The Last Days of New Paris

She gabbles. Thibaut is staring at a dream of Hélène Smith, the psychic, dead twenty years and commemorated in card, glossolalic channeler of a strange imagined Mars. The inaugurated thought of her, her avatar invoking a spirit in a new suit in a new deck. Keyholes for knowledge. She writes in the air with her finger. Glowing script appears in no earth alphabet.

German bullets spray away from her like drops. Smith’s letters crackle and in the sky there is a rushing. The night clouds race. A fiery circle is coming down, coming in, a dream’s dream, a manif of manif Smith’s conjuration of a Martian craft, spinning.

Behind the suddenly stationary marble legs, Thibaut can make out the priest and another man stumbling from the smoking car. They retreat, supporting each other, further and further back as he aims at them, getting away from him, out of sight, and though he fires Thibaut cannot pay any more attention, because now the cartomantic Smith is pulling into presence the crafts of more Martians and troll-like Ultra-Martians. Her extra-terrestrial contacts exist, at last, in this moment, and they are descending, tearing into the air, firing. The Smith-thing exults.

Bolts burn, twist, melt metal. Fire descends and holes the earth. A fusillade out of the sky engulfs the Nazis and their smashed manif giant. There is a sound and light cataclysm.

And, at last, quiet and dark.

—

The sky is empty. Smith is gone. The card is gone. The wet towers of Notre-Dame quiver. Vinegar spurts where one’s seams are buckled.

Where the dream Martians attacked, the ground has become a glass zone. Dying people twitch between the brekerman’s feet. The legs are pulverized, the marble feet charred. They do not twitch. They sink slowly into vinegar mud.

Sam runs past the exquisite corpse. It trembles, wounded but upright. She is taking pictures, touching things, prodding smoking remnants. Her camera is a camera again. She reaches the buckled car and without seeming effort wrenches open the door by where the driver lolls. She rummages within.

“Look,” she calls to Thibaut.

“Hold on, be careful,” he says. She yanks a smoking briefcase from the man in the passenger seat and holds it up so Thibaut can see on it the letter K. She holds up something else, too, something twisted, three broken legs like another, wounded, Martian.

“It’s a projector,” she says as he approaches.

The passenger is pinioned and crushed, spasming and breathing out gore across an absurd little imitation Führer-mustache. He is trying to speak to the driver. “Morris,” he breathes. “Morris. Violette!” The driver’s uniform is a man’s but she is a broad, muscular woman, now a dead ruin filling her bloodied Gestapo clothes. The passenger turns his head, shaking, watching the exquisite corpse as it approaches.

“The priest,” Thibaut says to Sam. “He got away.” With his other plain-clothed colleague. Moved by some uncanny means. “Sam, that was Alesch. The bishop. The traitor.”

The jeep is pouring off bloody smoke. Sam pulls documents from the wreck, more dirty objects, the remains of machines. “Well, he went too fast,” she says. “Left stuff behind.” She pulls out a smoking canister full of film.

“What did you do?” says Thibaut. He kneels, speaks almost gently to the passenger, whom he can tell is dying, too, who stares with widening eyes at the case Sam took from him, at the letter K. “You can control manifs, now? Is that your plan?”

The man wheezes and bats weakly at him as Thibaut goes through his pockets and finds and reads his papers.

“Is that your plan, Ernst?” Thibaut says. “Herr Kundt?” Sam stares at the man, at that. “What is Fall Rot?” Thibaut says.

The passenger coughs through his blood. “Sie kann es nicht stoppen…” he says. You can’t stop it. He even smiles. “Sie eine Prachtexemplar gestellt.” They made a—something.

“A specimen,” says Sam. “A good specimen.”

“A specimen?” Thibaut says. “Of what?”

But the man dies.

Chapter Six. 1941

Jack Parsons was drunk.

The Surrealists were playing a game. He watched them sourly. Varo drew a snake coiled on a wheeled cart. She scribbled it in seconds. From where he was sat, Jack alone could see what she was drawing.

“Allons-y,” she said. She held it up and turned it around, for one second, to show it to Lamba, who drew her own quick version. Which she showed to Lam, who showed his own rendition to Yves Tanguy, and so on. The glimpses were diminishing echoes, evolving from corkscrew serpent on its chariot to a spiral on a square.

The frivolity disgusted him. But though Parsons could not say why, watching excited him.