by Tanith Lee
The ride was not too bad. A faint flurry of snow disturbed the horse, who for a mile kept stopping and shaking his head distractedly. I saw no beggars, and no wolves, though once I heard one howling. I arrived at the town gates before the sun set on a grey thick sky. I should proceed at once to the Aunt’s, attending to my Father’s wants in the morning.
I had not seen either the town or the Aunt since childhood. Both had been different then, more interesting to me. I had half anticipated some sense of purpose or festivity in the town, and there was none I could perceive; the shops blinkered, the populace running homeward before the cold. Hardly a soul on the streets. The inn looked welcoming with its gold and red sign, but now I was not going there.
What did I remember of the Aunt?
She had been slender and excitable, with a high hot colour in her cheeks. Her dark hair was drawn up with combs, and curled. She wore a dark red gown and was dancing, for it had been a festival – hence my anticipations – memories – of the town.
As a child I had liked her, but she had paid me very slight attention. Her own father was alive then, and had she not been engaged to be married? There was some tragedy or scandal never spoken of to me. Her money had come to her with the town house, at my Grandfather’s death; my Father benefited in other ways. My Aunt was then alone in the world. Having no one on whom to squander the excess of her small riches, she made provision for me and my two sisters. In me, a less grateful wretch she could not have hoped to find. Far better I had liked the little drummer doll with his bells, the first gift she gave me indifferently at the festival. That was fifteen years ago. She would be old now, for she was not young then.
I reached her house, which stood to the side just off from the square. Ancient black trees, already edged with snow, occluded its walls. The shutters were fastened, and not a light showed. The house might have been deserted, the impression it gave. I dismounted, secured my horse, and tried the cumbersome knocker.
I had knocked some six or seven times before I got any answer. And then to my surprise it was the Aunt who had come to the door and opened it.
“Old Ermine died,” said she, standing in the dim hall, which just barely fluttered at her lamp. “Now I’m my own maid. My own housekeeper, too. You mustn’t expect too much,” she added, as if we had been speaking for an hour.
It seemed she knew me, for who else but the looked-for nephew would call on her? Nevertheless I introduced myself politely, and then she extended her dry powdered cheek for my kiss. She was indeed as aged as I had feared, a skinny old woman in a wrinkled reddish dress, with eardrops of dull pearl, which perhaps she had put on to honour my advent. She wore no rings, but her hands had been mutilated by rheumatism. She led me in.
It transpired there was still an antiquated man, Pers, she called him, who would see to my horse, as he saw to the fire in the parlour, and other manly work. I caught a glimpse of him, about a hundred he looked, but the horse was getting on too, they would be patient with each other.
The parlour was like home: Crowded by slabs of the furniture, which was all I knew, and that spelled affluence, and entrapment, had I given them names. Crystal and china, perhaps never used, bulged upon a wooden mountain, dully catching the firelight through their dust. The fire was a poor one – what else could you expect of Pers?
“Will you take some tea?”
I doubted there was a drop of spirit in the house, and felt a very real and unjust anger at her, my Aunt, forcing me here to this cage, uncomfortably not equipped to please me in the least.
We had tea, and some thin jam, and she told me I should not smoke, not in the rooms. I had guessed and not tried – truth to tell, I was not much of a smoker, though it was expected in a man, a sort of condoned vice.
By now it was night, these unshuttered back windows very black beyond the rusty curtains. In the town a few panes were alight, but they looked dim and parsimonious. My Aunt had lit two lamps, these windows of hers would have that look.
I forget properly what we spoke of. There were long silences; what could she expect? She asked me of my work, which I disliked, of my school, which she had provided and I hated. She asked of my uninteresting family, and my sisters, one of whom was now married to a fat bumpkin very suitable to her.
Finally, in a sort of sneering pity, I said, “I remember you dancing in a red dress. You gave me a doll with bells. I was very young.”
“Ah, that was another time.” She added, obscurely. “Another woman.”
Later we went into the dining room. And I had my first shock.
The long old table was hung with a lace cloth over mulberry velvet, and meticulously laid with china and a silver service. There were ten places, each fully set.
“I thought we dined alone, Aunt?”
“I never dine alone. But then again, you will see no one besides me. I, of course... I see them all. In my imagination, you understand.”
Pers brought in the dishes, there were only three; they had come from an obliging cook shop, heated up in the kitchen below, but not sufficiently. Water was served with the meal. Very proper.
I was interested to see Pers pass every plate from the eight other settings. On to each was placed by my Aunt a tiny portion of the frugal meal. Pers filled each goblet from the water jug. I looked on, and tried to picture ghostly fingers raising the glasses, invisible hands plying the knives and forks. Pers left us.
“Who is here, Aunt? Won’t you tell me?” I inquired, because I was so very bored, a leadenness had stayed with me compounded of snow, tiredness, inertia. Besides how could her secret guests be a hidden matter when she paraded them?
But she was reticent.
“People of my past.”
“Is Grandfather there?”
“Grandfather? Of course. It is a family table. He is at the table’s head.”
“Your fiancé, too?”
But she lowered her scaly eyes and would not answer. I had been indecorous, probably.
“Why did you never marry, Aunt?” I demanded brutally
“It was a long time ago.”
“I recall everything well. I recall the man –” I did not – “dancing with you downstairs.”
“No, no,” she said.
But I was irked enough I did not allow her any rights to pain. She had interfered in my life, it seemed to me, and made things worse. She had forced me here when I might have drunk brandy at the inn. “Surely you can tell me? I’ve only heard stories of it –”
“What stories?”
“That he jilted you. Left you almost at the altar –”
“Oh the liars! Who said this?” She was inflamed now, surprising me a little.
“Servants – an old nurse I had –”
“None of it is true. He died. He wasn’t young. His health wasn’t good. The excitement... He took a chill and was dead in a week.”
There was the longest silence yet.
“But you see him here tonight?” I even shocked myself at my grossness. Perhaps the water had made me drunk, I was used to a glass of wine at home.
At last she spoke to me. “Yes. I see them all. I invite them here. Why shouldn’t you know? My father, my betrothed. My mother takes her place. And my mother’s two sisters. Then there is my girlhood friend I see, there. She died so young. She is the youngest among us. And there is my tutor, whom I feared and loved, and who darts me terrible stern glances, because he thinks I have forgotten my lessons. And he’s right in that, for I have. And old Ermine is with us too, now. I included her a month after her death, for she required her rest before that...”
A nasty but interesting idea came over me that I could see them after all. The Grandfather as I recalled him with his fob watch and high collar, the invented mother I had never myself witnessed, and her aged crone sisters in their black and lace and old-fashioned hair. The young friend caught fast for ever – perhaps she did not mind – I put her in an antique gown. The mature bridegroom, coughing a touch at his handkerchief. The elderly tut
or. And old Ermine, who once or twice I had really seen, for she had been mercilessly sent to the village on my Aunt’s errands when only a trace younger. I guessed Ermine was content, to sit at last at her mistress’ table, even to the tepid meat and water.
“Pray don’t let me prevent you,” I said, “conversing with them all, if that’s how you usually go on.”
“You think me very eccentric,” said my Aunt. “But those who are dear to me – those for whom I have a responsibility. What else should I do?”
As she had put me through the school, just so she kept these by her, these withered flowers, her ghostly dinner guests. For ever, or until her death, and – why not? – maybe beyond her death, they would sit nightly at this drab table, eat the unpalatable food – I was becoming as foolish as she.
“Well you must do as you think fit, Aunt. And now I thank you for this meal, but ask you to excuse me if I go presently to bed. The long ride tired me greatly, I’m up so early, and must be off early tomorrow, I fear, on my Father’s commission.”
She was startled a moment, then she settled down. The old are early to bed also, she told me, she did not keep late hours. But I must take a cup of tea with her in the parlour, to cheer me for my couch. Out of the kindness of my unkind heart I consented. I spent one further hour with her before escaping to the dusty dark room aloft. There in the great bed, by the poor light of one thin candle, I had meant to read a smuggled book.
But my own bane of tiredness came in on me. Soon the lines swam and I blew out the candle and yawned myself to oblivion.
There I dreamed of being a prisoner in my Aunt’s house. I could not get out, and was in the act of bribing Pers to open a tiny door in the cellar for me – I think it did not in real life exist – when I woke. It was a milky dawn, and the fine snow blowing, and I had my Father’s business to transact before I could start out on my ride home.
My Aunt was not yet risen, so I left my message of gratitude and farewell, with Pers.
The business took up half the morning, and when it was done, I gathered myself to the inn and there on top of the bread and stale tea of my hasty breakfast, I put in three brandies against the rigours of the ride home, which truth to tell I was now dreading. I had a sort of presentiment of ill luck, which drinking the brandy, rather than dispel it, had brought closer.
Shortly after midday, though it looked more like dusk, I left the town, and the staid old horse and I went down the road, and in among the great stands of the forest.
The snow had stopped, and a freezing was coming on, you felt it approach like a stealthy noise. Now and then a branch cracked in the forest at the cold, but there was no other sound save for the plodding of the horse. A faint smoke hung once in the distance from some charcoal burners. Otherwise there was no hint of any human creature. I might have been alone in the woods at the world’s edge out of a legend. And this thought oppressed me, even as I began to have a quite incompatible fear of robbers.
Robbers there were, but not of the mortal type. About an hour after I had got beyond the town, when my home in my Father’s house, so despised, had begun to seem to me the dearest place on earth, a small pack of wolves started to follow me.
Despite all that is said, and agreed, on wolves, they are in fact not so much of a foe to a mounted man. But I feared them and disliked them in company with anyone I could think of. My childhood had been spiced by the tales of other children the wolves had carried off and eaten, and only a dead wolf was a pleasure to see, as occasionally I had.
Their eyes were the worst, for their shapes, loping along a few yards behind me, were almost lost in the trees. But out of the afternoon dusk now and then would come a green flash, or I would see an actual eye, fastened on me with a malevolent unique intensity.
I tried a sharp shout or two, which gave them doubts, but then on they loped again. I was the only moving thing of any size for miles. They were curious, and they were hungry.
How I longed for a joint of raw meat I might have bought and thrown to them, how I longed to have drunk more, or less. Or that the old horse might have been pricked to a gallop. But my attempts to hurry him presently confused him – he did not like the wolves either, but was inclined more to congeal to stasis and shiver than to hasten off.
Perhaps they would get tired of me, and let me be.
They did not.
About mid-afternoon, when I had been followed a good hour, the old horse managed a brief canter, hit us into a low-slung bough that brought snow down on me, and stumbled. Between the bough and the stumble I went out of the saddle and slithered to the ground. As I lay there stunned, the horse, relieved of my slowing weight, gave a bright whinny and fled along the road.
I sat up before I was ready, and my head rang. Then I tried to get to my feet and slipped full length again. And then the wolves, there were five of them, came out of the trees and on to the road.
They stood looking at me, and vividly do I recollect their lean black shapes against the snow, each one exactly resembling the model of the others, as if all had been cast from a single mould of wickedness. Their eyes were like the eyes of cruel men, intent and hypnotic, yellow as flames. Was any one less than the others? An entity they were, one thing, and all gazing upon me. I despaired.
In that moment I imagined myself at the gate of death. And this is what I saw: First the terrible rending agony of being eaten alive, and then the mildewed pit of the dead, from which a faint drear voice was calling me. “Come, dear nephew,” it said, “sit down. I’ve laid a place for you.”
And out of the teeth of wolves and shadows of the grave I emerged into that cold dining room with its table of mulberry and lace, and sat myself before a setting of dusty china and silver. To my right was an ugly young girl in an outdated gown, and to my left a balding scholar in a shabby coat. All around were old ladies with piled up fake curls, and a coughing man of sixty, and my Grandfather consulting his watch, for I had come late and kept them waiting. And there, opposite his place, sat my Aunt in her red dress and eardrops, nodding and smiling at me, as she helped me to a bobble of cold steamed food, and Pers filled my glass with water –
“No!” I cried. “You shan’t!”
And I flung myself forward at the wolves. I was shouting and roaring, and out of my pocket I had taken my wooden matches, which I struck in panic and nearly set myself alight.
Perhaps it was these brief gusts of fire, or the awful noises I made, and which I myself heard as if from a great distance, but the foremost wolf backed off. As I rushed screaming down at them, all five turned sideways into the bushes, and bolted suddenly away from me between the trees.
They were gone.
For some minutes I remained, yelling and stamping, jumping up and down in the snow, while burnt matches stuck to my burnt fingers and the hole I had fired in my sleeve.
I recall I howled I would not go, I would not be caught for ever, for eternity, in that smothering. No, not I.
When I came back to my wits, no hint of the wolves lingered. A vast emptiness was there, and I was blazing hot inside the great orb of the cold. I went down the road for something to do, and found the horse loitering at the wayside a quarter mile off.
I mounted him in silence, and he walked on.
Who would believe me? I have heard since of men frightening off wolf packs with loud cries and curious behaviour, but that was in other lands, and at another time. For then I knew only I had not been brave and had best keep quiet. More than their eyes and teeth I had feared the dinner table of my Aunt, I did not want to be another of her winter ghosts. It was that cowardice which made me turn against the wolves, and, seven months later, the same cowardice which made me run away for good to another less safe, stranger, and more ordinary life.
Yesterday
Blown deserts, dry mountains, broken seas: an open untenanted sky wide as eternity. This is all that is left to us. All we are allowed.
Aside, of course, from Yesterday.
A dragon black as deep night s
wept slowly over the bright dawn sky, its wings star-glittering and its jaw lined with purple fire.
Below, the land was golden, its valleys dressed in green forests, the high crags rising from them, shoulders of granite dyed with the last red coral of a risen sun.
The dragon breathed a silky sigh. A wash of flame swept unsunlike in the wrong direction – down. Helpless, the earth was held in stasis. But now – there – the mauven incendiary paused – it broke and scattered, purling in exquisite rays, to form a vast sunshade. This then faded, softly as lamplight sinking in a million amethyst lamps. One must search carefully with one’s eyes to solve the mystery, finally locating, on a tall up-thrust of mossy rock, an aged man, who stood firm and fearless as any mountain, even to his snow-cap of silvered hair and beard. A mage, a sorcerer: with his cunning spell he had becalmed and next put out the falling lave of fire. Even as it sank to nothing, the dragon, high in the sky, unaggrieved, perhaps even unnoticing, soared on, passing into distance until, against the tender amber screen of day, it was only tiny and unthreatening as a crow.