Free Vermilion Sands by J. G. Ballard Page B

large sonic-sculpture emitted a tense nervous pulse, as if roused from its midnight silence by my hesitant step.
    ‘Wait!’ I pulled Emerelda back from the next flight of stairs, rousing her from her self-hypnotic torpor. ‘Up there!’
     
    A silent figure in a dark suit stood at the rail outside the door of Emerelda’s suite, the downward inclination of his head clearly perceptible.
    ‘Oh, my God!’ With both hands Emerelda clung tightly to my arm, her smooth face seized by a rictus of horror and anticipation. ‘She’s there … for heaven’s sake, Paul, take me –’
    ‘It’s Gruber!’ I snapped. ‘Dr Gruber! Emerelda!’
    As we recrossed the entrance the train of Emerelda’s gown drew a discordant wail from the statue. In the moonlight the insects still flickered like a carpet of diamonds. I held her shoulders, trying to revive her.
    ‘Emerelda! We’ll leave here – take you away from Lagoon West and this insane place.’ I pointed to my car, parked by the beach among the dunes. ‘We’ll go to Vermilion Sands or Red Beach, you’ll be able to forget Dr Gruber for ever.’
    We hurried towards the car, Emerelda’s gown gathering up the insects as we swept past them. I heard her short cry in the moonlight and she tore away from me. I stumbled among the flickering insects. From my knees I saw her disappear into the screens.
    For the next ten minutes, as I watched from the darkness by the beach, the jewelled insects moved towards her across the terrace, their last light fading like a vanishing night river.
    I walked back to my car, and a quiet, white-suited figure appeared among the dunes and waited for me in the cool amber air, hands deep in his jacket pockets.
    ‘You’re a better painter than you know,’ Charles said when I took my seat behind the wheel. ‘On the last two nights she has made the same escape from me.’
    He stared reflectively from the window as we drove back to Ciraquito, the sculptures in the canyon keening behind us like banshees.
     
    The next afternoon, as I guessed, Charles Van Stratten at last played the screen game. He arrived shortly after the game had begun, walking through the throng of extras and cameramen near the car park, hands still thrust deep into the pockets of his white suit as if his sudden appearance among the dunes the previous night and his present arrival were continuous in time. He stopped by the balustrade on the opposite side of the terrace, where I sat with Tony Sapphire and Raymond Mayo, and stared pensively at the slow shuttling movements of the game, his grey eyes hidden below their blond brows.
    By now there were so many screens in the game – over forty (I had secretly added more in an attempt to save Emerelda) – that most of the movement was confined to the centre of the group, as if emphasizing the self-immolated nature of the ritual. What had begun as a pleasant divertimento, a picturesque introduction to
Aphrodite 80,
had degenerated into a macabre charade, transforming the terrace into the exercise area of a nightmare.
    Discouraged or bored by the slowness of the game, one by one the extras taking part began to drop out, sitting down on the balustrade beside Charles. Eventually only Emerelda was left – in my mind I could see her gliding in and out of the nexus of corridors, protected by the zodiacal deities I had painted – and now and then one of the screens in the centre would tilt slightly.
    ‘You’ve designed a wonderful trap for her, Paul,’ Raymond Mayo mused. ‘A cardboard asylum.’
    ‘It was Van Stratten’s suggestion. We thought they might help her.’
    Somewhere, down by the beach, a sculpture had begun to play, and its plaintive voice echoed over our heads. Several of the older sculptures whose sonic cores had corroded had been broken up and left on the beach, where they had taken root again. When the heat gradients roused them to life they would emit a brief strangled music, fractured parodies of their former