by Tanith Lee
So, to continue the story of Thuvia.
I’d see her quite often, from then on, usually after full dark, once or twice in pre-dawn twilight, or the evening dusk. Never very near; perhaps she was cautious of me, or shy. And there would be gaps, a week, a fortnight even, when I didn’t see her at all. I used to ask Sybil then. “How’s your royal princess friend, Sibby?” Sybil, naturally, did not reply. But I had a strong feeling that Sybil would have shown symptoms of disturbed surprise if Thuvia had simply disappeared for good.
And there was one evening, late that summer, I recall, a hot, still, navy-blue hour just after quarter-moonrise. I was sitting on the lawn in a garden chair, looking at the stars, and wondered vaguely where Sybil had gone and what she was up to. But she was frequently off on her own errands, a part of her great charm; an independent lady, who still loved me enough to want to spend time with me, other than meals, too.
I’d had a thought, I have to confess, (an unworthy one): was Sybil so intrigued by Thuvia because my cat believed her some sort of large etheric Mouse? An unfitting idea indeed.
This evening though there was a sudden springing rush in the shrubbery by the wall. But what leapt forth was not Sybil, but a large black male cat I had seen here and there before. He was attractive and healthy and quite young, and I pondered whether he might have had a run-in with Sib. He had that look, slightly ruffled, but – having seen me – going all nonchalant, sauntering into the shadows. Oh, whatever it was, I meant to do it, said his demeanour. Always in control, c’est moi.
Sybil, of course, by then should not be attacking young males, at her age. So I went to make sure she was OK.
She was. There she lay, quietly sleeping under the apple tree, (which had pleased us so much by aspiring to produce apples soon to be picked, by Sid and me). Her sleep was so profound, her fur smoothly poured and rising and falling with gentle respiration, that I suspected she’d missed the handsome fightable biteable feline youth. About to turn and resume my stargazing, I caught a flick of pallor. And so I saw too the doll sitting there about half a foot from my cat. I had seen Thuvia seated before. Once, rather memorably, on the banister-head at the top of the stairs. But now all her attention – if so I can call it – seemed centred on Sybil. As a doll she had only one expression, knitted and stitched in, vague, regal. But something – how can I put it?
I thought, very oddly, of a small child with another somewhat older child, one the younger child trusts, likes, is comfortable to sit beside, even if the older child is sleeping. It wasn’t as if Thuvia were guarding Sybil. Just – watching over. I went back to my chair, and found I had begun to hum a lullaby from way back in my earliest childhood, something my mother had sung me. Golden Slumbers. Silly, sweet, perfect.
Thuvia was watching over Sybil and singing her a lullaby, then? Silent and wordless, phantasmal. But sweet. And profoundly kind.
When I drifted in to bed around eleven thirty, I left them to it. Sybil woke me briefly when, having come in via the cat-flap, she joined me at 2 a.m., curling up by my head. She was alone, relaxed, and in turn sang her own lullaby to me, in her lovely contralto purr, that shook my pillow with its marvellous vibrato.
II
Summer had been beautiful that year, and autumn was spectacular, the woods around, and even here in the garden, having certain trees with bright red or mauvish leaves, to augment the oranges, yellows and browns. Sid knows all the names. I try to remember.
I spent Christmas day with Sid. I cooked a lavish Christmas Dinner, which we ate at 3 p.m., a time I’ve always observed for this traditional feast, just as once my mother and father did. (Of course, by then, Sid and I were occasional lovers. Not the passion of youth – or youth’s ridiculous hang-ups and rages, thank God. Fondness and friendship, and a lot of damned fun. He’s a bit older than me, but I’m no girl. We suit, and we don’t crowd each other either.) Sybil liked Christmas Dinner, always had done.
She would have her own cat-size plate of turkey, even carrots and a little roast potato, cut to size. A happy time.
Next year was fine. Though the winter-spring weather was foul. Now and then Sid would come to cut the grass and be rained off, and we’d just sit and drink coffee and talk. When summer arrived the warmth was intermittent, two days on, five days off, sort of stuff. But we went for walks and to the cinema in town, and Sybil still got her siestas on the lawn on fine days, or up in the sunny back bedrooms.
Now and then I would catch sight of Thuvia. I always said hello, by this time. I spoke to her in a calm, friendly way
“Hi, Thuvia, nice to see you. Hi, Thuvia, how are you?” Why not? She took no notice, but perhaps she felt the welcoming vibes.
Sybil though was always aware of her, even when I didn’t see Thuvia at all. I had got the impression, (aside from my irrelevant mouse comment), that my cat liked the little ghost. And, too, there were a couple of times more when I saw Thuvia sitting by Sybil, and once Sybil was then awake, and gazing back at her, calmly, herself also seated, and with paws tucked in. Sybil never, that I saw, tried to touch, to make physical contact. It wouldn’t have worked. Couldn’t have. Can’t touch a spirit. Sad, that. I confess I too had come to like Thuvia by then. To care about her, perhaps, however hopelessly.
In a white, wind-stripped-bare end-of-October, I woke up one morning around 8 a.m., and there was nobody there. That is, Sybil was there. But she wasn’t. Not anymore. She was dead. It must have happened gently, in her sleep. I’d kissed her goodnight around 1 a.m. – up late watching TV, and she already installed on the bed. She’d rubbed her face against mine, and returned into her slumber. Never surfaced. No disturbance. Peaceful as a slow sunset.
The white morning sun now shone in, and lit her fur like dark grey velvet. But the lamps of her eyes were shut. A single white whisker had been dropped, as sometimes they were, on the edge of the duvet. I still have it. Always shall. She was nearly twenty-one years old. In human terms, well over a hundred.
“Sid, are you all right with this?”
“Course I am. Wouldn’t think you’d want her anywhere else.”
I’d asked him if he would mind digging the grave for her here, in the garden.
Then I said the second thing. “I thought... maybe next to Thuvia.”
He looked at me. Great eyes, Sid, sometimes dark as Guinness, and sometimes, like just then, almost copper. “Yes?”
“Well, she saw her. The little doll. Didn’t she. And I’ve told you how once or twice I saw Thuvia sitting near her.”
“That’s fine,” he said. He downed his tea, got up, and we went out into the cold, cold, cloudy opaque day.
He dug the grave perfectly, the exact proper size. I had wrapped Sybil in a piece of old soft silvery silk. (I’d meant to have a top made from it, about twenty years before, never had.) I kissed her again and folded her in. She was curled up tight, her body hardening and lightening a little by then, a beautiful unreal case from which the content had removed. She was laid to rest, and Sid filled the grave in. I had found a smooth pale stone, and placed it on the top. I’d written her name on it, but of course this would fade. “I’ll cut that for you,” he said quietly, “if you’d like.”
“Thank you,” I said.
We stood in silence. What prayer do you say for one you love who is dead and gone and isn’t human? Worse conundrum than for burying a bloody atheist. But then Sid put his arm round me and we went back in and had, at ten thirty in the morning, a whisky each.
He cut the stone – engraved it, no less – Sybil’s name, with small elegant flourishes. One more talent I hadn’t till then known he had. I didn’t plant a shrub there. The rhododendron would make the show, with leaves and pink flowers. Sybil had enjoyed the rhododendron, even personally watered it now and then.
The stones shone in the dark for an evening or two after. Perhaps the disturbance of the earth caused that, or frost. Thuvia read one. Sybil read the other.
It was a filthy winter. It snowed and the snow covered everything. T
he wind howled over the garden, forcing the trees almost to their knees, or so it seemed. Ice hung from the drainpipes, windowsills and porch.
I didn’t see Thuvia. Never. I thought, perhaps I’d done the wrong thing, asking for my cat to go into the ground beside her. Or maybe Thuvia just missed my cat, as I did, as even Sid seemed to. A gap in the safe wall of the world, where one flawless gold-eyed brick had fallen out.
I didn’t, after about a week, visit the grave on purpose. Sybil wasn’t there.
Spring didn’t really return until May, and then, three weeks after, there arrived a full hot summer, 75 to 90 degrees (in old money). House all open windows, and during the day doors open, too.
Up from the lawn came wild flowers that I hadn’t seen there before. A rose, quiescent until then, opened its magenta sculptures along the trunk of an oak tree.
It was in the dusk again, on the lawn again. I was sitting out, listening to a play on the radio, and the finches and blackbirds were paying last visits to the bird-table and birdbath we’d installed, singing presumably with beaks full of seed.
And then, along the lawn, about ten metres away, (in new money – about thirty-two feet), a small white, dark, amber form, and another, slightly bigger if not taller one, walking on four paws, tabby-grey and primrose-yellow eyed. She was young again, about five, perhaps, in human years around twenty-seven. And Thuvia too – she’d had some sort of make-over! If Sybil was sleek and groomed and full-whiskered, Thuvia’s hair was now like silk, her skin smooth as good china, her dark eyes wide, bright – her dress washed, pressed and adorned with something sparkly – sequins – miniature diamonds?
In slow-motion, a sleep-sitter, I reached for the radio and turned it off. The play had been good. But this, oh this, was better.
“Hello, girls!” I called, a mother thrilled to insanity and trying to be urbane. “Brilliant to see you! How are you doing?”
Both of them drifted on, nearer and nearer.
My heart, like a bird, sang – and rang and ached. My eyes burned. I had the sense not to attempt to get up; I’d probably have fallen flat on my face.
When they were only about ten feet from me, they did a kind of dance together, minueting about each other, hair swirling, tail whisking, and then they had a sort of play-fight – you could see it was play. And Thuvia – I can’t explain this – had an expression now. It was of laughter. And though I couldn’t hear her laugh, through the bright sprinkles of birdsong, there was a lower vibrating note. A purr? Louder than even Sybil had managed, in life. Yet also, somehow, soundless.
They didn’t come quite up to me. We couldn’t presumably touch – except each other’s inner selves, maybe. Their amused, partly condescending fond approval, my singing, ringing heart.
And then they sprang, both of them, straight up a tree.
Up, up, into the leafy higher boughs. And were gone. Or, not gone. Here. Real. Alive – in whatever non-comprehendible etheric fashion. Crazy, happy.
When I phoned Sid at ten o’clock, at which hour, if he had to work early, he might well have been sleeping, he listened carefully, and told me it was wonderful, and congratulated me.
And when I went upstairs, I wept. I cried my songster heart out. It was the first time I’d been able properly to grieve for anyone, because now I knew, some way or other; they would all be all right.
Lots of evenings, after that, I saw them, always together, outside the house in the garden, up trees, once on the roof playing about, and in the house too, naturally. Once they rolled all the way downstairs together. And then sprang up, not a curl or a whisker out of place.
Eventually Sid saw them too. In a way, he was bound to, they were so often about, and he, I suppose, often here after sunset. He said they were perching on the top of his spade, which he’d left stuck in the earth, (both of them, and somehow they fitted), like two robins. It was the spade for digging up weeds and so on; also the spade that had dug the grave for Sybil’s body.
But why should that matter? She had a body now, young, and at maximum capacity.
Both Sid and I jointly saw them one hot summer midnight, when we were strolling and canoodling under the trees, and both cat and doll were there, asleep as it were in each other’s arms.
He and I, together, noted that Thuvia could now close her eyes, for closed they were by eyelashed lids. Only Sybil opened hers for a second or so, winked at us, and shut them once again to sleep the just sleep of the ghost.
The summer flowed away. The autumn entered and departed. Winter was back, an unwelcome guest, bringing Christmas quickly in, like a sumptuous present to placate the reluctant hosts.
I think perhaps we were beginning to see Sybil and Thuvia, Thuvia and Sybil, just a little less.
At New Year we toasted them in champagne. A cup of kindness. Old Acquaintance. Auld Lang Syne.
But I was the one that saw them last. Or, shall I say, for the last time in this world.
Unlike the previous year, there was one of those forward springs, seventy-five to eighty degrees at the end of February, and buds and crocuses and daffs out all over. The sky by day was blue as hyacinth, with transparent occasional flocks of clouds which, when the sun set around five thirty, melted into rosy embers.
I was sitting, chairless, on the lawn, in fact, and the blackbirds were already giving their sentry alarms of Keep off, I’m nesting. A dragonfly, green as glass, flitted past on what seemed like foot-long wings. And next, there were Syb and Thuve, up the oak tree, among the hopeful dabs of returning leaves and roses. It was very early for my girls, I remember thinking. Usually they only seemed to be around once the sun was mostly sunk – the generally accepted ghost-hours.
Half involuntarily I waved. And – to my astonishment at such a direct response – a little stiffly, Thuvia waved back.
(And she had fingers – had she had those before?) I must tell Sid – my first thought. But presently there would be more to tell.
They sat, and I sat, they in the gods upstairs in the tree, I in the lawn-stalls below, as the afternoon ended its drama and the curtain fell.
The sun was powdered away. The afterglow beamed and faded. Twilight came. And deepest, moonless, starriest night.
I was lying on the lawn by then, a cushion behind my head. I was idly considering getting a glass of wine and an apple – but an interruption (if you can call it that) occurred.
Like the dragonfly before, Sybil and Thuvia were suddenly whirring round and round the tree. They were flying, but without wings. I watched, admiringly. Then they dipped, and came over the lawn, passing low above me, so I saw the underside of Sybil’s black/pink paws, and the little satiny shoes on Thuvia’s feet. A fly-past. A salute?
After which, as before, up and up they bolted, but not now into the top storeys of a tree. This was more like a pair of rockets: they were clearly aiming at the open sky.
I’d sat up again, shot up, really. I stared after them, that flit of white and brown and grey, a double single entity – Ascending. Themselves two shooting stars in tandem, but not falling to earth. Falling upward into the air.
I knew, without knowing, or understanding. I knew.
I believed it was Sybil who coined or grasped the plan, and taught it to Thuvia. For a made (knitted) being, even one as imbued with spirit as Thuvia must have become, no doubt it would be harder to envisage, let alone independently accomplish. So Sybil, who instinctively predicted other possibilities, had broached the scheme, and next led them.
Up, and up.
Once or twice, lying down outside, I’ve felt that supernatural tug towards the sky. Yes, even stone-cold sober. (And I don’t use drugs.) To leave the physical body, to lift and float and drift. To consign oneself to some other powerful, omnipresent and uncruel force. To reach some otherwhere. Some otherwhen.
I watched as gradually their small shining images melted, like the sunset clouds, into the dark and gleam of night. Until they were like feathers, and then like minute dots, and then invisible.
N
ot for one moment did I believe they would, now, ever return. Except, conceivably, into other reincarnated lives, a cat, a doll, or – or something else.
I lay on the still-warm grass, and saw the sown-diamond field of stars, and asked myself, less sad than wistful, where exactly Sybil had guided them.
I woke at 3 a.m. when the morning-night had grown cool and damp, and foxes were padding through the woods with urgent screams of volunteering lust.
To bed I took myself. Then lay awake. I wasn’t, as I say, sad. It had been too beautiful, for that. I didn’t know what I was.
Sid arrived at nine. He was going to see to the garden and then we were driving into town to have lunch and watch a film. I was up, ready. I didn’t tell him till the coffee-break.
“All the stars were out,” I said, “I could see them so vividly, and the planets – no moon, they had the sky to themselves. The stars, and Sybil and Thuvia.”
We held hands and the coffee got cold. Holding hands was much better than coffee.
After a while I said, “Sid, where do you think they went? I mean, Heaven’s only up there metaphorically. It just looks as if it ought to be. Where did they go? Eternity–?”
Sid smiled. He has a great smile. Even now, some years later, some years after Sybil and Thuvia left us, when we walk our handsome dog, Harry, Sid smiles at somebody we meet, and you can see them, especially the older women, react.
Sid smiled, and held my hand. And then he grinned. “P’raps, maybe,” he said, “Mars...?”
The Winter Ghosts
Winter is a ghost that haunts the world. You know it by its grey transparencies, its crystalline white comings and goings.
It was early in the winter that I went to the town to see about some business for my Father, and was told I must call in on my Aunt. I resisted. “She has been good to you, young man,” they said. She had paid for my education, and other things. My life was full of obligations, it seemed to me, and nowhere was I free to do what I wanted. I had been the slave of my school, and now was my Father’s, working in his shop, where I did not want to be, and trapped in the village of my birth. I had seen and done nothing. But there again, what would I have chosen to do? I had no great driving talents. I liked to read and to lie a-bed, for either of which occupations there was now slight time. Every day I was up at dawn, for on Sunday I must go to church to show my respect to God. At night I ate my supper and fell between my sheets exhausted. What a life. The town and the prospect of visiting it had cheered me a little, despite the winter road and the stubborn old horse, the wayside packed by forest, starving beggars who seemed to signal from every glassy bush, according to rumour, and the first waves of wolves that I hated and feared along with everyone else. But now my sojourn in the town was to be divided between my Father’s commission and my Aunt’s fancy. It was decided; I was not to stay overnight at the inn, but at my Aunt’s house. My heart sank into the floor, it stayed there, and I left it behind.