Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  The light there was harmonious and soft, the hearth blazing. Like every other fire in the house, after three hours, it would die down, and the igniter must be pressed. Then it would blaze again. Then die again. Then blaze again — on and on.

  The drapes were unclosed, and on the pale backdrop of the snow-paved garden, the tree stood immense, its huge arms outflung.

  Araige took coffee, and rolled a blue cigarette.

  Marsh sat over a bulb of brandy, his eyes hard with scar tissue.

  Stemyard’s three cats had jumped onto the wide windowsill, where they sat in a neat line, looking out at the snow.

  ‘Isn’t this cosy,’ said Jenver unforgivably. Only Marcusine realised the crack had been made from nerves.

  They looked out at the tree.

  ‘You know,’ said Marcusine, ‘we never did come to an agreement about the tree. Marsh, how do you feel?’

  ‘You mean I’m permitted to have feelings?’ he said bitterly, embarrassing them further. ‘At least, to have them, if not to mention them verbally.’

  ‘Marsh, I think we all seem to be rather on edge,’ said Marcusine. ‘Jenver was impossible. He didn’t mean to be.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Jenver. ‘I’m sorry, Marsh, Stemyard. Is there anyone else I’ve upset?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I could contact someone about the tree tomorrow,’ said Marcusine. ‘If we can all agree.’

  ‘But you know we can’t,’ said Stemyard.

  ‘What really is your objection, Stem?’

  ‘It’s always been there.’

  ‘I know it’s very old,’ said Marcusine calmly. ‘But it truly is potentially very dangerous. It blocks the light. And the roots are almost certainly damaging the foundations. If it fell — ’

  ‘I won’t let you — ’ said Stemyard.

  ‘Won’t let me? Well, perhaps we should take a vote. What do we all think?’

  ‘The tree or not the tree,’ said Jenver. ‘Let’s get rid of the godawful thing. I hate it and I’m sure the feeling’s mutual. I have plenty of enemies, without adding a tree to the list.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stemyard, ‘Jenver would agree with his sister.’

  ‘But not for the same reasons. Hers are logical. Mine are superstitious.’

  ‘Then you ought to know the superstition that to cut down a healthy tree invites a curse.’

  ‘Oh, Stemyard,’ said Marcusine, ‘we’ve been all through this before.’

  ‘Have we? Then did I tell you before the thing I found out about our parents, yours and mine? And Marsh’s mother?’

  Shoh, the spotted cat, hissed like an erupting pan. Set, usually the hisser, turned his back.

  ‘All right, Stem,’ said Marcusine. ‘What strange occult detail did you find out about our joint parents?’

  Stemyard took a deep breath, her slight body swelling, rather in the manner of certain birds or lizards, enlarging themselves with air in order to warn adversaries.

  ‘My father kept a diary. When I was about ten I found it, and I read it. The week they planned to make the crossing in the air-ship, and have the party, that week they planned something else, too. They planned to have the tree cut down when they came back.’

  Jenver rattled his cup.

  ‘But they didn’t get round to it, so what happened to them can hardly have been retributive.’

  ‘It could have been preventative,’ grated Stemyard, with unqualified emphasis. Her cheeks flamed, and she looked, Jenver noted, almost interesting. What a weird young woman she was. ‘You see what I mean, do you?’ she rasped on, carried by her tide. ‘The ship — they burned. It stopped them.’

  Marcusine poured herself a cognac, hesitated, and poured one for Stemyard too.

  ‘Here, drink that. I believe you’re saying that the tree — our poor old monster out there — killed our parents to prevent their killing it. So that we too (oh dear, Stem) will suffer the same fate if we make the same horticultural decision.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Stemyard was now morosely defiant. ‘It wouldn’t harm the house. It’s used to the house, respects the age of the house, even though the house is a mere child to the tree. A symbiotic relationship, perhaps, on some level. But if we left the house it might somehow do — something. They were all together, weren’t they? And a great distance off, in the sky.’

  ‘Good Lord, trapped together for ever and ever and amen,’ said Jenver. ‘Unable to leave. But quite able to signal for help. We could call in the tree people, whoever they are, whoever cuts down trees. Just call them, and sit back and wait.’

  Stemyard bit her lip, staring at him.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Then there’d have to be some other way.’

  ‘I wonder what. Green tendrils by night, sucking out our blood. Replacing it with green tendrils…’

  ‘Marsh,’ Stemyard said loudly, ‘do you remember what my father wrote? They did agree about it, didn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Marsh. He could hear Araige quietly crying in her chair. He felt uncomfortable now, as well as wounded, and rather afraid. Oh, not of the idiotic tree-curse, not of that. Of real life. He had almost been included in the party on the air-ship. A mild attack of influenza had cancelled his place. He could not recall if they had planned anything about the tree. The tree had not concerned him, then. It was simply there, as the house was, the family. And outside in the world, the young men with their greeting eyes. In those days, mirrors had not offended him. If he had told the same joke twice, entranced, his companions had still laughed at it.

  Old fool. Bloody decrepit old fool.

  He should have been more careful. The snake under the stone. It might have been better if he had been on that blasted burning ship, he thought, with abysmal, hopeless resentment, and hated himself the more for this concept of martyrdom.

  Stemyard found herself outnumbered and on the verge of tears. She loathed all of them, and herself also, for resorting to fantastic theories before them. Such ideas could only harden their closed minds further against her and her plea.

  She was frightened by the thought that the tree might really be destroyed. It was an awful fear. She did not even try to put it into proportion.

  ‘I’m going up,’ she said. ‘To read.’ To re-enter the Renascence, where you are not. ‘Good night.’

  She went.

  Presently the cats followed her.

  Araige lay in her chair, now smoking, now crying, now still, now crying again, miles away.

  Marsh lit a cigar.

  Jenver poured himself more coffee.

  Marcusine stood by the window looking at the tree.

  She felt old, far older than Marsh, old as the tree itself, maybe. What type of tree was it? Did any of them know? Something might be done with the stump. Vines would provide camouflage. A marble shape, an aerial statue, might stand on it, making a feature of it.

  Jenver opened the book he had brought from the library. He had lost his place. This passage seemed familiar; he had obviously read it before. The next page then…

  He glanced at Marsh, who was dozing, the cigar dead between his fingers.

  Damn. He should have been patient with Marsh. But Marsh was so touchy. What, after all, had Jenver said? Nothing really. Only the truth. Damn.

  Jenver probably needed, he thought, to get away from the house, the family. Even from Marcusine, maybe. But both their escapes had always been alone. For the pleasure of returning and being together again?

  The fascinated love he felt for his sister was already sweeping over him in waves. Wherever he went, whoever he was with, he would come back to her.

  Marsh woke with a dull sense of deprecation. He had fallen asleep in the coffee-room, and been abandoned there. It was the chill of the dead fire which had finally alerted him. He pressed the button with irritation, and the flames sprang to attention.

  Yes, they had all gone. A wasted evening. And for sure, he would never sleep in bed now. It was after o
ne o’clock.

  He rose, grunting and dry-mouthed. He poured himself a cup of the stale, cooling coffee and drank it wincing, looking about. Almost all trace was gone of everyone; he might have been alone in the house. Only Araige had left her tinsel scarf, as usual, and a scatter of blue cigarette papers, and a scrap of writing on a page torn from a note-pad. Crazy quarrel, it read. That was all. A comment on the whole evening, probably.

  Marsh went up to his suite and ran the tub. He lay in it, trying to relax, aware it was useless.

  He considered Jenver, the vicious little beast. There had been a hint of movement as Marsh passed his door, serene preparations for sleep. Well, that could be remedied.

  If Marsh must lose sleep, he need not do so quite alone.

  He grinned maliciously, catching sight in the mirror of grey, loose skin and yellow teeth.

  In his sitting-room, he selected a Cibienzi cantata, magnificent and pealing, and set the player.

  The glorious paean roared out, and Marsh grinned.

  Not long after, the door across the corridor slammed with some violence. Footsteps went towards the stairs.

  Marsh grinned maliciously.

  Araige dreamed burning birds fell on an icy river, and she ran along it, after a man who forever walked away.

  Stemyard dreamed of formlessness, surrounded by cats snoring and twitching, a furry doss-house.

  Marcusine dreamed, with an overpowering sense of terror and hot revulsion, that she was making love to her brother.

  The sky lightened behind the tree, and the sun rose. The weather had changed. The weather, the world, these were always capable of alteration, progression of some kind. But the tree stood rooted to the earth, grey slush rushing and shifting now about its claws. By midday the snow would all be gone, the sky a smoky innocent blue. But the tree would remain, fixed, living, experiencing perhaps minor varieties — buds, leaves, fall, frost; winds and snows and night and day; the movement of things in the air and on the ground, the growth or decay of time. Yet, throughout such changes, unchanged. Always. Every day, no matter how different, was the same for the tree. The boredom of its colossal life was oppressive.

  Marsh, at last asleep, dreamed of a sinking liner.

  Jenver did not remember his dreams.

  Jenver woke up and saw, across the darkened room, a long white finger of window. In the window, on the slope of the garden, Marcusine was standing in the melting snow. And beyond Marcusine, the tree. The tree was immense and winter-black, its huge arms outflung at the sky.

  Marcusine turned and came back to the window.

  Jenver touched the igniter and the hearth blazed.

  ‘Well, good morning,’ said Marcusine.

  ‘Don’t ask why I’m here; I’ll tell you. Marsh was playing one of his ghastly cantatas un poco roaro.’

  ‘And you hate soundproofing your room.’

  ‘And he knows I do.’

  ‘Speak to him.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s his house, too. Confound him.’

  He looked at his sister. Her dress was holly-berry red, a winter colour. He explored her face, the sharp, slender cheekbones, darkly polished eyes.

  ‘The tree,’ she said, ‘it really must come down.’

  ‘Must it?’

  ‘The roots are well out of the ground. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Yes. Besides, it makes everything pitch black, even in summer.’

  Marcusine knelt by the fire.

  Upstairs, Marsh felt the tugging swirl of water as the liner vanished.

  Stemyard was awake, brushing her bobbed hair briskly, leaning to the window.

  Marsh heard distant crying, and leviathanic bubbles rose from the water.

  Araige lay in bed, thinking of the birds. She would feed them today, on the marble bird-table whose top reminded her so much of a frozen river.

  ‘Blast you, Cat!’ Stemyard exclaimed, as one of her loving companions of the night, the purring Shoh, bit her.

  Jenver, who had slept all night with the tree facing him through the library window, over the sloping lawn, wondered how old the tree was, and shivered.

  I WAS GUILLOTINED HERE

  There were a number of side-shoots that came out of my two-year research into the French Revolution. Most of these have got into print, as the historical novel itself so far, has not.

  From the table outside the café, it was no trouble to look into and all about the Square. At the statues and the drooping flags, hangdog today under the windless, colourless sky; but not far off the French traffic roared and rushed in all directions.

  I tried to think what it must have been like that day, that other day, when I was here before. Not that I believed it, but even so…

  Mr Ross kept interrupting.

  ‘Yes. I see. But nevertheless — ’

  Spry and dapper was Mr Ross, in his youthful early fifties. I had met his type before, and he thought he had met mine. To me he was not attractive and I didn’t want him, but in the way of business I was obliged to go with him this afternoon to the Illustrators’ Exhibition, and thence to dinner, and I knew there would then be difficulties, sexual difficulties of some sort. After all, he did not see himself as I saw him; he would long ago have put a bullet through his brain, as indeed would so many of us, if we were granted that alien perspective. I had already been forced to hint heavily at my preference for men much younger than myself.

  And over there, in the Square, I had been guillotined, late in the eighteenth century.

  The seed of this had started a year ago, at a party in Manhattan. The small, elegant woman had been persuaded to ‘have a session’, and we had asked, not unreasonably, Well, then, who had we been? And I, primed by the wine and the vodka-tonics, said: ‘I only want to know if I was ever famous.’ And was accordingly told that once I had tangled with the French Revolution, stood raging in the wrong places about the wrong issues, worse, written about it and published. Tried and condemned. Riding to the execution in company with Danton, no less. Died over there, somewhere, under the keen edge of Madame.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t agree with the Americans over this lay-out,’ said Mr Ross. ‘The format was perfectly all right. Will you have another?’

  I said I would.

  The waiter came. As Mr Ross made demands on him, showing off his excellently accented yet unmistakably Anglicised French, I thought about it and what it must have been like that day, over there, somewhere.

  Standing up in the tumbril shouting at the crowd, and Danton saying, ‘Leave it, fool. They’re not listening. Leave it. Bloody rabble. Let them stew.’

  It was not hard, educated in the era and armed with a scatter of facts, to evolve the whole event. Even not believing in reincarnation, there was no harm, was there?

  Ah, mon amour. He was younger than I am now, that man I had been, male where now I was female. With all that implies. A dark young man, slightly stammering when afraid or excited. He must have stammered a lot, those last days.

  ‘Leave it,’ says Danton, big, ugly, splendid, his lion’s head against the peerless sky. ‘Bloody rabble. They learn nothing. Let them stew.’

  Yes, that sky. A sweet, clear blue. Not a cloud. A lovely day. A day to go on a picnic or boating, or to make love.

  But the cart stops, and here is the queue. And here we queue up to die.

  It was like this before when they got hold of the aristos. Now the monster was unleashed. Look at it. Not even like cattle herded mercilessly to the abattoir, more like meat carcasses, trussed and flung forward on the face, the belly, as if to vomit, over the black step. For there it is, obliquely set against the sweet, young sky of love, that black thing, rusty with blood. Each time the blade comes down the earth seems to shake, and every time, we shuffle nearer.

  Adieu, mes amis.

  What did I feel? Why can’t I remember? Why do I feel nothing now? It should be I would grow cold and sick, cry, faint, just being here. I should be unable to cross that Square, all decked with drooping flags. But I ha
ve already crossed the damned Square, and felt nothing.

  And when it was my turn, pushed, manhandled, tied, lifted, flung down — what? The hiatus before the blade falls, was it filled by prayer, or mere terror, or just bewilderment, that sea of faces swimming there before me. And the blow, when it came, not pain but concussion only, and whiteness.

  Whatever, my love, you ended with your head in a basket.

  Oh of course I’m in love with him, that young man I was. Ultimate incest.

  Mr Ross got up. We really should be going.

  I smiled at him. There is something I do unintentionally, with my eyes, with men, even when I don’t like them. I know I do this, not how to stop it. And always we end up in difficulties. It comes, I think, at base, from being so afraid of men. Odd, if I have been one. Or, not so odd, maybe.

  We walk into and out of the Square, and there is a glint of sun, over that way, towards Notre Dame.

  We will go and look at the pictures and meet various people. And then we will go for drinks with the agent. And then Mr Ross will take me to dinner. He liked good food, also, they say, the one I was.

  Later, there will be the nasty, prissy, lying tussle, in the taxi, or in the hotel lift. If I’m lucky, only a tussle of words. You really are awfully nice, but I don’t think this is right. We have a business relationship. And never mix business with pleasure. And of course it would be a pleasure, since you’re such an attractive man. But truly, I have this kink for sixteen-year-olds.

  ‘You’re a very understanding woman,’ Mr Ross says, now.

  But no matter what Mr Ross does, it’s not so awful is it? Once you’ve been guillotined, you can take this sort of thing in your stride.

  CRYING IN THE RAIN

  Chernobyl impregnated me not only with some of its poisons, but with this story. (We and our environment seem almost daily doused with careless spillages of one lethal sort or another.) The lack of official information, the unbelievable reassurances that attended the passage of that ‘Cloud’, inspired me to rage and fear. Later I passed into accepting helplessness. No one should live in constant terror, but also it can’t be right to accept the unacceptable. If the mind is the only available weapon, use that. So I wrote Crying in the Rain.