YD6-104(Cradle)—Aetheria Puppeteers the Sun-Rays and the Shadows in the Mirrors

 

What if the spaces you walk through aren’t passive, but aware? What if every sunray, every rattling stair, every shadow slipping across the wall is part of a larger intelligence shaping you as much as you shape it?

In this chapter, Aetheria isn’t a character — she’s the field, the consciousness behind the mirrors and thresholds. My renovation becomes her language: light and dust, workers, timbers, spores, all arranging themselves into something that feels sentient.

If you’ve ever felt guided by an unseen presence or sensed meaning in the architecture around you, step inside.

YD6-104(Cradle)—Aetheria Puppeteers the Sun-Rays and the Shadows in the Mirrors

The illegal Polish crew walked up the avenue, suddenly animating in my morning-hushed stare, emerging from the maze of reflections cast by the glass shelters—tram and bus aligned in their shimmer—blurring the far side of the wooded park’s gaping first-light greening the pooling lawns in stealth with the nearer shelter. I brush off the thought, ‘Did they come by bus and tram?’ and step away, indifferent to more pressing thoughts, from the faux-balcony. I press the French doors closed and, from the derelict Belle Époque enfilade of rooms, sense the horseshoe path curving through the crystal portals waiting for the return of their 1912 glitter of beveled panes. I descend the adjacent split-level toward Erebus, crouched in the apron behind the sentinel of entrance doors, uneasy beneath the luminescent peek of the stained-glass bull’s-eye above the peacock fan.

The men sigh in the gait of their clothes and shoes, shadowing through the gaping door’s filtering light. I shut behind them after a brief exchange of greetings. Their past few weeks have taught their way to the stairwell, groping into the shadows around the landing’s handrail by the gaping ±0 floor. In the white-hot filament of a dangling bulb’s light, the line of men disappears underground; after them, I catch the faint bulb on the -1 landing. But the cascading treads creak their whereabouts, and I catch up with the wobbling handrail, counting -2 in the shadows of another bulb. While they hang up their city clothes between the balusters and don their work gear, I check off their time, 

The white tiles under their feet, the glue cured over the weekend, and I thought through the men: Teddy—who claimed his art was a painter’s roller and block brush, and who wastes himself at the end of a fishing rod for bait as a hobby—stirred nothing in me, only dread. Yet for the weasel in him, closest to lackadaisical work, I assigned him to grout the floor-tile joints that would wrap up our construction-site office. 

I tug Adam and Valdek back with me upstairs—the helping hands who do not shy away from my command. Sentient of Adam’s meticulous Virgo and Valdek’s plodding, steady Goat, following, I remind myself of the -1 landing before crossing the threshold into the tunnel behind the panel door. I scan for where to implant our workshop: a waking wing-tips’ glow, faint, exhaust in the stale air, dies where light skims the low ceiling of the rooms in enfilade.

Heading toward the backyard glow, I slip into the hollow behind the stairwell projection, its walls dropping into the derelict basement. With Adam and Valdek, we set up a joinery shop there—the last resort, out of the planned apartment I had offered to De P’pa and De M’ma during their visit, the floor I perceived as their retirement refuge should they ever leave South Africa. 

Morning dawns on me: the rotten staircase I reverse engineer in my mind give way to geometry—clean, efficient, modular. I rise, dress, and head to work; rejecting the grind of the original design, I order pre-fab materials, and maximize for a low-skilled crew. The Poles had treaded from the sidewalk; Germeau’s truck had craned down the load; timber slid through the half-high window and settled on the enfilade floor, the room holding its hush, waiting until my planned gaze unfolds. Adam and Valdek lift a foot-wide redwood plank off the stack, carry the raw stringer to a pair of trestles, and cantilever the end for a working balance. 

Stanley’s thru-zero hook grips the end of the plank; the yellow blade draws; my carpenter’s pencil ticks 175 mm. With a hardboard template at an angle of 40° angle, I traced the cross-grain and deduce the two-inch thick tread. I mirrored the pattern onto the second stringer, adjust a circular saw’s tungsten teeth width, and half the depth, and clamp the guiding rail. 

Time and again, Adam hands me the circular saw - Wronggn, tzweeng. . . - miter-cutting grooves inside the pencil line through the red grain; mechanical, hands sliding the template, merciless blades  - Wronggn, tzweeng. . . - until the hush settles on a stack for thirteen mortices; the jigsaw snuggles the tenon-tread ends, the earlier claw hammer - Bang, bang, bang. . . - and the wide blade chisel chop out the waste.  

Adam and Valdek’s hands don’t rest; they hold and release stringers and treads, pass the self-taping screws, while I twist the screwdriver - whining - as three-inch screws punctuate the stringers and, in the morticed hollow, seize the tenon tread, before Adam calls the men. 

Orchestrating with Teddy, Cesar, and Andre on the -2 floor, I dismantle the balustrade, and descend for the last time with the creak of stairs. Watching the top -1 perch and the -2 bottom, raised hands meet; they unhook the old stringers from the traversal trim beam at the gaping vaulted floor and lay the rotten staircase on the white-tiled floor. 

Adam, Valdek, and Radek, perched overhead, slide down the redwood staircase; the top of the stringer locks into the -1 slab trim as Teddy’s team foot the base. We fix—three balusters to the tread, the handrail, the newel post—setting up the crew’s change-room corner beneath. And after all, the man in Victoria's shadow—Jean-Francois Smeets’ near accident—awakens my childhood: moving through houses under construction, primordial, a squat toilet reached from the rear courtyard—taught me to set up a convenient WC in the vestibule’s crawlspace the cistern against the street wall alongside the dozen-pencil light shaft that pelted the raw chisels coal-chute.

These Polish men stay close, teamed-up, swirling around me when I work amongst them—flowing like flies in desert heat, drawn to the faint moisture off the skin. I drop the Rudy-ghost effect—the Capricorn who once stood sentinel against the weasel in Teddy, wrapping the whole crew into his orbit—eager to send me errands in my glass bubble. I remain sentient of how lackadaisical they become as I distance myself, when I vacate their workplace floors.  

A hopelessness wanders in me. I never read a crew of Zulus coming—how it rhymes with Shaka Zulu, warriors with spears and skin-shields. I misread their demeanor, unlike the Italian, the Dutch, the Nordic features glow. Child of Africa, yet behind the dark mask of South Africa's dozens of tribes, I still failed to read the men. When I discharged one worker from my construction site, the crew walked off; one man turned away and said: “One Zulu is all Zulus!” That truth stays with me—just as the Poles would walk off site now. 

In the light of progress, the electric supplier treaded a three-phase cable from the street to the meters; then, under different regulations, a contractor treaded up the stairwell’s back wall, running back-to-back with the technical shaft, dropping a distribution board to every floor. My mind settles on the Taurus in Radek, sprawling—treading through the floors, walls, and ceilings. Followed by the intercom's wire, the telephone. 

An impervisible darkness lingers with the Vultures’ eyes perched on a black pipe—André and César at the ratcheting pipe-threader, overseeing a short-threaded pipe in the vise—Aetheria’s augury rising in the coal-chute’s shadow, where dozens of pencil-shaft lights stream with Helios arc winds-up the day. 

I wake up and churn back to where I left off yesterday—at the -2 with the Vultures, the ±0 Belle Époque stairwell cinder-block firewall, the city gas line diverted into the shaft; while the old runs in the +1 Spanish woman tenant, and the +2 truck driver and wife, who must be kept in water flow; and above, the +3 loft drains and flush toilets still feeding into the city sewers. 

I open my eyes at the loft window: the dilapidated frame, blistered paint, the watery-pane sashes. First light over the suburb calling me to rise. A glance at Victoria, cocooned under the covers, and it hits me—Alexandre, her seven-year-old boy, volatilized from our life. I flip back the duvet to Victoria’s side; logic settles in, as if I'm reading her thoughts: ‘Pipo is better with his father, André, while the Belle Époque apartment is under construction. 

I kick my feet to the floor, slip into jeans, shirt, step into shoes, and walk toward the +3 landing behind the gaping doorway. I stagger down Erebus’ crouch in the stairwell, cowering under the dangling meager bulb, until the ±0 Belle Époque landing, where I curl my way to the French door before swinging back, from the split-level’s rise before the bull’s-eye rose and peacock fan-tail hosts a mottled aura, before I crack the door open for the men in the glow. 

They trail each other up the broad flight of marble stairs to the ±0 Belle Époque landing, vanishing in the shadow of the crystal wafer portal before echoing down to -1 then -2. In the shadows of the barn staircase, where I followed them, I give them leeway to change into work clothes, tick their names in their shifting eyes as the starting time, and speak with each of them to resume yesterday’s shift.

In the makeshift -1 workshop, I pull my overalls off a nail in the wall, step into the pants, and pull up the shoulder straps. I walk away, calling Adam and Valdek upstairs, little did I know, a hyphae head—legless spider clung for life in the darkness of the floor joist. We walk the linoleum covering the floorboards through the ±0 interleading rooms in enfilade toward the rear grand glazed portal defined over the kick panels by a stained-glass cafe curtain. Stripping the warped hardboard, we clear the lamenting stained-glass ceiling mural—water-stained and dust-choked—a sunroom's skylight. 

My curiosity tethering the lamenting ceiling mural, as Helios crosses over the roof ridge, stays with us for the remainder of the day and into its sleep. Returned to morning light, I hunt the walls—in pursuit of a forest undergrowth reclaiming its habitat. I show the men to strip the plaster, astonished by the living white, translucent web of spores amongst seasonal brown dead webs at the outer bottom corner by the nighthall doorjamb—radicalizing, clinging to the bricks’ pores. The spores had rooted the mortar bed and perps, the wall—though thirst rid moist—showing advancing strands that permeated, trailing into the planned bathroom corner.

Now the master bedroom comes under my scrutiny, breaking a living enfilade—the tweak of a lateral pivot, the extension behind the narrower service enfilade, raised on stilts from the backyard’s -1 basement level. The Poles like a beehive, are stripping the ceiling, Teddy, with Basha’s husband, carry the wooden debris through the enfilade, out the half-height egress window to the container in the street. 

I continue scouting the spores, discovering intelligence agencies underneath the nighthall along the floor joists. Between rising daylights and falling sunsets, the whole crew of Poles, stripping the extension naked to the brick walls, until  roofless to the winter skies, the far window stripped, found the ramifying spores at the reveals. Exposure in the back of my mind, the sales deed’s clause on fungus echoes: ‘the seller is liable for the dry rot’—yet I was naïve of the monster living in the townhouse’s entrails. I doffed off my overalls downstairs.

I climb to the mezzanine’s landings, the swingback stairs by the +1 sentinel of a panel door, the intermediate landing onto the +2 sentinel of a door, before the heavenly flight of stairs, to sit at the table I share with Victoria for dining and vanity, facing the loft room’s gable wall. With the Yellow Pages open, the phone cradle before me, I dial a fungicide contractor. After a chat that wraps up the complexity, and with the man eager to come and take samples, I hang up—seeing no need to exert myself further. 

After a phone call spilling complexity beyond me, I welcome a  man in the glow of the entrance door. With his laboratory suitcase I lead him up through the crystal wafer portal, into the ±0 derelict shadow of rooms in the enfilade. The alchemist turns away from the extreme portals’ glows, crouches by the lateral wall, at skirting level, just short of the grand interleading portal. From the pouch he brings with him, removes a spatula—an investigation. Sophisticated evidence-gathering: he scrapes the raw wall and, with the diligence of propagating through the air, bottles it. He moves on to digested cuboidal timbers, slips it into plastic bags, offers a quick greeting, and vanishes as swiftly he had arrived from the derelict apartment.

A week later, in the shadow of the entrance door, I pick up the mail. From the unfolding report—to the rite of sealing the contract—I open the entrance to two men in white space suits arriving with spraying equipment. In the evening, they greet me on their way out, saying, “[N'entrez pas pendant quatre jours]—Don’t enter for four days.” They had quarantined the ±0 derelict apartment, leaving me to detour to the -1 basement and reassign the men there to keep the renovation progressing. 

Amongst the embracing extension’s raw brick walls, open to winter’s grey skies, Adam and Valdek work with me—on and off the shifting articulated stepladder. Teddy gangs up with the rest of the crew, feeding me the timber remotely from the -1 floor’s stockpile off Germeau's truck. A roof joist rises at the hands of men, to end up among twisting figures, lying on the wall-plates atop the facing walls; I drive nails through the plate-to-joist anchors, fixing the beam. 

As the sky withdraws, shying away from the framed joist ribs, I climb onto the beam’s edge, straddle over the void, balancing as a board is hoisted between multiple hands coming to rest across a few ribbed joists. I step on, punctuating with nails, while the next board floats beneath me, rising into place. By day’s end, we needed another barn-flight of stairs to puzzle together for access to Victoria’s futuristic plant-nursery terrace roof. 

Hands unrolled rubber bands of waterproofing, vulcanizing the joints and the turned-up ends against the walls. I left César and André to affix the sheet metal flashing and, along the opposing edges, the gutters and the water-draining downpipe. Then I return to a re-sealed master bedroom—somber—as the Scorpio quiescent in Radek feeds cables to light outlets, switches, and plugs, while I fit into the raw opening a new double-glazed, hinged sash window. 

Valdek shoulders sacks of gypsum from the -1 storage. He tears the composite paper and shakes the powder into a bucket of water. He lifts the electric mixer from the floor, plants the paddle shaft into the bucket - Whirr… - his gaze an extension of the swirling shaft. Retrieves the mixer for Adam, who leans in to scoop the pasty compound, slapping a cake off the bricklaying trowel onto my handheld hawk. 

I twist and turn with the hawk between Adam and the wall, scraping off with a plaster trowel and smearing the raw bricks. From the floorboards, light sticks in the white sheen; in the paste swathes of curved trowel strokes, a wainscot rises and climbs the wall faintly lighting the room. 

I step onto the articulated stepladder, hands shift as I reach the smear up along the roof joist. Then I descend from the scaffold and, facing the luminous wall, seesaw the straightedge from edge to edge—from floorboard to roof joist—filling the hollows, skimming, wood floating, troweling the wall to a gloss, believing the fungus’ lethal chemicals entrapped behind the gypsum. 

I backtrack through the doorway into the nighthall, leaving the plastered master bedroom exuding the window’s curiosity—daylight refracting off the fresh wall, Aetheria’s possessive mirage hanging in the middle of the room. I have no sooner passed on the curiosity than I’m plastering the damaged patches in the nighthall, backing out to the corner along the doorjamb where the dry rot seemed sourced. I strip off my overalls and hang up on a nail in the -1 temporary workshop, where dusks come and dawns rise in a rite. 

Until I storm the ±0 enfilade of rooms ahead and find the men downed tools, grouped beneath the stripped ceiling mural, the stained-glass already dispatched to Hasselt, Flanders, for a promising restoration. From the flank doorway to the nighthall, Basha emerges after Christina—her Moon in Taurus and Sun in Horse—her gait stick-limbed in her sister’s wake. Against the grand portal with the stained-glass cafe curtain, picturing the morning light ingesting the western-hanging night, Basha stands up to Teddy.

Calling out, “Teddy! [Il est paresseux]—he is lazy. . . I caught him out.” 

As I take my time to respond—with men caught in a crude herd of zebras before me, their black-and-white striations merging into one body, their leader lost in the mass—Basha’s gaze freezes on me, a woman suddenly finding herself alone. She awakens what is stirring between us, the thought rising in me, ‘I don’t know what to do about it?’ 

Before the pack of wolves—men in city clothes unchanged since the first day of ousting Lucifer from the -2 wine cellar, ripping up, breaking down, heaving bags of rubble through the -1’s half-window into the container in the street—Cinderella appears, a beacon of femininity. Teddy nudges her forward as the newest addition to the crew. Her eyes, dazzling yet unsure, whisper to themselves, ‘What am I doing here?’ She stands petite in a flimsy summer dress, as delicate as the girl herself, long wavy blond hair ruffled over her shoulders, catching the bare light beneath the striped ceiling mural. Among us—men stunned into silence, possessed by her beauty—I wrench my gaze away before exposing my foolish heart, leaving Basha to absorb the weight of an angel suddenly dropped into our midst. 

Basha’s words echo. “Teddy! [Ne travaille pas]—doesn’t work,” and beneath them a more thoughtful whisper resonates, ‘he’s robbing you.’ Bashful, Christina—the eldest of sisters—readily slips into Teddy’s charms, while Basha, the baby of the sisters, weighs out her strides, wrangling with Cinderella as she borrows a free passage along the lateral wall, trailing across the marches of the interleading grand crystal portal. 

The bathroom wall stands dismantled, the stained-glass combination panel already shipped off for restoration, leaving the raw brick that framed the door, both sidelights, and the transom wide open—waiting for me to slip into blues and block the opening up. The room lies bare, ghosting its modernization, the sanitary-ware delivery close at hand. César and André have already unpacked and scattered the pieces across the adjacent floor of the planned kitchen layout—Victoria and I have already crossed the city to Facq’s showroom and picked the corner bathtub, the wash-hand-basin vanity cabinet, the WC and cistern, and the kitchen sink. In the son’s need to stay useful, earning another day’s wages, while his father floundered beside him, Radek hovers over them, guiding with whatever plumbing wits they could muster, steering them through the glitches and coaxing their efforts to pipe the rooms for the fixtures.

The men had scattered, the women too, toward the front door’s interleading grand crystal portal. I stroll behind Victoria to the flank wall, where I replaced the former panel door—Adam and Valdek enlarging the half-brick wall opening and clearing the rubble—with the relocated combination of door, sidelights, and transom, its frame now a glazed threshold onto the stairwell ±0 landing, sharing light. I finish spraying with a can of blue. 

Victoria’s inhibition stirs as she approaches Cinderella’s shoulders—her flowing hair, her slippers among a field of dried shaved curls: It’s unimaginable: her silky fingers gripping coarse, gritty sandpaper, persistently rubbing the grooved profile of the delicate glass beads—medium, then fingers sanding down with the finest sandpaper—until the wood bead’s grain is silk-smooth, framing her girlish figure. I crave to catch her gaze mirrored in the wafer-mosaic of beveled panes. 

But at the adjacent set of folding doors, besides the shared, open five-gallon can of paint remover, Christina stills the razor-blade scraper—caught in a blister of paint along the wooden glazing bead. She lifts a gentle smile behind Cinderella… yet Victoria, in her stride, steers her eyes away from the work-women, charting her curve toward the flank exit.  

I return Christina’s smile, her hand tethered to the glazing bars slicing the casement door into a glassy grid—half open, half V-folded on its hinges to the door-wide grand casement. Afar, Basha’s spirited gaze; both sisters in jeans scraping paint in tandem, the paintbrush dribbling remover gel, blistering and mottling the portal as they shave off the dark-green paint—working through the tedious muntins. They’ve left a show of progression through the stiles, railings, and the bottom kick panels—pale yellowish-brown pine, unsealed to light after a century.

Victoria stirs a smirk, pulling the flank door, urging her exit across the threshold to the ±0 landing, as I retrieve a last gaze from Cinderella’s pianist’s fingers—an echo behind a heavenly harp. But on Victoria’s heels, I satisfy my mind: ‘tomorrow is another day.’ I step out onto the landing, pull the door closed, and catch up down the split-level vestibule apron, Victoria already stepping in the street. By the taillights, I round the Audi, slip into my seat, lean resiliently over the central console to pull the doorsill knob, tweak the ignition key—and as her door closes, we pull off, bound to skirt the eastern suburbs north to Zaventem.