YD6-86(ARMH) Aetheria Nestled in the Branch’s Crotch
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Chapter Prologue Tease: Through a doorway’s crack, a promise escapes—Victoria’s voice, bright with discovery: a house, a way out, a future for Pipo. But in the shadows, loyalties shift and old threads tighten. From the park’s green hush to the soot-stained gables, a century stirs beneath our steps. Come inside; the walls remember more than we are ready to see.
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 its 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.
YD6-86(ARMH) Aetheria Nestled in the Branch’s Crotch
Her world echoes as the dark-brown panel door cracked out of shadow. from the hollow of the hallway Jean-Francois Smeets eyes emerged. In the light of the living room, Victoria exults. “[Dutch] Tonton—I’ll be free from Andre’s menaces, taking Pipo away—We found a house!”
His popping eyeballs didn't share her spark. Slipping out from the shadow, he raises his head for a confrontation, the Aries in him bristling—then lets it fall to a desolate smile. He had stood by Andre Daniel through Victoria ’s illicit affair; the comfort of his existence bled out.
I steer the Audi, its emblematic rings spin before me, the glass bubble’s tires muttering - patter, patter... - over the cobblestones of Rochefort Square. Docked vessels of apartments line the quay, we orbit afar the pivoting park’s gate by the green river of pooling lawns, its gritty yellow prong pushing through the leafy hedge. Old trees edge the sidewalk to a bus halt, as I turn a blind eye at the systematic rows of garage doors spooling the avenue along the park.
A driver in dark terracotta clothes, slouchy peak beret, suscitating ghostly holographic before me, still trailing the ghost of smoke from the distant brick kilns, walks out the naked valley landscaped - clomp clomp clomp - harness draft horses, his eyesight dwelling on the broad sweep of gravel-graded avenue. Irregular-paced architectural merlon flanks the expanding community. Their slender gable walls towering in the shadows, the irregular crenelation of bare parcels awaiting bushwalker clearing the terrain. As his hush shouts whip his horses, “Heu! Heu...” facing the quiescent, nascent landscaped park across the way.
He pauses, turning toward his horses. Across them, the quiescent red earth excavation, a narrow soil perch like a landing field above the backyard, and rear neighborhood. In his hush, his shouts carry—figures climb from the excavation to street level in a line formation. Hands gather a paired-bricks - Clack Cleck - from the flatbed stack, twist, lunge, bricks in flight to catching hands - Clack Cleck - along chain links past laid-down shovels, tilted water buckets, slop of lime-mortar mix. The bricks pile into the trenches, along mortal boards, and masonry trowels. In the shade of thick, plummeting walls, the sub-structure rises from the haunches and rises of arched foundations.
The elongated V-bed cart, in the hush of ghosting the driver whips the horses on - “Heu! Heu!”— turn from Brussels’ crown—the highest point, once bequeathed by Guillaume Duden to Leopold II, who sold the forest, and straggles down the slope through flowing lawns. The brick caterer turns back to the distant smoking brick kilns, leaving behind the backdrafts pooling in the lawns at the bottom of Queen Marie Henriette Avenue, just before the park’s gate. Until, Aerts, a teacher, took occupation of the townhouse, a knot in the thread of time—1912—De_P’pa, Father’s birth year.
Coasting in toward the hedgerow’s white-stone ashlar facade—four heights, red-brick fenestrated to the white cornice—our glass bubble’s hums. Victoria, hawk-eyed, peers through her side window. . . only now disappointment, the threat of Andre, effaced from her mind. Neneria—young, blond, hair in the wind, but seen through a film of soot—unaged in the Pierre Blanche de France: the sculpted figurehead poised the transom, now black in soot.
Her thoughts flip back—her own reflection in stone gone with the wind. Victoria’s door flings open; she springs to her feet - smack, smack - doors shut. Stepping from around behind the Audi, I join her, pausing. She’s fixated on the figurehead over the entrance’s soot stained-glass fan.
She scurries forward, reaching for the flimsy, sloppy-glued push-buttons on the inside of the finely hewn ashlar jamb, their casing filmed with soot. I look above: a cast-iron arm pivot, ghost of a pull chain, waiting for - dinge, a ling - to echo inside the townhouse. Beneath it, Victoria’s myopic gaze cascades over rickety, weathered name tags; she presses one: “Van Goethem-Polfliet.”
I track a pair of glued electric wires, twisted, worming through an ill-drilled jamb, vanishing behind the dark-green sentinels of hefty wood-paired doors. I meander closer, ear pricked for any stir within. Victoria back-steps down from the bluestone, bulb-shaped doorstep—a fierce clang as the half-moon metal plate under her soft step ill-fits the coal-shoot frame. The street’s dirt-shoe scraper still lingers there. Whoosh, whoosh—a trickle of air behind us tires to efface the century beneath the graded asphalt.
We wait for our rendezvous. Then, the hush stir—an electric fry: whir, click, thwock - and the door seam crack. Victoria palms the rebated stile; the door hinges right back. The avenue’s waiting glow slips, mischievous, through her hands and feet, outsting Lucifer from his lair.
It shakes me—I don’t know about Victoria. But once the door closes, the light is barred. A chill wafts, empty. Gradually, seeking a source, overhead: a bulb’s burning filament, its twisted wire paling in the ceiling’s hollowed throat of a spire.
The silhouette dangles down through the giant, dreary dark eye—refined here into a simmering stained-glass bullseye—and further along the cord, filtering through the mottled fanlight. Together the pools of light only flush the darkness, just outlining the broad walk-up.
At the pace of Victoria’s heels, across the door apron, besides the semblance of a green flank, bending, overreaching on us—walls devoid of light—I’m imagining crystals. Cross-facing mirrors bring the fairy into this desolate vestibule. The sigh of her slippers - skhiff, skhiff, skhiff - paces upward to where Nyx reflects witchy behind the small-pane full bay portal, the horror of a stairwell she hasn't escaped since candlelight walked the shadows along the walls.
Unimpressed, Victoria crosses the threshold. We veer beneath a bulb’s electric-burning filament, stepping aside from the newel before taking its evanescent flight of stairs. Already I see the crystal spectrum spilling against the landing walls. Victoria hesitates before an ajar door, craning her neck, from a claustrophobic stairwell—drawn across the threshold by the linoleum’s gleam within the dereliction.
In pace with Victoria, accosted by stale air, I peek over her shoulders into the room: an open-hearth blending in the darkness, still telling tales of burning logs. Victoria’s sweeping gaze confronts a ramshackle—dull and empty—through the crystal portals of rooms in enfilade.
Her gaze snaps left. She pushes herself onward, her conviction lagging, oblivious to the odds of finding a house with a room for Pipo here. In her drive, she reaches the threshold of the interleading Belle Époque open-bay crystal portal, centered by an obese, solitary silhouette in dark attire, spilling over a seat on slender stilts.
With irate strides, Victoria advances toward the woman, overbearing a Formica backrest and metal tubes that indent the drooping flab. I couldn’t miss it—in my line of sight, the metallic beige casing of a gas heater, couchant before the open-hearth, a loyal pet, reflecting in quiet vigil her hibernation.
Victoria bows. The obese woman, frozen in her past youth, rests palms on her thighs. Victoria turns to crouches to face her, meeting her eyes at level, lifting her eyebrows to break the woman’s distant gaze. “[Mevrouw Van Goethem. We zijn hier voor het bezoek.] — Mrs. Van Goethem. We’re here for the visit.”
Mrs. Van Goethem mumbles. “[U mag naar boven. Ik heb de huurders van uw komst verwittigd.] — You may go upstairs. I’ve notified the tenants of your coming.”
Victoria uncoils, brings life into the darkness with her lively, musical tone: “Thanks.”
I remain fixated on the big fat cat’s glow, squeezing from beneath the outside’s lopsided roller blind—slats hooked up by one side—creeping up the gap between shutter and glazed door. Head and claws paw out, scraping over the French door’s kick-panels, then collapse to lie exhausted on the linoleum. Aetheria’s mirage, failing to reach out.
As Victoria steps through the enfilade, her gaze falling from the rococo rambling-rose cornices to the ceiling medallion, where I catch a protruding historic gas-lighting pipe. Her eyes drift forward, brushing past the mysterious nailed hardboard that blocks a portal.
Disinterested, by the boarded construction-site appearance. Victoria scurries onward—yet curiosity draws her back, toward the offside boarded large bay. At its center, she turns the doorknob; her eyes push into the dark. Aetheria-enticed, she’s tugged inside the gaping doorway, along the dim light, pausing in the shadow. Her eyes fixed, baffled: ‘A wasted room, windowless?’
She lingers long enough, held back, before stepping heel over toe away—abandoning the hope of finding archaic relics—only to spring back. Behind the door leaf, she reaches toward a glint.
‘Ain’t that cute?’ she breaks the hush, footsteps skittering with an ecstatic yelp. “Cupid.” Her fingertip strokes the brass doorknob. She drifts away, dithering in her strides, eyes roaming without settling, until she slips through the crystal portal—last room in the enfilade. A slow swirl: ‘I’ve seen it all?’ But she springs back.
Roamed aloof, she spins back from butting these grand bay portals, until the rear roller blind, slivers of light prying through its fine slats, with scattered piercing glows. She spins away, eyes unable to imagine herself living beneath a macabre brushwood forest bending over her. Then-an exclamation: “Daddy! [Oh, regarde ça !] — Ho, look at that!” She pauses, eyes lifted to the sky.
I was there ahead of my strides, my gaze prowling around, the shielding Masonite boards—water-stained, warped, edges curling themselves, loosening their guard, peeling from the ceiling. Then I’m called back to the peeping light’s kaleidoscopic shimmer. Closer, our minds meet the cries of a stained-glass mural, snippets of glows fading beneath a film of dust from the skylight overhead.
Victoria calms beside the sentinel of a flank wall’s panel door, trimmed with archaic-modern beadings, Curiosity tickled her again, She hesitates, then backspins—a step forward up to the sentinel of the door—before rolling a few fingers over the brass-jewelled lever to the escutcheon plate with keyhole. She cranks and pulls; the door swings, drawing her around into a nighthall that leads to an offset room.
In the distant window light, I doodle in my mind—opening a room to the window’s glow, letting it luminesce the interior—while she, in the macabre of darkness, relies on her imagination without a clue. Victoria turns from the dead-end room, as I mentally dismantle the frosted panes of the derisory half-glazed wooden partition from the 60s, which shies away a shower room and toilet.
It stuns me—a modernization stunt that turned a bedroom into an en-suite, shadowing the old toilet house in the backyard. The plumbing, once outdoors, has been brought along the rear walls of the houses. But my engineering eye passes over Victoria’s blindness to the renovation’s entrails uncoiling in my mind, while she, baffled, shadows her way out.
Victoria’s hand runs up the handrail—flex her resilient legs—along a gleam of light sketches the dark brown drail turning on the intermediate landing - swhiff swhiff - slightly sticky over linoleum bullnoses. She pauses by a row of faux-panel doors and finds a discreet door lever.
She creeps inside at the pace of the door swing, square-open into the cut through section of the wall, as a low-gloss ceiling seems to greet us. Her heels - tock tock tock. . . - echo across the floorboards as she progresses deeper across the room,
She left me stunned: in the bay of the load-bearing wall, I note the two-and-a-half-brick-thick door jamb. Here, at the rear-end of the stairwell, I discover the core of the house—to birthing the technical shaft, key to modernizing the whole structure. As victoria’s silhouettes slips through the distant gapping doorway, my mind nurtures the idea of steel girders to strut and support the weight of vanishing walls.
In the hush of Victoria silhouette in the elongated window, I join her above the terrace roof of the offset master bedroom below. Our gazes across the plane field of asphalt roofing, perched high above the deep, retrenched shadows of the basement’s backyard, then leap over the trimmed off brick wall gleaming glazed coping ridged tiles, and on—into shadows beyond, settled in the midst of sunlight efflorescing through the neighborhood. I keep my shimmering thoughts; yet the mezzanine behind us stirs a semblance of an ideal space for a seven-year-old boy.
I size up this vacant little room—a former water closet, fit only for a stairwell—then turn away from our stand on the concrete deck above the nighthall below. We track back along the running gleam of the floorboards through the gaping doorway. A faint luminescence sketches the meager staircase, above us dangling a bulb’s dead filament from electric wires. I shut the door behind, and we’re caught in a cosmic blackness. I step ahead of Victoria, a fool fallen to the light timer, the handrail our only guide - swhiff swhiff swhiff - Victoria behind, our eyes groping the invisible flight of stairs.
Until—our sign: a star in the distance. A feathery orangey dot. I reckon by my hand’s glide along the U-tuning handrail; my steps hint at the last risers. Assured of the upstairs landing, I rush across to the pilot-light—finger jabbing - click - and the wall leaps up before me. I turn to Victoria, besides the stairwell bay of built-in cupboard doors. dizzy and beamed into light beneath the burning filament of a dangling bulb. Her eyes spin back, catch across the landing on a panel door set in the flank wall, and she scurries toward it.
Victoria’s knocks resonate, escaping through the stairwell behind us, until—the seam of the architrave—the door cracks open to meet the concerned eyes of a bright slender woman. As it swings wider, she backsteps—her hand fixed on the blind lever behind the door—a reflex grip, not yet ready to release the apartment that has been part of her family for years, and more. She straightens, extending the door leaf in an imminent farewell. Through the gaping invitation, a lounge reveals a figure beyond the upholstered furniture, in the light of a distant rear window.
Victoria asks, “[Pouvon nous. . .]—May we…”—two bronzed twins of womanhood, mother and daughter, a generation apart.
“[Vous pouvez]—You may,” says the fortyish mother, wavy blue hair, standing with a ruffled, angelic daughter still childishly clutching her skirt. Victoria, peppish, passes by, breaking the eighteenish girl’s naive gaze that titillates the heart. Victoria moves toward a large, thick-framed portrait—one among a historic array of canvases across walls—its pursuing eyes watching our intrusion. Before me, Victoria swerves toward the source of light, away from the stare of the young athletic man, his presence not of this realm. But, I’ve stepped on a stage—his presence impregnating the set—re-enacting the scene of a young couple’s immigration from Spain a generation earlier to this local territory.
Victoria breaks through the gaping glow of a double doorway, attenuating their dining room—heavy drapes theatrically gathered besides angled sashes winging the void landing the avenue. The frame before the void of the bay window reveals a loggia facing a sea of leafy-green canopies across the park. She steers to the side, where the gaping doorway reflects a wall-fixed porcelain basin. As I stand by, I trace its siphon waste pipe as it pierces the floor to the vestibule below.
We turn away from the room, butchered—its cold-water feed skirting beneath a double bed wedged between the narrow walls—a princess and her prince’s lair. At the headboard the built-in cupboard bay—and call onto street windows’ light to flood through a translucent portal, to lie in peace and spread like smoke up and down the stairwell.
Backtracking through the enfilade of rooms, past the young man and toward the rear portal, a distant window spills its light on ill adapted living: narrow aisles shadowing a squared bedspread before an open hearth, the protruding mantelpiece of a fireplace jutting into every room.
Victoria retrieves herself through pepish pirouettes, passing the little family and saying, “[Merci beaucoup pour la visite]—Thanks for the visit.” She stops as the woman addresses me: “[Si vous achetez, que va-t-il nous arriver]—If you buy, what will happen to us?” Then, Victoria leaps across the landing, palms the pilot-light, and the door closes behind us. We head for the flight of stairs, and I think, ‘That door has to be blocked up!’
Upstairs, after Victoria’s knock, a fiftyish moon-faced woman offers a plastic, joyful invitation. She releases her grip on the door, but steps aside with a matron’s wicked smile, excusing the man: “[Il a eu un accident de camion]—He had a truck accident!’”
I straight away thought about an insurance payout. Over Victoria’s shoulder, in the shadow, emerged the beast of a wrestler—hefty arms elongated from the armrests sunk deep in a leather club chair. His glance at Victoria strikes his wife’s face; she slaps back at Victoria with a jealous eye stroke, her chaos succinctly witchy in the deep thick drapes stifling light to the rooms. The man’s gaze, resilient and fixed, lines up a crosshairs—one heel on a footstool—through shoe toes of crossed-over ankles, spearheading sight angled across a coffee table, straight into the flickering bright screen of a television in the dark corner across the room.
I follow Victoria into heavy classic tapestries and upholstered armchairs veering into the calling light of the street peeking a glow through heavy drapes, beneath a valence, sketching the iron balcony, beyond the French doors. Turning around for the rear bedroom window. Before Victoria egressed, leaving behind the walls stir in chaos, past them, the Flemish blond’s eyes linger: “[Si vous achetez, allez vous rénover la maison]—If you buy, are you going to renovate the house?” Turns around and closes the door.
And, if the there is another translucent door — instead of across the landing, the miserable bulb’s short light lifted a two-step gangway. Mrs. Van Goethem’s words echoing. ‘[La femme de l’appartement mansardé. Elle est partie pour l’occasion et a laissé la porte ouverte]'—The woman of the loft apartment. She has moved out for the occasion and left the door unlocked.
Victoria pivots, palm on the newel post, and faces a barn flight of stairs, an eager glint cracking toward us. At the top, a mere doormat apron fronts the sentinel niched doors. Skeptical, she cranks the lever and swings the door back. A heavenly light welcomes us; I gaze up at the loft peaked ceiling and promise it—your roof’s will be graced with large windows, letting light pour down the stairs to reach the cellar.
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