Chronicles of Mystery

The rise to hell

When Alistair woke up the next morning, he was surprised to find that he had slept until ten in the morning. On his table next to his bed, a meal tray had been placed containing his breakfast, probably prepared by Maude and brought by Lucy, accompanied by a little note wishing him a good appetite.

A thin smile appeared on his lips. Lucy always had a way of making him happy. It must have been a gift she possessed. The gift of illuminating every life.

On a warm spring afternoon with an unusual temperature for the season and the London climate, while the trees in the avenues were resplendent with a lively green color, bathed in the generous light of this day, the cobblestones of the streets were taking a joyful appearance, as if in the sun they had been cut out. The houses looked much more cheerful, happily showing off their cream-colored facades, and the sun's rays produced fiery undulating waves in the air. Puddles and mirrors became dazzling spots made of light. Lucy, cheerfully, found herself once again in the street, blithely ignoring the somewhat sordid appearance of the neighborhood, which the sun had not made any more beautiful but only served to shed more light on these dark streets that were not made to be shown. To dully warm a rottenness that the usual curtain of rain masked. The heat of that day caused fetid exhalations and bitter puffs to rise from these neighborhoods, like the breath of a dying body abandoned on the road and revealing roughly the inside of its entrails, heated by the sun, resulting in a strange kitchen whilst a cloud of flies swirled in all directions above the pile of flesh and skin thus amassed.

The air in all these tiny apartments was stale, reeking, full of scents several days old, a terrible smell of piss, of food which, exposed to the temperature, had gone bad more quickly than expected, and also of bodies piled up together on top of each other for whole days without a breath of wind being able to infiltrate the room.

Lucy, without knowing anything about all this or without wanting to know it, had gone out early in the day and had been wandering without any specific aim for several hours, trying to question relatives and passers-by as discreetly as she could about her great and new investigation, that is to say, regarding Lucy, with very little discretion.

Everyone in the street had long been convinced that the poor girl had a mental defect or that she was trying to write funny novels. In the end, no one ever understood anything about it. The vague mention of a newspaper article made them shrug their shoulders indifferently. It was common knowledge that newspapers never said anything true.

Despite these rumors which never reached the innocent ears of Lucy, who, generally speaking, hardly listened to the people around her when they were not talking about her immediate interests, she led very good hours, under the warm sunlight, sometimes lying against a wall of dubious cleanliness to feel her skin cooking gently as if she had been an enormous turkey spit. She couldn't help but think that she would have made a great turkey spit. All it took to perform this function was to look scrumptious. Her natural charm must have been enough!

Tired of spending so much time doing nothing and feeling the need for a snack, she thought about going home. No, there's no way she could have come back empty-handed so soon.

She would instead stop by Shaheerah's house, maybe she would see the drunk man the Lieutenant was talking about recently, in any case, she would get some interesting story. Shaheerah always had odd visitors, it was clear that she would find valuable information there.

Shaheerah was a Persian who resided in one of the multiple apartments that hollowed out the various buildings like countless caves. She had lived there for almost twenty years, since the day she had just arrived from home, from this country, scene of tales which recalled those of the Arabian Nights, at least, according to what Lucy thought, of which Shaheerah did not speak anymore, rarely evoking it with sadness. It was said that, there, she had been a rich princess before whom hundreds of lovers had bowed, offering at her feet cascades of jewels that they seemed to have gathered in the mines of the heavens, similar to myriads of stars. But the beautiful flower of Tehran had fled these gifts without explanation, crossing the tumultuous seas of the Mediterranean and the cold waters of the Atlantic and the English Channel to reach this capital with its always gray sky which, since then, she had never left...