Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Bloodmantle

  The Gorgon

  The Tree: A Winter’s Tale

  I Was Guillotined Here

  Crying in the Rain

  Elle est trois (La Mort)

  Nicholas

  The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn

  A Madonna of the Machine

  Red as Blood

  The Rakshasa

  Bite Me Not or Fleur de Fur

  By Crystal Light Beneath One Star

  La Reine Blanche

  Sweet Grapes

  The Tenebris Malgraph

  Black as a Rose

  Rachel

  Down Below

  White as Sin, Now

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  About the Author

  Copyright

  BLOODMANTLE

  The forests of the mind are benighted, dark and dazzling places. Things wander there that shine, and burn, and bite.

  Much of my writing, long and short, begins with nothing more — or less — than a feeling. The nearest I can come to describing this is to relate it to those curious unremembered memories, triggered maybe by a scent, or a certain seasonal light. Bloodmantle started in just that way, a sensation. Then quickly followed the notion of Roman Lupercal as a werewolf-finding feast. Wolves are creatures that live most definitely in my mind forests. I meet them with the primitive and often irrational wolf-fear, but also in fascinated love.

  The girl in the red cloak of course most of us know. Innocence can be cruel.

  February, the wolf month, is also the colour of wolves. And through the pale browns and greys and whites of it, something so very red can be seen from a long way off.

  In that fashion then, he saw her, coming down among the slopes of the damp and leafless woods. She passed by the old altar with its wrapper of ivy, the strips of hide hanging over it from the trees above. She crossed the stream by the old stones, carefully, so as not to get her little shoes wet. But the rain, which had earlier drenched the woods, beaded her long dark hair, and the fine palla she wore. The palla was so dense and rich a red, sight seemed to sink into it, it drowned and made vision drunk, as only natural colours were supposed to do. It was altogether of a hue that had no place in the wood, making everything else dim and unreal.

  Having come over the stream, she could not avoid seeing him in turn as he emerged between the trees and stood there, looking at her. She was not apparently startled by him, though he was an interesting apparition, clothed, in the wintry day, only in hairy skins that were belted by a twisted briar. His own hair was long and shaggy, but his face clean-shaven and beautifully chiselled, as was his body. He too was the February colour, silver-brown, his skin, his hair, and his eyes like brown water with a silver rim.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he said to her. ‘And why did you dye your cloak with blood?’

  ‘Not blood,’ she answered haughtily. ‘Scarlet that the ships bring from the East.’

  ‘I serve the god in the woods,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do,’ said she.

  ‘You must submit.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Then you offend the god.’

  ‘I care nothing for your god. I have my own. I am a Christian,’ said the girl in the red palla.

  ‘Yes, I have heard of him,’ said the young man who served Lycaean Pan. He spoke indifferently. The priests had marked him, he had a wolf soul that had shown itself during the ritual, grinning like a wolf with strong white teeth. He roamed through the woods, sacred to Faunus Lupercal, sleeping in dead trees, bathing in dew, shaving with slate, eating beetles, and hares with the life-hotness still in their meat, drinking from the fountains of the rocks, dancing under the full moon with wild hoarse howls and shrieks. It had always been this way, his kind in this place. And if she did not know it, the girl, she was a fool. And if she did know, why else was she here save to tempt her fate?

  ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘submit. Or I can pull you down and have you anyway.’

  She neither ran nor trembled; she went no nearer to him.

  So then he came up to her.

  ‘What does the needle do with the pin?’ he said. ‘The pin has a round knob and a piercing shaft. The needle has an eye. One goes through the other. Thread the needle with the pin.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the girl, ‘but you will be sorry.’

  Then she opened her scarlet mantle. She was naked under it. She lay down on the ground on her hair and the red stuff, and he lay down on top of her. No sooner had he possessed her — with difficulty, for she was a virgin, and hurt him — than something terrible occurred. The folds of the palla began to move and stretch and reach out, and before he knew what was happening, they had folded up over him and covered him and buried him, like the petals of some huge poppy.

  The sensation was at first not unpleasant, then it became horrible and fearful. The great palla settled down on him and all his energy was drawn away into it, as into the body of the girl. They were together a blood-red plant that consumed him…

  Later, much later, when the sun was going down through the woods, only a patch of rusty moisture showed on the earth, and by moonrise, this too was gone.

  ‘The lupin is the wolf flower. Why?’

  ‘Because it’s hairy. And once there were blue wolves. They were born in nests high in the trees.’

  ‘Men,’ said my grandmother, ‘and wolves, were all one race, in the beginning. Then there had to be changes. There began to be a tribe that had only the heads of wolves, and the bodies of men, though they were shaggy-haired all over. But all wolves have human eyes. That’s the difficulty. Men see it and they say, “These are men disguised as animals.” Men have always been afraid of their own kind, but daren’t admit it. Then they see the eyes of wolves and it gives them an excuse. That is why men hate wolves.’

  ‘I think wolves are handsome,’ said my young cousin, George. ‘I wouldn’t mind being a wolf. Could I be
?’

  ‘Very likely,’ said my grandmother, spending her double meaning only on me.

  ‘But you didn’t finish the story,’ I said. ‘What happened to the wolf-boy? And the girl in the red cloak?’

  My grandmother shrugged. ‘Where’s your imagination gone? That was in the days when the beast gods were respected, although the Christians were driving the old ways out. That girl wasn’t a girl, but a demon conjured up by some priest. The boy thought he had the protection of his own god, Wolfish Pan. But Pan was already dead. The Christians killed him. And that’s another story. Now, off home, before it starts to get dark.’

  My smaller cousin, Bettany, began to cry. She said there would be wolves in the wood, and they would devour her.

  George, a cruel, pretty child, sly, looking under his lashes, declared it was the demon girl who would cause us trouble.

  Grandmother said there were no such things any more as demons, and that, otherwise, there had been no wolf seen in our countryside for fifty years. Besides, wolves ran away if you shouted at them. She had done this as a girl.

  I held Bettany’s hand, though it was wet from her snifflings. But George skipped ahead of us, slashing viciously at various bushes. The shadows were lengthening, but the wood was still bisected with broad avenues of light. It was April weather, not February, birds sang and waking squirrels sprang over the budding branches. We crossed the stream by the bridge, and I looked for an altar the other side but of course there was nothing left of it. It was easy to fancy, for all that, a slim brown shape now here, now there, between the tangle of trunks and sprays of wild vine.

  Beyond the wood, the lane ran across the fallow fields, by the deserted park and the dilapidated houses of rich people long since dead and forgotten, and so uphill to the outskirts of our town.

  During the night, I dreamed that a wolf had given birth to me, high up in a tall tree of colossal boughs. By moonlight, the wolf was a soft milky blue, with wonderful sad eyes.

  It was a melancholy, almost a mystical, dream.

  Near morning, something very dreadful happened. I was roused by an awful crying note, over and over, so repetitious I thought it was something mechanical. The whole house seemed in uproar. Then, through the window, I saw one of the men rush out, and presently return with the doctor. George was very sick, my aunt told me, and put weeping Bettany, whom I was irritatedly powerless to comfort, with me into my room. Endless comings and goings next, we excluded from them, and finally silence.

  A week later, I, with the rest, was dressed in black and taken to a grave-side along the hill. Little George had died of an unpronounceable illness that years subsequently I discovered to be meningitis.

  In the following months, the family cracked like a trampled eggshell. Soon I was sent away to school. Other things, events, and my maturity, drove me further and further off to exile, to the cities and the south.

  I did not visit the town for many years, by which time not one of my kindred remained there, and my rather improper, story-telling grandmother had herself died. The ancient wood had been felled for the timber mills, and the encroaching roads and buildings of the town rolled over it.

  ‘You’ve come back at a bad time,’ said the old man, who thought he remembered me, but in fact only remembered the little girl I had been. ‘Something going on now, not nice.’

  ‘What is that?’

  But he would not tell a little girl. Later on, over midnight glasses of hot chocolate at the hotel, a sinister gossiping began between staff, regular guests, and the itinerants, among whom now I was numbered.

  ‘There’s been another.’

  ‘So there has.’

  ‘Oh, where?’

  ‘The same area as last time. But worse, much worse, this one.’

  ‘Is it true that they — ?’

  ‘Oh, yes, quite true.’ Then, seeing me lean closer: ‘The throats are torn out and the bodies mauled. Dogs, you might say, or something escaped. But there’s the other thing — they wouldn’t do it. It’s not an animal. Or if it is, then that’s not all it is.’

  Although there are streets now, and hard concrete, over the wooded tracks, and the stream runs in a canal with seats on the banks and refuse in the water, and the trees have gone to copses on neat lawns, even so, the town keeps its dreams and nightmares of legends. They know what they think this is. Only the alien traveller would scoff.

  ‘A month to the day they moved the cemetery. Lifting the stones… Everything was done properly, the priests saw to it. But there. The old Vaudron family, they were here from heaven knows when. The old lady, you knew her? Some of her tales, now, the children used to shake with fear for weeks — ’

  ‘And him only seven years of age, and dead in a night, calling out in pain. Awful cries, like something lost, or a whistle — ’

  The Vaudron family was my uncle’s; they were talking about my little cousin, George.

  ‘Well,’ said the receptionist, the doors being closed, coming to drink her own chocolate beside me. ‘There’s a police patrol now every night, and a lot of good it does. Last month, they saw someone, a man, very late, along by the canal. They’re not sure, he may be innocent, but they’ve found a dead woman — and there’s something about him. They follow. Then he passes under a street lamp. Now there’s a girl, looking out of her window, waiting for somebody, maybe. He goes by, across the street, under the lamp — and she starts screaming. He vanishes down an alley. The police run after him, can’t find him. Some of them go up the stairs and hammer on the door of the girl’s room. Was it a signal? It seems not. That girl, all she can say is, A man, but he had the face of a wolf. And they have to take her to the sanatorium, where she is to this minute. She lies there and screams that she saw a man with a wolf’s head and a wolf’s face.’

  ‘Do you believe she saw that, really, madame?’ I said.

  The receptionist shrugged. ‘Why not? Is it so strange? In my grandmother’s day it wouldn’t have surprised a soul. Now we have television, which would have upset her no end.’

  I thought about my own grandmother, just young enough to have seen such witchcraft as television in. She was still renowned, it would seem, for her stories. I thought about little Cousin George, dying of meningitis. I couldn’t accept that if any essence of us persists after death, it could degenerate into something so arcanely banal as a murdering ghost or werewolf. But on the other hand, perhaps some sort of subsidiary impression had been left over from the physical energy of the male child who liked wolves. Like a paw-print in wet cement.

  A couple of nights later, I happened to run out of cigarettes, and so I walked down to the neon café and bought a packet, and drank a fine. Then, not wanting to go back to read or sleep, I began to stroll along by the canal. It was just after midnight, but the moon was high, completely round and slicked with white, so the street lights were nearly superfluous. A clear-edged bluish glow lay everywhere, and the shadows were only transparently black. Stars stung the sky. There was nobody about, not here, away from the cafés of the main street. It had occurred to me that, in the era of my childhood, this must have been the route to my grandmother’s house in the wood: this the stream, though the old bridge was gone and I had already crossed over by the new one, and trees invisibly all round, in the blue light. Ploughed under now, everything, house and all, along with the rich people’s villas, and the concrete poured over, paw-marked or otherwise.

  I smoked a cigarette, and when I finished, tossed the butt into the moon-lit water. Then, turning, I saw a man under one of the lamps, leaning there, watching me.

  I walked over to him. Perhaps he was looking for company, but the prostitutes who might occasionally have touted here no longer did so. Then, without shock, I recognised him. It was not from the past, but the story.

  Of course, I had never believed my little cousins would grow up, either of them, any more than I thought I would myself. This may be the reason why children are often not offended by the death of their peers. Five years older than
he, I had found him easy to leave behind. Yet, there was a family resemblance; mostly he looked like the wolf-boy in the legend. Handsome and curious, those ash and amber colours, veiled by moonlight, and the pale, beautiful lupine eyes. It was a human head, if less human than anything I had ever seen before, less human than the face of an animal. Nor was he dressed in skins, but as one would expect of a poor young man, perhaps a student. Was he nineteen years old? Probably. I was twenty-four, that would be right.

  I went up to him, and I said, ‘Good-evening, George.’

  He smiled, gorgeously. The hot eyes did not join in, but all the rest of the face, the body muscles, seemed to do so.

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘We’re related, shall I say?’

  ‘Is that,’ he asked, ‘why you’re wearing red?’

  It had happened, as it happened I had run out of cigarettes, that the coat I had brought with me was of the reddest, most scarlet wool, a coat of blood.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Remind me of your name, since you know mine,’ he said.

  I told him, adding that until I was twelve, we had lived in the same house, with my uncle, his father. He looked uninterested rather than dismayed. He said, ‘Ah, that. But that’s past. Well, will you come and have a drink with me?’

  I said I would.

  Naturally he did not, taking me lightly by the arm, walk me back towards the bright busy cafés, but away along the canal, and down a side-street. Soon we had reached some closed shops and then a rough empty lot with a ruined, boarded house, and many trees. He led me to the house, through the thickets, which were full of fallen stones. I had no notion who it belonged to, it had been built, and abandoned, after I left the town. Several had bivouacked there since. We crept through some loose boards into a cold, moon-stripped salon. A fire was ready-laid from branches, cones, newspapers, in the grate, regardless of the state of the chimney. This fire he immediately lit with matches. From under some bricks he took two bottles of wine, a cheese wrapped in oil-cloth, and a bag of apples. We feasted solemnly. We had done so as children.