by Tanith Lee
I remember I bustled off and bought the facsimile of the Queen of the Night aria, and wrapped it with care, hoping that once his birthday celebration arrived, things could reverse, at least for me, to normal. But of course he died, didn’t he. He died the way most people do, it seems, leaving nothing behind for me, not even – his ghost.
I wish I hadn’t thought of this again, sharp as if for the first, in such hollow depth, only an hour or so into my reborn life.
But perhaps it is an inevitable effect. The Zombie-brain is memory-emptied. And any new tenant of a home will want to fill up the bare cupboards. Will even begin to do it without quite being ready.
It’s fresh for me again, now, my ridiculous and spiteful and pathetic lapse, his utter though gentle and controlled rejection of me. I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t her. It’s shame, too, I feel. All my adult emotional existence after, I spent trying to replace my dad with worthless men, the beautiful, the pretty, the seemingly artistic and kind, and so many of them petty, ugly, and worthless–
That’s why I unpacked this one memory. Or, this memory was finally able to hunt me down. Elizabeth, the black-haired fox, at bay now among the bones of another body, Elizabeth no longer.
It’s that memory, even unremembered, it’s that subsequent misjudgement of mine with all my male lovers, that’s brought me to what I did tonight. That’s why I chose as I did.
You, my father. Me, your daughter.
But now – no longer either.
(Laurel): We – I washed at the rill, and the cold was frightful. Yet too, I luxuriated in it – I can touch water, wash and drink, (all my new teeth are sound), I can feel the cold, shiver – and rub myself dry with grasses as I have only read of persons doing (briskly) in novels, long ago.
Already we are walking well, she and I.
I’ll stop saying We and Our. I and my. Me.
At the house I will search out clothing. The historic show-clothes which remain will fall to bits if I attempt to sort, let alone put them on. It will have to be modern garments I take, with their uncorseted waists and short skirts. And trousers – How shall I feel then? Oh, like Heaven.
Only as I let myself in at one of the looser house doors, unable now to pass straight through, although for one silly moment I almost tried to! Only then memory came to me, a remembrance I didn’t ever before recall, and don’t properly, now... like something told to me, which, nevertheless, I must believe.
Captain Ashton, my beautiful captain, so brave and able, so couth and fine, who danced with me, as so seldom anyone did. Who left me, as did they all. Who, in my feverish dreams, as the virus known subsequently as Spanish ‘Flu closed fast its talons on me, as on so many others – he, he too, died that night. He died since he had never lived. He was part of my fever-dream, that first night of my death. So real he seemed. So absolute that I have never doubted. But oh, like the fool I was – as never would such a man have paid court to me, become my lover, wed me, stayed with me – I dreamed him from the ashes of my evening, and of my life. My brain concocted him from nothingness. He wasn’t real, my gallant captain, with his blue eyes and his moonlight hair. I changed my last living night for myself. I made it somewhat magical after all. Where, in fact, I’d sat as ever on that – what is it Elizabeth says? – that fucking chair. Sat as always I did, and died myself, early, of humiliation and loneliness. Oh, possibly a couple of diehards, egged on by embarrassed relations, took me for some loathsome, graceless flounder about the dance-floor. Maybe even one of them said he knew an aunt of mine, as if to prove I was safe with him – or more likely that never would he have danced with me at all if not requested. But he, my love, he never did. He wasn’t real.
Oh, Laurel, what a glittering jewel your brain was then, no zircon, but a diamond of gleaming facets and silvery light, to conjure such a demon-angel lover to dance with you the dance of death, before the mansion of your life fell in.
But even I, we note, didn’t lie to herself beyond a certain point. For in the fantasy he left me, too. He was polite, and just a touch equivocal. No more. Yes, even I, Laurel, the child of cold stone hearts, colder far than the spring-winter water morning, with its saffron sky and frost thick as thin snow, even I did not defraud myself to that extreme. My phantom love bestowed no kiss. He didn’t clasp me to him, promised nothing. He bade me courteous and dry farewell.
More of a ghost than I, ever, Captain Ashton.
But now I am alive. My name isn’t Laurel. I’ll become again my true physical self. Daphne, before metamorphosis. Not quivering and cowering leaves, but a woman.
(Coral): - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
(The Warrior): Sun is full risen and I see her, my Lady Eliseth – but she is other now. Though I know her still. Under the trees standing, and in a form that wounds me through. But it is her.
She – or the other now she is – that laughs at me.
Go on then, bold knight, she says. Down in the wood they are, the ones you seek.
A pass of birds, small as bees they seem to me, feathered arrow flights, passing over, and she or that-she-is looks up and laughs too at them, and so I behold she is not mocking either bird or this man before her. She laughs in gladness. She is happy then to be so at change, and other. Would it so then for me, I wish. With all my heart.
I pass, and go down the slope, stepping as I do as if I must. But my feet are not upon the world, but in air. And how I long for anchorage, to tread on ground. I will take any I may, it will not cost me, if it be to be again as alive, and touch whole earth under my feet.
It lies below a tall wilden holly, and the spikes of thissen and else have rent it.
Stand I and stare on it. The Sub-umbris is a corpse in all truth now? For never do we see, nor hear report, these things can diey. They are already of the dead.
As is the Scholar’s choice, and my lady’s, there is not much seems amiss with this stricken enemie. Others of its kind trample a way off, avoiding maybe this one. Its eyes are open, blue, and now I see them turn on me. Makes sound, the lips of it. Has lost a tooth to one side. No impediment, I in life lost two, one deep in, that blackened and I pulled it forth, and one in fighting, but in the lower jaw.
I go near. I am stood above.
It makes a sound at me. But its both eye close now.
It is near death, and I not liking it, then surely the easier to leave it should I mean so.
It is of the male division, what else. Its hair is black as that of my Lord, when I served him, Hroldar, that Eliseth has call Rauldr, or some such. But the eyes as mine, in life. I stand, and by my will I reach inside.
Here it is this way: an empty tower. Its stones are firm and all in place, but through the vault of it the cele winds run like water in a stream.
I make testing of the spaces. None is there. One glimpsing sceadowe before me flies. It is a remembering, I think, of death. But that is done, as long far off was mine. Yet still I pause, thresholden, not yet to enter in.
And while my thought speaks to me, my life takes hold, and in like a spear of ice and fire, before ever I am ready, and so inside the towr of it am I.
Who now then will I be? I lie in fear, then to my feet I ream, lifting the lunk of me like a great wiht upon my soul. And stand I now, and solid as a tower may be, and my feet upon the back of the world, as Great God intended, flesh and blood and bone.
And then again I fall. The weight of him, of life – and there are memories – they run like rats, white and black and grey – and red. And with them, my own, my own, rising out of deep water.
I have the language now of this future place. I have the truth of my past. I am ruined, like the towers of the castle. Defeat and fall, if not death.
He – I – hurt. I hurt. There is rot all through him. Gangrene is its name. Inside a day or so, I’ll die of the rot in him. Why did I never see in time? In my first life then, we had this evil rot, but now I can’t remember its proper name – its name-of-then.
I lie, groaning, helpl
ess. This ruined tower will die, and then I shall be free again. Or can I be? No second chances.
The pain is horrible.
I remember a pain as bad, and worse. Though did not last for long.
It was then, the battle, on the ramparts of the castle, my Lord’s just fight –
Only –
I remember –
I remember.
The Fall of Leaf had come, and the weather yet very warm, the skies deep blue.
We were to fight the foes of my Lord. They sat below our fortress like mad dogs about a tree in which they had brought to bay something as powerful, but more so, than they.
But being crazed of course, they would come up to kill us. And so, a back door, as it might be, being undone for them, they duly do.
And then I am before my Lord. I cast off the foe from him and so his life is safe, but I in turn receive the blow, which is mortal and does for me. There we go. Done for. Always look on the bright side – these frills come from my host’s dead brain-case. I speak like him. Or near to it for Christ’s sake and damn this filth of pain in him – but I try to break away, and now I can’t. Stuck in the mud of him, this Zombie. (Even without a tenant soul, still these dead bodies are able to die. They fall apart, as does the castle over yonder as, bit by bit, the house does too that was built here, with its green silks and old statues that aren’t real...)
There instead am I, before my Lord. I take the blow for him and perish. And he lives.
But, to be honest. It wasn’t like that.
Christ.
It wasn’t like that.
Two months or more before that autumn, I had the spring fever common to these parts. The illness passed. But then came another skirmish, some unimportant little spat between my Lord and some other lord, some bugger with less right to hold an army than a fly. So on that day too I went to fight, I and fifty others. No more did we need. But on that day, that little new summer day, that day of stink and shit and hell, on that day some passing mace or other club came down upon me, and knocked me for six upon the ruck of grass, where I lay, not in my senses for some while, till gathered up.
And when again I came to myself, to myself I did not come, not I.
Do I remember this? In a manner. I heard a bell ringing in my head, over and over, on and on, till I would take a knife and stick it in my ear to stop the noise, yet some fool stops me. (There is always some fool will do that, sure. God makes fools for the very purpose.)
Let me be frank. To be honest. Lay my cards on the table.
From that dry tomorrow I was an idiot, a piece of flesh not a man, silly as a child of two. Weak as one. A fool forever.
Any other master would have slung me forth to whine and beg about the land, or for the holy women to care for, or the landsmen to jeer to death for a jolly wee laugh.
But my Lord, my Lord Raulder, he kept me on. Oh, no more his man, no more the guard of his body, the companion to toast at the feast: “My Gui – to you.” As a hanger-on he kept me, to trail about the barracks, where men I had fought by, drunk by, swung through the brothels with and kneeled alongside at the holy Mass, might scorn me or be kind, or chafe at the omen of my fall: and wish me dead.
And so, in the fight upon the castle walk, where was I then?
Never beside my Lord, to serve and save, gladly to die for him if God willed it so.
No. In the yard below was I, gathering up the shed weapons and fallen stuff that might yet be of use to him, and those others yet men who could fight and save.
And there, like a ruined bird of prey, I picked around, gathering as I could, and only half aware, while overhead upon the stonework the insurge roared, flame flashed and blood flew free.
Gathering, pecking up, poor broken worthless bird, until an arrow, strayed from some otherwhere, out where the world was, and life and reason, shot through and into my world of sodden lolp and lack, and through my throat, so I choked and stifled, retching and cawing, and dropped dead. Useless to myself, and all.
And he above, my own God, Raulder, Hroldar, he fell. I saw him fall, and could not even cry or breathe or mourn, my windpipe all pierced through, and he pierced through his golden heart and through his silver soul. The wound I would, and happy, have borne for him. The wound of pride I was denied. Instead a wound of shame was mine, and is.
And when again I came to myself, and this time was myself, if a ghost, and less then than all and anything I had ever been, yes even as an idiot, then for myself I had changed the plot of the fucking story, hadn’t I, bloody little lie-to-self cunt. Useless blundered fool. Like the cowards boasting in the tavern-pub of those brave, brave deeds and noble that they did and done and never done nor did, for real. None real. Me then, paur him. Poor bird.
Oh then formerly and forever let me die here and be done with all this crap.
(The Scholar): “My God!”I exclaimed. “Why – why on earth?”
Elizabeth was physically walking up the stairs, (as I, not so long ago, had already done). I knew her – but only in some aesthetic, intuitive fashion, maybe even psychic. There was no other possible way I could have done.
Like myself, she had become flesh and blood. She had pre-empted and assumed the body of a Zombie, and wore it now with swaggering joi de vivre. But – “My God,” I said again. “What possessed you?”
“No, Matey,” said Elizabeth. “I possessed this. Fine figure, don’t you think? And look! Ten straight workable fingers. Impressed?”
“Uneasy,” I said.
“Oh, come on, sir,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve got the thing a bit together. But when it’s fully scrubbed up and suitably garbed, we’ll cut quite a figure.”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “you are a female. And that–”
“Is the body of a strapping young man. About early thirties, I’d say. Great hair, too, like black treacle. Just need to get it properly washed, and let it grow. About two feet, I think, yes? Down to the bum.”
“You’re a woman in the body of a man.”
“And you, monsieur, are behind the times. I’m a ghost-soul in the body of a splendid living thing.”
She was by then on the landing.
We stared at each other. I through the brown eyes that now were mine, and she through the (black treacle?) eyes of he she had assumed. He was, had been, perhaps could be again given her loving care, handsome. And strong, you could see, as an ox; perfect sculptor material.
“Why?” I said. Too late.
And gentle as the dove in the song, she said, “I was getting really sick of batting for the other team.”
(El): How sweet he is, that old man. So astounded, yet still an open mind. The big old hunk he’s now in looks good as a US tank for some forty years or more. Well done. And he operates it just fine. I’m doing well, too. Coordination, coordination.
He’s told me his name, now, the one he’s decided to answer to, which he admits isn’t his own, but “that bit has passed”.
He’s Edward. Edward, our Scholar.
As for me, I’d better be El, (which sometimes I’ve been awarded as a nickname in the past, too, and then concluded was an abbreviation of Hell.)
So here I am, El or Hell, shaking Edward’s hand! We can touch. Although, alas, I doubt I’ll ever touch my Warrior-Knight now in any at-all intense way. I’ll have to see how I feel about the Fair Sex, I suppose. (Fair Sex? Where the heck did that phrase come from? Oh, who cares?)
One thing that must be done. Soon.
I can see ghosts. I saw Laurel when she was – and I was not – and I hope, and think she’s something else by now, but have to wait to confirm this. Not sure Edward the Scholar can see ghosts now he’s flesh again. My Knight – I’m not sure either. And if he could, can he still, if he made it into that excellent Zombie I spotted and directed him to? No news yet there, either.
(Why am I so confident? The drunken exhilaration of achieving what one must. Like the splendid result of a supremely-needed exam.)
But to return to earlier things. I,
or I and the Knight whoever now he is – must try to find little Coral. I’m worried about her. And she’s still – well, as we all were not long ago – a ghost. We have to try to reassure and coax her. She’s part of the family. You don’t desert them.
No, Mummy, you don’t.
And darling, sweet Father, forgive me, I knew not what I did. If ever again I find you, we’ll sort it out.
I love you.
I’ll always love you.
But my time of loss and remorse, guilt and blindness, some twenty-five years of it – and more, more – together nearly eighty – is it? – years. And that’s over. I’m a different person now. Aren’t I, my black-haired darling, aren’t I, boyo? Giddy-up, my fine stallion! On to the Dance Floor of Life!
(Daphne): I go up the main staircase. My feet still feel like weights of lead, but that too is wonderful in its way! And I can breathe! I touch the banister, and run my hand along it. Neglected and in bad repair, a splinter cuts into my palm. I rake it out, and there’s a little speck of red, red blood. I am proud of the blood. All is as it should be.
I believe I shall manage the lack of two fingers on my left hand quite well, since for so long I’ve had no true tactile contact with anything, and am re-learning how to touch and balance and position myself in relation to all other things, which seems to be rather as a child first learns to do it, and so the disadvantage with the hand will simply be taken into account automatically.