Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  These feelings of mine Vikram guessed; all this. We had not spoken often, I had seen to that. I am independent, female, blonde and in my late thirties. Such things can be an incitement and a dreadful error in a world of masculine tradition, where the perfect (and commonplace) woman is dark and very young.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Vikram. ‘You do not believe me.’

  ‘I’d love to believe you. There should properly be demons in the rukh.’

  ‘When I was in England,’ said Vikram, ‘I was treated very kindly and shown many things. Shall I show you the demon?’

  ‘Won’t it object?’

  ‘No. Why should it?’

  ‘Or be capricious and vanish.’

  ‘Capricious,’ he said, tasting the word.

  ‘And then,’ I said, ‘I should be so disappointed. I might start doubting it was there after all. Really, I’d much rather take the supernatural on trust.’

  ‘But you take everything on trust. And trust nothing.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ I countered warily. I touched at my book, implying I might wish to continue reading it. Of course, I would rather go on looking at Vikram.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Vikram. ‘You have a formula for everyone — a characterisation. As you meet us you say to yourself, Ah! This one fits here. And this one here. And this one is like that one. And so we are all popped into jam jars and neatly labelled, and can be no longer a nuisance.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. It had just the correct blend of regret and flippancy. What he said was largely true, but no business of his. How we defend ourselves is our own affair. Creatures like Vikram so seldom need to, they never understand; it is useless to explain, though pointless to deny.

  ‘Moonrise,’ said Vikram, ‘or the hour of dawn. Those are excellent times to surprise a demon.’

  I had allowed myself one fantasy only of Vikram. That had been in the early morning, too. Half sleeping and half not, disturbed by the clatter of fresh rain. Vikram as Krishna then, playing the pipe through a vaporous sunrise. I, very young — about fifteen — Indian in all but skin or eyes or hair or thought, had followed him away into the mystery of the trees. But not thirty-eight and in the flesh. Never.

  ‘You must excuse me, Vikram. I promised Mr Khote a game of chess before lunch.’

  I got up and went in through the creaky screen door before he could move nearer. Mr Khote was older than I, and also interested in me. But he was not dangerous, since I was not interested at all in him.

  In the afternoon I wrote letters in my room. Or rather, I wrote the same letter several times, addressed to different people. Little and calm and yellowish, that room, a fading yellow rose. How oddly comfortable the sagging bed. Something about the dark wood of the headboard, the dressing-table and mirror-surround, filled me with the bitter-sweet longing for unremembered things — nostalgia for past lives? The Grande Namda had stood for almost a hundred years. Perhaps I really had been here before.

  Later, in anticipation of dinner, I went down and sat in the guests’ lounge, in one of the wicker chairs, under the turning, clacking fans. The other European at the Namda, a Frenchman, nodded to me with polite loathing. We had an instinctive aversion, he and I, hating each other on sight. Nothing psychic there. I am not tall, and Monsieur Lebrun was one of those few men I encounter shorter than myself. Our individual manners soon proved to him I would not be courteously dominated, and to me that he would require it of me. I knew his type, he mine, and we had no more to say. Yes, I had indeed put him in a jar and labelled him. Yes, yes, I had labelled them all.

  Our hostess, Mrs Sharma, had Irish blood. Once, enraged with a cook, I thought I heard her lapse into Gaelic. This, on reflection, seems improbable, however. Mr Sharma was permanently away, or had not been present to begin with. The daughter, slender but not beautiful, although once with hair like a black fountain to the backs of her knees — shorn in the first month of leaving (I could have killed her), was at college in Chahala. The staff came and went interminably, but these too I briskly pigeon-holed: the good, the bad, the lazy, the wicked and the silly. Usually I was right. The one whose jar I labelled “Thief”, for example, disappeared at the same time as Mr Khote’s little silver statuette of Vishnu.

  The residents were sparse, augmented by a few itinerants. The most interesting, to me, was a Muslim watch-mender who had refused to speak to any of us, and who left without paying his bill — amid terrifying consternation — then mailed the money several weeks after from Delhi.

  Presently, Mr Khote came in from the verandah, shoe-less.

  ‘There is a tailor-bird in the cinnamon tree. You know, Miss Laude, like in Kipling.’

  I got up and obediently went out to the verandah, peering through the glittering steam of afternoon.

  ‘Should it be here in the middle of the Rains?’

  ‘Why not? Why not?’ cried Mr Khote, full of pleasure in supporting avian liberation.

  He was a plump, gentle little man, lascivious and wily, but not underhand.

  The sun was low now, slanting through the empty branches of the cinnamon tree.

  ‘Our Darzee has gone away,’ said Mr Khote. ‘How lovely your hair is in the sunlight. A picture. You should be careful in the garden. There may be snakes. And no resident mongoose.’

  Mr Khote had read Kipling, and often reminded us. (Me.) Kipling’s India no longer exists, or never existed, but is perfectly valid, an exquisite parallel world, mostly supported by truths that exclusively obtain to it, but are adaptable elsewhere. Mr Khote did not regard any of it in this way. Kipling represented to him the foreigner’s absurd idea, the view through the glass darkly, of actual facts. Mr Khote never said this, exactly. He played chess rather in the same way, frequently winning, generally by accident.

  Down by the romantically leaning and twisting bo-tree, a shadow formed from sequined mist.

  ‘Vikram,’ called Mr Khote, in English for my benefit, ‘you scared away the little tailor-bird.’

  ‘Or the demon has done so,’ said Vikram.

  Mr Khote was perplexed.

  Vikram said, in Hindi, something about the Rakshas in the forest.

  Mr Khote threw up his hands and guffawed heartily.

  ‘What tales for small babies.’

  The Rakshasas are, of course, shape-changers. They can assume any form they wish, male or female, infant or ancient, and any sort of animal. Mr Khote instructed me in this, as he chuckled.

  ‘Such things do not exist,’ Mr Khote insisted with much jollity.

  Vikram smiled vividly to aid Mr Khote. Vikram’s glorious eyes were on me. But we know otherwise, said the glorious eyes of Vikram.

  Before it started to rain again, the evening grew oppressive. Thunder rumbled in the black hills of the sky, and spun in Mrs Sharma’s fans.

  Vikram followed me out on to the verandah, into the dark.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘The humidity. I feel I can’t breathe.’ I hadn’t meant to say this. I added merrily, ‘But of course I can.’

  Vikram stood by a verandah post, smoking. I could see the eyes of the two cigarettes, one after the other, but no longer his own.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Vikram, ‘I will meet you here. Or by the cinnamon tree, if you prefer.’

  ‘What?’

  No reply. The light of a window caught in his eyes, after all, and on his teeth.

  ‘Really, Vikram, if you expect to meet me you’ll be disappointed.’

  ‘Really, Vikram, if you expect — ’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Mimicry of that sort is awfully rude.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, disarmingly, unconcerned, ‘you are being awfully rude to me.’

  ‘Indeed I’m not.’

  ‘I tell you of a fascinating demon. You pretend to believe in it. I offer to let you spy on this demon, a unique opportunity. And you say: You piss off, Vikram, and go to hell.’

  Rather than annoy me, unfo
rtunately, this made me laugh.

  Vikram applauded my laughter, demonstrating it had been a mistake.

  ‘So you will be here tomorrow,’ said Vikram. ‘Half an hour before sunrise.’

  ‘I shall be oblivious half an hour before sunrise.’

  ‘I will throw pebbles at your window.’

  ‘And crack Mrs Sharma’s glass?’

  ‘I will shout, loudly and long.’ Vikram cupped his beautiful hands about his long beautiful mouth, and drew breath as if to bellow. I didn’t fall for this trick. I waited till he sighed and let down his hands. He was so much younger than I.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘what this reminds me of, is one of your forefathers touting to take one of my forefathers on a tiger shoot.’

  He looked at me, and I felt, by reference to such origins, I had insulted him enough.

  I stepped back into the hotel.

  As I went upstairs, he was standing just inside the screen door, watching me. He had on a shirt of scarlet silk that gleamed in the electricity as if wet, or oiled. He himself did not look at all real.

  I slept briefly, then woke and did not sleep again. In the gathering of darkness before the hour of dawn I opened my eyes and thought stubbornly, Why not?

  I lay there with my hands clasped at my waist, thinking it over and over. For some years I had not been able to bring myself to touch my breasts in this position. It may have started from a fear of cancer (routine examination often being conducted this way), but had become an aversion to the loss of their youthful plumpness, most apparent when flat on my back. A foolishness, this phobia. I had few others about my own body.

  Presently I got up and dressed in my jeans and a white cotton kurta, and brushed my hair. As I crept to the bathroom along the passage, I remembered something that had happened in London ten or eleven years before. I had had stomach flu, and one late cold neon night going home, I had sat for half an hour on a bus managing somehow to prevent myself vomiting. This feat — combined altruism and frightened vanity — was bizarrely augmented as we trundled through Piccadilly Circus. Three young Indian men, of that coffee-bluish complexion, two of them very handsome, leapt aboard the bus and at once began to torment me. Not realising I was unwell and might be a threat to their fashionable clothes, they leaned close and commented loudly and crudely on my attractions.

  I sat, with my insides firmly clenched, in imitation of a stone.

  ‘She’s so lovely, so blonde, such big titties. But she spoils herself with this coldness, this haughty attitude.’

  ‘I tell her this. I tell her.’

  Dazed by nausea, it was somehow not hard at all to maintain my stony stance. I heard them lamenting far away, separated by the gluey veil of illness.

  Then they were gone, abruptly as they had come, vanishing into the scintillant winter night, leaving me to get on with that battle homeward.

  But what had any of that to do with this? Only that I was young then, and out of my depth, and, so much older now, still had not found the bottom, how to balance, where to stand so the tide would not sweep me away.

  Outside birds were squawking and clinking in the forest. A cool luminous lightening of all things surrounded and enveloped the verandah. The rain would almost certainly spurt down as the sun came. I should be drenched, and what else? Walking through the rukh with a beautiful young man, married of course, for they all were here, laughing doubtless, joking and giggling like stupid children, pretending still there was a Rakshasa, which would display itself in the morning’s moist, green ghostliness.

  Vikram did not seem to be there, but then he appeared, conjured by my own arrival. He did not say to me, See, I said you would be here. Or, Well, after all that… He had expected nothing else.

  He held out his hand, and because it was just before sunrise in the rukh, and no human thing about that could see, I took the hand.

  We walked down through the garden and went out by the old garage, on to the road. Here, some villager had abandoned his derelict bicycle three weeks ago, and now creepers swarmed and swirled over it, hungrily.

  The road was sepia mud. We crossed it, and the jungle slid towards us. It was like entering the sea, or some vast river. In the dawn, greenness came like a blush.

  Swinging my hand lightly, Vikram told me a story of a Rakshasa. There was a young prince, it seemed, and the demon, seeing him hunting in the forest, fell in love with him. The demon therefore, in order to be near him, took the form of a charming boy, serving faithfully in the prince’s train, guarding him from harm, singing him to rest when the prince’s sleep was troubled. Then one day as the prince hunted tigers in the thickets, with just the demon-boy for company, they chanced on a wide dark pool sheltered by tall bamboo. The prince flung off his garments and plunged to bathe in the cool water. The demon, unable any longer to dissemble, took the shape of a desirable maiden, and swam to the beloved. But it transpired the prince mistrusted this sudden lotus, or had been warned. He rejected the Rakshasa with no hesitation, and struck out for the shore. But no sooner was he on the bank and reaching for bow and lance, than a terrible snarl alerted him. Out of the pool there leapt a tiger, large as an elephant, and much swifter than any arrow. The prince had no time, even for one cry for help, before he was torn in pieces. Rakshasas, too, apparently, resent a brush-off.

  ‘They are only, of course, evil in the company of man,’ said Vikram. ‘Among their own kind they are honourable, loyal.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  The story, the magical daybreak, made it reasonable to discuss such things theoretically.

  He told me it was a task set on them by Dharma, the trial and tribulation of men.

  ‘Then we’ll be unlucky, if we do meet one. Won’t we?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said teasingly, ‘they afflict you if you see them or not. To see one is sometimes helpful.’

  Then the rain began, a bath-tap turned full on immediately over our heads.

  Vikram seized me, and we flopped together through a wall of streaming foliage, to illusory anchor against some great stem. There was more laughter and an instant’s pulsating excitement. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. Yes, why else was I there?

  ‘You have every reason to misunderstand,’ I said. ‘But you are misunderstanding.’

  ‘Ah, pretty lady,’ he said. The rain rushed down. To make love here, against the convenient tree, would be like making love that time in the shower in New York. But not like.

  He tried again to kiss me. I pulled away, but said irritably, the surest defence, ‘Oh, do it then, if you must.’

  So he smiled politely and let go of me.

  Strangely, I thought, he turned to walk on into the sea of forest, beckoning me still.

  ‘Is there really any point?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To see the Rakshasa.’

  Sullenly, I moved after him, shuddering now at the blows of the rain.

  It would have been so easy to do what he wanted, and what I wanted. I knew how easy. It had happened often. I half anticipated he would, in a little while, question me about my refusal. I would say, truthfully, Yes, it would be straightforward, and wonderful. But afterwards I would remember my ever-increasing need and availability, coupled to the momentary nature of yours. I find I do not like to accrue a store of memories of this sort. The young men I want who service me because I am there to be had. I can no longer boast to myself: How free I am, I take what I can, and aren’t the takings good? One day I will be forty-eight, then fifty-eight, then seventy, and what then?

  But he didn’t question me. I was never a Catholic, and my need for confession can be solaced in other ways.

  I suppose about ten minutes later there was a clearing, and like a cue in the theatre, oddly, the rain was switched off.

  The wild rukh smoked, raw with its sugary, sappy smells.

  The young man’s hair was striped like wet black silk across his film-star face, and he pointed.

  ‘Look.’

  I looked.

  At
first, through the mist, I saw nothing. Then I began to see, about two yards away from us, shifting, coming and going as the mist shifted, came and went, a tree on its own, and in front of the tree, something white, quivering and moving — alive.

  Then the mist parted like a wave, and I stood staring, staring hard, at the creature my escort had brought me, quite faithfully, to behold.

  At last he said, not touching me, ‘You see, it is real, the demon.’

  Where it came from, how it got there, I don’t know, but there it was. In other circumstances, a joke, perhaps. But it was the truth too, and as truth so frequently is, it was cruel.

  I stayed just long enough looking at myself in the speckled, six-foot shard of broken mirror, leant there on the tree, just long enough to let him know I had received his message, before I turned and walked back to the hotel.

  Next day I went to Chahala. Next week I was in the safe colonial city.

  BITE ME NOT OR FLEUR DE FUR

  Again, apparently, vampires lure me. This is a fairy-tale invented by me, in the mythic tradition of True (sexual) Love, for which all things may be required to be sacrificed.

  For me, stained glass does seem to attend on vampires. But the pack of ravening angels flew out of the mind forest and surprised me, as such creatures often do.

  And I confess, the phrase Fleur de Fur began as a love-name for my cat.

  I

  In the tradition of young girls and windows, the young girl looks out of this one. It is difficult to see anything. The panes of the window are heavily leaded, and secured by a lattice of iron. The stained glass of lizard-green and storm-purple is several inches thick. There is no red glass in the window. The colour red is forbidden in the castle. Even the sun, behind the glass, is a storm sun, a green-lizard sun.

  The young girl wishes she had a gown of palest pastel rose — the nearest affinity to red, which is never allowed. Already she has long dark beautiful eyes, a long white neck. Her long dark hair is, however, hidden in a dusty scarf, and she wears rags. She is a scullery maid. As she scours dishes and mops stone floors, she imagines she is a princess floating through the upper corridors, gliding to the dais in the Duke’s hall. The Cursed Duke. She is sorry for him. If he had been her father, she would have sympathised and consoled him. His own daughter is dead, as his wife is dead, but these things, being to do with the cursing, are never spoken of. Except, sometimes, obliquely.