Muse by Rebecca Lim
‘Come and get me!’ I shriek, taking Angelo by surprise and shoving him out of the way so hard that he sprawls to the ground, his weapon clattering against the raised stone kerb. I dodge Vladimir’s outstretched arms and scramble away up the road on my scratched and bruised bare feet, almost losing my balance, then recovering it as I stretch out Irina’s long legs and run.
‘Are you seeing this?’ I shriek. ‘Any of you? Come and get me! I dare you! Show yourselves!’
I’ve almost made it past the hotel driveway when I’m crash-tackled to the ground by someone at least three times Irina’s body weight. Still facing down, the surface of the pavement moving past me in a blur, I’m carried at a run, under the arms, by the ankles, back through the emergency exit doors we came out of this morning, through the laundry room, the sound-deadened luxury lift, as if the day is being rewound all around me.
Someone throws open the door to my suite — every light inside blazing bright — and I’m set down, none too gently, on hands and knees on the floor. My damp hair hangs down stringily on either side of my face. I can feel that the soles of my feet are cut up and wet and filthy.
I look up to see a man in a suit standing over me, with a kind face and a courteous manner. He’s stocky and paunchy and clean-shaven, with a leonine head of grey, wavy hair and a tie like a stockbroker, all the stripes running upwards.
‘I’ve never seen you before,’ I say, squinting at him as someone helps me to stand. ‘Gianfranco?’
‘No,’ he says kindly in Italian-accented English. ‘But Gianfranco did send for me. And if you’re a good girl, you won’t ever have to see me again.’
Moving quickly for someone so large, he adjusts something just out of my line of sight and I feel a small stab of pain in one arm.
And just like that, I’m gone.
There’s the sensation of rapid movement, of leagues being eaten up in the space between two heartbeats. I’m flying, oh God, I think I’m flying. Something that’s been denied me for so long.
In the instant I recognise what I’m doing, I feel an intense wave of almost paralysing fear, but, also, exhilaration. And the two emotions could not be more distinct.
I’m looking down at the distant snow, so far below, a dull white in this moonless night. The air whistling past me is colder than any mortal could stand, but I’m moving through it easily, as if I’m a bird. Or an angel. Soundlessly, with purpose.
Watching the great distances pass beneath me, I feel my gorge rise, as if I’m going to be sick. I’m suffused with fear, almost rigid with it, and yet I fly on, under cover of darkness: over snow, over standing stones, ravines and valleys, one mountainous pass after another on which ski lifts and cable cars stand idle, all the floodlights out for the night. There’s no movement, no light, in the houses that I soar over unseen. The humans inside, they’re asleep. They’ll wake later, never knowing I was even here.
Am I … hurt? There’s a slight dragging pain in my side, as if I have a stitch, or I’ve been wounded. Not gravely; more of a flesh wound, a deep cut.
I’ll live. But it’s slowing me down, everything’s getting in my way, and I’m suddenly pierced through by so much rage, so much frustration, that I turn my head to find a target for my fury. I see a double-storey house with a steeply pitched roof and quaint paintwork, empty flower boxes at all the windows, and a winding drive. There’s a collection of outbuildings, built in the same style, gathered around it. Humans and animals all asleep within.
I narrow my eyes at them. That’s all I do. And set them all on fire.
The buildings burst into flame simultaneously.
Will it and it is done.
The night air is suddenly rent with screaming, the bellows of trapped beasts, the sounds of breaking glass, but I fly on. Torching anything, everything, I see. Because I can; because I am of a mind to do it.
Snow-covered trees with bare, frozen limbs as hard as iron; byres, barns, farmhouses, cars, convenience stores and cathedrals — all gone in seconds. Roads, cobbled laneways, truck stops, turn-offs, flyovers — all these become rivers of flame, the asphalt turning liquid, like mud.
Things that should not even burn — I set fire to them all. And I laugh.
A ringing laugh. Masculine.
There’s a sudden sensation of distance — as if I’m zooming out, refocusing, before zooming back in — and I realise that it’s not me doing this at all. Someone else is turning the world to fire and I’m just seeing it through his eyes. I’m somehow getting his feelings and mine, together. Unshakeable confidence versus sheer terror; triumph versus horror.
Of course, all the negative emotions I’m feeling are mine.
I know that laugh. Amusement tinged with cruelty.
How often did I hear it with my own ears when I was me, inhabiting my own body? How often have I heard it in my dreams?
Luc? I scream silently. Desiste! Stop!
But if Luc hears me, he gives no sign. Everything seems so real, it’s as though I’ve been given a temporary line into his head, as if I’ve hijacked his senses, shrugged on his skin. But what I’m seeing is unspeakable. The night sky lit up with flames, with suffering. It can’t be real, can it?
I’m hit by a sudden recollection. Of a time when the universe was young. Of Luc disrupting the settled orbits of planetary bodies, sending them careening into each other, displacing objects billions of times our size, mass and density, just because he could. Life had been an endless game to him, the universe his playground. But back then it had not teemed with the life it teems with now, and what he’s doing at this moment screams wrongness to me.
Luc crosses a final peak and soars down the heavily populated flank on the other side of the mountain — house after house built in terraces down the steep incline. In the distance I see a large body of water, a handful of lights gleaming upon its banks.
As he flies unerringly towards the vast lake in the darkness, he picks out main streets, town squares, winding highways, clock towers, restaurants, cafés, villas, jetties, pontoons, sailboats and cruisers and casually sets fire to them all. The lakeside is soon surrounded by a wall of flames reaching high into the night sky and sirens quickly fill the air, the lights of emergency vehicles wind up the twisting roads into the foothills, people spill out into the streets, into the gardens of their homes, to see the skies lit such an unnatural, incandescent red. Red laced with a blue so pale it is almost white.
Holy fire.
Except it can’t be holy fire because these people are not our enemies. They have done nothing to deserve our wrath. How could anyone even justify using it this way?
It’s the dead-heart of winter, with everyone inside away from the cold. Maximum damage, minimum effort. The loss of life would be terrible, if this were not a dream.
Luc continues, following the main body of the waterway until it splits into two tributaries. He chooses the right fork, flames rising in his wake along the right bank.
Through his eyes, I look back at each town or village that has been claimed by fire, feeling both exultation and nausea, his emotions still weirdly entangled with mine. I can’t understand how this is happening — how I can see what he sees, feel him, be him.
I know our connection is strongest while I lie sleeping, but this is something else altogether. Luc has always been so guarded, so unknowable. But tonight, I think I’m actually inside his mind, or what my sleeping self imagines his mind is like. And what I’m seeing there is utterly repellent.
When I knew him — when he and I lay entwined beneath the fragrant boughs in that hanging garden he created solely for me — I could never have imagined him capable of any of this.
This Luc? I don’t even know.
I’m so busy looking backwards at the devastation Luc has wrought that I don’t see her until she is upon me, us, with a rush of air, of silent fury. I am buffeted by her wings, the giant wings that are unfurled across her back like a warning of the terror to come.
I know those dark eyes, that
She’s moving so quickly that I only catch a glimpse of her. Her wide eyes are dark with anger as she cries in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘You may go no further, Luc. No further.’
She seems to draw a flaming sword out of nowhere, out of thin air, it’s suddenly just there in her hand, and she’s suspended in the air before him — before me, the ghost in the machine — with contempt and righteous anger in her eyes.
She’s more beautiful than the sun, and completely terrifying. Every part of her seems made of electricity, or lightning; the locks of her dark, wavy hair snake out around her face as if she has suddenly turned into that gorgon of myth, the Medusa. I can’t reconcile the gentle, playful creature who was my friend with this vision of terror and beauty. She seems ready to slay Luc, or die trying.
Luc laughs again, hatred in his voice as he replies, ‘I was the highest of you all. You were nothing before, never my match! Why dare hope that you could stop me now?’
‘I’m only the first line of defence,’ she tells him fiercely. ‘Even if I am defeated, they gather to end your misrule.’
‘If they believe you will buy them all enough time to reach Milan, their confidence is misplaced,’ Luc sneers.
Suddenly, the air before him — before me — seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns. The air itself bursts into flame and there’s a flaming sword in Luc’s hand — in mine — and there are giant wings flaring across his back — as if they are mine, too — and Luc rises into the air and falls upon Nuriel without warning, sword upraised.
I scream at her: Fuge! Flee!
But my cry is silent, and goes unheard, and Luc slashes down without hesitation, his burning blade driving at a point between her right earlobe and her jawline. He follows the blow swiftly with all his weight, as if he would strike Nuriel’s head from her neck in one blow.
She was his friend once, too, a long time ago. But there’s no glimmer of past affection. Certainly, no mercy.
It’s true that her strength did not ever equal his, because I glimpse genuine fear in Nuriel’s eyes as she brings up her own blade, clumsily, just in time, so that the two cutting surfaces meet with a crack of energy at impact, like a lightning strike. Her blade is caught at an awkward angle between their two bodies.
Luc and Nuriel grapple together, their blades locked for what seems an eternity, spinning and falling through the air in a dance both graceful and deadly. And the whole time, I’m completely disorientated, because it feels as if it’s me fighting Nuriel.
The cold air whistles past us as we fall and tumble through the icy winter air, the whole world red with flame at the peripheries of my sight. Nuriel’s eyes bore into mine with contempt, with barely concealed terror, and she bares her teeth against me, crying, ‘Haereticum!’
Heretic. The word causes a little catch in my breathing. What could she mean?
Luc drives down inexorably upon Nuriel’s blade, pushing it in towards the sweet curve of her face. I sense her beginning to falter as he bears down upon her with all his ferocity.
‘If they are all as weak as you,’ he hisses, eye to burning eye, ‘then your rule is truly over and mine? Begins now. I ascend even as you fall.’
He roars the last word, and the light of his blade seems to leach into the light of Nuriel’s. His blade is beginning to cut through. In seconds, she will be dead, her energies scattered.
But I know Nuriel.
And even before my eye catches her doing it, I sense her flow away from the point of weakness, the breach, until almost the only thing left of her is her broken blade, and then that, too, unravels and dissolves. Nuriel has become a slipstream of particles so fine and luminescent, Luc can’t hope to catch it or bend it to his will.
I watch as the particles disperse then re-form some distance away — like a swarm of bees coming together. And I see Nuriel again, in her customary form, her giant wings outspread, her hands empty of any weapon. Then she seems to somersault backwards, spiralling down gracefully, deliberately, with the velocity of a speeding arrow, towards the slick, dark surface of the lake far below.
Her feint has caught Luc by surprise, and she’s already pulled herself into a low, tight, skimming trajectory just above the waterline — moving away quickly, faster than a mortal eye could follow — well before he subsumes his own burning weapon in the palm of his hand and turns to follow.
Nuriel streaks past a large estate by the water’s edge — red light reflecting weirdly upon a small guesthouse and private pier on the lake’s edge — well before Luc has even completed his own dive.
Nuriel is picking up speed ahead of us; she’s now only a faint, luminous streak almost lost to sight in the reflected glow of red upon the water. Luc laughs again as he launches himself after her like a bird of prey, vengeance singing in his heart. The two of them are locked in pursuit, tearing over the water, weaving their way through and around islands both inhabited and uninhabited, exploding through outbuildings, ferry terminals, church towers, gateways, boundary walls, leaving only incandescence in their wake.
Luc goes after Nuriel without hesitation as she counted upon him doing. She’s leading him somewhere. Somewhere with reinforcements. At least, she’s trying to.
She may not be his equal in strength or ferocity, but when I knew her, there were few fleeter in mind, in spirit, than Nuriel.
And it hits me, that this isn’t a dream.
This is real. It’s happening. Happening right now.
Luc has reached the outskirts of the city. He’s almost here.
For a long time, I just drift. There are periods of dark, interspersed with periods of light, as if I am a rudderless boat on uncharted waters, a ghost ship.
I hear voices — both human and celestial, both real and remembered — and I know that real life is intruding upon memory, and memory upon real life. But that is the nature of my illness: that I must always straddle two worlds — the seen and the unseen. And also two ages, two epochs: the time when I was whole; and everything that came after that time.
But the pull of the light seems … stronger, somehow.
And yet I can’t seem to struggle back up into the light for an age.
The outline of the room I’m in finally starts to regain colour and detail, and I see Gia in her vintage pink and white blossom-covered kimono, curled up in an armchair she’s pulled up right next to my bed, her pyjama-clad knees poking out beneath her wrap. It’s like she’s keeping vigil over me while she taps away on her mobile phone like she always does. The chandelier’s dark, but all the lamps in the room are lit, suffusing the air with a soft, warm light.
My internal clock tells me it’s almost 5 pm. How long have I been … out?
For a moment, I see entire Swiss-Italian border towns on fire, fire pouring down the mountainside like a flood and I go cold with horror.
‘You’ve got to get out of Milan,’ I rasp in Gia’s direction before she even knows I’m awake.
I know I’ve given her a shock, because she jumps, visibly, dropping her phone down the side of her armchair.
‘You’ve got to get away from me,’ I insist, ‘if you want to live.’ My tongue and throat are so parched that they actually hurt.
Gia fishes her phone back up and taps something hurriedly into the screen, then tucks it beneath one knee. ‘That’s exactly what I tell myself all the time,’ she says. ‘That you’re bad for my health, like staring into the sun. Welcome back.’
She gives me the ghost of a smile and I see that her eyes are shadowed and puffy, as if she’s been crying steadily for many hours. For me? I didn’t think she liked Irina enough to have tears to spare her.
‘I know I’m not making much sense,’ I croak, ‘but you’ve got to leave. It’s not safe any more around me.’
‘I know,’ she murmurs, shifting in her leather armchair.
I frown. ‘If you know
She doesn’t answer; just uncurls her legs from beneath her and crosses the room to a fussy, bow-fronted, marble-topped armoire with gilt-trimmed legs and gilt handle pulls. She pours some water out of a covered silver jug into a glass tumbler and brings it over to me, carefully setting it down on the bedside table to my left.
‘Want some help sitting up?’ she says.
I shake my head, but just doing that seems to set off carillion bells behind my eyes. I roll over gingerly towards the wall to my right and lie with my back to Gia for a moment, unable to catch my breath, or see, for the terrible pounding inside my skull.
‘I still don’t know how you managed not to kill yourself going off the roof of the car like that,’ she mutters as she sits on the edge of the bed behind me. ‘Everyone thinks you’re certifiable right now. Gianfranco had to call Giovanni Re just before midnight to give him the bad news that his star model just tried to throw herself from a moving car. Everyone’s thinking of pulling the plug on you — Giovanni, even your management.’
Gia’s voice is barely audible. ‘I called Giovanni at noon to give him a progress report. He told me that if you woke, and you still wanted to do it — anchor his show — he’ll have you. If not, he’ll retire the three looks he made especially with you in mind. They’ll be archived, and never again see the light of day. Orla will get her way and close the damned parade in her sparkly silver dress.’
I shut my eyes, unsure how to reply. If I don’t ‘walk’ for Giovanni tomorrow, I’ll be responsible for ruining one of the defining moments of his long and celebrated career. And Irina will go from global icon to global outcast. She’ll probably never work again. But if I do … who knows what will happen?
There are so many variables, all of them beyond my control. The sudden blaze of intense irritation I feel is enough to send shock waves down Irina’s nerve endings. Immediately, I feel less sluggish, less weighted-down and sedated, more myself. I lean up on my elbows, with a feeling in my throat as if I have swallowed broken glass.