The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter One

1950

A street in lamplight. Beyond a wall of ripped-up city, the Nazis were shooting.

Past the barricade and a line of tailors’ mannequins assembled in a crude and motionless cancan, Thibaut could see the khaki of scattering Wehrmacht men, gray dress uniforms, SS black, the blue of the Kriegsmarine, all lit up by the flares of weapons. Something sped along the rue de Paradis, weaving in a howl of rubber between bodies and ruins, coming straight at the Germans.

Two women on a tandem? They came very fast on big wheels.

The soldiers shot, reloaded, and ran because the rushing vehicle did not turn or fall under their onslaught. There was a whir of chains.

Only one woman rode, Thibaut made out. The other was a torso, jutted from the bicycle itself, its moving prow, a figurehead where handlebars should be. She was extruded from the metal. She pushed her arms backward and they curled at the ends like coral. She stretched her neck and widened her eyes.

Thibaut swallowed and tried to speak, and tried again, and screamed, “It’s the Vélo!”

At once his comrades came. They pressed against the big window and stared down into the city gloom.

The Amateur of Velocipedes. Lurching through Paris on her thick-spoked wheels singing a song without words. My God, Thibaut thought, because a woman was riding her, and that absolutely should not happen. But there she was, gripping the Vélo’s wrist with one hand, pulling with the other on leather strapped tight around the cycle-centaur’s throat.

The Vélo moved faster than any car or horse, any devil Thibaut had yet seen, swaying between the façades, dodging bullets. She tore through the last of the men and the line of figurines they’d arranged. She raised her front wheel and hit the barricade, mounted the meters of plaster, stone, bone, wood, and mortar that blocked the street.

She rose. She hurled into the air above the soldiers, arced up, seeming to pause, falling at last through the invisible boundary between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. She landed hard on the Surrealist side of the street.

The Vélo bounced and twisted on her tires, slid sideways. She came to a stop, looking up at the window of the Main à plume’s hideout, straight into Thibaut’s eyes.

He was first out of the room and down the splintering steps, almost falling from the doorway out into the darkening street. His heart shook him.

The passenger was sprawled on the cobbles where her mount had bucked. The Vélo reared above her on her hind wheel like a fighting horse. She swayed.

She looked at Thibaut with pupil-less eyes the same color as her skin. The manif flexed her thick arms and reached up to snap the cord around her neck and let it fall. She rocked in the wind.

Thibaut’s rifle dangled in his hands. At the edge of his vision he saw Élise lob a grenade over the barricade, in case the Germans were regrouping. The explosion made the ground and the barrier tremble, but Thibaut did not move.

The Vélo tipped forward, back onto both wheels. She accelerated toward him but he made himself stay still. She bore down and her wheels were a burr. Adrenaline took him with the certainty of impact, until on a final instant too quick to see she tilted and passed instead so close to him that Thibaut’s clothes were tugged in the rush of her air.

Tires singing, the cycle-presence wove between the shattered buildings of the Cité de Trévise, into ruins and shadows, out of sight.

Thibaut at last exhaled. When he could control his shaking, he turned to the passenger. He went to where she lay.

The woman was dying. She had been hammered by the German fire the Vélo had ignored. Some fleeting influence at that powerful intersection of streets meant all the holes in her flesh were dry and puckered, but blood spilled from her mouth as if insisting on one outlet. She coughed and tried to speak.

“Did you see?” Élise was shouting. Thibaut knelt and put his hand on the fallen woman’s forehead. The partisans gathered. “She was riding the Vélo!” Élise said. “What does that mean? How in hell did she control it?”

“Not well,” said Virginie.

The passenger’s dark dress was dirty and ripped. Her scarf spread out on the road and framed her face. She furrowed her brow as if thoughtful. As if considering a problem. She was not much older than Thibaut, he thought. She looked at him with urgent eyes.

“It’s… it’s…” she said.

“I think that’s English,” he said quietly.

Cédric stepped forward and tried to murmur prayers and Virginie shoved him sharply away.

The dying woman took Thibaut’s hand. “Here,” she whispered. “He came. Wolf. Gang.” She gasped out little bursts. Thibaut put his ear close to her mouth. “Gerhard,” she said. “The doctor. The priest.”

She was not looking at him any more, Thibaut realized, but past him, behind him. His skin itched in Paris’s attention. He turned.

Behind the windows of the nearest building, overlooking them, a slowly shifting universe of fetal globs and scratches unfolded. A morass of dark colors, vivid on a blacker dark. The shapes rattled. They tapped the glass. A manif storm had come from within the house to witness this woman’s death.

As everyone gathered watched the black virtue behind the windows, Thibaut felt the woman’s fingers on his own. He gripped hers in turn. But she did not want a moment’s last solicitude. She pried his hand open. She put something in it. Thibaut felt and knew instantly that it was a playing card.

When he turned back to her the woman was dead.

Thibaut was loyal Main à plume. He could not have said why he slipped the card into his pocket without letting his comrades see.

On the stones under the woman’s other hand she had written letters on the road with her index finger as a nib. Her nail was wet with black ink from somewhere, provided by the city in that final moment of her need. She had written two last words.

FALL ROT.

Now it’s months later, and Thibaut huddles in a Paris doorway, his hand in his pocket to hold that card again. Over his own clothes he wears a woman’s blue-and-gold pajamas.

The sky is screaming. Two Messerschmitts come in below the clouds, chased by Hurricanes. Slates explode under British fire and the planes tear out of their dives. One of the German aircraft coils suddenly back in a virtuoso maneuver with weapons blazing and in a burning gust an RAF plane unfolds in the air, opening like hands, like a blown kiss, fire descending, turning an unseen house below to dust.

The other Messerschmitt veers toward the Seine. The roofs shake again, this time from below.

Something comes up from inside Paris.

A pale tree-wide tendril, shaggy with bright foliage. It rises. Clutches of buds or fruit the size of human heads quiver. It blooms vastly above the skyline.

The German pilot flies straight at the vivid flowers, as if smitten, plant-drunk. He plunges for the vegetation. It spreads trembling leaves. The great vine whips up one last house-height and takes the plane in its coils. It yanks it down below the roofs, into the streets, out of sight.

There is no explosion. The snagged aircraft is just gone, into the deeps of the city.

The other planes frantically disperse. Thibaut waits while they go. He lets his heart slow. When he sets his face and steps out at last it is under a clean sky.

Thibaut is twenty-four, hard and thin and strong. His eyes move constantly as he keeps watch in all directions: he has the fretful aggression and the gritted teeth of the new Parisian. He keeps his hair and his nails short. He squints with more than just suspicion: he does not have the spectacles he suspects he might need. Beneath his bright woman’s nightclothes he wears a dirty darned white shirt, dark trousers and suspenders, worn black boots. It has been some days since Thibaut has shaved. He’s scabbed and stinking.

Those pilots were foolhardy. Paris’s air is full of reasons not to fly.

There are worse things than garden airplane traps like the one that took the Messerschmitt. The chimneys of Paris are buffeted by ecstatic avian storm clouds. Bones inflated like airships. Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies in outdated coats shout endless monologues of special offers and clog planes’ propellers with their own questionable meat. Thibaut has watched mono- and bi- and triplane geometries, winged spheres and huge ghastly spindles, a long black-curtained window, all flying like animate dead over the tops of houses, pursuing an errant Heinkel Greif bomber, to negate it with an unliving touch.

Thibaut can mostly name the manifestations he sees, when they have names.

Before the war he had already committed to the movement which spawned them, which detractors had derided as passé, as powerless. “I don’t care about fashion!” is what he had told his amused mother, waving the publications he bought, sight-unseen, from a sympathetic bookseller in rue Ruelle, who knew to put aside for him anything affiliated. “This is about liberation!” The dealer, Thibaut would come to realize, long after those days, would sometimes accept paltry payment from his enthusiastic and ignorant young customer, in exchange for rarities. The last package he sent reached Thibaut’s home two days before he left it for the last time.

When later he had watched the Germans march into the city, the sight of their columns by the Arc de Triomphe had looked to Thibaut like a grim collage, an agitprop warning.

Now he walks wide deserted streets of the sixteenth, a long way from his own arenas, his rifle raised and the gold trim of his skirts flapping. The sun bleaches the ruins. A miraculously uneaten cat races out from under a burnt-out German tank to find another hole.

Weeds grow through old cars and the floors of newspaper kiosks. They cosset the skeletons of the fallen. Huge sunflowers root all over, and the grass underfoot is speckled with plants that did not exist until the blast: plants that make noise; plants that move. Lovers’ flowers, their petals elliptical eyes and throbbing cartoon hearts bunched alternately in the mouths of up-thrust snakes that are their stems, that sway and stare as Thibaut warily passes.

Rubble and greenery fall away and the sky opens as he reaches the river. Thibaut watches for monsters.

In the shallows and the mud of the Île aux Cygnes, human hands crawl under spiral shells. A congregation of Seine sharks thrash up dirty froth below the Pont de Grenelle. Rolling and rising, they eye him as he approaches and bite at the bobbing corpse of a horse. In front of each dorsal fin, each shark is hollow-backed, with a canoe seat.

Thibaut walks the bridge above them. Midway across he stops. He stands in plain sight. His soldier’s nerves itch for cover but he makes himself stand and look. He surveys the altered city.

Jags of ruin, a fallen outline. Framed against the flat bright sky to the north-east, the Eiffel Tower looms. The tower’s steepling top half dangles where it has always been, where the Pont d’Iéna meets the Quai Branly, above ordered gardens, but halfway to the earth the metal ends. There’s nothing tethering it to the ground. It hangs, truncated. A flock of the brave remaining birds of Paris swoop below the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up. The half-tower points with a long shadow.

Where are the cells of Main à plume now? How many have succumbed?

Months back, after the Vélo, Thibaut had been, you could perhaps say, called to action, insofar as anyone could be called to anything any more. An invitation reached him by the city’s networks. Word from old comrades.

“They told me you run things here,” the young scout had said. Thibaut did not like that. “Will you come?”

Thibaut remembers how heavy the card had been then in his pocket. Did someone know he had it? Was that for what they were calling?

On the card is a stylized pale woman. She stares twice in rotational symmetry. Her yellow hair becomes two big cats that swaddle her. Below each of her faces is a blue, profile, closed-eyed other, unless they, too, are her. There is a black keyhole in the top right corner and the bottom left.

“Come on,” Thibaut had said to the messenger. “Why do they want me? I’m protecting the ninth.”

A while after he declined came word of a dramatic sortie, one that failed in a terrible way. Rumors of who had died: a roll-call of his teachers.

Goodbye, he thinks at last, all these weeks later. His nightclothes snap in the wind.

Thibaut was fifteen when the S-Blast came.

A call like a far-off siren, by the river, and a wave of shadow and silence racing out and leaving young Thibaut wheezing for breath and blinking with eyes gone momentarily unseeing, and the city poised and primed behind it, something emergent, something irrupting into and from its unconscious. A dream invaded from below. What had been the world’s prettiest city was now populated by its own unpretty imaginings, and by the ugliness of the pit.

Thibaut was not a natural guerilla, but, hating the invader and struggling not to die, he had learned to fight. Parisian, he had been sucked into an apocalypse; to which, he would quickly come to learn, to his conflicted shock, he was affiliated.

Those first days had been all made of madness, assaults by impossible figures and misremembered bones. Street-fighting Nazis and Resistance had killed each other in panic as they tried to contain reveries of which they could not make sense. On the second night after the blast, terrified Wehrmacht, trying to secure a zone, had shepherded Thibaut and his family and all their neighbors into a barbed-wire pen in the street. There they shuffled, clutching bags containing whatever they had managed to grab, while the soldiers yelled abuse and argued with each other.

There had come a massive howl, getting quickly closer. Already by then Thibaut recognized the voice of something manifested.

Everyone screamed at the sound. A panicking officer waved his weapon, aimed it at last, decisively, at the gathered civilians. He fired.

Some soldiers tried and failed to stop him doing it again, others joined in with him. Over the echoes of carnage the manif kept up its cry. Thibaut remembers how his father fell, and his mother, trying as she did to shield him, and how he fell himself after them, not knowing if his legs had given way or if he was playing dead to live. He had heard more shouts and the manif voice closer still and the sounds of new violence.

And then finally when all the screaming and the shots were done, Thibaut raised his head slowly from amid the dead, like a seal from the sea.

He was looking into a metal grille. The visor of a plumed knight’s helmet. It was vastly too big. It was centimeters from his own face.

The helmeted presence stared at him. He blinked and its metal trembled. He and it were all that moved. All the Germans were dead or gone. The manif lurched but Thibaut was still. He waited for it to kill him and it held his gaze and let him be. It was the first of many manifs to do so.

The thing swayed up and back from the flesh and debris of the killing ground. It reared, seven, eight meters tall, an impossible composite of tower and human and a great shield, all out of scale and made one looming body, handless arms held almost dainty by its sides, its left thronging with horseflies. It declared itself mournfully, an echoing call of faceplate hinges. When that noise ebbed the huge thing stalked away at last on three limbs: one huge spurred man’s leg; a pair of women’s high-heeled feet.

And there was quiet. And Thibaut, war’s boy, had crawled shivering at last through the hecatomb in a field of rubble, to where he found the corpses of his parents and wept.

He has often imagined a vengeful hunt for that officer who first fired, but Thibaut cannot remember what he looked like. Or for the man or men whose ammunition killed his parents, but he doesn’t know who they were. They were all probably among those shot by their own comrades in the chaos, in any case, or crushed by bricks when the manif toppled the façade.

In rue Giroux, masonry slumps in sloppy drifts. Bricks bounce down a broken slope and a young woman emerges, her face bloody and filthy and her hair spiked with dirt. She does not see Thibaut. He watches her bite her nails and scurry on.

One of the trapped thousands. The Nazis will never allow Paris to contaminate France. All roads in and out are locked down.

When it was clear that the manifs, the new things with their new powers, would not disappear, before the Reich had settled for this containment, it had tried first to destroy, then to use them. Or to bring forth its own, less capricious than its infernal allies. The Nazis had even succeeded in invoking a few things with their manifology: incompetent statuettes; a Céline weltgeist, fungal lassitude, semi-sentient dirt and enervation infecting house after house. But their successes were few, unsustainable, uncommandable.

Now, years on, it seems to Thibaut that the number of manifs has started to diminish. That this is the second epoch of the post-blast city.

Of course Paris still teems. Just walk if you doubt that, he thinks, see what you meet. Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition guide, arms out to lethally embrace. The dreaming cat, as big as a child and incompetently bipedal, watching with sentient intent. You will encounter such figures, Thibaut thinks. For a while yet.

And if you go on walking like that and stay safe and keep out of sight then you will come some time to be alone again and there will be a stretch of window and bricks untouched by war and you could, for an instant, believe yourself back in old Paris.

I miss nothing, Thibaut insists to himself once more. Not the pre-war days, nor the recent relative safety of the ninth arrondissement. The stranded Nazis in the tenth could never take those streets, or the altered landscapes they crisscrossed, the sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes, houses of frozen rooms full of clocks, places where the geography echoed itself. The ninth was too completely made of recalcitrant art for anyone to take. It would shelter no one but the partisans of that art—the Surrealist stay-behinds, soldiers of the unconscious. Main à plume.

I don’t miss a thing. Thibaut clenches his fist on his weapon.

Each riverbank tree here is in a different season. Dead leaves and live. Thibaut wants railway lines. Routes out. Under one lamppost, it is night. He leans against it and sits and for long minutes looks up at stars.

Do I even deserve these places any more? They came at the wrong time and they came in the wrong way. Liberation was fucked up. But if Thibaut can find no spark of joy in them, he thinks, maybe he is no better than one of Stalin’s men. Or a drone for de Gaulle, an enemy of true freedom.

That isn’t me, he thinks. No.

He stands and steps back into the sunlight beyond the tiny manif nightlet, and as he does a howl fills the street.

Instantly Thibaut drops, takes cover behind the stub of a pillar, weapon raised. War has taught him how to be very still. That is not a human noise—nor, he is sure, that of a manif.

He waits. He controls his breathing and listens to a heavy approach. Something comes slowly into view. Thibaut sights down his rifle and tightens his grip.

A swaying body like a great bull’s. Its flanks are bloodied, and rainbowed as if with petrol on water. On its brow the thing has many long, gray, random horns, some broken. It bellows again and shows meat-eater tusks.

It does not move with the dreamlike specificity of a manif but with a thudding, broken step that he can feel through the ground. It comes with nothing of that stir of recognition—even at something inconceivable that he has never previously seen—that a manif brings him. It oozes and drips and raises nausea in Thibaut. Its blood crackles and smokes and hits the pavement in spots of flame. The beast shakes its head and flecks fly from its horns to land wetly. Thibaut’s innards spasm, and he knows from that clench that those are gobbets of manif.

If the devils and the living art cannot avoid each other, they will fight, terribly. The artflesh dripping from the demon’s face is fresh.

In the days after the S-Blast, the German forces and the newcomer manifs had been joined, appallingly, by such as this misplaced invader, battalions from below.

The exigencies of survival sent some of Thibaut’s comrades trying to make sense of these fallen, now risen, embarrassments. They accumulated expertise from bad books they hunted and found. They cajoled information from captured German summoners and specialist priests in Alesch’s nascent bishopric. The intrepid eavesdropped on snips of the demons’ bayed discussions, they pieced together information, parsed rumors of ill-tempered pacts between Hell and the Reich. Élise might have been able to tell him what kind of fiend it is he looks at, as he prays, if to no God, that it will not look at him: all Thibaut knows is that it is a devil, and a big one.

Like most of its kind the thing is obviously in pain. But that size, whatever its injuries or sickness, they will not help him. The few trinkets he has in his pack for use against the infernal are inadequate: it will kill him if it finds him.

But the beast shambles painfully away on what seems a varying number of legs and does not look in his direction. It leaves a trail of burning blood and broken ground.

He waits until it turns off the street, out of sight, and he listens to it haul itself away, and he waits longer until he can hear nothing. Only then does Thibaut slump at last, fingering his nightskirt. Even that, he thinks, tracing the edge of its hem, would not have saved him. I should get off the streets, he thinks. Then: Maybe I should take the Métro, he taunts himself.

Thibaut considers his dead, in the forest. He considers the ruined plan, the assault from which he exiled himself.

From his bag he pulls out a pencil and a stained old schoolbook, folded many times. He opens his war notebooks.

I’m not a fucking deserter. The mission is vacant. I’m not a deserter.

Thibaut was nearly seventeen when, following survivors’ stories and the noise of shots and burnt and uncannily twisted remains of German patrols and the intuitions that sometimes beset him, he tracked down the Main à plume in the ruins.

He was waving scrappy publications at them as he came, trembling so hard with nerves that he made the selectors who met him and ushered him into their compound laugh, not unkindly.

“This is you, isn’t it?” he kept saying, pointing at the pages, the names. They kept laughing when he told them, “I want to join you.”

They tested him. When he said he couldn’t shoot—he’d not yet held a gun—they joked that he’d have to try automatic shooting. Like automatic writing, they said. “You know who it was said the simplest act of Surrealism is to fire randomly into a crowd?” He did, and they liked that.

Other examinations. They pointed at certain objects from the junk that filled their cellar, asking him if they were surreal or just trash. Thibaut looked at the configurations and muttered answers too quickly for thought—a claw-and-ball chair leg was nothing, an empty cigar box and a hairbrush were surreal, so on. He corrected himself only once, over what he could never later remember. They looked at him more thoughtfully when he was done.

When one of the questioners took off his shoe to rub his toe, with boldness not yet characteristic Thibaut took it from the surprised man, picked up a candlestick he had previously dismissed as mere object and placed it inside the old leather. “Now it’s surreal,” he said. The glances of the selectors—artists, clerks, and curators turned guerilla—had not escaped him.

“You want to fight, I understand,” the half-shod man said, looking at him sideways. “Right now, though… with all this… why like this? Why with us? With the city like this, don’t we have greater needs than poetry?”

Immediately Thibaut almost shouted a response. “‘We refuse to flee poetry for reality,’” he said. “‘But we refuse to flee reality for poetry.’” The men and women blinked at him. “‘No one should say our actions are superfluous,’” Thibaut recited. “‘If they do, we’ll say the superfluous supposes the necessary.’”

He had recognized the question, the last test. It, and his answer, were the words of Jean-François Chabrun, speaking for the franc-tireurs, Surrealist irregulars, left in Paris when the Nazis came. A prophecy, a promise written after one cataclysm and just before another. They had carried it over after that next, the S-Blast, and Thibaut granted it fidelity.

He will never be a sharpshooter. He is an adequate hand-to-hand fighter at best. Thibaut was admitted to the Main à plume because of his way of seeing, the connections he makes, the synchronicity he notes and invokes. They taught him to conduct what they called disponibilité, to be a receiver. To tap objective chance.

In rooms at the top of leaning houses, in a city become free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible, Thibaut learned survival and poetry, from Régine Raufast, Edouard Jaguer, Rius, Dotremont, Chabrun himself, techniques he would take with him later, when training was done, full of thanks and solidarity, to spread the resistance, to join with others, and recruit. In his company, Jacques Hérold set a black chain on fire.

In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous. Thibaut’s are strong.

The Surrealists trapped behind had known immediately what the newly appeared figures were that the explosion had brought. Not the devils, those tawdry bugbears: them they considered as little as they could. But the others, they knew. They were the first to recognize them, to try to develop a strategy for life and for urban war that afforded them respect. The Main à plume owed them, not obedience, but a kind of fealty: this was hardly the hoped-for insurrection, but these were Surrealist glimmers, these manifs. They were convulsively beautiful, and they were arrived. The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers.

Now, alone, Thibaut drinks to the freedom of Paris from a standpipe in a square full of bricks like failed flowers.

Months ago, his scouts in the ninth reported demons in a charnel-house off Clichy. Thibaut and the comrades of his cell had looked at each other in horror.

“They’re not with Nazi handlers,” Virginie said. She was a recent recruit to the Surrealist resistance, ferocious but young and ignorant. “They’re feral. How urgent is it? Do we have to…?”

“You’ve not dealt with them before,” Thibaut said. “Or you’d know.”

The thing was, he told her, you could no more accommodate devils than you could a splinter gone septic, an allergic reaction. The power of the arrondissement had kept them out, so far, but for occasional lumbering, blundering intruders. But now they had established themselves, if they were not driven out or destroyed, they would transform the ninth into a zone of blood and infernal agony. The Surrealists had to prepare an exorcism.

There was a pleasure in some of the process and accoutrements, relics of wizardry that had embarrassed the Enlightenment. Other necessities, though, stank of clericalism, and the partisans were disgusted that they were efficacious. It was with distaste that Thibaut and Élise took a bag of crucifixes, bottles of holy water, bells, to Father Cédric. Élise made a joke—she, the rabbi’s granddaughter, carrying such things. The old priest performed desultory benedictions and they paid him in cigarettes and food.

“Turn the other cheek, Father,” said Élise at his expression. “Find some Free French if you want willing sheep to patronize. Until then, this is a marriage of inconvenience. You want to walk? There’s the door.”

He was safer in their company, and they in his. An uncomfortable symbiosis. The Surrealists despised his calling, and he them for their militant atheism, but everyone knew it helped to have a priest perform certain absurdities of his trade if it was demons you had to fight.

“Why?” Thibaut asked Élise when they left again. “Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.”

“Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.

However they might mock and bully him, Thibaut’s crew had a degree of unfriendly respect for Cédric: whatever else the man was, he was Resistance. In these streets, his very tradition had become unlikely dissent. Unlike so many clergy, he had refused to make any peace at all with the new Church of Paris, or with its leader, Robert Alesch.

For months before the reconfiguration, the Abbé Alesch had been a well-known preacher against the Nazis. A very few intimates had known, too, that he worked as part of Jeannine Picabia’s clandestine network, réseau Gloria. He’d been courier and confidant, able, as a priest, to pass through the zones, carrying messages and contraband. His Gloria comrades called him “Bishop,” and he heard their confessions.

He was a double-agent. In the S-Blast’s aftermath, he had sold his comrades to his Nazi paymasters, and almost every one of them had died. Alesch, V-man, informer, paid not thirty pieces of silver but twelve thousand francs a month.

Two austere activists, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and her lover, the Irishman Beckett, had escaped from the carnage of Gloria. They had gotten word out of Alesch’s perfidy, but he had not cowered. Rather, he had inaugurated a theology of betrayal. A Catholicism of collaboration—with the German invaders, and with those invaders from below. Rome denounced him, and he denounced Rome back. He made himself Bishop in his own Führer-funded church.

On their hatred for Alesch, Cédric and the Surrealists could agree.

At twilight the fighters had ascended to the roofscape, their guns loaded with that sardonically blessed ammunition. In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.

Thibaut was ready for manifs. He had his expertise, he could perform cathexis, or use a weapon itself manifested against them.

Humans, of course, could be killed with almost anything.

The partisans picked like wood-gatherers through copses of chimneys. Among the old bricks, dead crows, slates, and gutters, Thibaut saw pendulums and figures made of string. The detritus of the surreal, evanescent unconsciousnesses. There were doors at roofs’ edges. Dim things walking too close, at which he would not look.

Then the faint sound of screaming. They approached warily. With the sky huge around them, the Main à plume reached the source of noise. They stared down into a warehouse’s cracked skylight as if it were a scrying pool.

Far below, a man in robes spasmed suspended in the air above the chamber’s dusty floor. He thrashed amid monsters.

A trumpet-nosed beast with fish eyes swung a cudgel in brutal percussion. A legless thing with bat wings thrashed him with its spiked and suckered tail. Rag doll animals chewed the man’s fingers and gouged him with their horns.

“My God,” Virginie whispered. “Come on.” The resistance fighters grit their teeth in disgust and quickly readied weapons. A lizard-like doll-thing snarled, a hairy pig-faced assailant leered between assaults.

“Wait,” Thibaut managed to say. He held up his hand. “Look. Look at his clothes.”

“Get out of the way, Thib,” said Pierre, aiming through the glass.

“Wait. He moved just like that a moment ago,” Thibaut said. The man screamed again. “Listen.” Moments passed, and the distinct wavering cry repeated. “Look at the devils,” Thibaut said. “Look at him.”

The floating man’s eyes were unfocused and as flat as concrete. There was a precision to his sand-colored robes, his beard. He wailed and writhed and his cries grew neither louder nor quieter and the blood pattered unendingly beneath him in a pool that did not spread.

“Those demons,” Thibaut said at last, “are too healthy. They’re repeating like a scratched record. They aren’t demons. And what they’re torturing isn’t a man.”

The changing streets of Paris echoed now with the slamming of Hell-hard feet. They had burst from sewers after the blast came, torn open trees like broken doors, hurtling out into the world as the manifs did, though they were not like them, nothing like them, though the explosion had palpably been not of their nature. As if the explosion was not their birth but their excuse. They swam up into the light through pavements made lava, roaring up from a glimpsed painscape. Giants with cobwebs for faces, crab-headed generals encased in teeth. And so on. They wore armor and gold. They cast pestilential spells and yammered with abyssal gusto.

But the demons winced through their sneers. They rubbed their skins gingerly when they thought they weren’t observed. When they killed and tormented it was in faintly needy fashion. They seemed anxious. They stank not only of sulfur but infection. Sometimes they wept with pain.

The devils of Paris would not shut up. They declaimed as they came, in a hundred languages, they hissed and howled descriptions of their hadal cities, and beat their claws on the sigils they wore, of the houses of the pit, and they shouted rather too often to those they hunted and killed that it was from Hell that they came, and so that everyone should be terrified.

They had come flank-by-side onto the streets with Nazis and their Vichy allies, patrolling with specialist witch-officers, launching joint attacks, with bullets and bombs and the spit and boiling blood of Hell. It was clear: whereas the manifs had no overseers, the Reich had invoked these other things to win the war. Their collaboration was not always successful. There were times when, even during onslaughts against their enemies, their bickering exploded into bad-tempered massacres, fiends and Nazis ripping each other open while their targets, their own slaughter interrupted, listened bemused to screaming accusations on both sides.

Now they were here, to those who watched closely the devils were as cowed as their army handlers, as stranded in impossible Paris as everyone else. They came up but were not seen descending. Hide outside their lairs—as did the bravest or suicidal human spies—and you might sometimes hear them sobbing for a Gehenna from which by incompetent demonology it seemed they were permanently exiled.

You could learn to see that the living art of the city intimidated them. It sent them scurrying if outnumbered, or nervously on the attack if not.

“Those,” Thibaut said to his comrades that night on the roof, of the devil-like things below them, “are not demons. They’re manifs.”

Living images. Images of demons, and of their victim. And not even sentient like most of the art come alive in New Paris, but looping.

“No!” said Pierre, bringing his rifle back up. “Fucking bullshit,” he said, and aimed again. But he did not fire, and his comrades watched the scene repeat, until Élise gently pushed his gun down.

Thibaut whispers to those gone.

It’s night but he keeps walking. He wants cool air and dark to draw its edges into white Paris stone like drafting ink. So he walks crumbling streets until the moon arrives, then closes his eyes and walks more, lets his unconscious pull him toward whichever moldering house it will, feeling for safety. I’ll sleep an hour, he thinks. Two, three hours, that’s all.

When his fingers touch wood he looks again. He forces the door. His footsteps squelch on a swampy carpet. He walks with his gun up.

From a mantelpiece of a large front room a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes. It cringes at him. Blood drips from sickle claws. In the puddles on the floor, a drowned woman lies facedown. Thibaut sees her mottled shoulder blades: he abruptly knows, with an inner flex of insight, that the animal is waiting for her to rot.

He should be quiet at night—especially on this, his last night—but he is full of the rage of a failed soldier. He aims at the carnivore bush-baby.

It hesitates, as manifs do before him. Thibaut surrenders his will and fires, Surrealist-style.

His bullets sway. They correct mid-flight, burst into the thing as it leaps, slam it against the wall where it thumps its limbs and dissolves like tar.

Thibaut waits. His weapon smokes. Nothing appears. He goes to turn the dead woman but stops, holds his face in his hands and wonders if he will cry. He cannot sleep now.

Two days after the Main à plume’s abortive assault on the non-demons, as Thibaut ate his stale-bread breakfast, Virginie put a book on the table in front of him.

“What’s this?” he said.

She flipped through engravings to a picture of a trumpeting thing, a spiked tail, a horde of little devils. He recognized them. They beset the same St. Anthony that they had seen a few streets away.

“It’s by Schongauer,” she said.

“Where did you get this?”

“A library.”

Thibaut shook his head at her foolishness or bravery. To plunder a library! Books were not safe.

“Thing is,” she said. “That manif? Of this image? I don’t think it just self-generated. It’s not close enough. To the heart of the S-Blast.”

In the fecund shock waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists’ own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were figures from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the Surrealists’ ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon. Now Redon’s leering ten-legged spider hunted at one end of rue Jean Lantier, chattering its big teeth. A figure with Arcimboldo’s coagulate fruit face stalked the boundaries of the Saint-Ouen market.

“If this was Dürer, maybe,” she said, “or Piranesi. Schongauer? He’s important, but I don’t think he’s core enough to manifest spontaneously. I think someone invoked this deliberately.”

“Who?” Thibaut said. “Why?”

“The Nazis. Maybe they want devils that’ll follow orders better. I think they want their own manifs,” Virginie said. “I think they’re still trying.” They regarded each other. Pictured their enemies tugging at images from pages with whatever invocatory engines they could put together. “The Führer himself,” Virginie said heavily, “is an artist, after all.” Reproductions of his barely competent watercolors, his hesitant lines, his featureless faces, his vacuous, pretty, empty urban façades, had circulated as curios in occult Paris. Virginie and Thibaut shared a glance of contempt.

Whatever their source, those devil-manifs were weak, without even the verve to fully emerge. They’re probably there still, thinks Thibaut. Endlessly eating endless, dumb, saintly prey.

He approaches Garibaldi and boulevard Pasteur. Behind shutters he makes out the guttering of candles. These houses are tiny communes. A family in each room, stoves burning broken chairs, routes holed between walls. House-villages. Thibaut falls asleep and dreams as he trudges Haussmann’s boulevards.

He dreams Élise falling toward him in blood that obscures her face. He sees Virginie, and Paul, and Jean, and the rest of them, and he is too late to do anything but cradle their dying heads in the dark of the forest.

Thibaut does not cry out but he does jolt himself awake, still walking. He sets his face back into a city sneer.

At a junction, shining in the moon’s white light, there is motion, and Thibaut slows. Two skeletons. They jerk their fleshless limbs. They walk a slow circle.

Thibaut is still. The dead feet click.

Alain, the best officer his cell ever voted into place, would treat such prim Delvaux bones, or the dens of fossils, prone Mallo skeletons shaking themselves repeatedly apart, with great respect. It had not stopped three of them jabbing him to death one humming hot June day with their own splintering matter.

Thibaut backs away. He does not want to fight manifs.

The organ in him, his new muscle, cramps at a sudden spasm of manif energy. It comes from somewhere else. He staggers. It comes again, so hard he doubles up.

There is a rapid cracking of shots. The skeletons do not pause. The sounds are to the north. They are away from Thibaut’s route, but close, and his own insides still grip him from within, tug him, and when he runs, it is, almost to his own bewilderment, toward the firing.

Through a boundary into the seventh. His ears pop. Another shot. Thibaut smells sap.

The avenue de Breteuil is full of aspen trees. Their boughs stretch out to touch the houses. The complex of Les Invalides, that sprawling and once-opulent old military zone, is out of sight, has been overcome by millennial vegetation. Lampposts struggle up from roots and roofs from the canopy. The Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides is filled with bark. The Musée de l’Armée is being emptied, with slow, vegetable disorder, its weapons gripped and tugged over weeks out of their cases by curious undergrowth.

Another shot: a flock of night things disperses. Something laughs. A woman runs out of the forest. She wears thick glasses, tweed trousers, and jacket, all smeared with woodland muck. She labors under bags and equipment, waves a pistol.

There are growls, the snarl of breath. Beasts come rushing through the trees after her, with strange quick staggering.

They are little tables, stiff board bodies, unbending wooden legs, thrashing tails, and ferocious canine faces. They scream and bite the air. Fanged furniture jerking across the rough ground.

Thibaut hisses and steps past the stumbling woman into her pursuers’ path, between them and their quarry. They’ll veer from him, he thinks, as most manifs do.

But they attack. They keep coming.

He is almost too slow, in his shock, to bring up his gun. He fires as the first animal thing leaps, sends the growling table flying in an explosion of splinters.

Others hurl themselves at him, and his cotton nightclothes are suddenly as tough as metal. He swings his arms. The pajamas grip Thibaut, make him an instrument, propel him fast and hard. A wood-and-taxidermy predator reaches him, biting, and Thibaut’s clothed arm comes down and snaps its spine.

He stands between the woman and the wolf-tables, snarling as bestially as the pack. The tables inch forward. With a burst of creative chance Thibaut shoots the closest right in its snarl and sends it down in blood and sawdust.

There’s shouting from the forest. He can see two, three figures in the trees. SS uniforms. A man in a dark coat, calling in German. Quick! Be careful! The dogs—

A burly officer fires right at him out of the shadows. Thibaut howls. But the shots ricochet from his chest. The soldier frowns as Thibaut brings his own rickety old rifle up and shoots and misses of course and reloads while the man still watches, stupid and slow, and Thibaut fires again, this time with disponibilité, and puts him down.

Wolf-tables bite. A Nazi cracks a whip, to rally them, to gather them, and Thibaut snatches as the leather swings. It slaps and wraps his hand and makes it numb but he grips. By him the woman drops, pushes her fingers into the topsoil: the furniture that menaces her twitches and backs away. Thibaut yanks the whip-holder toward him by his weapon and punches him back again, sending him flying into the dark.

The Germans hesitate. The pack howls. Thibaut smacks a tree hard enough to make it quake, showing his pajama-ed strength. The attackers retreat, into the forest, back out of sight, toward the corridors of Les Invalides. The humans call as they run, and the little tables follow the sound, baring their teeth as the darkness takes them.

“Thank you,” the woman says. “Thank you.” She is gathering her fallen things. “Come on.” She speaks French with an American accent, a thin and cultured voice.

“What in hell was that?” Thibaut says. The man he just hit is dead. Thibaut goes through his pockets. “I’ve never seen anything like those things before.”

“They’re called wolf-tables,” the woman says. “Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner. We must go.”

Thibaut stares at her. Eventually he says, “Brauner’s have fox parts. Those tables were bigger than any I’ve seen, and their fur was more gray. They didn’t look like foxes. It’s as if they were crossbred. The soldiers called them ‘dogs.’ And they were doing what they were told. And…” He looks away from her. “As I say, I’ve never seen any manifs, including wolf-tables, like them before.” And they came right at me. They didn’t hesitate.

After a moment the woman says, “Please excuse me. Of course. I misunderstood.”

“Wolf-tables are scavengers,” Thibaut goes on. “One shot should have dispersed them.” They gorge themselves, trying to fill stomachs they don’t have, clogging up their throats till they vomit blood and meat and spit and then eating helplessly again. “Wolf-tables aren’t brave.”

“Of course you know manifs,” the woman says. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to be rude. But please… We have to go.”

“Who are you?”

She is a few years older than he. Her face is round with high flushed cheeks, her hair is dark and short. She looks at him from where she stoops among the roots.

“What are you doing here?” Thibaut says, and then instantly thinks he knows.

“I’m Sam,” she says. He takes her satchel. “Hey,” she says.

He upends the bag.

“What are you doing?” she shouts.

He scatters a camera, canisters of film, several battered books. The camera is not old. He feels no manif charge. These are not surreal objects. He stares at them. He was expecting scavenger spoils. He was expecting old gloves; a stuffed snake; things that are dusty; a wineglass half melted in lava and embedded in stone; bits of a typewriter; a barnacled book that has rested underwater; tweezers that change what they touch.

Thibaut had thought this woman a battle junkie, a magpie of war. Artifact hunters creep past the barricades to seek, extract, and sell stuff born or altered by the blast. Batteries of odd energies. Objects foraged out of the Nazis’ quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

He almost has more respect for his enemies than for the dealers in such goods. In the satchel Thibaut expected to find a spoon covered with fur; a candle; a pebble in a box. He blinks. He folds and unfolds the Nazi’s whip.

Sam checks the camera for damage. “What was that for?” she says.

Thibaut prods the books with his toe as though they might turn into more expected spoils. She smacks his foot away. Maps of Paris. Journals: Minotaure; Documents; Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution; La Révolution surréaliste; View.

“Why do you have these?” he says. His voice is hushed.

The woman brushes the covers clean. “You thought I was a treasure-hunter. Jesus.” She looks at him through her camera’s viewfinder and he puts his hand in front of his face. She presses the button and it clicks and he feels something in his blood. He keeps staring at her journals, thinking of those he once carried. He left them, years ago, when he took his leave of training. An odd homage to his instructors, those spare copies, pages full of their own work.

The woman sighs with relief. “If you’d broken this, you and I would’ve been on a bad footing.”

She puts the camera strap around her neck and brushes dirt from a big leather notebook. She offers her hand.

“I’m not here to steal,” she says. “I’m here to keep a record.”

After he left his dead parents behind him, before he found those who would become his comrades, Thibaut, not yet sixteen, had hid and crept and wandered for a long time. When he reached the edge of the old city, he had secreted himself where he could see gangs of terrified, trapped citizens run, launch themselves at barricades thrown up at the perimeter of the blasted zone, from beyond which the Nazi guards fired remorseless fusillades, killing them until they understood there was no way to leave. In those first days some German soldiers, too, had run at their compatriots’ positions, waving and shouting to be let across the street and out. If they came too close, they, too, were put down. Those officers and men who saw and hung back, pleading, were commanded over loudspeakers to remain within the affected radius, to await instructions.

He retreated to the unsafety of Paris. There Thibaut slept where he could and hunted for food and wiped his eyes and hid from terrible things. He crept repeatedly back to those outskirts, though, tried to scout a way out, again and again, failed every time. The city was rigorously sealed.

At last one night under pounding rain, sheltering in the ruins of a tobacconist and leafing listlessly through his belongings, he found in his pack that last stack of pamphlets and books he had received, the day the blast had blasted. Thibaut cut the string that still bound it.

Géographie nocturne, a pamphlet of poems. A review; La Main à plume. The Surrealism of those still in the occupied city. Written in resistance, under occupation. He had seen the names Chabrun, Patin, Dotrement. The rain cracked the window onto nocturnal geography.

“‘Those who are asleep,’” Thibaut had read, “‘are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.’”

He opened the second volume onto Chabrun’s “État de présence.” That defense of poetry, antifascist rage. The statement of intent of these stay-behind faithful, that, much later, Thibaut would recite to the Main à plume selectors, to pass his entry test. A Surrealist state of presence. He riffled the pages and the first words he read were almost the document’s last.

“Should we go? Stay? If you can stay, stay…”

Thibaut was shaking again and not from cold.

“We remain.”