The Musee Mechanique is alive with noise tonight. Not human noise, precisely, but the bleeps and whirls, the electromechanized hums, the tinned whir of antique machinery. The loop-de-loo of the Magic Hindoo Head swirling in the dull yellow light of its antique cabinet, the grimy, crank-a-drink song of an out of tune player piano. Luce is standing in front of the VITALIZER - tall and angular, in (somewhat) clothes tonight, worn jeans and a crisp white oxford buttoned up beneath a long charcoal gray cardigan whose lapels have been lined with glossy dark fur, fake or real.
Her hair is loosely pulled back from her face, with a feathery, windswept look but for newly cut bangs that will be gone this night next. She looks young, sharp only when she smiles, her make-up clean and simple. Her eyes are darker somehow, the irises nearly opaque. The air she gives off is that of a mod French school girl circa 1968, halfway between the Sorbonne and the protests on the left bank.
The VITALIZER takes her quarter and hums. It promises no electricity, demands that they STAND CLOSE for relief of their tired aching feet.
The arcade is closed but for the pair of them. A private party, the owner was persuaded to throw. Half the machines are on, though. Gleaming and grinning and whirling in their frames, giving the otherwise empty arcade the full glow of carnival atmosphere it usually has during business hours.
"I trust you weren't menaced by feral dogs on the way here?" The edge of her smile, that contained amusement, dark blonde brows making perfect arcs above the drowning dark (tonight) blue eyes, as Alice (or whatever face she wears, tonight) finds her admist the attractions, such as they are. "There's neither a pool nor a gun range, but I find the Hindoo Oracle rather more congenial company than all those silent ghouls of the mad queen."
Alice
This is the kind of place that people come because they'd like to conjure ghosts out've the tacky antique, the unnatural mechanical, the entertaining tricks of another era. This is the kind of place that people come because they want to be washed in ambience, in atmosphere, in curiousity, Curiousities, because they'd like to fold themselves up into the cabinet. This is the kind of place that people come to say they've seen not because they're looking necessarily to have fun. This is the kind of place where people come, now, to mock, to exclaim over faded charms, to smirk and nudge each other, and of course Alice is not smirking (yet), nor even nudging Marie-Hélene in the ribs, remember when.
And it is Alice, today. Alice, wearing the face she was wearing when she died how every many years ago, the Valentine heart face with too-large eyes, unsettlingly direct. Her skin is as pale as a ghost's, as a porcelain doll's, but her mouth is red on purpose, red like the wrong answer to the right question, baby, red like little red riding hood dipped in wolf's blood and dried, like a starlet, baby, like an un-kind princess. Not long before just now, someone stared at her mouth, then stared, startled, at her throat when she spoke: like how could that sound come from a woman with a smile like that, right?
"As incredible as it seems, I managed neatly to avoid such a fate. I won't go into specifics, but suffice to say that Batmanesque maneuvers were required. I flit from balcony to balcony, convenient gargoyle to convenient gargoyle, I made certain my beltthingy had those hookthingies." Alice grins, and it's a vibrant-thing, brights her dark eyes when she comes up whisper-soft behind Luce, peers briefly at the VITALIZER.
"OH!" Alice snaps her fingers, aw-shucks. "I remember now! I had a drinking game to play - a sort of half-bet half-game. Every time one of our brethren discusses wild dogs, and mentions fleas, owe a shot..."
Alice wanders deeper into the arcade, her shadow long, until she finds the very accurate palm reading machine. Her body gives every indication of being suddenly delighted, slow-waking, and sometimes it is easy, easy to forget that Alice isn't alive at all, such is her control of a certain elegant vivacity:
"You know. I don't understand silent ghouls, there but for the grace of, as if they had no life - only there to stand; it's quite too? There is such a thing as good service, but that isn't it. That's - la, I ramble, because I am nervous about my future. These machines always have my number, punch my ticket. We have a war on, these oracular machines and I."
"How are you, Luce, love? Any luck yet hunting down the items on your, um," vague, "list?"
And Luce comes stalking after; in her long black boots, the leather fitted to her calves, the clip of heels sharpened against the concrete. She has her hands in her pockets, distending the shape of the cardigan, pulling it open like a balloon around her tall, narrow figure. Her own shadow longer- jointed strangely here and there, as if she were made of clockworks herself, stick limbs and nobbly joints, able to fold backwards like an insect - until the angle of the light is behind her rather than aslant, and her multipartite shadows resolve into one, which is merely long. Which stalks ahead of her like a silent herald sewn onto the bottom of her booted feet.
"You should have a mask with horns to match the belts and hooks. Perhaps a leather tail to double as a whip."
There are a half-dozen tableaus between the Vitalizer and the Palm Reader. Mechanized dioramas where you can watch Marie Antoinette's wee head fall, repeatedly, into a woven basket beneath a mini guillotine, while a paper crowd cheers and a tinny marseillaise creaks up from a half-forgotten music box below. And so on. Luce pauses at the next tableau, the Opium Den, her hand cool on the glass. No oils on her skin, so no handprints on the glass, just the shadow of her reflection outlined against the moving figures within.
"I'm well enough; though this city is such a curious place. I have not tracked down anything on my list, but have found a new bookstore, named Hidden Gems, down an alley in Lower Pacific Heights. Open late on the third Tuesday of every month. Few customers, just a slippered old shopkeeper waiting for grace or bankruptcy, I expect.
"You should make the trip." Three long necklaces hang down the center of her narrow frame. Two strands of pearls, and a long, workmanlike chain linked through a small bronze clockwork gear, tangled together with the rest. They clink softly as she moves. "I brought you a present: a second edition of the English translation of the Dabestan-e Mazaheb by David Shea and Anthony Troyer. And I have a drum somewhere, if you'd like it."
Then she drifts closer, her shadow jagged in front of her, watching the glowing eyes of the mechanical palmist as she and Alice dual. "Your drinking game does not sound practical. We would soon drain those unfortunate silent ghouls, and be left with the terrible dilemma of turning on our elders or being named poor sports for quitting too soon.
"But what does your fortune say?" This is murmured aslant, the cut of her (dark) eyes sidelong, lingering on the long soft curve of Alice's heart-shaped jawline.
And quieter, still. "Tell me true: have you ever seen one of them? The wolves?"
Alice"A present? Exciting!" The dark-eyed creature (with the delicate ankles) gives Luce a somewhat ironic glance. "Is San Francisco making you feel it; the States's brand of Orientalism? If so, we should go to the under-city."
The hand of a man is the make of his life, the Palmistry machine says, and Alice fishes a penny from the pocket of her smock. She is wearing a smock, loose, blousy, curling in at the very edges, tight at the wrists but billowing at the elbows, of a fabric that might be a touch too summery for the chill Day-of-the-Dead-is-nearly-arrived nights, though beneath that she is wearing another layer, something that might actually be an excuse for warmth. There is no candle here, no bonfire, no sign of life or fever to fall back to when one is feeling doubtful. They are like snakes, vampires, the lamia: cold-blooded.
The penny goes clink; Alice splays her hand against the black inked handprint. The machine chinks; it whirrs. It does not give her a card as it should, and she is smirking, smirking when she glances sidelong at Luce: "Apparently, it is shy, has nothing to say for itself at all, come on you silly thing," and she knees the machine, letting another coin tumble into mechnical guts, re-start the process. This time a little card flicks out like a snake's tongue, quickly, bending against Alice's lower-thigh.
She takes it, glances at it as she answers Luce's second question: "Once. And from a distance. No, twice - the second time, I was told afterward; it looked just like a man to me. Pascal has seen more. I know Broderick has; he will wax on about remember the dark times, blah blah, the streets full of blood, dramatic and prickish. Although I'm sure very honest."
She glances up, and smiles. Open. "If I were a man, I would be assured of a good job, a rainy day, and a dark stranger. Were I woman, a sea-journey and a baby."
"Do you mean, literally, a city under this city?" Luce glances down at her feet, skeptical. The Musee Mechanique is after all on a pier, the Mission built over piled garbage and sludge poured into the bay. She knows this from the evening newspapers, the back and forth between engineers and developers, the worst-case-scenarios the seismologists discuss hidden in their pages. And she glances over them, ink on her fingertips, looking rather more openly for blood, murders, gallery openings. The usual.
That skepticism she wears like so: a mask that touches her eyes and her mouth, a certain light that men might think naughty or playful or challenging. It is something else; more animal than human, or rather than animal in the human in the monster. All prove-me-wrong. "Or perhaps more figuratively, the city inside the city. The back-alley clubs in Chinatown, with portly Mandarin - or Cantonese? - bodyguards? That under-city I have visited, but only as a tourist, mind. Passing-through."
She is slung against the frame of The Opium Den, mouth still curled though, bemused now as Alice's prediction comes true. Her insight into the vagueries of fortune tellers. Even the antique, mechanical sort. The faint huff of a quiet laugh flares her nostrils.
"If the streets were full of blood, I wonder that anyone stayed. Or perhaps this was when they were building the streets?" The question is rhetorical.
"I have a - " she pauses, delicately, between the words, fingers worming into the front pocket of her jeans for another pair of pennies. " theory about them, the lupines, based loosely on the old Cathar heresy." Hands over two old pennies nipped between her delicate fingers, so that Alice can have another go at the mechanical palmist.
"Do you know anything about them, the Cathar? They believed in two gods, one of the spirit and one of the material world. Loosely linked, I imagine, to the Zoroastrianism through the Gnostic heresies of North Africa."
"Yes. The city swallowed at the beginning of last century. I've always half-believed the Nosferatu were responsible, if anything other than an act of God was." Alice smiles, reminiscent, the dark muse lit from within, though truth is that in 1906 she was not in San Francisco, she did not have to deal with the terror of havens suddenly haven-no-longer, she did not have to deal with the wreckage, the fingers of sunlight which slaughtered many, the ruins of a flamboyant city, the fires. Like Hell.
The rhetorical question she does not answer, although she gives Luce a querying lift of an eyebrow as she steps lightly away from the Palmistry machine. The fortune she tucks into her pockets, and she keeps her hands in them, playing with her coins, jingle, jangle, jingle, although she grins (sweet, just shy of a dimpled thing) at Luce, accepting the Toreador's offer of two more pennies: circles back, ready to give the thing another try. Alice enjoys predicting the future. Alice enjoys predicting what people in the future will predict about the past, as well, though that game's beginning to become disconcerting, and rather than having a humanizing effect, she can feel it making her more alien. How alien she is become is not something Alice gives much thought to. That is not her fashion of introspection.
"I know nothing at all about the Cathar. Is that your theory, then; that the lupines believe in two gods, a material and a spiritual? The spiritual is perhaps ruled by the Moon?" She frowns, slightly, as she the first penny goes clink-clank, and then the next: "Or maybe the material would be ruled by the Moon. It's a god that you can see in the sky, after all. A physical presence. Ha. I wonder if they'd be able to stand it -- sent-up in a rocket-ship to stand on the cold rock?"
The somewhat poetic flight of fancy aside, the slope of Alice's shoulders, the slant of her glance is a listening one.
"I should like that, then. The city underneath, the ruin of it. And all the better if the Nosferatu were behind it. We might find a few down there. And I wonder what they would say - " all musing, rhetorical, the words floating at the time of her palette, lingering in the hum of her mouth.
"Ahh, the Cathar. They were slightly more complicated than simply two-gods-to-be-worshipped. They believed that a divine spark lived in each human being, but that it was encased in a fleshy corpus, chained to the material world, imprisoned inside it.
"That may be the best metaphor, I think: prison. The material world, they believed, was created by a lesser deity - the devil, the demiurge, a usurper god - and ruled entirely by his corrupt servants.
"Though they called themselves Good Men or Good Christians, the Catholics deemed them heretics because the Cathar denied the divinity of Jesu Christo. There was nothing godly in the flesh; true divinity lived only in the wholly spiritual spark trapped inside our corrupt bodies, in this corrupt prison of the world.
"And so, the Cathar believe sought to break the bonds of their fleshy prison; to transcend and escape it when they died, so that they might live in the bosom of god rather than be reborn into corrupt flesh.
"The lupines seem to hate the world; eschew civilization, seek to bring down what man builds that I wonder if they are like the Cathari - trying to destroy the prison of the material world, human works, and all such things - in order to transcend this prison of flesh, or destroy it somehow. Become wholly spiritual."
A faint, delicate shrug near the end of the long discourse. "There are those among the Sabbat who embrace Cathar beliefs, and see themselves as the true servants of the corrupted demiurge. So they revel in the sins of the flesh. Sink themselves into all manner of corruption and attempt to draw others into such sins."
A brief, sharp glance back to find and meet Alice's dark, reflective eyes. The supple wick of her mouth curving open, the lights of the machines glazing over her own gaze, marking them shifting pools of reflected light. "There is, I promise, more to this than idle speculation." The spark of humor underneath, humming through her frame.