SANDMAN - SILLAGE (EN)

PROLOGUE – SILLAGE

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Paris, a June night, 1949
Le Meurice Hotel – the room that never appeared on any map.

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The June night wind was not cold enough to shiver,
yet no one wanted to open the window when the room was already burning with the scent of sandalwood, old Armagnac, and the lazy drip of saxophone notes from upstairs.

She stepped in as though she had been here once — in another lifetime.

“Mademoiselle Aimée?”
The concierge’s voice rang from behind — but she did not turn.
She only gave the slightest nod, as though the guest himself had confirmed the identity of the guide.

Inside the room stood only a red velvet chair, a leather-covered table, and a large mirror — that reflected nothing.

And he was already there.

He did not rise. He only watched.
As though waiting for the exact moment to move — not out of courtesy, but for visual effect.

The cigarette smoldered.
His gloved left hand rested on the arm of the chair like a lazy cat.
Nothing made her feel smaller than the fact that he knew her real name — the name only her mother and an old lover had ever whispered.

“I hear you no longer sing.”
His voice — as if he had waited twenty years just to begin with that line.

Aimée said nothing.
She had never told anyone about the night when, after a fever, her voice disappeared —
how she began to dream dreams she could never remember, yet awoke to ink stains on the bedsheets, notes she had not written.

“I want to hear a piece of music I have forgotten.”
Her voice rasped, as if her throat were a wound not yet closed.

He nodded — and turned his chair slightly.

On the table, no score.
No instrument.
Only a small black radio, its dial broken, seemingly connected to nothing at all.

He placed his finger on the tip of the antenna —
and the radio began to sing.
A melody impossible to notate, flowing like smoke through the cracks of memory.

Aimée wept — not because she remembered,
but because for the first time she knew she had once loved someone she had never met.

“I wrote this… but never played it.”
she whispered.

When she looked up, he was gone.

The room returned to normal.
No scent, no song,
and the mirror now reflected only a woman crying —
without knowing why.

From the classified files, French Intelligence Office, 1951:

“The singer Aimée Delacour testified that she ‘met a man in a tuxedo, with languid eyes, who played music from a radio without wires.’
There is no evidence that Room 213 was ever in use.
The music recovered afterwards… matched exactly the handwritten score from 1944 by a Hungarian composer who had died in a concentration camp — never published.”

Who was he?
No one knows.
They only remember one thing:
wherever he appeared, there lingered a faint trail of scent — like a dream still clinging to the wrist of someone who had just fallen asleep.