleil. Or the wall. It made people more alive, to be reminded so constantly of mortality.
When light fled across the sea to the west I descended from the hotel. The breeze felt damp against my cheek. To the east—the hotel sat west of the wall—a faint haze appeared in the air. It rapidly gained in solidity, and began to shed its characteristic, faint glow.
My course took me down Rue Calais to Germaine and St. Beauve. I passed beneath the overhanging buttresses of the Hotel Londres which ponderously looked over the sea. At the six-lane Chatelaine I paused out of habit, though it had emptied of all traffic save two cars I could see in the distance, moving westward away from the wall. Not many years ago I would have regarded this scene with alarm: the Chatelaine free of traffic at any hour? Astounding!
I had become accustomed to the silence, however. Crossing to the beach without running the street’s high-speed gauntlet made the visit to the shore the more pleasant.
One other soul braved the seaside at this hour, a darkened figure I could see pacing the cobble off to the left. The figure walked with hands locked behind his back, his feet moving in a composed manner in the opposite direction. Most people kept free of the area after dusk.
The wall did not greatly disturb me, however.
That is not to say it left me unaffected. To even the most stable—or jaded—of minds, the sight of the pearly whiteness blocking off a fair portion of the land and sky could be unnerving. The wall had a presence of its own, even without the added spectacle of the ghosts.
The stones of the beach made a pleasant sound underfoot, audible even against the waves which clattered pebbles together while receding from the high tide of an hour before. I turned my gaze firmly forward and upward, however.
The wall stretched from some distance out to sea, maybe half a kilometer, to a point above the top of a low mountain north of the city. The mountain had become a magnet for mystics who liked to sit near the diffuse phenomenon. Few apparitions erupted from the wall to disturb their meditations, there. The mystics apparently achieved marvelous trances. Some wrote popular books about their experiences.
The spectral people and animals, of which most were horses, emerged from random points across the white surface. Sometimes they appeared at ground level, where they could be inspected. Pearly white of color and of an oddly grainy texture, they would slowly separate from the general substance. At a distance of some two meters they would begin dissipating. The graininess simply increased until the image no longer cohered. They dispersed, leaving no residue of any kind. According to many in the public, the apparitions failed to entirely disappear, but instead became invisible: thus Talleil, to the fearful-minded, was host to invisible denizens countless in number and visible only for brief moments as they emerged from this extra-dimensional portal.
Not a theory to which I gave much credence.
As I walked across the beach I saw a number of ghostly figures appearing. All looked human, this time. Being at a distance, I could tell little about them. The darkness had grown enough that more forms emerged above the sea and the rock-covered shore. Near me, a trio of horses thrust from the whiteness, kicking and breaking free with more speed than did most apparitions, dissipating then with equal alacrity when they charged into the air over the beach. I held my breath at their appearance.
Above and to the right, two small human figures appeared, both female, holding hands. I had never seen any apparitions hold hands before.
I wondered sometimes if my curiosity stemmed from voyeurism. The figures all went completely naked, even if they usually showed less definition than the marble sculpture carved in some of these regions during an earlier age. Yet I took equal interest in the young and old forms, and the male and female. I cannot deny a certain glandular reaction to the naked female body—but standing beside the wall of ghosts, I never entirely believed these white bodies wholly human. Female, yes. Human—I felt less sure.
Yet these two held hands—so human a gesture. In my more pacifist reveries I wondered if the apparitions were victims of war—for the horses could have fallen to sword and arrow and bomb, just as the young and old, fit and unfit could have been claimed in battle. Yet did young girls hold hands in war?
They disappeared.
