Mister Memory Read online

  Also by Marcus Sedgwick

  For adults

  A Love Like Blood

  YA Novels

  Floodland

  Witch Hill

  The Dark Horse

  The Book of Dead Days

  The Dark Flight Down

  The Foreshadowing

  My Swordhand is Singing

  Blood Red, Snow White

  The Kiss of Death

  Revolver

  White Crow

  Midwinterblood

  She Is Not Invisible

  Ghosts of Heaven

  Killing the Dead

  Cowards

  Doctor Who: The Spear of Destiny

  With Julian Sedgwick

  Dark Satanic Mills (a graphic novel)

  Mister Memory

  Marcus Sedgwick

  www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Marcus Sedgwick 2016

  The right of Marcus Sedgwick to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the

  prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any

  form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a

  similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 75198 7

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 75199 4

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 75200 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Ruth, with thanks

  Contents

  MEMORY

  THE FACTS

  FAIRY TALES

  ANOTHER FAÇADE

  OF LOVE

  A VISIT TO THE COUR DU COMMERCE

  MONSIEUR MÉMOIRE

  PUNISHMENT

  IN THE RUE SAINT-ANDRÉ-DES-ARTS

  AB INITIUM

  THE LIBRARY OF HELL

  INCONSTANCE

  THE STUDIO OF HERMÉS BARADUC

  AWAKE

  THE BALL

  COMMONPLACE

  TRAUMA

  ONDINE

  MARIE

  FACES

  THE LACUNA

  MEMENTO MORI

  WHAT THE CAMERA SAW

  EROS IN SECRET

  AT THE QUAI DES ORFÈVRES

  BEAUTY AND TRAUMA

  DOCTOR MOREL

  BOUNDLESSNESS

  IN THE CHAMBERS

  BERTILLONAGE

  THE ART OF FORGETTING

  A NIGHT IN PIGALLE

  HISTORY

  NIGHT TRAIN TO CLERMONT–FERRAND

  THE DOG

  MOMENTS

  AN EXCHANGE

  A FEW WORDS ABOUT MAGIC

  A LETTER FROM THE DEAD

  DR MOREL

  MAY AMONG THE VINES

  THE DOSSIER OF PAUL DELORME

  MOREL MAKES A DISCOVERY

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  A FINAL INTERVIEW

  A HISTORY LESSON

  THE ALLEY

  THE END OF MARCEL DESPRÉS

  MEMORY

  THE FACTS

  The facts of the matter were these:

  At a little before ten o’clock in the evening of the first Saturday in July 1899, Marcel Després returned home to his studio apartment in the Cour du Commerce, the narrow passage that connects the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts and the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  Reaching his rooms on the sixth floor, he discovered his young wife, Ondine, in flagrante delicto with an American man not unknown to the couple. Després shot his wife dead, then, at the urging of her lover, fled down into the passage, where he suddenly stopped, falling to his knees.

  He was arrested by two gardiens de la paix and held in the local Commissariat de Police for two days, when he was declared insane by the Préfecture, and committed to the asylum of Salpêtrière, under the care of Dr Lucien Morel.

  Such were the facts of the matter. In Paris, in the years before the century ended, such events were commonplace. The story might have won a few inches of newspaper column, perhaps even merited a portrait of victim and culprit, but only until the next bloody crime displaced it from public view. And so Marcel Després may have rotted out the rest of his days in the Asile de Salpêtrière, were it not for the remarkable finding that Dr Morel made about his new patient some days after his incarceration. For while Morel had various cases of amnesia in his ward, he soon learned that his newcomer had the very opposite relationship with memory.

  The memory of Marcel Després was, for want of any other word, perfect. It was total. Complete. He forgot nothing. Absolutely nothing. As the days went by and the doctor tested and tested again, creating ever more elaborate systems by which to measure his patient’s skill, he started to draw the only conclusion possible: that Marcel’s memory was without limit. It was infinite in scale, if scale is a word that can be applied correctly in the presence of infinity.

  For every experience, sight, sound, smell, moment, event, thought, emotion, feeling, the assimilation of every mundane circumstance and outrageous deed that passed into the mind of Marcel Després, once there, could not be forgotten. To Marcel Després, everything was not to be forgotten, but to those who met him, it was Marcel himself who was unforgettable.

  FAIRY TALES

  Paris at that time can be described as a fairy tale; assuming it’s understood that fairy tales are brutish, dark and violent.

  Of course, there is beauty in the old stories, a great deal of beauty: there are princesses, who are as simple and pure as they are pretty; there are roses; there are castles. There are slippers of glass and ball gowns. There are other kinds of beauty too: handsome heroes; young men with rare gifts such as courage and honesty. There is both good and bad, and the chances of survival of our hero often depend upon how well he, or she, sees which is which, for what can seem beautiful can hide the greatest evil. A beautiful glass goblet of deep red wine, an apple fresh from the tree: yet both are laden with poison. The young woman who helps you in the forest is, underneath her enchanted appearance, an evil old crone. The stepmother who is meant to protect you throws you to the mercy of the wolves in the forest; the forest itself, so beautiful from a distance, up close is rotting trunks, crawling beetles, nests of ants and the infecting spores of obscene fungi.

  This is how it was with the city of light. The place had a claim not only to be the capital city of France, but the world’s capital too, at the forefront of developments in all fields of human activity. In art, in music, in literature and theatre. In the sciences and in technology. In medicine, and in policing, and in architecture too; in a generation Haussmann’s rebuilding of the city had transformed it from something essentially medieval, a beast of putrefaction, into a modern city with nobler aspirations. The World’s Fair of 1889 had seen the construction of Eiffel’s tower: initially derided and intended to be merely temporary, in no time at all it became the beloved iconic landmark of the city, which no one would ever dream of tearing down. And across the river to the north, on the far side of the city on the hill of Montmartre, st
ood another great escapade in construction, half built: the basilica of the sacred heart, Le Sacré-Coeur.

  It’s facile but nonetheless true to say that we can only be aware of light with the existence of darkness, and both of them were alive and well in Paris. Yet both the beauty and the darkness of the city could be found symbolised in this work in progress. In 1899 it was not yet thirty years since the city had last convulsed in revolution and blood-letting, during the two months of the Commune, until the army had brutally restored order to the city with a week of summary executions in which ten, some said twenty, thousand were killed, turning the waters of the Seine red. So: Sacré-Coeur, designed as both a memorial to the dead and a penance for the crimes of the Communards. But where did the authorities of the status quo decide it should be built than on the hill of Montmartre, right in the heart of the revolutionary camp, and a clearer symbol of implied power it is therefore harder to imagine. And yet, where else should it be built than on Montmartre? Montmartre, the hill of the martyrs, so called because it is said that Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, was decapitated here by pagan priests, fearful of the great number of his conversions. Then again, it is also said that after his head was removed with a sword he picked it up and walked six miles, preaching a sermon as he went, so perhaps we should not take all old stories too seriously.

  Paris, like those old stories, was full of both darkness and light. For the forces of light we may count among many others the following: Maurice Ravel, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso, Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola, art nouveau, champagne, the cinematograph, telephony, the electric light itself. These and their friends represent the movement upward towards the light, the striving for better and higher things, and to look once at the surface of the city is to see these things and smile. But, appropriately enough, it is a French word that truly captures the nature of La Belle Époque, and the word is façades.

  For just behind the door, behind the red velvet curtain, beyond the imposing front of that elegant house, are the forces of the underworld: Les Apaches, the gangs of Montmartre; the shanty towns on the ruins of the old fortifications, where the zoniers picked through the scraps of the rich and barely survived; the maisons closes, brothels only distinguishable by the over-sized numbers above their doors; and, everywhere, crime. Crimes of violence, crimes of greed, crimes of passion; crimes of all three combined. As the century wound up, the Paris police were in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of daily acts of law-breaking, and though they had grown again and again in size and sophistication, there were always more criminals than police, and not just ordinary everyday burglars and robbers, fraudsters and cheats, but darker forces at work within the city too, organised networks.

  And there is one more ingredient to be found in fairy tales. It is in fact the very thing that truly defines the form: magic. Without magic, a fairy tale is only a folk tale, and that, after all, is no more than a mundane story told between friends and neighbours.

  Of genuine magic in Paris, there was probably none to be found. Of illusion, there was plenty. That was what the entire city was about: that the truth of what was really happening lay behind the pretty façades. It was as if the whole city was saying, Don’t look at that, look at this! I will show you what I want you to see, and you will be so dazzled by its beauty and its brightness that you won’t look any further, you won’t want to look any further. You know the darkness is there, but why look at that? When I can give you what you want . . . pleasure.

  If there was one centre of illusion in Belle Époque Paris, if there was one place where light and dark sat in the open, hand in hand and unashamed, it was the cabarets. And this is the right moment to return to Marcel Després, because Marcel was not usually known by his real surname, but by the name he wore on stage: Monsieur Mémoire, Mister Memory.

  He’d come to the city ten years before. He’d come, as his name suggests, ‘from the meadows’, from the village of Étoges, a place that would have been utterly unremarkable were it not for its location in the heart of champagne country. That alone turned what would otherwise have been a sleepy hamlet of eight horses and a dozen cockerels into an industrious community that turned sweat into sparkling glory, most of it crated up and trundled away to the capital.

  Marcel was the late and only child of a couple who’d spent their lives breaking their backs in the vineyards around the village. He never knew it but he’d been conceived one late summer day between two rows of vines on a curving hillside. His father, Nicolas, had travelled a little but, failing to make his mark on the world, had returned to the village of his birth, still unwed in his forties. His mother, Celeste, had never been away. She had been married before but her first husband had never given her children. To add insult to injury, he’d been killed in an accident, having fallen drunk into a slurry pit from which he never surfaced, at least not until they dragged his body out the following day.

  Nicolas and Celeste made eyes at each other across the rows of vines all that summer of ’66, until finally the warmth of the sun and the sweat trickling down their necks and the luscious eroticism of the hanging clusters of grapes had proved too much for them to delay any longer. They’d barely spoken a word to each other before they found themselves mostly naked and powerfully swept up by the utter physical joy, the urging, of their act. But this was no casual fling: once the ice had been broken and the desire had subsided, they found a good and genuine friend in each other. They lay between the vines all that night, talking, scampering away only at dawn when the first vignerons returned to the harvest.

  Nicolas moved in with Celeste, and it was there, in a little terraced house on the amusingly named Grande Rue, that Marcel was born.

  From the beginning, it was clear that Marcel was not like the other children of the village. They did what they were supposed to do: namely, go to school but hate it, run riot around the pond in the evenings, get a clip on the ear when they deserved it, drag their feet to church on Sundays, and grow up to be a sturdy and loyal worker of the vineyards. Marcel did none of these things. Even as a young child, he showed no intention to venture into the world. He did not run and play, he sat and watched. He was well behaved, he did not lie. He did not complain, whine, fight and brawl with the other kids, nor did he climb trees or sneak over the wall to swim in the moat of the local chateau, as the other children claimed they wanted to but never actually did. He went to school obediently, and he did what was required of him. He studied and he took tests, but he did not shine. It seemed he was no great academic either, something Celeste had been secretly hoping for him given his lack of physicality. It is remarkable, given what was to come later, that his extraordinary memory remained undetected throughout not only his childhood, but his early adulthood too. Perhaps this can only be explained by his unwillingness, or even refusal, to engage with the world around him. Marcel did not do. He sat, and he watched, and, we can only assume, he waited, though what he was waiting for, his parents never knew.

  And Marcel did not work. Not properly. They put him in the rows of vines, along with almost everyone else in the village. The work required no thought, none whatsoever, but it needed stamina, and that was something Marcel seemed to lack. Celeste was a short woman, Nicolas a slightly taller man, but from somewhere Marcel had grown to be one metre eighty at the age of fifteen.

  The village doctor knew exactly what was wrong with him.

  ‘He grew too fast!’ he declared, often and at volume, as if exasperated by the feeble body before him. Marcel would stand quietly, without speaking, as the doctor would throw his hands in the air and walk round in a tiny circle before appearing in front of Marcel again. ‘He grew too fast!’ Then the hands. As if it were Marcel’s fault, or Celeste’s.

  Marcel became a man. He had no friends. There were no girls, save one. Ginette, the doctor’s daughter, had seen Marcel on his frequent visits to the surgery and quite rightly found him handsome. How Celeste encouraged her son to respond to Ginette’s interest in him! It
would be a good match, this little romance; the doctor’s daughter, well off, and a little quieter, a little more respectable, than the other young people. But it was not to be. Ginette tried and tried to have Marcel notice her, interact with her, respond to her, and though Marcel was never rude, and always enjoyed her company, Celeste’s ‘little romance’ dwindled to nothing like an unkept fire.

  So Marcel worked a little when he was able, and otherwise pottered around at home, cooking and cleaning so his mother wouldn’t have to do it when she and Nicolas got home from the vines.

  Then, early in 1889, both his parents died. The influenza that year was a bad one; it struck many in the village over the winter. Marcel became ill too, and of the three you would have laid good money that he would be the one to expire, but it seems that finally his feeble body decided to fight, to kick into life and begin to work. He survived, while his parents, their bodies prematurely aged and weakened from the endless toil in the vineyards, did not. Nicolas and Celeste were put in a grave together in the small cemetery on the edge of the village, within sight of the rows of vines where they found each other.

  Marcel was lost. His parents had been loving and good to him; they seemed to understand and forgive his peculiarities where others in the village did not. They had been his whole world. He had the house, which had been his mother’s, but he had no income. He fell into debt, and finally he came to a drastic solution. The idea was put into his head by Ginette’s father.

  ‘Go to Paris!’ he said to Marcel one day. ‘Sell the house, clear your debts, and set yourself up in Paris. They are building the World’s Fair. They need many, many men. I read about it in the papers. All hands required, all kinds of work. They’re still building that metal tower, high into the sky! There must be work to be had there, or at the exhibition grounds. Perhaps Paris will suit you better than our little village has so far.’