The Call of Distant Shores (6 page)

That same day, the day she'd found the forbidden drink, she'd found the bookstore.
 
Shelf after shelf of words coated in dust and forgotten.
 
She'd tasted the absinthe moments after purchasing it, slipping into an alley and taking a too-long draught from the neck of the bottle.
 
With her secret treasure tucked deep in the depths of her purse, she'd run her fingertips along the spines of novels and histories, biographies and collections, leather and cloth, some covered in brightly colored dust jackets, and others with gilt lettering stamped deep.

Then she was discovered as a squat, balding man with one eye much larger than the other suddenly appeared around the end of one bookcase.
 
Belle, too startled to speak, backed away, her fingers gripping the first book that she touched and drawing it free, holding it out in penance for stolen moments of deeply clouded thought.
 
Money changed hands, money she could not afford, and the book was hers, as much a stranger as the man who sold it and she was off with her bottle and her dreams.

Sometime that night, she'd begun to read.

The parsley was more difficult than the peppermint.
 
The recipe was meant for a much larger batch than the single bottle Belle had concocted, and it took her more than an hour of teeth-gritting and mumbled curses to complete the calculations.
 
Even when she had the figure in her mind and on the paper across her knees, she agonized, going over each number one at a time as if afraid they'd shift and rearrange if she didn't pay close enough attention.

At last she clipped the top of a single sprig of parsley and dropped it into her mortar.
 
She knew the faint dust of the peppermint remained, but it didn't matter.
 
She ground at the leaves with the pestle, pressing tightly and feeling the faint release of juice, the smearing.
 
She made a mental note to be very careful in removing it.
 
Pouring some of the absinthe into the mortar, stirring, and then pouring it all back through a funnel was the best way to be certain.
 
Her measurements were very exact, and if she left anything out, she would not be able to calculate the difference later.
 
She would have to start over.
 
Her shoulders sagged, just for an instant, at the thought.
 
So close.

She worked the parsley slowly to a paste, tipping the bottle now and then to drip a trickle of green liquid over the top, then working patiently to blend the paste to a thick syrup.
 
Finally, wrists aching from the effort, she set the pestle aside on the napkin and reached for her funnel.
 
She inserted it in the neck of the bottle and with practiced grace, she poured the contents of the mortar through.
 
There was no discernible change.
 
Green to green, soft rush of bubbles and the bottle stood, still steeped in mystery.
 
Drenched in dreams.

She corked it carefully and stood, holding the bottle in both hands and carried it to the altar.
 
It was actually a bar, or had been, but Art had renamed it the altar when Belle began insisting that nothing but her bottle be kept there.
 
The bottle, and the book.
 
Pressed beneath a sheet of glass in an old picture frame, it remained open to the same page that it had been open to for nearly three years.

Belle whispered softly to herself as she placed the bottle reverently on the bar.

"In
Xanadu
did
Kubla
Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,

Where
Alph
the sacred river, ran,

Through caverns measureless to man ...

Down to a sunless sea...."

She shivered and the bottle nearly tipped as a moment of vertigo shivered through her.
 
She righted the bottle quickly and stepped back. The book and its frame seemed to watch her as she retreated, as she stumbled among the ingredients and tools and notes, as she tripped, finally, dropping to her knees.
 
She cried out at the sharp contact with the floor, but bit the sound off quickly.
 
She wanted no one else in the room.
 
Not yet.
 
Maybe not ever.

This time, she knew, it would have to be her.
 
Art could not paint this moment.
 
Sammy could not draw it from the strings of her dulcimer, or whisper it from her silent lips.
 
The bottle glittered, and Belle looked away.
 
She fought the urge to drink now, to soar and burn with the deep green liquor sliding through her system.
 
It wasn't time.
 
If she drank now, he might not come.
 
He might never come.
 
He might come, and leave her.
 
It had to be the afternoon.
 
She had to be alone.

She stacked her papers as neatly as her trembling hands would allow and gathered her tools.
 
She needed to clean up, and to ready herself.
 
The others would have to be told, warned away and far from the bottle, and the room, when the time came.
 
Belle had work to do.

Without a backward glance, she slipped from the room and into the kitchen.
 
Behind her, the bottle continued to glitter, as if that flickering, captured light dancing along the green glass could watch, or think.
 
Or dream.

Art didn't want to leave, but he knew from the expression on Belle's face that it was not a request.
 
It was her house, after all.
 
It was her gig, her dream or dementia or whatever you wanted to call it.
 
As much as Art liked to see himself as the other half of a couple involving Belle, he knew it was never going to happen.

Sammy only nodded, packing up her dulcimer and donning a long, shapeless jacket before slipping out the back door and into the alley beyond. Neither Art nor Belle knew where Sammy went when she wasn't with them.
 
Just that moment, Art would have liked to know.
 
He would have liked to have been invited to follow, to belong somewhere during the period when he didn't belong in his own home.

It was silliness, he knew, this jealousy he felt toward the bottle.
 
Pointless and foolish.
 
Any other night of the week he would have been up and out and gone without a word, but the thought that he was forbidden changed it all.
 
He hated it, chomped against the invisible bit it implied, and, in the end he grabbed his coat and stomped out into the streets without a word.
 
As he moved steadily down the street and away, he felt the vague flicker of something familiar and distant, and he stopped frowning.
 
He glanced at his hands, then back over his shoulder.

Very suddenly, he felt like painting.
 
The urge came over him from nowhere, slipped into his thoughts and displaced his anger.
 
He stood, undecided, the scents of oils and canvas wafting enticingly from his memory.

"Damn," he breathed softly.
 
He knew he couldn't go back.
 
Not yet.
 
Not now.
 
Belle wouldn't even open the door, and if he grew more insistent, she might go to his studio and his rooms and throw his things out the windows.
 
Images flickered through his mind.
 
Belle prostrate, lying back across the floor.
 
Sammy, fingers poised near the broken string, speaking softly, her words palpable in the incense-thick air.
 
The green bottle, pulsing, growing and winding in a coil that reached to circle Belle's prone form.
 
He wanted to capture it, but was forced to memorize, eyes closed, gripping tightly each sinuous roll of what he had seen and refusing to let it fade.

He would paint.
 
Not now.
 
Not tonight probably, but he would paint, and when he did, he would bring that image to life.
 
If he couldn't give Belle her magic, he could record their combined failures.
 
He could make it so real that the music and the lust burned the edges of the canvas.

He couldn't shake the image of the coils.

"
Weave
a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread."

Art whispered the words, and again he shivered.
 
He pulled his jacket more tightly about himself and headed off for Sid's, a club where the music was dark and dreary and the lighting was more so.
 
He wasn't in a mood to dance or mingle, but the nightly call of alcohol rang in his ears.

"Fuck it," he muttered to no one in particular.
 
"Just fuck it."

Belle poured the absinthe into a tumbler and set it upon the altar.
 
She knelt before it, trembling, feeling the weight of the empty house heavy on her shoulders.
 
Now that she'd sent the others away she felt vulnerable, fragile and inadequate to the task she had set herself.

With a reverence that regularly brought scornful comments from Art, she opened her journal.
 
In the pages of this book she'd documented her quest, her dreams, each and every mistake and small success.
 
She had also recorded her research, and it was to this she turned for strength.
 
The words that had dragged her into this surreal otherworld.
 
The history of
Xanadu
.

"The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between
Porlock
and Linton, on the
Exmoor
confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, –
 
Here Belle had scribbled a furious note, drawn from other sources - letters and fragments, notes of Lord Byron himself.
 
She had crossed it all out, including the word anodyne, and replaced it with absinthe
–
 
from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage':

'Here the Khan
Kubla
commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.'

The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. 'A person on business from
Porlock
' interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than 'some eight or ten scattered lines and images.'"

Belle closed the book.
 
She had read the words so many times she could recite them as litany.
 
She had researched and delved into the letters of Coleridge and Byron, certain she would find the answers she sought.
 
Hundreds of lines, reduced to a snippet of rhyme, and still so powerful that movies had been centered around small quotes from the verse, and novels written in the attempt to finish the work.
 
To close the portal, or open it, as Coleridge had seen it.
 
To present to the world the quality that inspired Byron to insist on the publication of a broken poem, as if it were a key.
 
As if, beyond the inspiration of Coleridge himself, Byron alone could see.

On the altar sat the fruits of years of labor.
 
Belle believed that she knew more of the essence of Absinthe than any living being, and still she quaked at her ignorance.
 
It was a gamble, each time, pouring the essence of each long-dead master's work into her bottles and vials, crashing into the walls of their failures and seeing, just beyond her grasp, the essence, the purity of form that would show her what he had seen, what he would have written.
 
The essence and completion of
Xanadu
that would make it real.

Art had made it surreal.
 
He had grasped the tenuous threads of all Belle had striven for and woven them into an incomplete tapestry that teased her with its borderline truth.
 
She loved him for his devotion and cursed him for the failure, but she knew that the failure was really hers.
 
Sammy haunted her.
 
There was more to the tiny, frail musician than met the eye, but there was no history, no record of things gone and those to come to measure her against.
 
Sammy was as she was, and she, in the end, had failed as well.
 
This one, also, on Belle.