Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  The female child sat unblinkingly on in the flat container of moonlight, watching him.

  He saw her only a moment. Then he slept again.

  In the morning she was gone, and when he spoke of her he was told he had been dreaming.

  The attic was often full also of the smell of cabbage soup, which Etiens recalled with slight loathing, aware that as a child of seven it had not offended him.

  Adult head down against the rain, he crossed a square. He thought of La Voleuse, the Thief.

  He saw her many times after that.

  At first, she remained near to the window, and was expressionless. Then she came somewhat closer and she began to have an expression. Suddenly she smiled at him, and he became alert to her. Her skin was brownish, her hair a bleached rag. Her clothes, too, were bleached of colour, and ragged, but in a most formal way, as if holes had been carefully cut in them rather than torn or worn. In some respects she was like a tiny scandalised version of a Pierrette, and indeed now she was actually clowning. She scampered about the attic noiselessly, balanced on her hands, cartwheeled, turned a somersault, all with an astonished insouciance, so he had to stifle his laughter with an edge of the blanket. It was only when she was very close that he noticed her eyes were almost all white, except for the two small black dots of the pupils. Her eyes frightened him for a moment, making him think of those of a blind dog on the Rue Dantine. But, as she could obviously see perfectly well, his fear soon vanished.

  After a long time of performing for him, she laughed soundlessly and ran away straight through the attic window and was gone. This did not seem peculiar. He would assume, if it were essential for him to assume anything, that she had a rope, and by means of this climbed down from the balcony. She was so agile that, even in adult recollection, it appeared partly feasible.

  The convalescent child was disappointed. He had wanted to join in the play. Will she come back?

  As if to tantalise him, she failed to return for a number of nights. He was by now at that stage of convalescence where he was horribly bored, still rather too weak to be about and occupy himself, but mentally fretful, anxious for diversion. And tonight his parents had left him alone, for he was thought well enough now to fend for himself. It was a wedding they had gone to. There would be gateaux and wine. His mother had promised to bring him home a bag of pastries, but he had come to distrust her promises.

  He had been dozing when he heard the clock strike from across the river: nine o’clock. The stove was unlit and it was cold as well as dark. The child Etiens prepared to huddle more deeply in the blankets, when he saw the other child, the pale Pierrette, step through the window. And for the first time he realised that now, as in all other instances, the window had been, was, closed.

  He wanted to ask her what she meant by it, but she forestalled him, dancing towards him in her neatly punctured rags. He was so amused, so captivated, he said nothing. The reward was immediate. She capered. She performed incredible tricks. She bent backwards in a white hoop, then elevated herself, balancing first on her hands, next only on her fingertips. Coming down she sprang — her spring was like a cat’s — and landed on the table-top. She spun, whirled over the edge, arrived on the back of a chair and ran along it — sprang again, and came to rest, on the ball of one foot, standing on the stove like a statue on a pedestal, her arms outflung. And from this position, motionless and in total equilibrium, she offered him the second reward. She beckoned.

  He could hardly believe it. He had been invited to join in the fun. He knew she would teach him her tricks. They looked so easy that, although so far, practising alone and without strength in a corner, he had not mastered them, he was certain that with her guidance, her mere approval, he would learn them all.

  As he emerged from the bed and stepped out on the floor of the attic, his friend smiled rapturously at him. Then, when he went to her, she flew from the stove and melted out again through the window.

  He was dismayed. Was she deserting him, at the very moment when he looked for involvement, enlightenment?

  Then he saw she was still there, on the balcony now, beyond the wing of the broken shutter and the grimy glass, her whiteness like a lamp against the dark winter sky and the army of darkly marching roofs. And again, urgently now, she beckoned him.

  He managed to open the window. Stepping out beside her, he felt the cold strike him like a hand, the hand of his father in rage. Pierrette laughed, without a sound. She darted upward, and suddenly she was standing on the thin curving rail of the wrought-iron balustrade. Soundlessly laughing, she ran up and down it, up and down, and despite the cold, he was entranced. Behind her flying hair like clawed string, the stars shrieked with frosty light. They seemed to snag on her hair, become caught in it, and two white stars had become her eyes.

  At the far end of the rail, where one piece of forgotten washing still hung, she poised. With her outflung hand she showed him what she wanted him to do.

  Climb up, climb up, follow me along the balustrade. This was what her hand, her face — tensed and nodding — the spikes of her hair, the stick of her body, were prompting him to do. Even her rags leaned out towards him, beckoning, explaining how simple it was.

  He hesitated. Not out of caution, exactly; out of a sort of wonderment. As in miraculous dreams, it never occurred to him before how facile such an act could be. Of course it was simple, straightforward.

  As if to prove it to him, she ran back along the balustrade. The rail was perhaps an inch wide, and where it curved it had buckled slightly. Her feet skimmed over it, sure and prehensile, and he knew that whatever she did he would be able, presently, to do.

  But he was careful as he climbed over the flowerpots and up onto the balustrade, concerned, not of falling into the yard five floors below, but of tumbling back onto the balcony.

  With the same care, he stood upright, his bare feet gripping the iron, which was icy and burned them, and pressed into them like a wire, but this did not bother him.

  Pierrette was in ecstasy. She clapped her hands, she dazzled. Come, do as I do.

  He heard, from a long way away, an agonised gasp from the room behind him. Initially it did not concern him, but then he understood in some surprise, that he was already losing his balance.

  He looked at Pierrette to see what he should do, but Pierrette was smiling, smiling at him. Could it be she had failed to note what was happening?

  There ensued a long, long inexplicable second as he felt the rail of the balustrade turning under his foot, and the whole world tilting sideways. Automatically he was floundering now, his arms thrown wide, but this was a reflex. In fact he was bemused still as to what had taken place.

  Even the stars were falling like rain away from him, and Pierrette going with them.

  And then there was a fearsome crash, an awful concussion. Stunned, he found himself in the midst of a burst of pressure and shouting.

  His father, too drunk to reason — for reason would have informed him he could not possibly reach the toppling child in time — had lunged towards the open window, half fallen into space himself, and grabbed his son back out of it. Both had plunged thereafter to the floor of the balcony in a welter of pots.

  The unique stink of wine on his father’s breath and the sound of his mother’s wailing, now released, demolished the child, who began to cry.

  ‘We should never have left him — never, never. He was walking in his sleep — ’

  Etiens saw, through his tears, she had forgotten to bring the pastries. Venturing to glance at the balcony, he found the white child had gone.

  Gone for good. He never saw her afterwards. But what, he might ask himself, and had done so from time to time, had she been, that apparition? Some dream of fever? Some ghostly thing inhabiting the attic, perhaps a child who had died there in similar circumstances, eager to see another fare as she had fared? Or a conjuration of the Devil, of Monsieur le Prince?

  The rhyme had told him. The rhyme knew, apparently. Lady Death, in her thr
ee modes — Elle est trois. Soit! Soit! Soit! Mais la Voleuse — Yes, what had Pierrette been but a thief, dressed like one, too, or the stagelike presentation of one. A thief of life who would have stolen existence from him by means of a trick.

  Etiens, turning a corner, caught himself saying the rhyme once more aloud, the rain entering his mouth with each sentence.

  She was three. Fine! Fine! Fine! But the Thief, the Seductress, and Madame Slaughterer — Ne cherchez pas.

  ‘Don’t seek them out,’ he said again. Why had he never repeated his macabre story to Armand? ‘Once, when I was seven… ’ Armand, though probably discrediting the truth of it, might well have been able to use such an idea. Or he himself, the painter — why had he never attempted to depict that terrifying child with her eyes of snow? Nothing but a sketch, tonight, and that swept away.

  Etiens checked, raising his head into the shattering tumult of the rain. He swore, but ritually. He had taken a wrong street and brought himself, not to his own lodging, but to that sprawling quarter of steps and crouching shops where France lived with his piano and whatever woman was foolish enough to indulge his parasitism. Looking about, Etiens beheld an alley, and along it the steep stair and the overhanging storey above, which housed the composer. There were lights burning.

  ‘Why am I here? What am I doing here? I feel no amazement at having come here. Do I intend to visit him at this hour of the night? He may not even be there — true, he left the café before me, but most likely he’s drinking elsewhere, or with a woman other than whichever woman is up there now, lamenting over his uninterest.)

  From the core of the rain and the dark, coincidentally from the overhanging storey that shelled in France’s room, a woman began frenziedly to scream.

  Leaving the Café Vule before the others, France had not immediately returned to his room above the alley. He had loitered for a few free drinks with a woman he knew, the draper’s widow, who lived behind the bourse. By keeping up a romantic fiction that he was almost inclined to go to bed with her — she was a plain, unappetising woman — France had gained many things for nothing, including a selection of astonishing neckties.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes before the gilded clock of Notre Dame aux Luminères struck midnight, however, he was toiling up the rickety stairs to the room Jeannette had struggled so thanklessly and ill-advisedly to maintain. He was very drunk, in a fog of drunkenness that frankly did not wish to see beyond itself. So, finding the door unlocked, he did not consider it very much. He himself, storming forth in an angry mood, had most probably left it so. What, after all, might it be anybody’s fortune to steal from him? Save the piano, too large and cumbersome for a common thief to shift down the vile staircase.

  The piano. His ‘Negro mistress’.

  A drunken sneering laugh burst from him. Quite so. His mistress. His cold amour who would render him only the music of others.

  He did not pause to light a lamp. Having slammed the door, he careened across the room and plunged his hands down on the keyboard in a blow. The discord jarred his ears, his very brain, and he let loose a string of oaths at her. (At her, why not? Why not?) This one female entity who did not court him or help him, and whom he could not dismiss as he had dismissed legions of women, even the submissive Jeannette, clinging like a wretched creeper. Even that bitch Clairisse, who understood him so well and used her understanding to prey on him — she too had been shown the door, and run out of it, weeping and threatening him. And here alone stood his real devil, on her four legs, bestially grinning her discoloured teeth.

  France sat down before her, a furious penitent in the darkness. There was only a glimmer, seeping in from a lighted window left unshuttered across the alley, whereby to find his way over the keys. Well then, a piece of bad-tempered Monsieur Beethoven would suit the occasion.

  As the chords crashed forth, he thought of neighbours wakened alongside and below, and grinned with malice.

  ‘Wake, wake, mes enfants! It is the crack of bloody doom.’

  Then, halfway through the Beethoven, he lost patience with it and left off.

  He squinted down at the keys and his hands clenched on them, and a trickle of notes went through his head. He started upright, listening, avid to follow the insistent impulse — and something distracted him, something at which he gazed, puzzled, mislaying the thread of melodic harmony, trying to detain it, trying also to make sense of what he saw, failing at both.

  The inadequate second-hand illumination falling in his room from the window had been describing one panel of the piano, a dim flush of light, which he himself sporadically shut out through the movements of his body, but now the light on the panel, undisturbed by him, was curiously dividing itself in two portions about an area of darkness.

  It was a singular, abstract darkness, a kind of hump, that slowly, incongruously — and quite formlessly — was rising upward, upward —

  France turned and came to his feet clumsily, upsetting the chair as he did so.

  There was really something there, across the room, a darkness darker than the darkness, and the open window behind it making it darker yet. It continued to rise up. He was peculiarly put in mind of dough rising in an oven.

  ‘Who is it?’ France demanded. Possibilities, laughable or unpleasant, suggested themselves. Instead of blundering forward to seize the intruder, he fumbled for a match. He considered perhaps Jeannette had come back to plead with him, or conceivably some creditor had lain in wait.

  The shape had reached its required elevation and was now in stasis. What was that? There had been a muddy flash, an indoor lightning against the rainy window.

  Then France had the match and struck it wildly.

  The flame exploded like the detonation of a born, then fell through the air, a blazing leaf, and went out. France was speechless. He had seen something he did not believe in, and his terror could not cry out. Nevertheless he was stumbling backwards, attempting to reach the door.

  He did not reach it.

  The screaming had stopped almost as soon as it began, but people had flung open windows and were glaring out into the night. At the end of the alley loomed a vehicle, shrouded in rain. And at the foot of the stairs leading to France’s room were two police, who refused to let Etiens by. A small crowd, others who inhabited the building, had gathered on the landing above, and eventually Etiens heard a ghastly moaning noise break out among these people overhead, and then the tramp of persons coming down.

  As he stood there, nauseated by apprehension and distress, Etiens was soon able to watch a white-faced young woman, rigid with an unnatural, maniacal composure, escorted by police out into the rain. He would learn from the newspapers in the morning that this had been Clairisse Gabrol, the former mistress of an impoverished composer who had ceased to care for her despite her gifts of money, and whom she had subsequently murdered. Her choice of weapon would cause some comment. In the gloom by the stair-foot, Etiens had not seen how her dress and her coat were patterned, here and there. But shortly the body was brought down on the first stage of its journey to the morgue. Even through the coverings, Etiens could not fail to remark the quantities of blood. In the doorway one of the policemen, who had been in the room above, doubled over and vomited helplessly into a puddle.

  The scene in the room would later be described as resembling a butcher’s shop. Etiens would read this sentence coldly. He would not paint for several months.

  Et Madame Tueuse —

  The neighbour whose cries had alerted Etiens as she entered for the first into France’s room had summoned the police. The insane piano recital had woken her; she had been on the very landing outside the pianist’s door, gathering herself to knock, and upbraid him — when a succession of unidentifiable yet strangely disturbing noises sent her instead to seek aid. She had not been able to explain her conviction that something evil had taken place. It was retentive though unconscious memory that had informed her. The analogy of the butcher’s shop had not been random, and she, who had had cause to
frequent such establishments often, recognised, unknowingly, the familiar, unmistakable sound that had no business in a human dwelling by night.

  There was no other clue. France himself had not cried out, even when the meat cleaver, which Clairisse had cunningly stolen some hours before, severed his left hand at the wrist, his right hand midway between the wrist and the knuckles. Possibly he had peered after them, his pianist’s hands, in the darkness, perturbed by such sudden and absolute loss. But then the cleaver passed through his neck, efficient as any guillotine, and the moment for all perturbation was done.

  So it had been only Clairisse, one of so many abused and silly women who had loved or thought they loved, and suffered for it. One, nevertheless, who was different, who wished that France should suffer, too. Only Clairisse, then, who with the colossal strength of the maddened had hacked her lover into segments and strewn these about the floor. Only Clairisse who had been, for these minutes, Madame Tueuse — the Slaughterer.

  But it had not, in the fractional ignition of his match, been Clairisse that France saw posed before him.

  She was very tall, at least, one might assume, two metres in height. In the best tradition of her trade, a tradition adopted more by the military than the civilian branch of her fraternity, she was clothed in pulsing madder. Splashed by life-blood, after the merest moment, she would again appear immaculate. It would seem her long-sleeved gown was dyed in blood to begin with. Her head, naturally, was also fastidiously covered. The scarlet headdress called to mind the starched winged wimple of a nun of some unusual order. Held in this frame her face was shrivelled, blanched, and sightless. Genuinely sightless, for the eyelids were firmly sealed, sealed in a way that implied they could not, for whatever reason, be uplifted. The hands were also white, they would show the blood when it splashed. They were sensitive, the hands, long-fingered and slim, in fact quite beautiful: the hands of an artist. For one could tell from the implements hanging at her sash that her method was not always as brutish as on this occasion. There were many knives of varying scope; some daggers; an awl; even a solitary, though very elongated, needle; a cut-throat razor, scissors; a shard of mirror; a hat-pin — and much more, not all of it instantly to be named. Everything was finely honed and highly polished. Cared for. In perfect working order.