by Tanith Lee
To make a little conversation with grim Russe, lurking in his ancestral forests, responsible for his fellow men, I said, “And where is my beloved erstwhile companion, Philippe?”
“My God,” said Russe. “You haven’t heard. Well, you have been hearing nothing, have you, but the sound of corks got out of bottles.”
“Heard what?” I thought, He has run off with her. That will be it. It seemed at a great distance. It did not matter.
“Philippe has vanished. Fifteen days now, and sixteen nights. Even the City police are alerted.”I said,
“Well, you won’t see him again.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
“He will be out of the City, over the borders, with her.”
“With whom? What do you know of this, Andre?”
“If he purloined her, how could he stay? The old banker might have wanted satisfaction after all. Old bankers are notoriously unpredictable.”
“If you are speaking,” said Russe stiffly, “of the von Aaron woman, she has nothing to do with this. She is in her house. She holds her salon twice a week now. Most fashionable. Everybody goes there.”
The bed seemed to slip away under me, a boat casting off to sea.
“He told me he was her lover.”
“Probably he lied to you. She is supposed to be virtuous. Oh come, Andre. Philippe – is that what began this –”
I wanted to get up, I was not certain why. I had some notion I should go over to Philippe’s house, and that he would be there. Then, since nothing else could then conceivably have happened, I might refind myself also. If I wished to. She no longer seemed a part of me. I had drunk Lethe, all the brandy-black glasses of it, and after all, did not recall her quite. Nearly faceless now, just the cowl of hair, the coals of the eyes – Her voice, murmuring something foul to me.
Russe would not let me get up. His girl ran in and joined his lament. I lay back down again.
In the middle of the night, when they were making love below, and the tweety-bird slept, I got out of the bed of bliss and dressed and crept down the house with my boots in my hand. Someone had polished them, these boots, as I saw by the glow of the moon and the street light outside the door. Polished the boots, laundered all my filthy linen, cleaned and brushed my coat. It was Philippe’s coat too, in fact. I had kept it, to go drinking in, to write and weep and vomit while wearing, to die in along some alley gutter. Well, better return it now.
From Our Lady of Ashes came the four o’clock bell.
I shambled towards the Wall Quarter, the old City barricade that once fenced Paradys above the river. Sometimes I laughed at the moon, she looked so like a nun, a priestess, with her bloodless face cowled by night.
The shuttered house too was gaunt in the moonlight. Was it not somewhat like a tall thin skull, eye-sockets, nostrils, cave of mouth with its teeth knocked out. And what about that phalanx of round attic windows above? Of course, the scars of the bullets which had gone through the brain and killed it long ago.
(In a skull then, the lizards played, darting, fighting, resting. And they had stored clothing, swords and books, and a rocking-horse, behind the bullet-holes.)
The bell jangled mournfully. It seemed to echo away over the chasms of the City. Would anyone come, at this hour, to let me in? So frequently Philippe, with the door key, much later than this, would go in to find one of them, Hans or Poire, dozing on the wooden seat in the hallway.
A lamp fluttered up behind the glass. A face pressed itself there, like a prisoner’s, staring out at me.
The door was opened.
“Good morning, Hans.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Is he awake?”
“Not here, monsieur. No. Haven’t you heard?”
“Oh that. He is here. Hiding from us all. Don’t you remember he used to do that, as a revolting child. He hid constantly from his hysterical mother, and the nurse. But I recollect every hiding place.”
I came into the house, and Hans allowed it. He looked bovine, and anxious, he looked willful, too, for I was not the master here. I was the impecunious writer, Philippe’s guest, and other things.
But then again, I had accustomed them to obeying me, or to tolerating my commands.
He stood there stolidly now, feet planted, relaxed.
“Come on,” I said. “We will search him out.”
“Yes monsieur,” said Hans.
He plodded after me. Very likely he thought I was drunk, and was humouring me. For Philippe might abruptly return and chastise him otherwise; Philippe might even be behind it all.
We searched the lower floor first, the two parlours and the dining room. (We would leave the basement area, I told him, the servants’ cells, until the last.) Philippe was not there, so upstairs we went. Still he was not found. In the library he did not conceal himself in the curtains or among the volumes. Beneath the massive desk there seemed some chance of locating him, but neither was he there. We ascended to the bedrooms. Hans was tired now, and had begun to remonstrate with me, for the game was gross and silly.
“He’s here,” I said. “Can’t you tell?”
“No, monsieur.”
“He is.”
Beyond the last bedroom – its canopy investigated, and even the chamberpot dragged from under the ruching – the gallery led across to the bathrooms at the rear.
The lamp faltered in this corridor, trying to give up its ghost, as disillusioned now as Hans.
“Trim the wick. I mean to find the bastard.”
Unhappily, Hans trimmed away, and the light steadied as I squinted into the stone-panelled privy.
A kind of coldness seemed to flow along this upper floor, disuse perhaps, for he had apparently been gone all the while, those sixteen nights. Or some essence of demons had been trapped between the walls, left over from his séance, and from the ghost-girl. But it was like absence rather than presence.
Hans began sneezing nervously.
“For God’s sake quiet,” I said, as if afraid to disturb something.
Why? Surely Philippe must know we were upon him?
The largest of the bathrooms, the remnant of the bath-house which had formerly stood separate from the rest of the building, raised its marble façade into the lamp-smear. Philippe had favoured this one’s round tub most often. I kicked the door wide open, and the watery light fell in.
The sinking moon was there before it, coming sideways through from the vanes of glass in the roof. And there, below, Philippe lay, in the bath.
Hans gave a high, pig’s squeal. He did not drop the lamp; habit, presumably, not to break his master’s things.
After a long time, I said, “Did you never think to come up here?”
“Oh monsieur,” he bleated, “only yesterday – and the maids, to clean – it was always done, every day –”
“Then it seems he came home this evening.”
“No, no,” he said, panting now and sobbing. “No, not possible –”
“Not through the front door then,” I said. I looked from Philippe’s uptilted unlistening face, towards the glass vanes. One stayed open. “Climbing on to the roof over the attics,” I said, “they let him down through the skylight. How curious. How agile.”
He was clothed in shirt and breeches, his coat and linen were gone, he was barefoot. He was white with a solid thick whiteness, like plaster. The density of his pallor, though not its colour, clogged the room, which was like a winter vault.
“Go down,” I said. “Get Poire and the others. Send someone for the police.” He stuttered, and shook. “Don’t take the lamp,” I cried out in a ritual fear. He implored me. “Take it then. Christ, there’s the moon.”
In the cold moonshine then, and alone, I went and looked into Philippe’s waxwork mask of plaster. His eyes were shut, and his lips parted. His hair now was darker than his skin. He did not resemble anyone I knew, and seemed dead a year, though it could not have been more than a day.
The bruises and cuts of the be
ating I had given him were all healed. Only the barber’s gash had not gone from his throat, or it was a fresh one. From the puffy dark mottling on his neck, one long dried trickle of blood had flowed out black, running down under his shirt, down to where the nipple had checked it. There was a similar abrasion on the inside of his left wrist, and the sleeve there was stained, plummy, under the moon.
Then I saw – he had not been quite dead, when returned. No, not quite, for on the bottom of the bath, in his blood, the artist had been drawing, as he had once drawn in the spilled ink … I looked closely. I thought I could make out the indication of a horse, slender and running, with a slender hooded thing leant forward on its back – and before that, two slender running hounds –
“Philippe,” I said, urgently, as if he would hear me.
What must I feel? I had spent it all, all emotion, all sickness, for her. I was bled out and had nothing over to offer him. Drained like the window of its light, like Philippe of his blood.
I sat down on the floor by the bath, in the coldness of his death, to wait a while, to see if he could catch me up.
Called to a painted hall in the Senate Building, I, with several others, was asked various questions. Russe, my surety, described to the officials, while clerks busily scribbled, how I had been taken sick, and spent a night and day in his home, overseen continuously by himself and Mademoiselle Y –, whom he did not wish to bring into the affair unless it were unavoidable. Philippe could not have been dead more than an hour or so, when found in the bath-house, this the doctors had quickly verified. Besides, the operation across the roof, the lowering through the vanes, these postulated several persons labouring in unison.
One by one, forming into irked and vocal groups, Philippe’s friends, amours, money-lenders, debtors, and scavengers extraordinary were sumoned, quizzed, and dismissed to pace the antechambers.
One sensed that, with all the muck that came swiftly to the surface, the murder of Philippe seemed not only inevitable but perhaps aesthetically fitting, to the members of this Senate Investigatory Committee.
At no time did I think I would be apprehended for anything, despite having arrived at an unsocial hour and plainly knowing the exact whereabouts of the body. Such behaviour was too pat for an assassin, or if I were one, they could not be bothered with me. At length, they turned us all out on the street, as innocent. The Committee had got hold of the idea that some enemy from Philippe’s past had done the heinous deed, then fled over the northern borders. This was deemed a proper programme. They liked it, and did not like any of us. If a single murderer had been proved in our midst, I think it would have disgusted them, for evidently the itinerary of Philippe’s life had not pleased. They desired the whole thing filed rapidly and put in a cabinet.
The death of Philippe was discussed generally after that. Many theories, including that of an ingenious suicide, were aired. At the Iron Bowl a fight broke out, and at the Cockatrice two more, though the Surprise and the Imago remained quiet. Indeed, under the black beams of the Imago’s medieval roof, they concocted weird scenarios of witchcraft. It was the Devil who rode over Philippe’s attics and dropped the corpse into the tub. Had there not been a drawing, in blood, to that effect, all over the walls, ceiling and floor? Better ask Andre, who had found the remains.
When any of them came to badger me, they found me out, asleep, or drunk.
“Well, and are you to grace the funeral?” said Le Marc, who had cornered me at last, partially sober, in a library of the Scholar’s Quarter. “You had better go. You may want to write about it later on.”
This was quite true. Besides, I had known him almost all his life. I would have to put him to rest somehow, and to see the lid of the coffin’s ponderous cigar-box closed on him might be the only way.
What a funeral this was. What a brave quantity of followers. Ancient fragile aunts had come from their towered and chimneyed crannies in the pastoral suburbs of Paradys, supported by equally elderly retainers. They doddered on each other’s arms in black lace mittens, stove-pipe hats, and veils. Had Philippe ever met any of them, or remembered them? Relics outliving his disastrous sprint of youth, did they hope to be his heirs? (It transpired that in a way I was, he had left me a quantity of largely unspecified, useless and bizarre treasures from the attics, to be collected by myself at my own inconvenience. A patronising, perfectly suitable bequest. Odd he had made a will. We stood amazed.)
His friends, if such we were to be called, also arrived at the graveyard gate. And, apart from this gathering of vultures, the morbidly curious of the neighbourhood strolled up to take a stare.
The memorial was to be conducted in the Martyr Chapel of the Sacrifice; he was then to be ladled into the ancestral vault behind the Temple-Church.
“Hallowed ground,” said Russe, to whom Philippe had bequeathed three huge clocks and a dresser too big for any of his rooms. “But he died godless, of course.”
The most savage of the vultures had found dark clothes to wear. I wore the coat I had stolen from him the last time, when I crushed the cherries into his mouth and hair.
The absurdities of his will, as I had heard them out, kept recurring in my mind. The jokes were too contemporary. They would not have worked when we had all grown old. He must have known he would die young.
Trap after trap drew up with its black horses and black ribbons, disgorging more and more derelict aunts. Then at last came the coal-black coach, whose black horses, like the steeds of Pluto, had each a black flame of plume upon its head. The overcast was also turning black. It was a hot and airless afternoon, with a sudden rough, similarly airless wind, that tore between the trees of the burial garden, while the immovable massive hills of the Temple-Church pushed up at the monumental sky. We, whipped and blown about below, were of no importance, but anxious not to face the facts, we went on playing at our rôles. Out came the coffin, nails already firmly hammered home. Supposing he had changed his mind? That would be like him, crashing forth in the midst of the service, cursing and shouting for his valet, in ineffable bad taste.
But the professional porters of death had the coffin up on their shoulders now, and bore it away along the gravel path. The aunts were permitted to go next, then the rest of us. Somehow I walked the very last, an afterthought.
I was not paying much attention to any of it, the stony fields of asphodel, the shaggy bear-like cypresses. The Chapel, with pale windows, lay ahead, and we would all get there.
Then came a noise behind me, another carriage, arriving late, pulled up, horses snorting, passengers dismounting, the gawpers at the gate, with a murmur, giving way. I halted, and turned. Along the path towards me walked the illustrious banker-baron, von Aaron, in darkest, greyest mourning, and on his arm, her feet scarcely touching the gravel, she. I took two long steps back, out of their path, standing as if at attention beside an angel on a pedestal of basalt.
As they went by, von Aaron nodded to me, not looking into my face, but quite courteously, as if out of consideration for my grief. She did not look anywhere, but straight ahead. Her habitual black was augmented by a strange dramatic black veil, like a mantilla, raised on a pearl comb, covering her hair and also most of her face.
When they were gone, when they and the rest of the funeral had quite vanished into the Chapel, I went after. The usher was shutting the door as I stayed him to get in.
A full house. I did not look for anyone, but stood at the back, alone.
The windows had closed with the afternoon’s darkness. When the wind clawed at the building, the candles flounced. Quickly, quickly, let it be over with. I rested my head a moment on the stone of a pillar, wondering how many others, overcome by this insidious faintness, might have done so. I must think. But why, and of what?
For example, had that running man come up the very path we had taken, had he reached this place? I considered. Not the Church, certainly, with its sacred altar of sanctuary, not that, for then how could Satan have claimed him. Where, among the angels and gargoyles, th
e marble praying children and stone wreaths, had the black hounds pulled him down? I had trodden in the face of his ghost. Or imagined the whole episode. Did I find the red ring in a drain?
The Chapel was mumbling now with spoken responses, the words of the priest in a magpie gown of white and black stripe. Everything swung to and fro, like a ship in a sluggish storm. Rain pummelled the windows. The shut doors shook. Another latecomer was wanting to get in. What was out there? What rider on what long-maned mare of the daytime night? Of the endless night, inescapable night, washing round us, which would have us all. Antonina, save me from this dark, this precipice into which I, with all the world, must fall –
Thank God, it was finished. I drew aside again, and let the porters and the cigar-box go out, and the tide of flesh and crêpe, the aunts twittering and sniffling now. And caught in the tide, the cameo of a face under the water of its veil –
The graveyard had become a desert sailed by cloud.
It was an old mausoleum, and it leaned. Through the tilted doorway they took him, and left him behind there. Some of the aunts were now being assisted. The smell of aqua-vitae travelled up the slope to me. His friends broke and ran, waving their arms. They must hold a wake now, what else was to be done? Drink the man down.
As the crowd thinned, separated, dissolved, some of it toiling or hurrying past me, I realised the rain had begun.
I stood in the rain, indifferently trembling, and watched the banker talking quietly to the priest. The door to the vault stayed open. She was inside. Did no one think that strange?
Of course, none of them mattered. Props, strawboard things, not real at all.
I walked down the slope in great strides, and went past them and by them, as probably they gazed at me distractedly, and up to the narrow, lopsided door of the darkness, and through.
There was an array of stone boxes, the family of Philippe already foregathered, but the coffin, being brand-new, was shining on its slab in the light of the white candles.
She was poised on the slab’s other side, her veil off her face, her naked hand lying on the coffin top, with a crimson rose between the fingers. As I entered, she let the flower go. She let it lie there, a drop of reckless colour on the dark. It might only have been her excuse for coming in, but was not even that – what had she said to me? – rather improper? To drop the bloody tear of a flower on the coffin of one’s salon’s mere occasional visitor. A cliché, too, madame, of the worst, and you waited, static as a doll, for me, or someone, to come in and see you do it.