The number one... followed some time later and after strenuous mental investigation by the number eight. What was the one? One of the seven? One of the six? One of the two? All of these number were suddenly in my head, throbbing as if of great importance, but they were a distraction.
What had I been searching for? It was difficult to recall as I had my forehead pressed against the cold glass of a locomotive window, eyes chilled as if dangling just outside by threads. What I saw was snow-cloaked firs by the thousands, with a stormy winter tailor still in the process of garbing them.
Naturally I assumed the number one had occurred to me because I'd seen something solitary somewhere in the landscape, and I'd lost the notion as we went speeding away like a ticket ripped from my hand by the inertial wind of the line I was supposed to board. Nay. A false conclusion, I decided when my analysis of the view returned nothing but trees. There were no singular features of any kind, even the moon lost in the white-on-black, the gray of wet seeping newsprint.
Far from my first instinct to brag, I'm afraid I must do so to elucidate my state of mind at the time. That was the central question actually. It was a time... but which time? My brag is that I've always been adept at approaching problems from new and unexpected angles, fully willing to try options that may initially have a whiff of insanity about them. A strategist is what I consider myself, with strategy being defined here as 'becoming the thrall of a new and untested theorem'.
Whereas a more typical passenger, more successful in most dimensions of civil society than myself, would let these numbers, one and to a foggier degree eight, join the firs in flying off into the distance, disregarded in favor of something more immediate, I insisted on placing them, and since I could not do it in the space outside the train where I'd been gazing I attempted to do so in time.
Quickly I was placed back on track. The year. I had been trying to remember the current year. A curious thing to let slip, but I did not let it at all. Always my mind has been a steel trap for certain things, mathematics and poetry chief among them, so I was rather put out by the concept silently grappled with in my private car, so much so that I muttered sentence-devices designed to force the information back to its place.
"The current year is..."
"No, I don't mind your asking at all; I was born in the year..."
"Do I have the time? Why it's... oh you mean the year? My pocket watch seems to think that unnecessary, but I can tell you this is the year of... one... eight? Eighteen! Eighteen..." A half-successful experiment. Firmly placed I now was in the nineteenth century, and precise enough that would be for a god, but an animalcule such as myself feels a clawing need for more magnified understanding. I can't die in peace without knowing how many teeth are in the maw of the beast devouring me, without knowing the chemical composition of its saliva, and what gave it a craving for Severin Molochi.
Which is my name, I should mention, for your benefit and not the benefit of the woman who came into my car at the height of my perplexed distress, who had a perfect opportunity to slot herself into my life like a puzzle piece and instead chose to enter as a razor and slice away any obstacle insisting she wouldn't fit.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, reflecting too many times in my corridor of mirrors, as she might put it. First, since I'd regained my chronological latitude as eighteen some-and-such, I also needed to acquire my spatial longitude. Drat. That was nowhere to be found either, and I looked for it, in my pocket, under my legs, beneath the seat, as if it was a misplaced handkerchief.
The pine trees were no help of course. Half the world had pine trees, and all of it had the night, save those boreal zones of mystery that ran off with the sun and moon for months at a time. The snow had no character, no map etched into the flake that landed on the glass and quickly melted. I didn't need them to be maps to buried pirate treasure, just something with a name hugging its coastline, assuming it had a coastline to hug.
A strategist formulates a strategy, and I wouldn't call myself such if I hadn't the habit of doing so. Somehow I, one (not followed here by an eight) Severin Molochi, had misplaced myself. The surroundings were unfamiliar, so the best chance at getting my bearings and chaining them down was to clarify what I knew about myself. Somewhere in there had be a clue as to how this person that was me managed to do such an absurd thing.
Most obvious among the potential answers was insanity, some rot of the brain enacted by a parasite boring tunnels to let some natural sunlight into his halls, but even a cursory glance at myself, either my attire and countenance or the broadest brush strokes of my life, revealed that I was no lunatic, at least up until the very moment I lost the moment.
Memory told me that Severin Molochi was a man of thirty-three, that number didn't trouble at all, who, as of yet, did not exactly make a living of his own. He and I had an uncle, a magnate among clothiers, whose fine vestments had brought wealth to the entire family. Uncle Piotr: the best dressed man in... No, that sentence-device couldn't get me to my country of origin. Drat.
Regardless, Uncle Piotr had his nephew do some of his errands in exchange for a life of luxury in Manor Molochi, tasks I was well-suited to and well-suited during. When his fatigue with the social world was veiled as chronic illness I was dispatched to speak to the women ordering for their dress shops, the trappers who had beaver fur and velvet to peddle, and the other smaller magnates who felt Uncle Piotr looked down on them simply because he sold the coat while they sold the needles, thread, and buttons.
The women loved my poetry, though it was entirely borrowed and not mine at all, rather like my position in the business, and the men appreciated my shrewd and swift calculation in financial matters, all the more reason I was privately humiliated in my train car for having my mind stumble on a one and stop cold on an eight.
What was Severin Molochi doing on that train car, in far from his finest overcoat? Could I get myself back to that point at least? Yes, for there was a scourge that transcended time and place in subtle insidious ways: the creature that had driven me from my comfortable life and into frozen foreign territory. Throng's delirium.
Strategist, mathematics-voyeur, salesman-of-himself, but not a physician. There's very little I can tell you about the plague that isn't already contained in the word 'plague'. From what corner of the world it had sprung was uncertain, though some suspicion was cast on house cats and their wet nuzzling as a possible passageway for the pathogen.
Better understood was what came after, a host of dreadful symptoms, chief among them a rash resembling strikes of the whip between the shoulder blades and across the ribs as well as a clouded manic mental state. I'd seen some infected people, five days adrift from their diagnosis, and when they were upright they always staggered, eyes unable to focus, mouth hanging open, but never a breath heard. One babbled about a 'roseate supersensual mist'.
Death was not guaranteed, but his dice looked much more suspicious to the gray of hair, my uncle among them, who was very agitated one day when I told him I could not perform an errand as the person I was supposed to meet had, despite only meeting it in passing, given their life to Throng's delirium.
My uncle was most incensed, though I recognized it as fear. With the plague's means of transmission still a mystery, he decided it was not safe to be around me when I had been gallivanting all about town touching many raw materials, and admittedly petting every house cat that came my way and a few I had to chase after, crouched and scurrying equally like buffoon and baboon.
Still, he had no intention of being cruel to me, and so used his many connections to secure me passage aboard... yes, finally! Aboard that very train! And while I could not place where it was going, I did know what it was heading toward. A largely unbuilt camp. A gestating village, part of a most noble scientific pursuit that I was perfectly happy to be a part of, though I also would've been perfectly happy to remain and risk the illness.
I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of a quarantine, diseased folks all gathered in one place so they cannot risk infecting the general populace. Obviously a morbid idea, as it orders the sick to die in sight of each other rather than their friends and family, but nature does not take suck kindnesses into consideration when smithing her push-daggers.
Now this camp was quite the opposite idea, with people living in health together instead of suffering and dying. The wealthy fellows funding it called it a reverse-quarantine, hoping to retreat to it should the plague saturate their homelands too densely. Only those who had never been infected and showed no symptoms would be allowed in, and they may remain sequestered there, receiving supplies only by timed delivery, for months or years at a time.
It had to be built first, so they couldn't enjoy it yet, but I certainly could. As per my uncle's orders I was to go there and assist in its founding, whether that be manual labor, tailor work, or simply finding a cozy place for my warm and affable personality so that I went largely unnoticed. I was to help, and to test it for him should he decide the journey was necessary for his own health.
Never mind that his initial paranoia was built around the possibility that I was already a carrier of the intangible lash, or rather its recipient, and that would make me a risk to such a fledgling settlement. It seemed his suspicions were just strong enough to send me away, but not strong enough to warn others about me. For my own part I was confident I was not secretly ill, for all seemed to manifest clear physical symptoms within three days of exposure, and I'd already been on the train nearly that long.
Three days on the train with my observant nature also had me sure I knew the faces of every passenger, as well as the engineer, the cook, and the rest of the staff, yet I did not recognize the woman who slid open my door and took a seat opposite me in the car that seemed to rapidly shrink from the moment she appeared. Even by the time she closed the door, mere slices of a second since it was opened, its closing click was somehow reduced down to the sound of a toy or an overturned beetle righting itself.
Rude as it was, stranger too, I paid her no mind, for I was still distressed by my inability to find my footing on a floor that had turned to paper and in a year like an unstable hill in an hourglass. Normally I was very attentive with women, but not prone to chasing them foolishly as I was kittens. Like a songbird, one does not reach out to a woman, for she will only be frightened before she even begins to sing, and pursuit would be both uncouth and pointless seeing as she has wings and flees into another reality entirely where no man has ever been able to pursue. Instead he is left standing on the Earth, beach of the sky, scratching his head oafishly.
But such thoughts were for the women I was accustomed to, women who lived in years and places that I properly remembered. This was no such woman. She spoke not a word, but even as my head was frozen to the window, mind swimming in a slush of opaque nonsense, I felt her eyes on me.
Without looking I knew her posture and expression, though it was still devoid of features to me. She sat upright (this was the act of sitting and not relaxation after the act) and kept her head centered on me, so she wasn't hiding her efforts. Eventually, which I say though it was actually very quick, the pressure she applied became too much and I was forced to right myself, back to the red velvet cushion, and take her in.
She was not a small woman, but she looked it, almost swallowed whole by the fluffiest furs I had ever seen. A coat of silver sable she wore, though the silver was a magnificent and awing shade, like treasures reclaimed from their burial under starless moonlight; it shone as if unsheathed from a pressurized and petrified peat bog to the howling of packs of impressed wolves.
About her neck sat (a hood? a scarf?) a fur from an unknown creature, though it looked light enough to be taken away by the wind even when it had been full of bones. Its rich brown spoke, and perhaps even smelled, of cocoa powder, of the dust left on a dessert in the tomb of a mummified emperor.
Her square hat was fur, and larger than her head. Her cuffs were fur, and her boots. Half the continent, whichever continent it was, had sacrificed their lives to clothe her, something I'd never been able to offer the clients of my uncle's business.
Here I must mention, for it will become clear that she knew something of this, that I've long had a romantic notion of women in furs. Even with my active imagination, dedicated as it mostly is to organizing shelves of poetry instead of composing it, I had not dreamed up that shadow-blued silver of her sable vestments, for I was always thinking of the same woman in her more typical furs.
Who she was I had no idea, in fact, upon reflection, she was rather the human equivalent of the year and the place I had lost: a person who moved through my life like a phantom who just happened to be traveling the opposite direction on time's trail, both of us heading for our deaths. I met her outside my schoolhouse when I was just a lad, though not so small as to see women as nothing more than larger girls.
A lesson was in progress, but I was on the other sunny side of it, educating myself with wildflowers instead of Chaucer and regretting none of it, as I do to this day. I don't recall why I chose to skip lessons that morning. Disobedience is uncommon within me, albeit much less so when the authority figure in question is lacking in civility, sense, or wit. Yet there I was.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
The reason is lost through typical follies of memory, not the arcane business aboard that express train to reverse-quarantine, and I know what triggered it was her appearance. This other woman of my past startled me out of myself, grabbing my wrist and pulling me away, plucked white flowers, small and common, dropping out of my hand like sugar lumps.
Right away she was speaking, scolding me for avoiding the lesson. I didn't see her face as I was dragged along behind, just her sable furs. Nor did I ever see her face. She was naught but a voice and an authority wrapped in furs, tone so capturing and hypnotic that there was no discerning the moments when she pulled my wrist from the moments I chose to follow her, wherever she was taking me.
She stopped us in front of the schoolhouse doors, put my back to one of them, where I was deeply conscious of how much thinner the wood was than the surrounding stonework. The image of her kicking my little body straight through and spraying my classmates with splinters flashed through my mind.
Still she scolded, so I did not look up at her face. All I saw of her were her hands on her hips, and they were gloved in pristine gray. Her lecture on my truancy was at the perfect volume as to not be heard through the door but still make up the entirety of my perception.
"Don't you want to make something of yourself some day?" she asked. "The flowers don't need lessons or your help; they make themselves. It's in their nature. The best you can do is kill them in an attempt to show others what they've made. Without lessons a little scamp like you won't know which way is up. I've half a mind to..."
On she went as heat smoldered in my cheeks. I didn't dare correct her, but she was wrong to assume. I did not want to make something of myself, and this feeling remained into adulthood. Always I've wanted to have something made of me instead. I would like to be someone's work of art, or a tool of their trade, kept safe in their collection and brought out for display or use with favored regularity.
An equation is teased out from the wool of the intellect, as are poems from the imagination. To think that my behavior, my accomplishments, and even my scars might be the verse of some mightier being is a most invigorating fantasy to me. This is how some people no doubt see their god or gods. With me it is how I see other people. I welcome their influence once I am certain I will not be mishandled.
And perhaps she sensed that; it could hardly be obvious in the bend of my schoolboy hairline. At some point her tone shifted.
"But if you're going to make something of yourself you have to be the one to make the decision. If you're not motivated I'm just shouting at a brick wall. So go on then, decide. I've said what I have to say." Then she turned and walked away, back to whichever people actually counted as members of her family.
For the longest time I just stood there, hot, slightly ashamed, melting like a candle. Making a decision was impossible if drops of me kept sliding down my sides. Eventually the lesson concluded and my peers were let out. The force of them behind me started me walking and I pretended as if I'd just been released as well.
Had I made a decision? Or had I been postponing it all my life? It seems impossible to differentiate between choosing to stay outside the classroom and remaining there in indecision. Whether the question was still open would quickly become irrelevant, for by the time I stepped out of that car, of my own volition, it would be closed and sealed with a hot wax kiss.
Now that we've examined her furs, and somehow much of myself in the process, but still not found that blasted year or locale to place my pin on the map, it is time to tell you of her actual appearance. Each feature could fill a volume when I'm holding the quill, but I'll try to keep it brief, even if my left has to slap my right to keep it from stroking her ego and her rhetorical silhouette in equal measure.
Her auburn hair was cut so short as to make one suspicious, as if she planned to disguise herself as a man in the near-future, a plan I was sure would never work given the way she radiated an aggressive predatory femininity. Despite not a hair being more than an inch across most of her head, there were two misbehaving tufts hanging in front of her ears like inverted flames.
She had small ears that stuck out slightly, giving the sense they only did so when she was listening intently, and that she did so all hours of the day and night, sleep included. A pin drop might make them grow, and a nervous swallow from three cars away might make them wiggle. There was one in the same car as her at that very moment, whichever moment it was.
Barely confined by a taut sharp jaw and a prominent chin was her wide mouth with lips perpetually ready to split and show teeth in all of their many capacities. I wasn't sure if she was wearing lipstick or if they naturally bore such a similar shade to her crop of hair. In this initial observation I was spared a full smile, which could've stopped my heart.
Above her unassuming nose, bolted into its bridge as if punched in fine leather, sat the two most magnetic eyes I'd ever seen, and the most piercing. Green, slick, electric. Like lightning seen through a castle window and an empty wine bottle held up to it. But the strike never ended. Some eyes are only briefly sharp, focusing when emotion or intuition flares, but hers were constant, like sheets of rain rolling down a conical emerald tower.
Combine these features with her papyrus skin, the bundles of freckles pinched between eyes and nose, the thick reddish eyebrows, and a long neck cemented into a collarbone as sturdy as a brass stand holding fire pokers upright to get... her. The most striking, pouncing, devouring, savoring woman I'd ever witnessed and ever will. A goddess. My Venus in furs.
Yet Venus was merely the first comparison that occurred to me. Probably a side effect of too much poetry, that was. Many of the greats were Greeks, or emulated the Greeks, and so made frequent mention of their goddesses. But there was more to communicate about this woman beyond her incredible beauty and divine aura.
If she was any god at all, it was an even older type. She was the sort of god that slunk out of the shadows, only revealing her eyes as separate from a wolf's or a demon's after a long conversation about your soul. Gods of her pantheon came out of the dirt. Their miracles were practical: making food where there was none before, reproducing in earthen vessels when bodies were not sufficiently nourished, and drawing curses on the ground with the fluids poured from them in the birthing.
Godly names likely defy pronunciation, but I imagine her most primal name sounded of man's oldest tongue and woman's oldest thought: a round sound like being cradled in the crescent claws of a gargantuan mole. Perhaps an 'oo' like in the fullest moon. or an 'ah' as in 'ah goddess, please spare me your wrath.'
My visitor had a name she was willing to share, but one of us had to speak first. This was a car reserved for me alone; she had trespassed upon my privacy, attacked me with her gaze, and intimidated me with her grin. But a staring male will always be the rudest creature in any chamber, civilized or barbaric, so I spoke first, after coughing out three non-words that were but the shriveled remnants of the sentence-devices I had almost said.
"Eh-eh-emm... excuse me."
"For what?" Her voice. I hadn't realized how much I'd yearned to hear it. It crackled like dry brush underfoot. Enriched with explosive potential. This was a voice that would throw sparks in an argument and topple buildings if applied to a few curated stanzas. A mere two words rained on me like flung phosphorus. My heart tripped down a flight of spiral stairs.
"I'm not sure what, but I have distracted you somehow. I felt your eyes on me. What is it? Have I the imprint of the window on my face?" I felt for it, but the chill in my cheek was completely gone, and indeed I felt like my face had lost the capacity to feel cold altogether. My mouth was a sauna.
"You are a malleable man," she said boldly, "but not so much that leaning on a window will misshape you permanently." I did my best to awaken the sociable self that could get a disappointed customer to invite him up for drinks.
"I won't deny the trait, but I'm curious how you know. You have... vivisecting eyes. Are you perceptive, or do you just peel people open and have a look at their character?" She sank into her furs, luxuriating in the collapsing heap of sable like a bubbling bath.
"Your name is Severin." She blinked slowly and sighed, as if the darkness under her eyelids allowed her to see my soul as a glowing coal. It was impossible to get a chill just then, but my spine stiffened and one of my feet developed a babbling urge to tap.
"No eyes perceive that much. Do we know each other? The idea that I could forget someone like you, even having met in passing, is enough to make me question my sanity." Even for me this was forward, but this Venus in furs had a power that drew me in strand by strand. Every statement felt like an offering to a shrine, each one inadequate.
"We've never met," she assured me, to some measure of my relief. "We're headed to the same place, but not to do the same thing. I should like you to change your mind, stop doing a favor for whoever you're doing it for and do some for me instead."
"Earning your favor sounds most intriguing," I said, turning the phrase as expertly as I could, trying to twist the knob of the conversation's gas stove and get it to a more comfortable temperature, "but I'm not much for spycraft. You must be a master, given what you already know about me Miss..."
"Pelts," she said, teeth glittering exactly once in sequence, "Wanda. Blasphemer. Pelts. For you? Wanda. I should like to be your Wanda."
"My Wanda?" An iron ball dropped into my stomach, and there must've been a chain attached for something tugged and ripped my heart down immediately after. I wasn't saying it as if she belonged to me, quite the opposite. She was mine in the same way the sky is mine, the Earth is mine... because I am of them. They are all I know, and thus mine.
"That's good to hear, and I'm sure pleasant to say," she said, reading me yet again, though 'pleasant' was a colossal understatement.
"What is it that you would like me to do for you, my dear Wanda?" My insertion of the word 'dear' did little to alleviate the flare of emotion I felt in addressing her. An erupting magnetism. A blast of super-heated air at my back nearly knocking me off the seat and to my knees.
"First, answer me this question Severin. What nation is this train currently passing through?" So she'd read that as well. This woman had to be a mesmerist of some kind, or so I would have thought if I didn't also feel a giant supernatural hand fondling my internals while both hers sat somewhere under those silver furs.
"I do not know."
"And what nation holds our destination?" I shook my head, but my eyes couldn't break contact in a polar perversion of my memory with the woman whose face I never saw. "And what nation did we start from? Are they all the same?" She knew I could not answer, and it amused her. She targeted a greater vulnerability. "Tell me my Severin... what year is it?"
"Eighteen and change," I said as confidently as I could with only half an answer. One of her eyebrows rippled, like a fox stirring from slumber. I'd actually managed to surprise her, if only slightly. Her aura, which I must insist she had, no more a figment of my imagination but an actual bubble of emotional stew about her, pulsed. There was a roil, a tinge to it that suggested irritation. Was my incomplete helplessness a disappointment?
"So all but the century is lost to you?" she purred, recovering, a fur pulled over the chink in her armor.
"Yes. I'm aboard the most advanced and direct form of transportation known to man, a mechanical marvel, yet I'm as adrift as a shipwrecked wretch. You are the first vessel that has passed by since, my dear Wanda. Will you be rescuing me from this woeful ignorance?"
"Severin," she answered softly, retracting her feet up into her furs. The mass of her cloak leaned forward as she flashed her true smile, one with the sharpest canines I had ever seen outside a stoat's mouth. My Wanda was fanged. "Twas I who sank you."
"Then my feelings haven't deceived me, but I cannot fathom your purpose... or what you have subjected me to." I didn't accuse her of anything. There were elements of hostility to our interaction, but how much does a man own information about the world around him? It was hardly a theft. The world about me had lost none of its qualities; I'd just lost my page. Even if she had slammed the volume shut I should still remember roughly how far along I was.
"This is a natural reaction," Miss Blasphemer Pelts explained. "You, a particular sort of man, are responding to me, a particular sort of creature. If you have any fear it is a healthy fear. Your place in the world is lost because I am near to you, drawing ever nearer, and I am taking its place. I am your new world... because I am a goddess."
I knew it. Obviously it made no sense at all, which my mathematical side insisted upon. Emotionally, coming to me from behind volumes of poetry with much more than a whisper, I knew she was not ordinary. Venus in furs. A phrase that now meant Earth, according to her. Never had it occurred to me that a man is conceptually anchored to both his planet and his chronological lifespan, until I lost them both. Or rather, they were shoved out of my mind, each one now a slicing radiating green eye, shooting beams at me from a formerly black point in the deepest tart pit of the cosmos.
"If you lose the ground, I will provide new footing," she continued as I processed. "If you ask for the time I will tell you it is the Age of Pelts, and you will be satisfied; you will be as calm as you were when you were a babe and your mother told you the sun would be back on the morrow."
"And what sort of god are you?" I choked out. "Forgive me for saying you don't seem particularly... Christian." She laughed. My Wanda laughed. It filled me with joy, for I had created it. It filled me with dread, for perhaps my suffering could trigger it as well.
"Nothing would insult me more than finding my likeness in some Catholic's pocket shrine, how obscene. Though their dogma does come from my stories. You Severin, you will get it straight from the golden calf's mouth. First let me make myself comfortable."
Wanda 's head was swallowed up by her hood that could also have been a scarf. The ball of furs shifted, like a breeze blowing over grass, and then she reemerged in a most magnificently scandalous fashion.
Bare feet slipped out with no sign of her footwear, and they did so on the left side of her seat. Which hole in which fur they passed through was a mystery. Then her arms appeared on the opposite side, stretching toward the window, fingers interlocked and palms out. Gone were her sleeves. A slight purple tint in the flesh of her underarms turned up and away as her arms formed a cradle for her reappearing head.
She'd entered the car with no jewelry, no spectacles, and I'm certain not even powder upon her face, yet even more seemed to have been removed for this second look. Her cheeks were brighter, as if she'd just been blanched and set out on a fine towel to shed steam. While her furs still obscured everything above the thigh and below the collarbone, I innately understood that she'd shed all her clothing within, all performed in silence, no click of unhooking hooks, no taps of shoelaces on wood, nothing.
"That's quite the parlor trick," I said with a palate of cement, "but better suited to the boudoir."
"Would you like to hear the story?" she asked, making it painfully clear my attempts at wit were just throwing molasses on our locomotive's tracks. I nodded silently, apologetically.
"For now I'll say it took place in 1816-"