M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

“You still want me to try?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

Anna stood, went to the shelves, and began pulling down jars. As she opened one after the other, taking out pinches and handfuls of dried leaves and powders, the cavern became redolent with a strange, mysterious scent. Adding a few drops of oil to the mixture, she ground it in a mortar with a pestle and then poured it into a glass. In the candlelight it glittered gold, almost as if she’d ground down some of the mosaics from the walls of the cathedral above us.

Next, Anna uncorked a dark green bottle and poured some of its liquid into the glass. Suddenly I smelled apples-the scent that always accompanied my messaging. Usually it made me queasy, but there, in the cavern, it caused no ill effect.

Finally, Anna unscrewed a jar, dug in a spoon, scooped out honey, and stirred it into the concoction. An aura appeared around the mixture, as if it were lit from within. Or was it just the candlelight’s reflection?

“You’ve always said that when you make the lockets you smell apples.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why apples are connected to the talismans?”

I shook my head.

“Try to remember that very first time. Tell me about it.”

I closed my eyes and thought back. “I was in the studio…”

“Picture it in your mind. Do you see yourself there?”

I nodded.

“Look around…”

In my mind I glanced around the workshop.

“Do you see anything unusual? Pavel loves apples, was there one on his table?”

I shook my head.

“Look down at your workspace,” Anna said.

“Yes, yes. I can’t believe I forgot. You’d brought tea right before the customer arrived. Apples and little cakes.

“I put the plate of food away when I went to help Madame Maboussine. Her son had been killed at the front, she said. And she’d remembered how her grandmother had worn mourning jewelry and wanted to memorialize her son in that old-fashioned way. As soon as she handed me the lock of his hair, my head filled with noise initiating an avalanche of pain. Suddenly the scent of the apple-still on my fingers, I suppose-became overwhelming.”

I told Anna how the next day, while working on the design for the amulet, I incorporated the apple quarters into the design. I was basing the locket’s design on an ancient Etruscan rock crystal amulet I’d seen in the Louvre. An orb nestled in two bands of gold. One wrapping it horizontally, the other vertically, with a hook at the top for a cord. A lock of hair sandwiched between two halves of the crystal. I was drawing it when Anna came into the workshop with that afternoon’s tea. Once again bringing little cakes and apples cut into quarters. I’d stared at the fruit, the sections, the slices, suddenly getting the idea to cut the rock crystal into slices like the apple, then etch in the symbols for the soldier’s astrological sign along with his birth date and death date and decorate them with his birthstone. A commemoration of his being born and mourning of his being gone.

“So the apple was connected to the talisman twice.”

“Yes, the first time when Madame Maboussine came in and I’d been eating the apple… its odor still on my fingers. The second, while designing the piece. I hadn’t realized it.”

Anna nodded. “Let me see your palm.” Reaching out for my hand, she turned it over and studied the underside. She’d first done this a long time ago, when I was thirteen and we’d just met.

She pointed to the crescent-moon-shaped scar on the fleshy part of my thumb. “I don’t remember this from before.”

“While I was working on the talisman later that day. I cut myself with a carving tool. It slipped.”

“And bled?”

“Quite a bit. It made me sick to my stomach.”

“Was that the first time you became nauseated in relation to the talismans?”

“I hadn’t thought about that connection before, but yes…”

“So you’d been aware of the smell of the apples before, but the scent hadn’t made you sick. That only happened when you cut yourself?”

“I think so, yes.”

“And now, still, you conjure the smell of apples when you work on a piece and feel ill.”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear Madame Maboussine’s son’s voice while you made the locket?” Anna asked.

“No, that didn’t happen until I gave it to her and she put it on. At first it was just a faraway whisper. A young man’s voice: Tell her even though I’m gone, she’s my mother forever. Tell her, please, for me. ”

“What did you do?”

“I excused myself, got up, and went into the showroom, thinking someone was there. But there wasn’t. I opened the door to the staircase, thinking I’d heard someone below, but the stairwell was empty.”

“You didn’t realize yet?”

“No.”

“Or you didn’t want to.”

“I was convinced I’d heard someone whispering. His voice was that clear and distinct. I just didn’t know where it was coming from.”

“How did you feel?” she asked.

“Confused and afraid.”

Anna nodded. Then, in the quiet, I suddenly heard chanting. Panic rose in me like bile.

Anna noticed my expression. Instantly, she tried to calm me. “I hear it as well,” she said reassuringly. “It’s the monks chanting.”

I relaxed.

“I believe that in the moment you cut yourself and bled over the soldier’s hair, you lowered the curtain between our plane and the one beyond.”

I shivered.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A saying in my family having to do with blood.”

She nodded. “ ‘Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting.’ Is that the one?”

“How do you know it? Did my mother tell you?”

“No. I knew about it before I met her. Most of us who are involved in the occult here in Paris know of it. It’s referred to as ‘the curse and the blessing of La Lune.’ ”

“But it wasn’t complete. I remember my mother sitting with me in the bell tower the year I turned thirteen… an ancient worn leather-bound book opened before us. La Lune’s grimoire-my mother explained how the spells were encrypted in the text. My mother said there is a quarto of missing pages that were believed to contain a poem, each canto holding a secret of the universe. Each, an enigma revealing a power. To ensure the poem never went missing, La Lune wrote out each canto separately and hid them somewhere else. My mother discovered the blood stanza when she was just about my age, in her grandmother’s house. The others, she told me, were still lost. But I think I might have found them.”

I fingered the ring I wore on my right hand. The ruby floret given to me by my mother when I first got my menses. Part of the La Lune legacy, she’d said, and told me it would protect me and never to take it off.

Anna nodded at my hand. “The crescent on your thumb… is it the only one on your body?”

“No, I have a birthmark on my back in a similar shape.”

“The sign of every Daughter of La Lune.”

“My mother only uses that name to sign her paintings. The real La Lune died in the sixteen hundreds.”

“And all her female descendants are called Daughters of La Lune. If you’d let your mother school you in their rituals, you’d be able to use them to quiet the voices.”

“But I didn’t want to learn. I’d grown to hate what made her different. What kept me and my sisters separate from everyone else. I just wanted to be normal.”

What did I even know about a normal life? Did I have a taste of it with Timur? Maybe for a moment, but my powers hadn’t even allowed me to enjoy a normal relationship with him.

“All right. Let’s see what we can do about it now. The German philosopher Nietzsche said if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. This is a dangerous journey we are undertaking. You must be prepared. First, I’d like you to drink this…” Anna handed me the glass of golden liquid she’d concocted while we’d talked.