by Tanith Lee
Directly below the window a panther was feeding. As she glanced down at it, it raised its head. Its stare was blindly seeing as the lenses of cameras, its mouth was full of blood; yet blood which had crystallized, full of rubies.
She felt no particular fear. Perhaps something other than the dream woke her, for she opened her eyes with none of that frantic struggle which accompanies the escape from nightmare. However, conscious now in the dark room, the dream still jewel bright in her brain, she was at once overwhelmed by a nameless instinct that drove her out of bed and towards the window.
She released the blind, and there lay the blue-grey beach, the blue-black sea, the sky of stars.
The surge of her body settled. She stood at the window with an inexplicable sense of unfulfilment. Then came a sound from the back of the house - a sound like an animal's large pad descending on the
sand. It struck her nerves, a silver chord ran over her. She thought: I am afraid.
She ran back across the room, yet halted at the door. She did not even recognize her fear. She felt the bemused and fascinated horror of vertigo, the abyss at the bottom of the height drew her, and she caught involuntarily at the walls to save herself.
'Adam,' she cried, but she did not really remember him at all.
Her movements had already disturbed him. As she discerned that morning he was aware of her even asleep.
'What is it?' he murmured.
'He has followed me here,' she said, still holding to the walls, still gazing sightlessly down the dark stairway.
'Who? Who did, Sovaz?'
'He's outside now,' she whispered.
In her mind she was seeing the surrealist black panther. She imagined it prowling across the veranda, slipping from shade to shade, stealthy as the night itself. Nevertheless, despite the waves of confused hysteria now converging on her brain, she knew perfectly well and with a deadly logic that the demon was real enough, and very near.
Adam had risen and was tugging on clothes swiftly.
'Calm down, Sovaz. I'll go and see. You know, perhaps it's nothing.'
Deep inside her (lost, unattended) a small nerve throbbed at his gentleness to her with a returning remorseful gentleness that was almost pity for him. He brushed her cheek with his finger, and then went by her, going down the stairs noiselessly. Passing the table in the living area below, he took up, with an off-hand and surprisingly brutal resourcefulness, an empty wine bottle.
'Stay there,' he said. 'I won't be long.'
She saw abruptly that he must open the house door. This thought terrified her. Only the shadow of the night was so far in the villa, but open the door and night's black face would peer round it.
The vampire, assuming the form of mist, could slip in through the slightest crack and materialize. And yes, the demon had been a vampire, for he drank the blood of his victim as he lay on her as if in the act of love. She wanted to scream out to Adam, to stop him, but
already he had done the thing she dreaded. The door stood wide a moment then folded shut.
She was alone in the black house with her terror.
Of course, it was so simple. He had been watching her, she had always known it. He had returned the rubies as proof. (How could she have put him from her thoughts?) She had witnessed his crime. He must kill her. And how easy for him to follow her here, and what better spot than this, the isolated villa lapped by the sea and the dunes, only a beautiful boy to protect her, one who picked up a bottle to defend himself, without cunning… Sovaz ran from one end of the room to the other and back once more, in a trap. Yes. Perhaps she was trapped.
She stood quite still. Her whole body was pulsing, electric. It was no longer fear she felt, but a more ancient and more complex emotion, the extreme abandon of something hunted.
If the murderer (yes, yes, call him that, though he was also the demon, the magician), if the murderer had waited outside in the shadow, why could he not similarly wait until Adam had moved off a little way, searching, then slip into the villa, come softly up the stairs to her.
She pressed herself against the wall, and began to slide herself down it and down the unseen steps. If she could reach the side door she could run out, she could cry for help across the desert of the sands to the waste of the sea, and perhaps be heard.
Adam Quentin walked quietly around the house, then along the beach a little way. He was not, in fact, particularly uneasy. His itinerant life about the vitriolic slums of this and other cities had partly revived in him those primitive senses geared to deal with danger, and these same senses relayed no warning. The night seemed to offer nothing except its perpetual air of menace.
At first he believed she had imagined the intruder. Then her words He has followed me here struck him with a certain symbolism. She had been reservedly distressed since his admission that Kristian had after all financed him. Possibly a phantom Kristian stalked round the villa for her. This idea gave birth to another. Standing on the empty
beach, he recalled Kristian's agents, the Englishman Prescott, the other men who discreetly followed Sovaz wherever she went about the city, to observe and report on her movements. It was feasible that she had seen such a man patrolling on the sand, incautious under the unlit windows.
The thought gripped Adam with a sudden fury. He envisaged at once a traditional carbon-copy spy lying on the dunes, perhaps with binoculars. The untroubled tenderness of the morning, their love-making on the beach, the gentle afternoon, all reduced by the professional outlook of the watcher to the insipidity all sentiment assumes when divorced from motive.
Adam looked around him.
About two hundred yards away, on an upper level of the beach, he could suddenly make out the ill-defined shape of a car without headlights. Adam swore softly.
It was rough going here, the sand slid from under his feet like silk. A little track came meandering down from the road and the car was parked just off it, among the drily whispering tamarisks. The stillness as well as the darkness of the vehicle impressed Adam as he came nearer, so that he moved more cautiously. Eventually he had come close enough to see in.
Inside the car a man and woman were embracing frenziedly, writhing and entwining in total silence and with a faintly ludicrous concentration, as if afraid that, should their attention be permitted to wander for a moment, they would lose the thread of this physical conversation.
So much for Kristian's agent. Crazy to suppose he would be in the first parked car… A sense of foolishness came over Adam, also of slight shyness. He did not like to see his own sexual passion translated by the antics of others. Turning, fortunately unseen, he quickly and quietly moved away.
He had abandoned the quest. Reaching the level sand, he began to run back towards the house. He realized now he must have been gone almost half an hour, leaving her alone and distraught, as once before.
There were, even now, no lights in the windows. The door was shut, as he had left it.
As once before. As once before, the room was deserted, and the stairs.
'Sovaz!' he called, as once before. She did not answer.
He ran up the stairway. This time she was not in the bedroom.
He went over the villa methodically, turning on all the electric lights.
Presently he discovered the side door standing open. He searched and found an oil lamp in the stone kitchen, lit it and went outside.
The shadows fled back in groups like black animals which had crept up to the house but retreated from fire.
Where was she - where had she gone? Purely instinctively he recognized the fear which had driven her into the open - his eyes ran automatically over the track which led from the villa back to the road.
From the head of the track was visible the dull haze of neon still lingering over the town. Had she fled that way for comfort?
Adam left the lamp and hurried up the track, for some reason ignoring the possibility of using the sports car, and, feeling the hard clay of the roa
d finally under his feet, he began to run in the direction of the town.
He ran for nearly a mile, then stopped. Sweat dried his shirt to his body in patches. He had been looking out for her at every step. But he could never hope to find her like this, it was too slow. He must go back for the car after all. (Something about the idea of the car repelled him; he pushed this from his mind.)
Besides, maybe she had returned to the house.
He trudged towards the shore, weary with anxiety. He felt a child and was disgusted by the childish sick fear that threatened him.
It was about three o'clock when he reached the beach house. He went in and called her name, but perfunctorily, without much expectation.
Unanswered he went for the car.
It would not immediately start. It too seemed reluctant to take the journey, and, fractious, obstructed him. At last the motor engaged.
Glancing over his shoulder as the car moved up the track, he noted incongruously that he had left every light in the beach house burning brightly.
When she reached the smaller door of the villa, opened it, and stood there, confronted by the night, Sovaz had ceased to exist.
The night was cool and black. It inspired ancient fears and joys.
These feelings had always been present in her, though her method of living stifled even while it encouraged them. Now, through a process of dreaming terrors and events magnified to terror, the inner elemental genius which was not Sovaz, but Sovaz deprived of all human conditions and desires, pared to the psychological and spiritual quick, emerged suddenly in the cold water of darkness and took possession of her shell of a woman's body.
If she felt anything at all, it was a sensation of release. As for fear itself, she was no longer afraid. What had driven her to flight now seemed unremarkable, almost normal. As when she had first run away from the murderer on the beach, the whole night was imbued with him, so that he was quite inescapable. And like the gods, he only asked for her consent, her surrender.
Yet she did not really think anything, or know what she did as she stepped out on to the sand drifts.
The landscape was full of unexpected forms - black birds or animals of shadow, while smoking tinsel galleys floated in the sky or on the sea.
Reduced to an ultimate in symbols, she followed at first a natural depression in the dunes, then, coming on the track, she followed this up to the road and so went along that, towards the dim phosphorescent glow above the town. The glow represented Destination, the trackways and the road a means of getting there, but these things were merely occupations. For she was offering herself, unprotected, vulnerable in her robe of white Chinese silk, to the night and the demon.
She could not have said what she anticipated - the knife, the Shadow -
she did not know how death would divulge himself or how she would greet him. She was trembling, vibrating with a wild excitement.
Every touch of the air on her skin, every breath of wind that lifted her hair, was in itself a kind of ecstasy.
Her bare feet (she had cut them on stones and not noticed) walked briskly. Shortly she passed through the little town where another
woman had sat beneath the umbrellas with flowers in her hat. The streets were now mostly deserted. A few dreary neons stared from the exteriors of bars. From a dark archway a chewing man came out and stopped to gape at her. She had all the appearance of a sleep-walker, or even a devil, so much so that he did not even lurch across to her to seize her arm as he might ordinarily have done with a stray woman seen on the night road. (About an hour later, a young American in a fast white car would come by, and give him money for this information.)
Sovaz went through the town following the road, and, because nothing had happened, continued on the other side of it.
The sea sounded very close on her left, though she was not aware of it. It threw itself against the rocks below with titanic explosions, as if trying to attract her attention. Hereabouts the great slopes began which fell down sheer beyond the railing - to the sea at high tide, or else to this vast lashing cauldron of rock and spray.
The wind blew up from the sea.
Coming from the town, Adam drove slowly, with a painful discipline, knowing she was probably ahead of him on the road. Reaching the first of the horrific roadside drops, his guts seemed to rise up and slam him in the chest, thinking of her wandering by in the state the opium-eater had described. Of course the man was drugged, yet his hallucinatory representation of the darkhaired woman in her thin white robe seemed, rather than to exaggerate, to strike the very essentials of her condition.
His hands sticky with sweat, Adam drove on at the same agonizing snail's pace.
Then he saw her. She was quite unmistakable, picked out by the headlights, walking at the very centre of the road. He managed to overtake her smoothly, pulling up ahead of her, getting out of the car and going back without moving too fast. She looked as though she were dreadfully shocked. Something must indeed have happened at the beach house after he had left her, yet there had been no sign of intrusion or violence.
Although she did not look at him, she had stopped still. Going up to
her so carefully, in a rigour of tension accentuated by finding her, he abruptly recalled any number of the cheap horror movies illicitly seen in his childhood, lovely zombies in fluttering grave-clothes, decollete heroines lured from their beds by vampires.
'Sovaz,' he said, unsteadily.
Her eyes were totally unfocused, yet she gave a brief polite little smile. He wondered whom she might be seeing in her brain that she greeted with such civil uninterest. He could not believe himself so entirely demoted. With a gradualness that made his arms shake, he reached out and took hold of her.
'Come to the car, Sovaz.'
She allowed him to direct her, quite docilely. He caught sight of her feet, the blood on them, and set her like eggs inside the vehicle and shut the door before he got in beside her.
A wash of desperate confusion went over him. There was no room to turn the car, only the steep bank going up on the right, the roaring descent on the left, crashing adjacent to his window. He saw he must go on in this same direction until he came to a wider and less perilous stretch of road.
He started the engine and began to drive swiftly north.
The road hugged itself to the flank of the up-slope, as if afraid of the sea below. Sovaz seemed to be staring out at it. All at once she said, with a sharp insistence, 'No.'
'What, Sovaz? Don't be scared, it's all right.'
'No,' she said again, 'I won't go with you. Let me alone.'
She screamed, a prolonged and terrible scream, and, turning towards him, began to scratch at his face.
Insurmountable horror attacked him. He put up his right arm to defend himself. She was no longer human. Her mouth and eyes were enlarged and quite mindless. He had a leopard locked in with him.
Then, slashing at him with her left hand, she clutched and scrabbled with her right at the door.
'Sovaz!' he shouted.
He was trying to thrust her away and hold her in at the same time, while with the other arm he attempted to steady the car.
At this moment the road, swirling around a bend, presented one of its practical jokes. A broken cart - perhaps even one they had passed earlier on their journey south - with a great sugaring of smashed glass about it. The sports car shot forward and ploughed through the cart, the glass… Sovaz' door gave as if at a signal. Adam wrenched about involuntarily, instinctively, to snatch her back. Simultaneously a glass dagger stabbed into the front nearside tyre, which blew with the sound of a gunshot.
The car spun left on the impetus of its three remaining tyres. It spun against the railing, which capitulated without protest. The car leaped forward and was for a moment apparently poised in stasis on the starlit sky. Below, the sea gnashed its jaws hungrily.
Adam Quentin, flung sideways across the seat, the sleeve of his denim jacket now uselessly caught
on the wheel, thought in a blazing jumble of emotions for which no words were possible, thought, as primitive man or as babies did, in pictures - but only for an instant, or perhaps twenty instants.
The car fell, still spinning, towards the explosions of rocks and sea.
Sovaz, lying on the road just clear of the cart and the broken glass, raised her head at the enormous boom of thunder that burst below, louder even than the waves.
A glare kicked up against the night.
Sovaz pulled herself to the shattered railing to look down at it, a huge chrysanthemum of flame alight on the rocks, the petrol burning blue and green on the water.
SIX
The house, caught in the last resinous light of the afternoon, had taken on the inanimate and empty look it frequently acquired by day, its blindness of windows unlit, the vines resembling cuttings of dark paper. It had seemed to the doctor, as he struggled up the steps towards it, like some great sarcophagus, to enter which inevitably invited a curse.
Dr Florentine was afraid of the woman, or, more accurately, of the condition in which he would find her. Kristian's note had been
concise but unrevealing. Although additionally the limousine had been sent for him.
Kristian's valet ushered him into the study. The room was burnished with the unearthly sheen that invaded the whole house during the late afternoon and sunset, through the polarized windows. It was hard to tell anything about Kristian in this mezzotint, and yet it seemed clear to the doctor that he was changed.
'Please sit down,' Kristian said to him, and the quality of voice and manner were certainly the same. Dr Florentine sat, his short penguin flippers folded neatly over his bag. 'I had better put you in the picture, hadn't I?' Kristian said. 'My wife has been involved in a car accident, last night to be exact. She was driving in company with a friend' (the word was spoken quite implicitly) 'on the shore road about twenty-five miles south of the city. There was a wreck of some sort. I gather the young man swerved to avoid it and lost control of the car. The passenger door seems to have given way; my wife was discovered lying at the side of the road, unhurt. Her driver, however, had no time to get clear of the car before it broke through the railing. There is nothing that side except the sea, and rocks when the tide is out.'