I decamped to the hotel after dinner. Because it was the off season and the hotel was gigantic, I felt as though I were the only one staying there, and I’m certain the skeletal off-season staff resented that their off-seasonal rest had been disrupted by a gorgeous stranger (I put in the part about me being gorgeous to remind myself, and you). I got some unfriendly stares from the female staff, and some ambiguous stares from the males, but I ignored everyone and deadbolted myself into my first-floor room, which was unexpectedly large and full of shadows. I tried to drink myself to sleep with the rest of the bottle of pear brandy H2 had gifted me. Didn’t work. I lay unmoving in my bed in the dark for a solid semi-hour, gazing at the adumbral patterns moving across my ceiling, occasionally swigging straight from the bottle; then got up and turned on the light at the desk and opened my laptop. There was no wireless connection. I wasn’t surprised.
I closed the laptop and went outside for a walk. The seafront was deserted, and many of the surrounding buildings – also hotels – were latent, some run down to near-ruin. Walking up a side street towards the town, I found a woman’s left shoe with a broken heel. I picked it up; it was fairly new, except for the heel, and comely. The leather was supple, dyed a delicate blueish green and decorated with a large cabochon, triangular in shape and metallic gold in colour. On looking closer, I saw there was on the right side of the pointed tip a spot of what could have been dried blood but which was probably dirt.
I put the shoe back where I had found it, on the uneven paving stones of the side street next to a granite staircase. Looking up the steps of the staircase I saw a heavy door painted black, with no handle or lock or intercom or doorbell that I could see. Stepping back, I could see that the house was between numbers nine and eleven on the odd side of the street, but had no number itself. In the place where you’d expect to see a house number, there was instead an eye carved into the stone the wrong way up, enclosed in an upside-down equilateral triangle. I continued up the little street until I found myself at a café – Café Rudolph, on the south-west corner of Place de l’Opéra – that appeared to be open.
There were two other customers in Café Rudolph, both sitting at the bar, and I slid into a booth near the windows to avoid having to talk to either of them. I ordered a small coffee from the ungarrulous waiter and thanked the sidereal entities once again for making French waiters by law surly and speechless. My coffee arrived presently, and it wasn’t, tbh, any good, but with the supplement of a lump of Perruche, it didn’t need to be. I looked out on the square.
A tow-headed girl in a tattered light blue dress was selling flowers on the opposite side of the street. I thought this odd for two reasons: 1) Who sells flowers in the street at midnight in this empty town? and 2) The girl looked like Temple, H2’s daughter, whom I’d seen dead in a bathtub only a night or was it a thousand and one nights before.
Things I am learning: whether you like it or not, stories happen; all the time, even while you’re sipping bad espresso in a coastal café minding your own beeswax; they are busy breeding in the dark; developing minds and even bodies of their own; bleeding into one another, careless of the carpet or the cobblestoned street; leaving their spoor for others to follow.
I will follow.