The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  My immediate impulse was to follow up his invitation. Not today, for when I emerged on to the street, already the dusk was coming down, the blue hour, and along the boulevards they were lighting the lamps, while on the summits of the Sacrifice and Clock Hill the neons of the theatres and the nightclubs had begun to blaze. Tomorrow then, at midmorning. Not too early, for I sensed he would rise quite late, not too late, for then, I sensed, he would be gone.

  I had an article to finish that evening, and went to my apartment on the Street St Jean.

  At midnight, when, work completed, I turned down the gas, I had already started to have doubts on the other matter. De Jenier might so easily be a poseur.

  Next day, rather than seek his address in the Observatory, I attempted to discover his nature from colleagues and acquaintances. A few thought they had heard his name. My editor at the office of The Weathervane believed that there was an actor named Louis de Jenier, a southerner, however, obscure.

  Daunted, by my own initial eagerness more than by anything else, I did nothing more. The day went, and the night, in uneventful pursuits and ordinary sleep. And after that some further days and further nights.

  Of course, he was so beautiful, and he was a man and I a woman – worse, he had unmasked me as a woman, casting away my literary shield. It was all very dangerous. I had come to value the calm sky-pool of my life.

  And then it struck me, walking out one morning to the bright sunlight of spring, birds twittering on the roofs, and the women everywhere with their baskets of dew-beaded violets – it struck me that this was the last day of the week he had postulated for his life.

  I stood amazed, the violets I had just bought glistening like coloured shards of glass in my hand.

  Thissot, who was with me, laughed at my aberration. He pinned the flowers to my lapel. “What have you forgotten?”

  “Somebody’s death.”

  “Dear God. So serious?”

  “Perhaps.”

  But I breakfasted with him before I set out. It would not do, I felt, to upbraid the liar on a sinking stomach.

  Once, the ascent to the Observatory had been wooded parkland. Duels were fought there under the misty trees, and in a number of ruinous little cemeteries all about, lay the unknown bones of the stabbed and shot. But now the cemeteries were wedged between the high walls of tenements. And where the cannon had pounded at the end of the Years of Liberty, neat flats now stood one upon the head of another, with bell-flowers and papery gentians pouring through the loops and slots of iron balconies. De Jenier’s street was tucked down between two others. Three or four largish houses dominated it, his being the third. On arrival, seeing its number, I learned the whole building belonged to, or was rented by, him. It was a very new house, I thought, not even ten years old. Nothing had been done to it to give it any character. It looked like those villas at the seaside, occupied for only a couple of months a year, kept up by workmen and gardeners, never properly lived in.

  I went up the steps and rang the bell. I expected a servant, but when the door was suddenly opened, I saw the face of one I knew. It was the second, talkative man who had come to arrest de Jenier in the café.

  It seemed he also remembered me.

  “Ah – mademoiselle. Did you –? That is, I’m afraid I can’t let you come in.”

  I was not in the least surprised. I felt only dull horror.

  “But you must,” I said.

  “No, no. Louis – that is – no. It won’t do. If you’ll leave your card, mademoiselle, a telephone number if possible, where we may reach you –”

  I did not want to say, Where is the corpse? Because that would be incriminating, perhaps. I said, “He told me to come here. Let me in, or shall I call the police at once?”

  The man quailed. Oh indeed, so they had not yet resorted to the means of the law.

  “All right,” he snapped. “In, then.”

  He hustled me through the narrow opening which was all he would allow.

  The hall was clean and empty of anything except for an equally empty umbrella-stand. Two closed doors, a passage leading away below, and an uncarpeted stair leading up.

  We stood in this oasis. I said, “Upstairs?”

  “All right.”

  He directed me to go ahead of him. The heels of my shoes clacked on the treads, and a strange light began to come down. I hesitated, to look up, but he fussed behind me. I went on without looking and reached the first landing to be told, “Go on. Go on, then.”

  On the top floor under the attics, a double door stood wide, and out of it came the densely-tinted light that had fallen into the stair-well. The room stood at the back of the house, of medium size, a sitting room perhaps, but it was entirely bare. In the polished wood of the floor, the marble fireplace, and on the plaster walls, reflected four cobalt pillars of light from four west windows blind with cobalt glass.

  What a fancy. What an artifice. I thought of opium-smoking and other drugs, where the eyes are affected and require deep shade. The window-glass was like a drug in itself. You stifled, grew drunk, stumbled and lost the awareness of balance. It was like being hung up in a thunderous evening sky. No oxygen available. Blue above, beside, below. Nothing substantial anywhere.

  I thought we should have to stop there, maybe until I was overcome and fainted or ran away. But now the second man moved before me, also weaving, holding his hands away from his sides slightly, a wire-walker. He took me through another door into a study.

  It had a skylight, it was not drowning in blue. I could breathe again, and looked about. Sofas and chairs crouched under dustsheets. On a sheetless desk lay dramatic impedimenta – polished pens never used, a tidily stacked column of books, scholarly artifacts, such as a skull of quartz, and a leather diary and pencil. One chair stood away from the desk, also unsheeted. Its back had been broken, and some wood splinters scattered along the Persian rug.

  On the wall beyond the desk, over the small fireplace, a convex mirror was flanked by two big photographs, both depicting women. One, to the left, wore period costume, perhaps of the Liberty Days, with a corseted, sashed waist and plumed hat, pearl bracelets, long, dark, curling hair. She was beautiful, and had been labelled in copperplate: Anette. To the right of the mirror, the other was a contemporary of my own, her figure freer, her face more obviously powdered and mascaraed; she was clad in a sequined evening gown, furs across her breast, her hair, also dark, pinned up with lilies. Her label read: Lucine. It was apparent both were the same person in a different role. Across the convex mirror in between them striped a colossal gash. Since glass can only be scratched by diamond, I supposed a ring had been used, but over and over. In fact, the marks were more like those made by a set of claws.

  Of the dead body of de Jenier there was not one trace.

  “Wait here,” said the man who had brought me. He turned towards the blue room.

  I did not want to wait. I did not like the feel of the room with the desk, and the blue chamber outside had unnerved me.

  “Where is he?” I said. I reached out and caught the man by the sleeve.

  “Let go. This is disgraceful.”

  “Yes it is. What’s happened?”

  He worked his lips. “Something’s happened,” he said, idiotically.

  “I asked you what it was?”

  “You’re no one he knows. To invite you here was just his joke, Louis told me. You shouldn’t have come.”

  “Let me see him then,” I said boldly. “I’ll go at once.”

  “You can’t see him. He – he’s not on the premises –”

  “You carry on, monsieur, as if he is dead and you have hidden the body.”

  I was being rash, but my nerves now drove me. As for this man, he was more nervous than I was. We both trembled. Finally he said, “You must wait. Please. I’ll return directly.”

  He scurried out. I stood a while and looked at the chair and the claw-marks on the mirror. Nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. I picked about, cautiously li
fting a corner of a dustsheet, peering down at the splinters on the rug. I was partly afraid of finding something. But what?

  That man was taking a devil of a time.

  Suddenly I resorted to the desk, and picked up the leather diary. This was, probably, the written account de Jenier had referred to. It was unlocked. I opened it. The inside cover formed a pocket into which a number of documents and papers had been carefully compressed. The fly-leaf had pencilled untidy writing on it, his own. It said, “For you, Mademoiselle St Jean, to do with as you think fit.”

  St Jean was the literary pseudonym I used, after the wild poet who is said to have lived on my street and for whom my street is named, and who one day mysteriously disappeared for ever. Either Louis de Jenier did not know my true name, or he had kept this as a sort of password between us.

  Whatever, he clearly meant the book for me.

  I slipped it, with scarcely a qualm, into my purse, and walked quickly out of the study. It was now evident to me that the man who had let me in, having no answers to my annoying questions, did not intend to return. All the doors of the house, but for these two and that of the front entry, were doubtless locked. There were to be no clues. They only wanted me gone. It might anyway be unwise to remain.

  As I started across that room dyed cobalt, something peculiar happened to me. I have said I disliked the room, and the study, though for varying reasons, neither quite deciphered. But in the blue room now a wave of dizziness and emotion came over me. I say emotion, but what was it? It was like a sort of smiling fury, a sort of sensuous silent howling – it was bestial and beastly. I began to run towards the doorway, and in that instant the double doors, with no one by them, swung in and closed with a bang. The room seemed to rock. The floor tilted, like the floor of a balloon up in the air, caught by lightning.

  I was terrified. The hair bristled on my scalp and I moaned aloud. And something insisted to me that I turn, and look at the four windows, the windows of cobalt glass.

  So, in the trap, I did turn, and I ran towards them, not knowing why.

  I was about three metres away from the two central windows when abruptly one of these displayed a pattern all over itself, an intricate but abstract pattern drawn fine in black ink. I stared at the pattern, stopped in my running. Then I seemed to understand all the glass in that window had fissured. Next second it fell to bits. It exploded – not inward but outward, with a sound as if a huge tap had been turned on.

  The glass of the window flared like a bomb of violets, violet and blue confetti, jettisoned into blue space beyond.

  After half a minute, I went forward, and looked out of the vertical where the window had been.

  The view was perfectly normal. Some house-backs and dormer lights, trees and walls, on the right hand the descent of the City to the river, gracious in the morning. Below, the glass lay glittering all across a small enclosed garden. Between the window and the sky, suspended in air, a rope that seemed to flicker and smoulder, coming down from above. A man’s body hung from it, the dark head lying towards one shoulder.

  I started to cry, from shock and grief. The blue room had now no feeling in it. Then something made me lean straight out and crane upwards, and I saw two men, the foremost the one who had let me in, and another, vague at his back, both looking down. We stared at each other, they and I, a few seconds.

  Then I turned and ran from the room and down the stairs and out of the house. They did not seem to pursue me.

  I got as far as the cafés along the embankment, where I had to go in and ask for cognac.

  At first I was simply frightened. Pretending to have the spring influenza, I concealed myself in my flat, putting on a hoarse doubtful voice when Thissot called me by means of the telephone in my landlady’s parlour.

  Gradually I concluded the men at Louis’ house could not have known who I was, or my whereabouts. They would not be able to run me to earth. I wondered if they were themselves the agents of his death, but did not really think so. I was haunted by a dull distress and sense of loss. My sleep was peaceful and free of the nightmares that filled my conscious hours. I had locked the diary and documents into a drawer of my bureau.

  At last, one afternoon, the city veiled in rain, I lit the gas-lamps and the fire, then went firmly and unlocked the drawer, and extracted the diary.

  Even so, I hesitated. I decided I would look at the papers to begin with. They were many. I took them forth and laid them out. Some I saw at a glance had to do with the rental of the house. Others I could make nothing of (or would not), but they were randomly numbered, and since the pages of the diary were also numbered, presumably they were notes or additions to these. Then again there were scribblings in another hand I could not read, except, here and there, for a large black letter T. One sheet in Louis’ writing bore what seemed to be a line of poetry, which said only: Kingdoms of the sky-blue universe.

  In fact, I was daunted, was afraid to delve. My visit to the house (blue room, breaking window, hanged man), that had been enough.

  Then a small notice fell from among the rest. It had a business heading, the name of a shop in one of the by-ways of Sacrifice Hill. I skimmed that, for beneath was a typed message. It seemed the firm were pleased to inform Monsieur de Jenier that a picture was ready for his collection.

  I looked at my clock. It was not yet five. If I went out I should be in plenty of time to reach the place before it shut.

  Something had galvanised me. Perhaps only the excuse that by doing this, I was investigating the diary – while completely avoiding it.

  On the streets the rain attacked a hurrying umbrella world of wet black tortoise-backs. I hailed a taxi-cab, which shortly deposited me high on the south bank, under the shadow of the Temple-Church. The shop lay in a narrow sloping passage leading up towards the Church, roofed by dirty glass on which the rain beat, and with a carpet of peels and papers. The shop itself was a photographic salon. I had not read the bill properly, and had been anticipating art. Art there possibly was, in the dusk portraiture of young women lurking under a shrubbery of ferns within the windows.

  The bell jangled as I entered, and from behind a curtain a man glided out to look askance at me. I was not the usual clientele, plainly.

  I handed him the chit at once. He gazed on it, on me, and said, reproachfully, “This has been ready for some while, m’mselle.” I stared him out, but he next said, “I understood a gentleman was to collect the portrait.”

  “Monsieur de Jenier has entrusted that task to me.”

  “The work has been paid for,” said the accusatory man. “The money was sent round.”

  Prepared to pay, this alerted me: Louis had bought the photograph but not taken possession of it. What could it be, this mystery? I recalled the phantom women on his study wall, Anette, Lucine.

  “Just one moment,” said the man.

  He slid behind his curtain, and I heard a faint rumble of conversation, the words: “Most odd. Something funny here.” And I was, in a manner of speaking, hand on sword-hilt preparing for battle, when back he came beaming, carrying in his arms an oblong item, already scrupulously wrapped. It was quite large, the “portrait.”

  A chill went over me. The garish electric light, with which the shop was gifted, seemed to darken.

  “Will it not,” he probed hopefully, “be awkward for you to carry, m’m-selle?”

  A premonition of police – death’s revelation – “I live close,” I lied, and named an area to fool them all.

  Then I took the wrapped thing from him. My second of prescience was done and the package felt perfectly mundane, weight, paper, string.

  By the time he had cancelled his chit, and bowed to me, and opened the door and let me out in the covered alley, the cab-driver was from his cab, leaning in an arch at the entrance, smoking.

  He aided me and my parcel back inside the vehicle.

  “That’s got a bad name, that has,” he said, “that place.”

  I wondered if he meant the shop only, or t
he alley entire. But I hardly wanted conversation and did not reply.

  Returned home, I went directly upstairs. Again I lit the gas, and the oil-lamp on my desk, and stoked the fire. I propped the covered picture against an armchair.

  Then, exactly as I had with his diary, I sat down and looked and looked at the hidden form, with terrific, immobile reluctance.

  The clock chimed gently. It was midnight, I had fallen asleep. On my hearth the fire had perished, and the gas was bluely waning.

  I got up in a dull trance, and tearing the wrapping off the photograph, revealed it.

  She was not Anette, nor Lucine.

  Her hair was modishly bleached, platinum blonde, but unfashionably cut in a kind of long, shining hood, that reached her shoulders, but framed forehead and cheeks with a high invert crescent of fringe. Her eyes had been inked in by kohl; that, and the gauffered sleeves of her dress, indicated it was all Garb-Egyptian, which had been something of a rage in Paradis, seven or eight years before. She wore a costume-jewellery collar, too, gilded and set with opaque gems. Strangely, only one earring, pendant from the right ear, a disc, with an odd design on it, perhaps a flower, having eight thin rays …

  No, she was not Anette, or Lucine. She did not smile or provoke, as they had done, there on Louis de Jenier’s study wall. This creature looked filled by darkness. Her eyes, though they could have been any rich colour, were miles deep. Through the obligatory minute, as the photograph was taken, she had sat so still her soul might have gone from her body. Look into the eyes, and fall down the miles to nothing. To nothing but – nothing.

  But she too had a label, a name. There on the photograph’s edge. Timonie.

  She was portrayed, however, by the same being as had modelled the others. The bone-structure of the face, the set of the eyes and heavy brows; even the figure as far as one saw it, the small shallow breasts and flaunting shoulders – this one too belonged to the group. The three were one. Yet … Timonie – was so different.

  The silver earring in the right ear had caught a weird high-light. Stared at, the dark flower seemed to wriggle on it, wanting to detach itself. A trick of tired vision. I recalled the large letter T on certain of the papers in the diary. The line of the poem, if it was, returned. Kingdoms … sky-blue universe. It struck an uncomfortable chord, but nothing more.