Synopsis
Book by Terry Griggs
Extrait
Chapter One
Theft
In the month of May, 1898, on his wedding night, Thomas Griffith Smolders was chased around his hotel room, not by his bride, as you might expect, but by a ball of fire -- luminous and strangely cool. Needless to say, this was a clandestine event, occurring as it did in a private room in a small hotel that was located in a provincial city in Canada. The world was looking elsewhere, already busily nurturing the Twentieth Century in its dark nursery. Mussolini was fifteen, Hitler a boy of nine, Franco, the “little sausage,” only six. The ball lightning, that rare phenomenon, was scarcely moments old, having been conceived in the heat and humidity of the day, born out of the belly of omen and mystery. The thing sailed in through the open window of the Belvedere Hotel in London, Ontario, hissing like an angry cat.
Only moments before, Grif had taken off his shoes and arranged his morning coat on the back of a chair, fastidiously straightening it, dusting off a few specks of dandruff, attending to it as if he were dressing a younger brother. He was prepared to take much longer over the matter of his trousers, and had begun to pace the floor while he considered what their removal would ultimately entail. It was his suspicion that his bride knew much more than he did about how the evening’s scheduled pleasures were to be conducted, and he was right. She was waiting for him in the adjoining bedroom, dressed in absolutely nothing but her frightening knowledge.
Grif, pacing pacing, heard someone cry out in the street below, the voice plaintive and slightly crooked with wonder. He stopped and glanced toward the window, then stood frozen as he watched it float in, a yellow ball big as a head, haloed with white light. A live chicken would not have been unexpected, or a string of firecrackers; some of the wilder boys he knew might have ridden into the city to charivari the bride and groom with lusty drunken songs, and the odd boot or brick pitched through the window. But this. This was so far beyond being even the unexpected that it stripped him completely of comprehension. His eyes might have told him that, really, this was nothing more than a swarm of brilliant insects clustered tightly together in a mating dance. They did not tell him this. They didn’t tell him a blessed thing, and he stood gaping, dumb as a doorknob, as the ball advanced toward him, sizzling and crackling, as if in the uncertainty of his newly married state he had become a magnet for impish and unruly phenomena.
The glowing sphere suddenly dropped and hit the floor with such a sharp whip-snapping crack that it woke him from his dreaming disbelief. It was then that he was struck through with a presentiment of danger -- not merely from this fiery harbinger, but from the whole roaring marital furnace into which he had stepped that day so unguardedly. He took to his heels, and the ball lightning pursued him so closely that it ate holes in his socks and fried the leftover wedding rice that he was shedding profusely out of his trouser legs and shirt cuffs. A plucked Mercury, he made a dash for the open window and clambered out. The fire escape’s rope burned into his palms as he slid down, but no matter, for as soon as he hit the ground, he was gone. He landed in a soft pool of street light, his stricken face illuminated briefly, and then he was off, running blindly into the night, certain that his life lay before him and not behind in that small, suffocating hotel room.
The ball lightning, meanwhile, fizzled to nothing. It simply faded away, this amazing electrochemical manifestation, witnessed by no one but Grif Smolders and leaving behind only the trace of an odour, pungent and sulphuric, and a faint crescent-shaped mark on the floor.
Posed puris naturalibus on the bed like an odalisque, Avice Marion Smolders, née Drinkwater, heard the commotion in the adjoining room and smiled to herself. She pictured Grif in his virginal anxiety tripping over his own feet and crashing into the furniture. Then there was that noise, goodness, that sounded very like a shotgun going off. Someone playing pranks, no doubt, perhaps even Hilliard Forbes who was dead mad for her and would play them more seriously than some. Grif would be rattled by it all, and then more so if he ever got up the nerve to open that door and see her, behold her, stretched out naked on the bed. The gift of herself too beautiful for wrapping. Besides -- she ran an admiring hand over her breast, down her thigh -- she didn’t need a man to undress her, to inch her nightgown up over her knees in the concealing dark, while they both pretended it wasn’t happening.
Avice was a virgin too, of course, but she believed in research and had given Judith, the Drinkwaters’ maid, the silver breakfast cruet from her trousseau in exchange for the details. A scene you might imagine conducted with much whispering, blushing and giggling, yet it was a fairly businesslike and frank transaction. Silver for sexual information -- a bold if secretive female bartering, and all the more satisfactory for that.
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