by Tanith Lee
“Here you are. Three pound change. Yes, old Alice, and that old horse. Half dead it looked, said my gran, but went on for years. And old les Alice was filthy. And this dirty old bag slung on the saddle. But she kept her hands clean as a whistle. And her stuff. There wasn’t one girl she seen to come to harm.”
“You mean – it didn’t work.”
“Oh it worked. It worked all right. They all got rid of them as wanted to, that Alice saw to. She was reliable. And not one of them got sick. A clean healthy miscarriage. Though my gran said, not one ever got in the family way after. Not even if she could by then. Not once Alice had seen to her.”
On the homeward shady path between the hedges and fields, Naine went to the side and threw up easily and quickly among the clover. It was the sausages, she thought, and getting in, threw them away, dousing the bin after with TCP.
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse–
The rhyme went round in Naine’s head as she lay sleepily, waking at five in the summer morning. The light had come, and patched beautifully through her beautiful butterfly-white curtains. On a white horse, on a white horse –
And something sour was sitting waiting, invisible, unknowable, not really there.
Old Alice Barterlowe.
Well, she had done some good, surely. Poor little village girls in the days before the Pill, led on by men who wouldn’t marry them, and the poor scullery maids seduced at the Big House by some snobby male relative of the strict Missus. What choice did they have but those clean strong probing fingers, the shrill hot-cold pain, the flush of blood –
Naine sat up. Don’t think of it.
Ride a cock-horse, clip clop. Clip clop.
And poor old Alice, laughed at and feared, an ugly old lesbian whose lover had died. Poor old Alice, whose abortions always worked. Riding astride her ruinous old mare.
Down the lane. Midnight. Clip clop. Clip clop.
Stop it.
“I’ll get up, and we’ll have some tea,” said Naine aloud to her daughter, curled soft and safe within her.
But in the end she could not drink the tea and threw it away. A black cloud hung over the fields, and rain fell like galloping.
When Naine phoned her friends now, they could never stay very long. One had a complex dinner on and guests coming. One had to meet a boyfriend. One had an ear infection and talking on the phone made her dizzy. They all said Naine sounded tired. Was there a sort of glee in their voices? Serve her right.
Not like them. If she wanted to get pregnant and make herself ill and mess up her life –
Naine sat in the rocker, rocking gently, talking and singing to her child. As she did so she ran her hands over and over along the hard small swelling. I feel like a smooth, ripening melon.
“There’s a hole in my bucket, dear daughter, dear daughter...”
Naine, dozing. The sun so warm. The smell of honeysuckle. Sounds of bees. The funny nursery rhyme tapping at the brain’s back, clip clop, clip clop.
Naine was dreaming. She was on the Tube in London, and it was terribly hot, and the train kept stopping, there in the dark tunnels. Everyone complained, and a man with a newspaper kept saying, “It’s a fly. A fly’s got in.”
Naine knew she was going to be terribly late, although she was not sure for what, and this made it much worse. If only the train would come into the station, then she might have time to recollect.
“I tell you there’s a fly!” the man shouted in her face.
“Then do it up,” said Naine, arrogantly.
She woke, her heart racing, sweat streaming down her, soaking her cotton nightdress.
Thank God it was over, and she was here, and everything was all right. Naine sat up, and pushed her pillows into a mound she could lean against.
Through the cool white curtains, a white half moon was silkily shining. A soft rustle came from the trees as the lightest of calm night breezes passed over and over, visiting the leaves.
Naine reflected, as one sometimes does, on the power of the silliest dreams to cause panic. On its Freudian symbols – tunnels, trains, flies.
She stroked her belly. “Did I disturb you, darling? It’s all right now.” She drank some water, and softly sang, without thinking, what was tapping there in her brain, “Clip clop, clip clop. Clip clop, clip clop. Here comes the abortionist’s horse.” Then she was rigid. “Oh Christ.” She got out of bed and stood in the middle of the floor. “Christ, Christ.”
And then she was turning her head. It was midnight.
She could see the clock. She had woken at just the proper hour. Alice Barterlowe’s hour.
Clip clop, clip clop...
The lane, but for the breeze, was utterly silent. Up on the main road, came a gasp of speed as one of the rare nocturnal cars spun by. Across the fields, sometimes, an owl might call. But not tonight. Tonight there was no true sound at all. And certainly not – that sound.
All she had to do now, like a scared child, was to be brave enough to go to the window, pull back the curtain a little, and look out. There would be nothing there. Nothing at all.
It took her some minutes to be brave enough. Then, as she pulled back the curtain, she felt a hot-cold stinging pass all through her, like an electric shock. But it was only her stupid and irrational night-fear. Nothing at all was in the lane, as she had known nothing at all would be. Only the fronds of growing things, ragged and prehistoric under the moon, and the tall trees clung with shadows.
Past all the houses Alice had ridden on the slow old wreck of the horse, down the lane, and through the village.
To a particular cottage, to a hidden room. In the dark, the relentless hands, the muffled cries, the sobs. And later, the black gushing away that had been a life.
Why did she do it? To get back at men? Was it only her compassion for her own beleaguered sex, in those days when women were more inferior than, supposedly, during the days of Naine?
Go away, Alice. Your time is over.
It was so silent, in the lane.
Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop, clip clop.
Here comes...
Naine went downstairs to the bathroom. She felt better after she had been sick. She took a jug of water and her portable radio back upstairs. A night station played her the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and even an aria by Puccini, until she fell asleep, curled tight, holding her child to her, hard, against the filmy night.
The doctor in Spaleby was pleased with Naine. He told her she was doing wonderfully, but seemed a bit tired. She must remember not to do too much. When they were seated again, he said, sympathetically, “I suppose there isn’t any chance of that husband of yours turning up?”
Naine realised with a slight jolt she had been convincing enough to convince even the doctor.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Some men,” he said. He looked exasperated. Then he cheered up. “Never mind. You’ve got the best thing there.”
When she was walking to the town bus-stop, Naine felt weary and heavy, for the first time. The heat seemed oppressive, and the seat for the stop was tormentingly arranged in clear burning yellow light. Two fat women already sat there, and made way for her grudgingly. She was always afraid at this point of meeting the awful, cheery, nosy woman. Because of the awful woman, Naine no longer pegged out washing, and had kept the postman waiting on her doorstep twice, while she peered at him from an upstairs room, to be sure.
Somehow, to see the awful woman again would be just too much. She might start talking about Alice Barterlowe. Naine was sure that her child, in its fifth month, was generally visible by now. That would set the awful woman off, probably. No use for old Alice, then. No. No.
When the bus came, the journey seemed to last for a year, although it took less than half an hour. All the stops, and at every stop, some woman with a bag. And these women, though not the awful woman, might still sit beside her, might say, “Oh, you’re at Number 23 in the lane. The lane where
the abortionist rode by at midnight on her nag.”
Exhausted, Naine walked down from the main road. She made herself a jug of barley water and sipped a glass on the shady side of her garden. The grass had gone wild, was full of daisies, dandelions, nettles, purple sage, and butterflies.
“I’m so happy here. It’s so perfect. It’s what we want. I mustn’t be so silly, must I?” But neither must she ever speak her fear aloud to her child. Of all the things she could tell the child – not this, never this.
And round and round in her head, the idiotic rhyme, compounded of others that had gone wrong...
Clip clop, clip clop.
She must have been courageous. Alice. To live as she did, and do what she did. Especially then. It took courage now. Naine could recall the two girls caught kissing at school, and the ridiculous to-do there had been. Did they know what they were doing? Dirty, nasty. They had been shunned, and only forgiven when one confessed to pretending the other was a boy. They were practicing for men. For their proper female function and role.
Naine, of course, was properly fulfilling both. Naine must like men, obviously. Look at her condition. It was her husband who was in the wrong. She had been faithful, loving, admiring, aroused, orgasmic, conceptive, productive. But he had run off. Oh yes, Naine was absolutely fine.
She did not want any dinner, or supper. She would have to economise, stop buying all this food she repeatedly had to throw away.
But then, she had to eat, for the sake of the child.
“I will, tomorrow, darling. Your mother won’t be so silly tomorrow.”
She had told the doctor she could not sleep, made the mistake of saying, “I keep listening –”
But he was ahead of her, thank God. “The pressure on the stomach and lungs can be a nuisance, I’m afraid. Ask nurse to give you a leaflet. And you’ve only moved out here recently. I know, these noisy country nights. Foxes, badgers rustling about. Whoever said the country was quiet was mad. It took me six months to get used to it.” He added that sleeping pills were not really what he would advise. “Try cutting down on tea and coffee after 5 pm, some herbal infusion maybe, and honey.” And so on.
After the non-event of dinner, Naine watched her black and white eighteen inch TV until the close down. Then she went next door and had a bath.
She had never been quite happy with the bathroom downstairs. It could be grim later, when she was even heavier, lumbering up and down with bladder pressure, to pee. Maybe when things were settled anyway, she could move the bathroom upstairs, put the work-room here.
The child’s room, the room the child would have; she had been going to paint that, and she ought to do so.
Blue and pink were irrelevant. A sort of buttermilk colour would be ideal. Pale curtains like her own. And both rooms facing onto the lane. It would not matter about the lane, then. By then, Naine would laugh at it, but not the way the awful woman had laughed.
Clip clop. Clip clop.
After the bath, bed. Sitting up. Reading a novel, the same line over and over, or half a page, which was like reading something in ancient Greek. And the silence. The silence waiting for the sound.
Clip clop.
Turn on the radio. Bad reception sometimes. Crackling. Love songs. Songs of loss. All the lovely normal women weeping for lost men, and wanting them back at any cost.
At last, eyes burning, lying down. We’ll go to sleep now.
But not. The silence, between the notes of the radio. A car. A fox. The owl. The wind. Waiting...
Clip clop, clip clop.
It was the horse she couldn’t bear. It was the horse she saw. Not old Alice in her dirty labourer’s clothes, with her scrubbed hands and white nails. The horse. The horse whose hoofs were the sound that said, Here comes Alice, Alice on her horse.
Old horse. Try to feel sorry for the poor old horse, as try to feel proud of courageous Alice. But no, the horse’s face was long and haggard, with rusty drooping eyes, yellow, broken, blunt teeth, dribbling, unkempt. Not a sad face. An evil face. The pale horse of death.
“I’m sorry I can’t sleep, baby. You sleep. You sleep and I’ll sing you a lullaby. Hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye.”
But the words are wrong. The words are about the white pale horse. The night-mare. The nag with the fine lady, the old lesbian. Clippity-clop –
Clip clop clip clop.
Clip clop clip clop.
It was coming up in her, up from her stomach, her throat, like sick. She couldn’t hold it in.
“Clip clop clip clop clip clop clip clop here comes the abortionist’s horse!”
And then she laughed the evil laugh, and she knew how it had trundled and limped down the lane, its hoofs clipping and clicking, carrying death to the unborn through the mid of night.
“It’s my work that’s the problem. I didn’t realise it would be so awkward.” She was explaining to the estate agent, who sat looking at her as if trying to fathom the secret. “I’ll just have to sell up and get back to London. It really is a nuisance.”
“Well, Mrs Robert... well, we’ll see what we can do.”
As Naine again sat on the hot seat waiting for the bus, she thought of the train journey to London, of having nowhere to go. She had tried her friends, tentatively, to see if she could bivouac a day or two. One had not answered at all. One cut her short with a tale of personal problems. You could never intrude. One said she was so sorry, but she had decorators in. This last sounded like a lie, but probably was true. In any case, it would have to be a hotel, and the furniture would have to be stored. And then, flat-hunting, five months gone, in the deep, smoky city heat. The house had been affordable down here. But London prices would allow her little scope.
It doesn’t matter. I can find somewhere better after you’re born. But for now. For now.
She knew she was a fool, had perhaps gone a bit crazy as they said women did during pregnancy and the menopause. Even the kind doctor, when she had vaguely confessed to irrational anxieties, said jokingly, “I’m afraid that can be par for the course. Hormones.”
To leave the house – her house – how she had loved it. But now. Not now.
No one came to look at the house, however. When she phoned the agent, they were evasive. It was a long way out unless you liked walking or had a car. And there had been a threat of the bus service being cut.
Day by day.
Night by night.
Over and over.
Its face.
The horse.
She was dreaming again, but even unconscious, she recognised the dream. It was delicious. So long since she had felt the tingling. This promise of pleasure. Her sexual fantasy.
She was in the darkened room. Everything was still. Yet someone approached, unseen.
They glided, behind dim floating curtains. The faint whisper of movement. And at every sound, her anticipation was increasing. In the heart of her loins, a building marvellous tension.
Yes, yes. Oh come to me.
Naine, sleeping, sensed the drawing close. And now her groin thrummed, drum-taut. Waiting...
The shadow was there. It leaned towards her.
As her pulses escalated to their final pitch, she heard its ill-shod metal feet on the floor. A leaden midnight fell through her body and her blood was cold.
Its long horse face, primal, pathetic and cruel. The broken teeth. The rusty, rust-dripping half-blind eyes. It hung over her like a cloud, and she smelled its smell, hay and manure, stone and iron, old rain, ruinous silence, crying and sobbing, and the stink of pain and blame and bones.
The horse. It was here. It breathed into her face.
Naine woke, and the night was empty, noiseless, and then she felt the trapped and stifled pleasure, which had become a knot of spikes, and stumbling, half falling down the stairs, to the inconvenient lower bathroom, she left a trail of blood.
Here, under the harsh electric light, vomiting in the bath, heaving out to the lavatory between her thighs the reason, the light, the life of her lif
e, in foam and agony and a gush of scarlet, Naine wept and giggled, choking on her horror. And all the while knowing, she had nothing to dread, would heal very well, as all Alice’s girls did. Knowing, like all Alice’s girls, she would never again conceive a child.
Blue Vase of Ghosts
1. Subyrus, the Magician
Above, the evening sky; dark blue, transparent and raining stars. Below, the evening-coloured land, also blue to the depths of its hills, its river-carven valley, blue to its horizon, where a dusting of gold freckles revealed the lights of the city of Vaim.
Between, a bare hillside with two objects on it: a curious stone pavilion and a frightened man.
The cause of the man’s fear, evidently, was the pavilion, or what it signified. Nevertheless, he had advanced to the open door and was peering inside.
The entire landscape had assumed the romantic air of faint menace that attends twilight, all outlines darkening and melting in the mysterious smoke of dusk. The pavilion appeared no more sinister than everything else. About eight feet in height, with a flat roof set on five walls of rough-hewn slabs, its only truly occult area lay over the square step and through the square door mouth – a matched square of black shadow.
Until: “I seek the Magician-Lord Subyrus,” the frightened man exclaimed aloud, and the black shadow vanished in an ominous brazen glare.
The man gasped. Not so much in fear, as in uneasy recognition of something expected. Nor did he cry out, turn to run, or fall on his knees when, in the middle of the glare, there stood an unnatural figure. It was a great toad, large as a dog and made of brass, which parted its jaws with a creaking of metal hinges, and asked: “Who seeks Subyrus, Master of the Ten Mechanicae?”
“My name is not important,” quavered the man. “My mission is. Lord Subyrus is interested in purchasing rarities of magic. I bring him one.”
Galaxies glinted and wheeled in bulbous amphibian eyes.
“Very well,” the toad said. “My maker hears. You are invited in. Enter.”