Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  Lucette believed in Heaven. That Lucien, regardless of his faults, was already there, she did not doubt.

  So, in her white dress, her fleecy golden hair cut short, she went blithely up to the platform and lay down for the stroke, barely seeming to notice, they said, what the executioner was doing.

  The guillotine is very swift and supposedly humane, but who knows?

  Stories are told of severed heads which winked malignly from the basket, and even of one that brokenly whispered a request for water.

  Doubtless the climate has an effect on an outdoor apparatus of this type - shrinking or swelling the metal parts; on some days it might do its work an iota more slowly, or more quickly, or more neatly, than

  on others. Nothing the crowd would notice, of course. And then the physique of the victim must be taken into account. A large neck makes its own demands, and the fact that long hair, collars and neck-cloths were removed indicates even such as these could throw the blade. Louis Capet required more than one stroke; an unreassuring if unusual occurrence. Nor should one forget the condition of the subject's nerves - as opposed merely to his nervousness. No two human things are quite alike. One ventures to suggest that there have been as many different sorts of death under the guillotine as there have been heads lopped by it.

  D'Antoine, for example. Who could judge splendid powerful D'Antoine would experience that partitioning in the same way as anyone else?

  It seemed, when it came, like a blow, the blow of a sledgehammer, but not quite hard enough - so there was an instant's appalled thought: Those bloody fools have botched it! Then the perspective altered. The eyes glimpsed the basket as the head fell into it, and other faces, already forgotten, looked up at it with anxiety as it came to meet them. After this the light went and there was only one odd final sensation, the head lying where it was, but the last reflexive relaxing spasms of the body eerily somehow communicated to it. Is this what a chicken feels? And a moment of horror, wondering how long one must endure this this. Followed by oblivion.

  Oblivion of course, for D'Antoine the atheist had reckoned on nothing. And here nothing was. All senses gone. The void. Blackness not even black, silence not even silence. Sans all.

  There is a certain smugness attached to finding oneself perfectly right, even if one can no longer experience it.

  Heros, who had been dispatched a short while before, was experiencing something similar.

  In his case, the passage of the blade had been sheer. To use the analogy of hot knives through butter is in bad taste, but there. It is the best one. Stunned, Heros lost consciousness instantly. He may have expected to. When he opened his eyes again, everything was altered but still he saw only what he expected.

  The way to Hell was gaudy, festive almost; the lighting, to say the least, theatrical. Flames leaped crimson on the subterranean cliffs that

  lined the path, and a grotesquerie of shadows danced with them.

  Heros was, on some unrecognized level, gratified to see that it had all the artistry of a good painting of the subject. Indeed, some of it was so familiar that it filled him with a slight sense of déjà vu. Presently a masked devil swooped down at him on bat-wings, with a shriek.

  Heros, unprotesting, elegant, moved towards his punishment.

  The bright entrance and the gradients beyond were littered by howling, pleading, rioting or bravely joking damned. Among them he caught sight of certain prior acquaintance, just those he would, in fact, have anticipated. He also partly expected to see D'Antoine arrive at any moment, ushered in behind him. D'Antoine, who had led a magnificently licentious life, had believed that only oblivion followed death. His friend would have been interested to see D'Antoine's face when he discovered he was wrong. On the whole.

  Heros did not think Lucien would make up the party. Although Lucien had done a thing or two that would doubtless disqualify him from eternal bliss, he had a sort of faun-like innocence that would probably keep him out of the ultimate basement area.

  Occasionally goaded, though never prodded, by appalling devils, Heros walked on and found himself at length in a sort of waiting-room with broad open windows. These gazed out across incendiary lakes and lagoons, and mountains of anguished structure. Actual torments were visible from here, but, being in the distance, not very coherently. It was a subtle arrangement, threatening, but restrained. If questioned, Heros would have confessed that he approved of it. At a stone table in the waiting-room, a veiled figure sat dealing cards.

  Heros, who had been inclined to cards in life, sat down opposite and, without a word, they began to play a hand.

  The game seemed to last a very long time. An extraordinarily long time. Abruptly, Heros came to from a kind of daze, and with a strange feeling to which he could assign no name - for he felt, absurdly, almost guilty. It appeared to him at that moment as if, rather than being kept waiting here, most cruelly, to learn his exact awful fate, he himself- but no, that was plainly ridiculous. Just precisely then, a tall flame burst through one of the windows, and out of the flame a demon stared at him with a cat's wild eyes. Beckoned, somewhat relieved, Heros abandoned the cards, and went towards the demon, which suddenly grasped him and bore him out into the

  savage landscape beyond the room. A backward glance showed the veiled figure had disappeared entirely.

  They did not exchange small-talk, the demon and Heros. Hell spoke for itself. They passed over laval cauldrons in which figures swam and wailed, and emaciated moaning forms chained to the sides of mountains and tormented by various… things. Others of the condemned crawled about at the edges of retreating pools, croaking of thirst. Some toiled like ants, great boulders on their backs. Still others were being flayed or devoured by fiends, from the feet up.

  Allusions both historic and classical were nicely mingled. There was something in a dreadful way reassuring about it all.

  At length, the demon chose to hover in mid-air close to a weird contraption, a kind of swing. Back and back it flung itself, then forth and forth, with a tireless pendulum motion, until about a mile away it plunged into a torrent of fire, and far off screaming was detectable.

  But now it was swinging back again. Seated in a froth of summery dresses - the height of Revolutionary French fashion - two young women, quite unscathed, toasted each other in white sparkling wine.

  As they drew nearer, Heros noticed that there was room on the swing for one more person. Just then, the blonder of the two ladies glanced up and beheld him.

  'Why, it's Heros - Heros!' she cried; the darker girl joined in with:

  'We saved a place for you, Heros darling.'

  Hdros smiled and greeted them. Both looked familiar, although he was not sure from where. Instead, each of them seemed like an amalgam of certain aspects of all the women he had known, the dark and the blonde, the coarse and the refined, aristo and plebeian -

  delightful. And no sooner had he concluded this, than his demon escort dropped him. There was no sensation of falling. One moment he was in the air, next moment in mid-flight on the swing, a girl either side, soft arms, warm lips, curly hair, and very good champagne being held for him to drink. 'Knock it back quickly, lovely Heros. In a minute, we'll be into that again.'

  'The fire?' queried Heros. The swing had reached its furthest backward extent, paused, and now began once more to fly forward.

  'Oh, the fire. The pain! The terror!'

  'But it only lasts a moment,' said her friend and, indeed, his.

  'You get used to it.'

  They toasted the monarchy, something it had long since ceased to be sensible to do upstairs. Then they embraced.

  The swing was broad and comfortable enough for almost… anything.

  After a few extremely pleasant minutes, his two companions clutched at him with exclamations of fright and boiling red flames enveloped them. They all screamed with pain. Then the swing rushed out again and the pain vanished. They had not been burned, not even blistered.

 
The champagne too retained its refreshing coolness, nor had any of it evaporated.

  Heros relaxed amid the willing human cushions. Three seconds of agony against several minutes that were not agonizing at all seemed an excellent arrangement. Of course one suffered. One was supposed to. But the ratio could only be described as - civilized.

  The next time they went into the fire they were all singing a very lewd song of the proposed Republic. They screamed briefly, though in perfect tempo, and came out again on the succeeding verse.

  In perfect tempo too, Lucien felt the pain of the guillotine's blade. It was swift and stinging, not unendurable, leaving an after-image of itself that grew in intensity, not to greater pain but to a terrible struggle. Physically the guillotine had deprived him of sight, hearing and speech - but not totally of feeling. He hung there, formless, and for a long ghastly eternity fought to breathe, tried to swallow, and most of all to cry out.

  When he broke from this, he did not know where he was, but that he was somewhere seemed self-evident. Still blind and deaf and dumb, he had convinced himself that he was now breathing, and because of this thought that he had somehow been rescued by the crowd, who must have pulled him clear of the crashing blade -by unimaginable means - at the last moment. But of course, there was no one near him, nothing. When he attempted to reach out, his hands found only emptiness, and besides, they were not hands. All that was done with.

  His body had been lost. Only he remained. And for a horrible second he was not even sure of that - But he held to himself grimly, to everything he could remember. This was the second struggle, and in

  the middle of it he managed to open his eyes, or at least, he began to see.

  What he saw was not encouraging. It was truly a scene of total emptiness, a skyless desert made solely of the absence of things, and yet there seemed to be matter in it. For example, to stare at something was to produce a sort of illusory smoky shape. And then again, there was nothing to be stared at in the first place. His feeling now was of depression, a fear and misery he had never known to such a degree even on the volatile emotional seesaw of his life. And of loneliness, which was the worst of all.

  Somehow he had survived death. Or had he? This seemed the most tenuous and precarious of survivals. Limbo was the notion that came to mind. If he still possessed a mind.

  He found that he looked ceaselessly in all directions, but all directions were the same. He was searching for a method of escape, or a mode of return. His life was precious to him. He longed for it.

  He wanted to go back! There must be some way -And when this passionate yearning grew very strong, out of his confusion the desert seemed to fill with crowds and colour and noise. He was in a procession on horseback, or else watching one from the roadside. He heard the cannon booming over Paris on the day the Bastille fell; he heard - but these were only waking dreams. With an effort, each time he shook them off. The door to release was not to be found in this way.

  It seemed then he rummaged about in the emptiness, or maybe hurried over it, or dug through it, all to no avail. And then, when he stopped, his thoughts grew very still and began gently to flow out from him. He was afraid to lose them, and himself. This fear was more dreadful than any of the others, more dreadful even than the fear of death had been.

  There was anger too. None of this was what Lucien had believed would greet the 'immortal' soul. It was demonstrably useless to call on God. (He had done so.) Either God did not exist, or did not attend.

  There were also curious moments when it seemed to him that he, not God, had the key to all of this. But how could that be so?

  Perched there in the depths of the waste, he huddled memories about him, warming himself at the recollections of beautiful Lucette, and

  crying over his child, or thinking that he cried. But the loneliness pressed down on him like an inexorable coffin-lid. Though he supposed he could people the colourless greyness, which was not even grey, with the figures of wife and friends, or with anything, he knew such toys were false, and useless.

  Was everything he now experienced a punishment? Not the ridiculous Catholic Hell, but some more deadly state where he must wander for ever, weighted by depression, alone, until his own self was worn away as time washes smooth a stone? Lucette -Lucette -

  Lucette, desiring her freedom so much, was already partly out of her body as the blade fell. She heard, and felt the stroke, but from some way off. Then the multitude, the blood-soaked guillotine, all Paris, the very world, dashed away beneath her. She rose into a sky almost cloudless and utterly blue. Whole and laughing and lovely, she entered Heaven with the lightest step, in her white dress, her hair already long again.

  It was all so beautiful. It was as she had dreamed of it when a child.

  Balanced on their clouds of cirrus the streets of gold, the pearly dazzling palaces, the handsome people smiling and brave, the little animals that made free of every step and cornice, the birds and the kind angels that flew overhead, about the level of the fourth floor windows… She ran along, crying with pleasure, at every crossroads expecting to meet Lucien - probably sitting writing something, and so engrossed, he had momentarily forgotten the time of her arrival. But she did not find him. And at last, there in the golden sunlight of endless day, Lucette paused.

  A stately woman in white robes came down the boulevard, and Lucette approached her.

  'Madame, excuse me, but I should like to ask your advice.' The woman looked at her, gently smiling. 'I'm searching for my husband.

  He died some days ago, and I expected he would be here before me -

  The woman went on smiling. 'Madame -1 can't find him.'

  'Then perhaps he is not here.'

  'There is nowhere else he could be,' said Lucette firmly.

  'Ah, my dear, there are numerous other places. He could be in any

  one of them.'

  Lucette frowned and her fine eyes flashed. Was this woman daring to suggest -

  'Where?' said Lucette. It was a challenge. One did not live next to a fighter such as Lucien without some of the trademarks rubbing off.

  But enigmatically, the woman only said, 'Seek and ye shall find.' And so passed on down the street.

  Lucette sat under a portico to pet a pair of white rabbits. She told them about Lucien, and once about the child they had had to leave behind them, and then she wept. The rabbits were patient, and dried her tears on their fur.

  Eventually Lucette rose and went on alone, determined to search every street and park, every room and cupboard of Heaven. She did so. Up stairs she hurried, over bridges under which ran the sapphire streams of Paradise, scattered with flowers and ducks. Into high bell-towers she went, and from the tallest roofs of all she gazed into rosy distances, between the flight paths of the angels. She did not grow tired. There could be no tiredness. But she grew unsure, she grew uneasy. Now and then she asked someone, once she even asked an angel, who stood calmly on a pillar some feet over her head. But no one could aid her. Lucien? Who was Lucien? She was accustomed, was Lucette, to being married to a famous man. It added to her sense of outrage and sadness that they did not know him.

  Though there was no time, yet her search of Heaven took a lot of it.

  In the end, it seemed to her she had visited every inch.

  Finally she sought a gate, and walked out of it into the clouds. She turned her back on Bliss. It was not bliss, if her love was not to be there with her.

  An infinity of sky stretched away and away. Lucette moved across it, still searching, and the glow of the ethereal city faded behind her.

  Like an… illusion.

  On the astral plain, though illusions may be frequent, one does not sleep, let alone turn in one's sleep; neither does one do so in annihilation. Nevertheless, in a manner of speaking, D'Antoine did

  'turn' in his 'sleep'.

  It was as if, determined to wake up at a particular hour, he now partly surfaced from deep slumber to ask himself, drowsily
, unwillingly, 'Is it time, yet?' But apparently it was not yet time. With a - metaphorical

  - grunt, the Lion who no longer remembered he had been the Lion sank down once more into the cosy arms of oblivion, burrowed, nestled, and was gone again.

  The demon whose turn it was on the spit with Heros stared at him quizzically.

  'Don't you find all this,' said the demon, 'a bit samey?'

  'Being tortured, do you mean? I suppose, as torturer, you might find it so. We can swap places if you like.'

  'You miss the point,' said the demon.

  Heros eyed the demon's pitchfork. 'Not always.'

  As it had turned out, the lascivious fiery swing was not the only appliance to which Heros had been subjected. He had suffered many more stringent punishments. Although strangely enough, only when he himself began to consider the lack of them. But doubtless that was merely the prescience of guilt. Strangely too, more strangely in fact, even the worst of the tortures seemed rather hollow. This one, for example, of being slowly roasted alive, stabbed the while at suitable junctures by the pitchfork -somehow it was difficult to retain the sense of agony. One's mind unaccountably wandered. One had to remember to writhe. It was not that it did not hurt. It hurt abominably. And yet -

  'I apologize,' said Heros, 'if I don't seem properly attentive. No fault of yours, I assure you.'

  'Perhaps,' said the demon, 'yours?'

  'Oh, undoubtedly mine.'

  'Perhaps,' said the demon, 'you shouldn't be here.'

  The spit had stopped revolving. The roasting flames grew pale.

  'I can't think where else.'

  Try,' said the demon.

  Heros frowned. Now one thought of it, this was the first occasion one of the minions of Hell had held a conversation with one. Since his bonds had disappeared, Heros sat up and looked about him. Hell seemed oddly inactive, and dull, as if it were cooling down, a truly appalling idea. Weary spirals of old smoke, as if from something as mundane as burnt pastry, crawled upwards from the cold grey obsidian rocks. Nothing else moved. When Heros turned to the communicative demon, it too was gone.