"You have arrived to. The Beauchamps. Residence. Welcome...Louise."
Five voices, the last one her own, screeched out of the ornicab’s logophone. The dissonant message struck her with an eerie nostalgia. The ornicab’s rubber door had softly sealed against the port, and delivered her right into a familiar patio. André Beauchamps had long been her favourite guest. An ageless, lanky man, crowned in sparse grey hair. He was an engineer they said, a genius, who talked of powers long forgotten. Things to dwarf coal, empty the endless furnaces and gag the torches that spit soot on every living soul in Lutecia. He promised her he'd topple the Iron Tower and free Lutecia of the acid rains. He promised her, she'd always be by his side.
Louise didn’t believe him of course, no one did. But he was rich enough to invite her often. He cared for making her laugh and for making her moan. He liked strange things, disguises, old stories and pleasures hidden in her flesh. Of their last evening together, she remembered him looking as her body made a shadow by the lights of Lutecia. The lights of the chimneys making the sky a storm. His seed pearled from her lips like milky dew. He watched her lick it all, with a little smile she didn’t have to fake. He called her adorable. As she dressed back up, he started to dream aloud. He promised her another time, in another world. Like he always did.
The next day, André Beauchamps was gone. Without a word, without a trace, without a cry, without a last hurrah. Gone the Tchéka way.
The residence was left behind. Ever the engineer, he had built it atop an old Haussman, an architectural tumor erected over Lutecia’s crumbling history. He had it furbished in priceless woods and stones. That remained, but with Beauchamps gone it felt all dead. She missed him, she missed the papers all over the floor and the books lining up entire walls. Most of all she missed the colorful artworks hanging in seemingly random places. He was so proud to have saved what he could of the Tuileries, so sad to have failed the rest, to have left it be fuel. But it was still a safe place, a good place to be lonely and watch the rains fall.
She left her heavy white furcoat fall down from her gracious shoulders, like Beauchamps used to like. For some reason, she even wore his favourite outfit, a sophisticated dress of black silk, open in all the right places to diplay lingerie that was nothing but a cascade of laces and grey diamonds. A dress made from the tireless work of the seamstresses and lingerie from the mines. He liked to caress her with the stones, and feel his fingers fall in between the threads of lace to find her skin.
But first, she remembered, he always caressed the strange symbol she bore on her forehead, half an ellipse with a line drawn through. She shivered.
Without its owner and architect, the residence was naught but a silent memorial. The clicking sound of her steel heels against the marble floor echoed clear against the rain battering hard outside. But there was something else: the sound of paper rubbed against paper. She felt her heart racing. That caress here was not a foreign sound, this was a sound of Beauchamps. But it couldn’t be, for Beauchamps was no longer.
Was he back ? Was it a thief ? Was it Tchéka ?
It was only a girl, a dirty thing wrapped in a brown leather coat. She was nonchalantly laid, on the colossal half-circle sofa that stood in front of that wall that was a window. She had long blond hair, spreading orderless over the white cloth, and endless legs she left to rest on a bulgy leather bag. Not just a poor street wench. In her Louise saw something languished, elegant even. She was reading, indifferent it seemed to the ferocious dark rain behind the huge glass panel. She did turn for the clicking of heels.
"Oh, you must be André’s Angel," she said in the calmest tone. "Would you care to join me?"
Angel. Louise had been called way worse. With a shrug she left her shoes to fall down, enjoying the tingle the cold marble shot through her spine. She coiled herself on the opposite end of the sofa, her dress tensed over curves that had made good men kill, facing the intruder. The diamonds scraped softly on her nipples and lips. Her body woke, it always did, sent an echo of pleasures not yet had. She kept herself a statue, an image of tempting perfection. She had been taught well.
"So," she asked the intruder. "How did you enter here?"
The girl lowered her book, with unsufferable languor. She shot her a look back, and for the first time in a long time, Louise doubted that in a duel of sheer presence, her triumph was assured. The leather wench had eyes of coal, burning like fhe furnaces underneath.
"André left me a key." A casual, sharp tongue.
Where there are masters there are servants, Louise thought. Not all of them could be precious whores adorned in grey diamonds, carried above the black clouds in Company ornis. Not all of them even knew what the sun felt like. Yet, even looking upon all of Lutecia, she had always been alone with Beauchamps, in rains and clouds of coal...
"What did you do for him?" she asked.
In lieu of an answer, the other girl took the bag she was laying her feet on. She threw it in her direction, effortless in appearance. Louise followed its flight, made no attempt to catch it as it crashed under her. She reached down, opened the bag. But even she couldn’t hide a jolt of surprise when it revealed a messed up pile of thick books.
The one work in the hands of a strange woman, that was something of a curiosity. A whole stack of words and knowledge, that was something of Beauchamps.
"You’re his peddler!" she said, hiding awe. "He talked about you, but I always thought you were a man."
The leather girl was no threat, no intruder. She was the source for the only thing Beauchamps ever needed more than Louise and her body. The one thing her gentle man talked of with a fire matching her feats of debauchery. She looked around, instinctively looking to someone to show the books to. Her eyes met only empty shelves, and when she looked back at the peddler... sadness. The realization hit her, together with the pain. The girl missed him too.
Here they were, a blond vagrant armoured in leather and a coal-haired courtisane with a marked forehead. A lonely whore and a ruined peddler. The only souls left to remember a man who wanted to change everything. Louise wanted to laugh and cry but could do neither.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Alis," said Alis.
Between her hands, the rare volume, heavy and binded with black leather, was called Alis’ Travels across the Marvellands, by Louise Carole.
"Where you named after her?"
"Maybe." A flash of pain on her face. A memory.
"Well, maybe I was named after the author," Louise replied.
She giggled, and the peddler smiled for the first time.
There was nothing left to say. Louise left her sight drift across the window, following raindrops along when they crashed against the glass. A game from her childhood. She watched every clear drop race down against the sooty soup seeping from the slate roofs. Even now, she always hoped one single pearl of clear water could reach the bottom its purity intact. Alas, entropy doesn’t care, it just is. At the end of the race, every ounce of rain had taken it’s share in coal dust and lost itself into the grey. Grey buildings, grey tracks, grey people struggling underneath it all. Only the Iron Tower was a shade as black as her mark.
They stayed silent for hours, or seconds maybe. The whore had nothing to say, but the peddler did. She had a soft voice, it sounded nice rythmed with the rain.
"You know, I hated you before," she stated. "Without you, André would’ve been my way out of down there. But he never looked at anything I had to offer, nothing except the books. Nothing breathing but you. Nothing else had that...Thing."
Louise turned her head but did not catch the peddler’s eyes. She didn’t expect to. Alis was staring straight at her forehead. They all did, sooner or later. But that precise look, could not be decomposed. No disgust, no judgment and fascinating shades of lust. But there was something else she’d never seen before.
"Do you want to see it?"
She shouldn’t have offered. But even a whore can be curious.
Alis nodded, biting her lips like a child caught in a lie. Louise stood up, in the center of the sofa’s curve, like she had done for him for their first time. She remembered, in this place she could not escape Beauchamps.
Reaching behind her neck, she found the golden clamp. She pressed it. Diamonds fell around her in a priceless hail, bounced all over the marble floor. The sound melted into the rain. Her dress slipped too, falling off her hips, a silent counterpoint to the noisy jewelry. Alis’ eyes widened, seeking not the the precious stones treated so forgetfully, nor the silk on the marble or even Louise's exposed flawless cunt. Her iris captured instead by the dark shadow that spread beneath the whore's skin.
Psi revealed. Something in shapes of pitch-black that ran not across but underneath her epiderm. A new life, darker than coal, darker than eyes, crawling swifter than lightning. One moment in one place, her skin was pale as ivory, untouched by men and time. The next, the monster existed within, along her nerves and every fiber of her flesh. Alis saw it move and couldn't stop a gasp. For Louise, it was nothing but a light and powerful caress that never, ever stopped.
But when it did, it became so many other things.
They had found Psi and some others like it decades before. By accident, in some deep cave, in some dark place. Like a virus, they killed all the strong men who dug to their lair. But the woman who came next was willing, the first to understand. Through her, some letters and words were taught, a Compact was formed. Someone good might’ve asked the strange new life for knowledge. Instead, the woman became Alpha.
The head of a nameless empire, built on whores and parasites. With Tchéka to watch them all.
Louise willed Psi into the shape of its own name. Half an ellipse, covering both her breasts down to her belly. A line going straight through, down into her cunt painted a black so dark there were no shapes to be seen. Everywhere else, perfect alabaster skin. The monster writhed some sensible nerves in approval of meeting the heart of her pleasure, and even after years, the jolt made her bite her lips. She was making a show of it, and wondered why.
"What does that mean?"
The girl witnessed what only the Guests ever could, and yet concerned herself for the shape of it. Truly, she should’ve had Beauchamps.
"Psi." Louise answered, "That’s what they told me it was called. An ancient letter from Hellas."
"Can I?"
Alis extended her hand forward. The strange look again, and Louise found, surprised, that Psi was eager. It liked that they were being naked in front of that particular, insignificant peddler. It made her nipples impossibly hard and soon, the lips of her cunt would shine in black all the way down to her thighs.
"Please," Louise answered. Lust and curiosity.
Alis touched her where the circle and the bar met. An innocent spot of her flesh, over the solar plexus. And the whole world changed.
Louise had been given to many Guests, men and women alike. Her lips had been the price for one man’s life. Her cunt the finest course of a banquet. Her ass the reward in kind for a dirty mine pit. Her whole, an inspiration for André Beauchamps. All of what was her had been adored and defiled, many times over. Beneath her elegance she was Lutecia’s beacon of perversion, a body made to meet the depraved wishes of anyone with enough coal to spare. A living, breathing, fucking reminder that nothing was sacred, that moral cannot endure under the grey rains of soot and entropy.
