[YD6-83(Dr.)rev] Lucifer in a Cloak of Light, the Husband, and the Boy’s Niche

 

Chapter preface: Blustery winds drum against the apartment door, yet inside, a storm of another kind brews—André’s voice lashes through the telephone line, a menace cloaked in distance. Amid crates and half-built furniture, Victoria wrestles with shadows of love, motherhood, and a husband’s threats. Lucifer’s light slants across the Belle Étage, unveiling a boy’s niche in the mezzanine—a fragile sanctuary waiting to be claimed.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

#LuciferInLight, #BoysNiche, #Mezzanine, #LiteraryMemoir, #PoeticProse, #AetheriasMirage

[YD6-83(Dr.)rev] Lucifer in a Cloak of Light, the Husband, and the Boy’s Niche

Blustery sweeps around us; the wild winds stall at the door as Victoria—businesslike in miniskirts and jackets, stockings taut—skips the steps and vanishes into the hollow entrance hallway. A sigh of the door breathes me into the apartment, where she slips away and leaves her gleaming black-duco wardrobe waits, poise antique alongside the Emperador Dark marble mantelpiece. 

I pause at sight of last weekend’s assembling—the panels that carried into the late night—long doors once meant for garments, staple in its fashion now reimagined with shelves, their curves reshape into a cupboard interior designed to stand proud against the living room wall. Closing the door behind us, I follow Victoria’s trail, a winding path cut through movers’ crates scattered across the mottled carpet—a reminder of the assault of order we must bring upon this chaos. 

In my search for tools and screws, I become oblivious, crossing paths with Jean-Francois Smeets, lingering in Victoria's shadow. During the move he drifted from the head of the wrought-iron kitchen table undercarriage—another relic that found its way here as if by stealth. Its presence triggers a flash of Jephte’s terrace in my mind, and with it, the memory of my slim-fit pants—shredded into ribbons by Victoria's sudden wrath, at collecting my suitcases from his place. I veered at the door jambs, slipping into the scullery, rummaging through Smeets’ arsenal of plastic trays and wrenches. His shelves of tools lean into a corner, half-shared with bunker-staked canned food, as if this building still remembers WWII—an odd echo of the old veteran’s ridicule.

The assault unfolds in my head, seed under Victoria’s imagination, already at the hands of assembling her black-duco wardrobe. She hints at borrowing the highway toward the North Sea, leaving the city’s fringes, our glass bubble cutting through the wind as we hunt the pointer “Ikea,” a promise rising among the faceless mega-retailers. The idea draws me into its tracks, zigzagging under an artificial light until its anonymous display leaps alive with flat-pack promises. I’m aware of Victoria's blatant gaze—steady, a decisive support for the specter of my mind: egress, hire a van, unload home, unpack a dream from the cartons, assemble the wardrobes, compartmentalize after doodling in my mind the waste of niches, shift them to the flanks either side of the open-hearth fireplace. I leave Victoria the opportunity to shelve her shoes, her kaleidoscope of bright, hippy-serious attire, all waiting to breathe against the clean lines yet to be assembled. 

Through the portal of the interleading rooms, Tonton was praising Victoria near the bay-window—his words spinning in a corner, convoluting AlexAndré until the boy collapses into simple truth: Mamouch’s delight for the coming weeks, until Victoria settles the bed for him. Smeets steps away, leaving—his prowling eyes lingering on the carpet where I stand—his eyes pulling the rug, reeling me along. But the door shuts on his lingering gaze; he’s bound to return the box truck and the uncouth men to their sources.  

Nyx is drawn into the tangled leafiness of the flocculent street canopies, unsettled by the lantern-spirit flaunting its brilliance across the yard. Lucifer’s gleam slithers through the bay window, laying pale fingers over the autumn-mottled carpet, tracing the muddled bedsheets and duvet piled over mattresses left astray in the movers’ frantic rush. His shroud of light prowls across the room, pressing into the portal, brushing the milky-folded pendant light, scattering over the shambles of the weekend’s move—until Lucifer’s electric whisper turns bleak against the fluorescent glare gapping from the doorway, mounting harsher over the kitchen table.

Lucifer creeps from the skies, casting a wave of vertigo through the mirroring interior. The window sashes strain against the blustery whistles swirling into the little courtyard, where a thicket lashes the gleam of eerie leaves—zulu dancers before the pitch-black, trembling panes—anger flickering over Victoria’s shoulders. I thrive on the ravaging pulse of equatorial storms—childhood reborn in the memories of their tempests, raging stubborn in disbelief. For a while, I linger, witnessing again the shifting mood that had eluded me until now. The riffling strom eases; the dark-pelting window softens to a beaded rainfall, tapering to a drizzle, leaving only veins that purfle the glass. Nyx recedes, sensing a quirk of daylight, mocking the twilight back into the courtyard as lingering drops settle before drying away. 

Ring, riling, riling— 

The hush shatters. Victoria kicks her feet, frolicking away, swirling around the sofa, skimming the gaping kitchen doorway. She paces behind the sofa, eyes darting toward the far reveal of the windowsill, and swipes the handset to silence. With the magical tone of a princess in her own realm, she answers: 

“Victoria.”

But Victoria stares into the darkness glued on the glaze, her eyes sinking to the sill, before drifting back into her own tracks. She steps away, the telephone cord trailing behind her, clutched to an appeasing murmur: “André, let me explain. . .” 

But André’s distant horn blares, cutting through her words—his screams tearing down the line—shredding her voice to a whisper: “André. . . André. . . André. . .” 

She distances herself from the phone cradle, pacing along the window, lowering the handset from her face.

André’s screaming shatters every thought she holds. Just short of the gaping kitchen, Victoria stops, turns around, her eyes carrying the bewitching scars of a mother’s worry. In my silence, I reason. ‘My Little One, hang up the phone—that’s what I would do.’ She tracks back along the trailing cord, her gaze lifting—jumping the phone cradle—to meet the far blank corner wall of the room. His own screaming folds back on him, his echo punctuating the silence; forced to hear himself, he falters, appeases, and lies low. In the hush, we can sense André thinking through a change of strategy.

Victoria, at the monster of a dead telephone line, hangs up. She paces off, distraught: ‘How did André get our phone number?’ A glint in her eye, in the hush, blame a smoke drift—faceless. Behind the phone call, the scent of Tonton lingers—the man without a past, breezing in the shadows of a double agent. Meanwhile, AlexAndré remains in respite care, just up the road with André’s parents. 

At the switches of her mind, Victoria drains her distress into stillness. We step through the portal into the adjacent messy room. We roll into bed—as I gauge the Belle Étage ceiling, flush and white, loftier by the lantern’s moonlit gleam filtering through the bay window. She crawls into my arms, as I am machinating her concern—for more than a bed, but about a room for her little boy in the wake of André's threat: “It’s not sane, a one-bedroom apartment with a child.”

She sheds the shambles that surround her: the scattered modules of a move that refuse to assemble themselves. They’ve lingered through the past week and this morning beneath Helios, who creeps along the bay window as Saturday's city murmur rises in the distance. She breaks into a peppy gait, crossing the interleading portal, calling out, “Daddy, Vient, on y va–Come, let’s go!” 

Her eyes dart the exit door. I don't bother guessing what idea is spurred in her head—though it hangs there, that there is only one bedroom, and André has capitalized on this, threatening Victoria that it’s unsuitable to bring her boys home. A telegram of doubts lingers: ‘How did André find out about the apartment setup?’ I pondered how to double the space, I pull the apartment door close behind us, then the entrance, trailing her across the yellow-tiled path. With a stride through the gates, she veers from the brick pillars, brushes by the few curb-parked cars, then swirls. Her pause before the Audi’s door says it all. ‘Door open.’ 

I cut through the cars to the lane, slip into the crotch of the seat, draw the door close behind me while reaching over the console to hook the door latch on hers. I straighten. She slips in. I tweak the ignition. She pulls her door shut, sealing us into our glass bubble—to the engine’s purr as we pull away. Weaving through a fall of names, the clues arriving as landmarks at the edge of her fingernail. We bridge the green river, from the upper woods to the lower park, past a sweeping century-old hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades along the riverfront. The tires patter over Rochefort Square, fall silent on the asphalt lane running alongside tram tracks through the median. We spiral around St. Gilles Square, the tires pattering as we orbit its Nomadic Aquarius girl spilling water. We divert outward, crossing the valley, cresting the moat’s drawbridge, weaving our way into a fast-aging district. 

We turn off the transcity boulevard into a narrow street lined with curb-parked cars, slip into a space, and step out in the shadows of slender stone pillars topped with green-hued statuettes. As we backtrack away, the tradesmen arise along the wrought-iron fence—historians in disguise, as if aware of their own fading, striving to maintain a copy of what once was. 

We borrow the zebra crossing toward the right flank of the cathedral-like church blotting the perception of the Grand Sablon. Before my eyes, evolution rolls back, revealing an uninhabited marsh, its winged sources feeding brooks that vanish into oblivion beneath the now cobblestone streets. 

Sauntering down the descending sidewalk from the parvis, the hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades tapers the vista as we drift beside the row of retailers. I’m still bemused by the translation—“Grand Sablon—Great Sands”—by Victoria’s words carried on the breeze “Petit Sablon—Little Sands,” trying to absorb their weight. She suddenly veers aside, pausing beside a set of open barn doors, drawn to a poster. I catch the words, “Ceramic by the Kilo” as she slips away disappearing inside the porte cochére.

Pep steps—she turns into the crack of the side wall—through a gaping double door, into a rudimentary warehouse, a specter of a repurposed classic mansion. We drift among men and women in artful, hippyish attire, roaming through aisles of white catering pottery stacked in mass on raw joinery shelves. I follow Victoria, pausing as she lifts cups and saucers, then moves on to plates—her trail self-guided, spiraling to where the porte cochére once opened to the backyard, now bricked up. In the sealed corner, an industrial steel platform rises, crowned by a large weighing dial.

We place our paper bags together on the weighing platform; the hand of a giant dial climbs and sticks. We look back, standing frozen. The cashier finishes with a customer ahead, who steps toward the glow of the porte cochére, drawing along the young attendant. She rushes from the far end of the counter—approaching, eyes locked on the scale. In a sweep, she twirls back—signals— her ballpoint pen jotting the weight on her note pad—us, to gather our bags. We pace as the attendant rounds the counter and punctuates the cash register keys. Victoria trails onward, her gaze on the unfolding transaction—I read the tally, wallet in hand, and slide a banknote across to the attendant. Turning away, I tuck the change in my pocket, catch up to relieve Victoria of a bag, and together we step into the sunlight. 

A market spills out behind crooked storefronts—an earlier continuation downstream, disordered—chocolatiers mingling with antique dealers, terrace cafés, and painters squeezed between single mannequin boutiques. Victoria drifts through scattered terrace tables. She settles, and I follow. Beside us, thin trickles of traffic coasts past downstream—mirrored across the square, riding upstream breaking through bright umbrellas and scattered terraces, pooling before a distant jumble of restaurants. 

Victoria lights a cigarette and orders a red Porto from the waitress—’one for me as well,’ I call out. She has only to mention, “C’est l’endroit que Jephte fréquente—this is where Jephte hangs out,” for the Hydra head of my mind to follow her tread of thought, across the Grand Sablon island, to the crouched medieval door beneath a fenestrated, gabled brick facade. I find myself an eye, stealthy inside the ceiling, hovering on the exuding hollows of somber vertigo—the club flaring with Jephte’s silage, his lingering trail. From an upstairs floor, no wider than a stairwell’s landing along the railing to the flight of stairs, single round café tables in a row, crowded by a current of effeminately dressed men, folding into each other—and I slip out this nightlife den he stakes out.

The waitress brings our drinks. We linger behind another coffee, and Victoria a glass of water—idling in the lull—until she grows ratty and calls for the bill—in the quiet, AlexAndré’s dilemma—her boy left with his grandparents, creeps under my skin, and with it, André’s threats. The bill called and settled, she rises, saying. “Il y a un magasin d'antiquités que je veux voir—There is an antique store I want to see.” 

We stir from the mindset of the terrace crowd, facing the hedgerows of fenestrated facades, tapering to a confluent interstice. I stalk the imagined flow of the brook dried beneath the cobblestone street. Only to emerge from the crotch of the square, narrowing into a light-stifling stretch of the asphalt. In the distance, another cathedral-church seizes the sky. As we approach, our steps echo the stone walls—‘the church is in the middle of the village’—but the village suffered a corner deflagration—yielding an incongruent 1960s awakening: a single modern store, its oversized landscaping display windows wedged into the hedgerow of classic fenestrated facades.

I glimpse around a marble-clad concrete column, an open window dining room display. The brand of a childhood memory—“Au Bon Repos—At Good Rest”—but diluted to Victoria’s generation. Rounding the corner, she prances past the bluestone plinth beneath the plate-glass, missing the lounge display: straight, a master bedroom, its bedding, and furniture arranged just so. Then, past the next marble column, a baby bedroom, a pane revealing a children’s bedroom. I freeze before the next display window, filled with an array of bunk beds for children. Victoria, lost in her thoughts, drifts onward—past the following décor displays. I call her back with a glance, but we don’t connect; she keeps pacing forward, where the cliff of church walls blinds the girdling street, unfolding toward a corner brasseries—few patrons inside, if any—lingering as a ghost of the village that once surrounded churches. 

She relents her fixation—from the narrow, light-stifled bus route through the Marolles. At her pace, with her backward glances. I pause by a window, reverse-engineering gleaming freestanding bunk bed, thinking about the modular timber at a builder’s merchant. Then, I catch up with Victoria’s inching strides, her hold-back step bringing her shoe toes to the curb, waiting. As I join her, she steps down, and we cross the zebra crossing veering deeper along, where the Grand Sablon is downgraded to dusty flea market storefronts beneath squatted hedgerows of brick facades. Her eyes sweep over dust-clinging storefronts packed with a jumble-mumble of classic furniture. At the door, she hesitates, then enters the store.

After whirling through the store, Victoria comes up empty-handed—nothing stirs her to take home. She steps out, and we stroll upstream along the Grand Sablon, tracing our way back to the Audi. I slip in behind the wheel, unlatch her door, and tweak the engine to a purr. We drift away from the Petit Sablon, weaving past the moat drawbridge tower and through younger, quieter communities until Dr. Decroly Avenue barrel vault.

After parking, we unload the Audi’s trunk, carry our bags, and veer away from the trunk’s guard before the bay window—through the gate, up the terrazzo path to the front door. I swing the door shut behind me, severing the street’s glow as a pall falls across the hallway. My eyes grope; offside, keys drift and jingle. My ears catch Victoria picking the lock—a crack of light flares, mischief spilling out, a puppy glow clutching her silhouette.

‘Ain’t I beautiful?’ Aetheria’s mirage claims, in the hush of homecoming—a fading laugh unrolling a carpet behind my feet. Her light filters in an artist’s brushstrokes, soft gleams outlining the wooden wainscots, the newel post’s grip, the streaking handrail, the baluster winding along the folds of Lucifer’s cloak wavering the walls—André stitched into the fabrics of darkness—rising toward the tenant’s hush upstairs. 

In choir I step in. The door eases to a stand—wide open—offering a glimpse of the phone cradle perched in the far corner: clawed and fierce in its hush, a frightful weir of fluttering wings. The shriek of a ring breaks the silence, searching through the rooms, echoing back to find a vulnerable creature—body and mind reminiscent of André in the shadows. But the hush domineers—the phone remains perched in a bathing light, silhouetted against the back courtyard’s terracotta-autumn brick enclosure, shouldering the lone deep-green thicket’s leafy peace.

But I am eager to finish what consumed me—skipping after work across the communities into the shadow of Drogenbos’s highway overpass, Paris-Brussels, to park. I alight, slip beneath the yellow Brico fascia, and roam hardware aisles, drifting out into the builder’s yard.

Behind the door I catch a glance—Victoria scurrying through the gaping doorway, leaving her bag on the kitchen table. Circling, her Shiva arms swing. She unpacks the clinging ceramics, rinses them clean, opens cupboard doors, stows them on the bare shelves—leaves behind the crumpled flat paper bags, mine I posed alongside.

I precipitate back across the living room, through the portal—orienting myself where we left last night’s and the night before: mattresses on the floor, muddled bedding in the bay window, lantern light fluttering from the leafy canopy—amid a makeshift joinery workshop cluttering the room with tools.

The building merchant’s seven-foot  fluted-pine laminated planks—sanded beautiful and yellow-smooth—I’d fetched from Brico’s racks. Now, in the joy of my youth’s dream, they begin to mold into a construction. An inch-thick module, a three-foot cross-section stands sentinel-tall beside one-footers, all resting against the wall. The components linger as a 3D blueprint in my mind, waiting to be assembled. 

I grab a three-foot-wide plank from the stack and lay it flat on the carpet, then bring down its twin, setting its edge alongside. I straddle the angled planks—crouched, one foot braced to keep them from slipping, my kneecap joint hooked into the ridge’s angle, a Siamese clamp for balance. A self-tapping screw ready in my left-hand, I twist and bend, swiping the screwdriver off the floor. Monkeying—I twist my shoulders into a hovering T-cross stance, fingers pinching a pointing screw, the drill bit aligned into the screwhead, knuckles heeled to the carpet. My finger triggers a whirr, letting the spinning three-inch screw bite and speak for itself as it vanishes into the wood, sinking the head with a dying whirr. I rise, dropping the drill empty-handed. I step away.

At the head of the pillar, I grab and lift it just enough, rotating the length around the foot end—tilting from its flat face to tumble onto the other edge. I lower down, settling the eaves on the carpet. I straddle the roofline ridge, bend, and drive a screw from the foot end, punctuating the middle with a steady series. Lifting and moving without reverberation is the test of the first pillar’s sturdiness—to stand upright alone against the plain wall. I assemble the second three-by-three pillar, and join the earlier. Then I pick the slender one-foot cross-section planks off the wall. I assemble the third, letting the baby pillar lie still on the carpet—not risking a free-stand without a guardian in proximity—the fourth follows, also remaining behind as I proceed to the next phase.

With a bit of acrobatics—flooring both three-foot pillars - whir, whir - and again - whir, whir - I fix the upstairs and downstairs headboard ends tucked into each corner. I grab and raise, testing the frame’s emplacement. I cross over, grabbing the one-foot footboard - whir, whir - and again - whir, whir. Now I face the dilemma of ghosting an assistant. I plant a one-foot plank, raising a sentinel from the corner of the food frame - whir, whir - and then the other baby pillar - whir, whir. With a drawbridge tilt, I lift the slender footboard, raise the pillars at my sides, and watch from afar as the side rail slots into the massive headboard pillars. My hands walk across to the side rails and over to the headboard.

In the three-foot pillar, I clamp the side rail - whir, whir - and again - whir, whir - duplicate on the other side to lock the platform frame. With a feel of ancient mechanics in a garage pit, I orbit the undercarriage with a pull-out five-meter Stanley measuring tape, marking the thickness of our box-base. With thick truss steel reinforced angle brackets, and one-inch screws, I secured the pillar corners—following the ballpoint pen’s trace and driving the same brackets instead of bed legs. Nearing the end, I heave one mattress box-base overhead to rest onto the brackets, then slot in the other to pair them - whir, whir. . . - fastening the seam together with truss plates. And with a sigh my final task: lifting the last single mattress box-base downstairs for Alexander.

I turn my back on AlexAndré’s niche, granting him all the space between four pillars. Then, forgotten, I step back toward the bay window. In the hidden corner, I take a ladder, and coming around, skimming the portal, I hook it to the mezzanine side rail. I walk away—and with a last sigh, I call Victoria to dress the beds: ”Pipo, can come home to you.”

Victoria returns from her bustling, crawling on hands and knees after waving the sheets and bedding to lie flat, tucking the edges with a whip of the wrist. Her climbing down says it: ‘Hoops! that’s done.’ She steps through the portal, content with the layout—her coffee table poised before her Napoleon III Cabriole sofa. She tests her decor, still in work attire, stockings; she settles, swinging her feet to rest besides her. I join her across the table, sinking into one of the scattered Bergère chairs. Over her shoulders, the courtyard recedes and vanishes into darkness, its shadow paid for by the brightening of the living room—yellow upholstered glowing—where our reflection meets in the window.

1. ---

2. You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

3. https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing