swing, kick the exquisite corpse in the center of its pile-up self. The Surrealist manif staggers mightily and sways and sheds bits of itself. Things wheel in the black sky.
Sam is behind an outcropping of wall, pinned by fire and blasts of Gestapo magic. She is aiming her
camera,
again, and Thibaut sees that what goes between it and the soldiers is a jet of bad energy. She takes their picture and blows them away. She takes a picture of the brekerman legs, too, but they brace against the impact and stand tall and come for her.
Coldly, suddenly, watching the broken brekerman withstand and the onslaught of the soldiers, Thibaut knows that even with whatever it is Sam deploys with her lenses, despite the wordless solidarity of the exquisite corpse, they will lose this fight.
From his pocket he pulls the Marseille card. And plays his hand.
—
The Siren of Keyholes becomes. Between Thibaut and the soldiers and the staggering Nazi manif is a wide-eyed woman, in smart and dated clothes. She is not like a person. The lines of her are not lines of matter.
She gabbles. Thibaut is staring at a dream ofHélèneSmith, 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 passengerturns his head, shaking, watching the exquisite corpse as it approaches.
“The priest,” Thibaut says to Sam. “He got away.” With his other plain-clothed
Sam is behind an outcropping of wall, pinned by fire and blasts of Gestapo magic. She is aiming her
camera,
again, and Thibaut sees that what goes between it and the soldiers is a jet of bad energy. She takes their picture and blows them away. She takes a picture of the brekerman legs, too, but they brace against the impact and stand tall and come for her.
Coldly, suddenly, watching the broken brekerman withstand and the onslaught of the soldiers, Thibaut knows that even with whatever it is Sam deploys with her lenses, despite the wordless solidarity of the exquisite corpse, they will lose this fight.
From his pocket he pulls the Marseille card. And plays his hand.
—
The Siren of Keyholes becomes. Between Thibaut and the soldiers and the staggering Nazi manif is a wide-eyed woman, in smart and dated clothes. She is not like a person. The lines of her are not lines of matter.
She gabbles. Thibaut is staring at a dream ofHélèneSmith, 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 passengerturns his head, shaking, watching the exquisite corpse as it approaches.
“The priest,” Thibaut says to Sam. “He got away.” With his other plain-clothed
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