Free Vermilion Sands by J. G. Ballard

experience, Dr Gruber thinks she may never recover.’
    ‘He’s her doctor?’
    Charles nodded. ‘One of the best I could find. For some reason Emerelda feels herself responsible for mother’s death. She’s refused to leave here.’
    I pointed to the screens. ‘Do you think they help?’
    ‘Of course. Why do you suppose we’re here at all?’ He lowered his voice, although Lagoon West was deserted. ‘Don’t tell Kanin yet, but you’ve just met the star of
Aphrodite 80
.’
    ‘What?’ Incredulously, I stopped. ‘Emerelda? Do you mean that she’s going to play –?’
    ‘Eurydice.’ Charles nodded. ‘Who better?’
    ‘But Charles, she’s …’ I searched for a discreet term.
    ‘That’s exactly the point. Believe me, Paul,’ – here Charles smiled at me with an expression of surprising canniness – ‘this film is not as abstract as Kanin thinks. In fact, its sole purpose is therapeutic. You see, Emerelda was once a minor film actress, I’m convinced the camera crews and sets will help to carry her back to the past, to the period before her appalling shock. It’s the only way left, a sort of total psychodrama. The choice of theme, the Orpheus legend and its associations, fit the situation exactly – I see myself as a latter-day Orpheus trying to rescue my Eurydice from Dr Gruber’s hell.’ He smiled bleakly, as if aware of the slenderness of the analogy and its faint hopes. ‘Emerelda’s withdrawn completely into her private world, spends all her time inlaying these insects with her jewels. With luck the screens will lead her out into the rest of this synthetic landscape. After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.’
    ‘But can’t you simply move her physically from Lagoon West?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps Gruber is the wrong doctor for her. I can’t understand why you’ve kept her here all these years.’
    ‘I haven’t kept her, Paul,’ he said earnestly. ‘She’s clung to this place and its nightmare memories. Now she even refuses to let me come near her.’
    We parted and he walked away among the deserted dunes. In the background the great hoardings I had designed shut out the distant reefs and mesas. Huge blocks of colour had been sprayed on to the designs, superimposing a new landscape upon the desert. The geometric forms loomed and wavered in the haze, like the shifting symbols of a beckoning dream.
    As I watched Charles disappear, I felt a sudden sense of pity for his subtle but naive determination. Wondering whether to warn him of his almost certain failure, I rubbed the raw bruises on my arm. While she started at him, Emerelda’s fingers had clasped my arm with unmistakable fierceness, her sharp nails locked together like a clamp of daggers.
     
    So, each afternoon, we began to play the screen game, moving the zodiacal emblems to and fro across the terrace. As I sat on the balustrade and watched Emerelda Garland’s first tentative approaches, I wondered how far all of us were becoming ensnared by Charles Van Stratten, by the painted desert and the sculpture singing from the aerial terraces of the summerhouse. Into all this Emerelda Garland had now emerged, like a beautiful but nervous wraith. First she would slip among the screens as they gathered below her balcony, and then, hidden behind the large Virgo at their centre, would move across the floor towards the lake, enclosed by the shifting pattern of screens.
    Once I left my seat beside Charles and joined the game. Gradually I manœuvred my screen, a small Sagittarius, into the centre of the maze where I found Emerelda in a narrow shifting cubicle, swaying from side to side as if entranced by the rhythm of the game, the insects scattered at her feet. When I approached she clasped my hand and ran away down a corridor, her gown falling loosely around her bare shoulders. As the screens once more reached the summer-house, she gathered her train in one hand and disappeared among the columns