The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  She was alone, not one of her slaves with her, and now there were men standing up in the black of the trees. But they were obeising themselves. They were pulling something forward, showing her – the black and pale flickering among the foliage of the chestnut grove was confusing. Then he saw the face, the lolling tongue and half-moon eyes. It was a corpse they had brought. They laid it on the ground, and she made passes over it. She had put off the cloak. Her arms were smooth and rounded, strong but very female, braceleted wrist to armpit. And her hair was youngly-white.

  He did not think, I am dreaming of Timonie by the Nile in Egypt. He knew it was not Egypt. And not Timonie, and not a dream.

  Then she made a sign, and all the men slipped away out of the trees, all of course but the naked corpse. Another shape emerged between the castaneas, male and mantled. He spoke to her, and then she said something to him. Her voice was light but throaty. His, harsh, sounding angry, cowardly. They were speaking – not the classical Latin of the modern school-room – but the everyday speech of real life, tailored by a hundred foreign intrusions, and the colloquialisms of a military camp. The City had not been built yet, nor even the Roman town of occupation, just the walls, the towered fort, a storehouse or two. And over there were the bothies of the savages who had been here first. And underneath all, the silvermines for which they had optimistically named the station Par Dis.

  He had told her, in a patrician’s Roman slang, he did not care for it, now it was to happen. And she said, her accent not the same as his, Too late.

  Then she made a kind of channel, in the mud among the tree-roots, all about herself and the corpse. At intervals in this channel she thrust in small sticks that seemed to be lying about on the ground. She lit them, it was not certain quite how. The light was bluish, unclear, like dying gas-glim. Yet as she moved, a single earring flamed and darkened from her right ear, and in the other ear, as it seemed to be, a part of an earring. There was a pectoral, over and between her small breasts bound in byssus. The Egyptian enamel and lapis was of eyes and hieroglyphs, but there hung from it a flat moon-disc spider, in silver, and there another and another was sewn on her skirt. She had placed some little images at points along the channel, the invisible watcher could see them now, though again, not exactly where they had come from. They were very small and appeared to have been formed of simple baked clay, and she was breathing on them, like a god giving life in a myth. Three he saw quite distinctly. A man sitting cross-legged, a great belly and a fat man’s bosom on his lap, in either arm an urn, one up-ended to the earth, and one tilted skyward. Near him was a scales, empty and in balance. Now the woman sighed upon two little animals, like lambs or young goats, lying with their forefeet entwined. Having breathed on these, she straightened up. She stood a moment, slender and poised, and unhuman, like some wading bird, attentive to something other than the night.

  It was the dark of the moon, and she was making magic, too black for the Roman’s fort to hold it. For they were the children of reason. They built roads and armies, forts and baths and laws. Her kind built from shadows, different things.

  Somehow the watcher-witness had been excluded from the spell, pushed back on its rim. He was looking at her then, from a slight distance, not seeing her quite clearly. In the peculiar light, her eyes might not have been blue after all, for all of her had a blue cast, jewels and clothing, skin and hair.

  Then she turned to the corpse, and spoke to it shrilly, words that made no proper sense – like commands to an idiot or a beast. And the corpse sat up, and answered her in a whistling moan, not even in words.

  There came a prolonged sequence after that, during which the dead thing rose and stood, showing that it glowed a little, and that in places it had indecently decomposed. At first it spoke only noises and gibberish, but the sorceress, she, Tiy-Amonet, she shrilled out again and again at it, she threatened it with its unburial, and some loss injurious to its soul-life. And finally it hung its head and began again to whisper, and the whispering formed words. And then she asked questions and the corpse replied. They were to do with a battle, and an enemy. It was for the commander of the fortress, her protector, that she asked. While he stood apart, his mantle held over his face, his eyes rolling with fear and nausea and a wish to be gone.

  But it was impossible to tell anything from her eyes. Not even colour.

  And as the corpse mumbled on, the watcher heard the frogs, unawed, chorusing, and then a deep explosion shook the world, a pane of light broke into a million pieces of rain.

  The rain was not wet. It fell beyond a partition of glass and bricks. Louis de Jenier lay in the bed and watched the lightning of the storm crack again across his walls.

  Then he sat up, aware that in just this way the corpse in the dream had got itself upright from the earth.

  The night was full of noise, the breakages of heaven. A bolt seemed to pass right through the decanter of water at the bedside, and shatter it. On the pillow a fire-ball flashed and died. The silver earring was lying there, the spider at its centre. Louis put one hand to his face and found that, in sleeping, in the dream, he had lain with his cheek pressed against the earring. He left the bed and opened the wardrobe door and looked into the mirror there. In the next lightning flash, he saw the impression of the spider stamped into his flesh.

  By ten o’clock the next morning, when he went to see about the costume, the spider mark had faded altogether, which was as well. He had arranged a photographic session to follow, to charm and stall Vlok with budding results.

  That the earring had been returned was also – not a stroke of luck – but a stroke of some sort, perhaps of lightning.

  By the time of the photography at the shop in the covered alley, Louis had recalled, excavated and read the page of print Curt had given him.

  “A stranger, reading this, will assume I had seen the item previously, and so manufactured the dream on cue. Perhaps I had, because the name Tiy-Amonet seemed always resonant, in the way Timonie had done. The dream was correct in its details, even to the fact of being set on the north bank. Now even I begin to wonder, did I look at Curt’s page before I went to sleep? Did I find the earring and put it ready on my pillow – sleep-walking, maybe. No, it isn’t any of that. I’m caught in something now, can’t stop, must go on. I dreamed Timonie’s dream, her dream of her own alter-icon.

  “At the photographer’s, in my covert of screens, I donned the costume, exact to my design. Everything was perfect, and such gasps and purrs and looks from the camera fellow and his adjuncts, I might have been back in one of Vlok’s carefully-chosen nightclubs. Even some muttered asides to me about a client or two of theirs, who would … etc., to match the other asides when I entered as a male.

  “The mirrors in the screened back “room” were full of the image. I felt drunk, or rather full-flush as you do at the start of drinking, before the weight settles over the eyes and in the brain. A marvellous portrait, they assure me. The earring felt very cold. Then, when I removed it, burning blazing hot in my hand so it was nearly dropped. I keep it in my pocket now. Where might it go if, idly, I put it down. Back to the room with the windows, probably.

  “Someone may be playing a joke, or I’ve gone mad.

  “But – I’m addicted. Too late as the lady said in her wild Roman I forget but understood. Though we were never taught Latin, but for the religious niceties where I was raised. I can hardly wait for the darkness. My hand’s shaking.

  “I shan’t dine tonight. I only want water from the decanter that lightning speared through. Bathe, put on those garments, the painted mask of cosmetics, the breasts and the hair, the jewel. Then take all of it, and myself, up there. Wait.

  “If this is fear I’m feeling, it’s more potent than a drug. I never felt anything like it before. The difficulty is if I think: what shall I do afterwards? So I don’t think it.

  “The sky through the windows is lapis-lazuli, and they’re lighting the streets. The rain has stopped again. Clear heavens, not a cloud. Every win
dow of the house now like coloured glass. Better start to get ready.”

  I looked at this point, in vain, among the documents in the diary pocket, for that torn sheet concerning the sorceress. Eventually I found it pasted in, as with some other of the entries, but at the end of the diary behind many blank pages. It scanned as follows:

  Tiyamonet. Reputedly a healer, diviner and necromancer, as many of her race were reckoned automatically to be. Mentioned in several writings of the period, she was the mistress of that previously noted Roman commander, who controlled his part of the Empire’s campaign here in the north with two legions, inaugurated the building of walls and fortifications, portions of which remain, and opened the silver-mines. These, actually mined out in fifty years, gave the area its original name, which soon came to be rendered in the records as Par Dis. Dis being Pluto, god of the Underworld, its mineral hoards, and incidentally, its kingdom of the dead. At the wish of her patron, Tiyamonet is supposed to have summoned up spirits and thus reanimated cadavers, then enjoining them to answer questions as to the outcome of impending battles, or the weaknesses of the commander’s enemies. An old tavern, the Imago – the Apparition – which was destroyed after the Years of Liberty, was built it was said near the site of one such event. It stayed an inn of ill-repute ever after. The personal seal and sigil of Tiyamonet was the spider. The arachnid has always enjoyed connections with witchcraft, mostly due to the insect’s abilities as a spinner – see also the Fates – and since it is able to build a trap out of an emanation of its own body – ectoplasm? – the thread and the web. A blue-eyed Alexandrian, Tiyamonet may have been feared in her own land, for in the East blue optics were, and sometimes continue to be taken, for the Evil Eye. When the luck of her patron changed, the commander being killed, as formerly stated, in a revolt of his own garrison, she committed suicide rather than submit to assault and torture. She is said to have employed for this purpose the bite of a poisonous spider, of the species – now extinct – shown in her seal and on the earring. Along with many magicians, Tiyamonet was rumoured to possess a particular secret, in her case to do with the ethereal powers of Air, Pliny the Other’s Regna Caerulea, Galen’s Caerulei mundi regna. As with most such secrets, for example, the Book of Gates, the precise formulae of the sorcery are unsure, but seem to have to do with a triumph over time and death. The method of the woman’s entombment and rites, if any, go unrecalled. Her possessions were certainly stolen. The spider-earring of Tiyamonet, on view in this museum, came to light in another trove, of far later date, and may indeed be merely a Roman copy; its authenticity has never been verified.

  (Nowhere else, in what is left of the diary, does Louis de Jenier make any reference to this information.)

  The image into which Louis transformed himself that evening must be the same which is memorised by the photograph. Timonie’s image, but modified. He did not, for fairly obvious reasons, bare his torso. He was not a woman in any physical sense. Instead, the pleated linen is very nearly opaque, and folds about him, with cape-winged upper sleeves, the lower sleeves bandaged down to the elbows, where bracelets take over. The ornate collar feminises the shallow breast. The face is exact, might be anything, is desperately beautiful. The hair of the wig owes too much to our idiom, Egypt seen through the lens of a vogue, but it will do. The eye-paint cannot be faulted. The earring is probably real.

  When he had finished, the house seemed to have become timeless, nearly dimensionless, and he went across to the window-room in the dark, half-thinking the doors might open on a desert, the river of Par Dis, the past, space itself splattered with cracked stars.

  But the room was only itself. He sat on the floor quietly, near to one of the central windows. (He had taken the diary in with him, though he could not properly see to write, as the sloping and overlapped letters give evidence.)

  After a while the violin, which he had hung from pegs by the study door, began to make a noise. He could not see if anything played it, or even if the strings vibrated. This time there were definite melodics, harmonies and stopping, though all at variance with each other. Then, he heard the cittern, which he had not bought and which did not exist in the room save in his plan. After the cittern, there were a number of instruments. All had strings, and some bells. They seemed to be floating about in the air, passing and re-passing over his head, mischievously. The incense smell also came again, more strongly, the joss-stick kuphi lit at Timonie’s drunken parties. There was a kind of lulling, rock-a-bye quality to all this. And then, something went out of tune. The cloy became a stench, and the combing of the strings began to tear and rip. Then the coldness came. He had been braced for it, but even so it nearly stunned him. It was like falling through ice into some winter glacier. And no sooner had it seemed to cut to his marrow than the awful heat blasted after it.

  The room no longer cradle-rocked, it was in quake. The doors, which he had closed, crashed open, then crashed shut again. A high singing buzz sounded from the window-frames. He expected the plaster on the walls to snap off in chunks, and bricks to fly out.

  And then the throbbing and heavy lugging noises started, and next the screaming began. They were ghastly screams, not human, like those of an animal in a snare. Agony and primeval terror, mindless, hopeless.

  His euphoria had spired into an all-consuming horror. But Louis could not move.

  He sat and listened to Timonie’s murder, in the eyeless darkness. He vaguely thought, It’s this, then. The murder was the fixative. That’s usual. Do I somehow have to give her peace from it? And, trying to keep sane among the driving nails of the screaming, he thought of priests, and that some priest must come in to free her screaming soul –

  And then the screaming itself ended, not dying out, not in a death-rattle or a groan, but as if the noise had been sliced off by a knife. All the sounds went together.

  He thought, Get up, for God’s sake. Light the lamps.

  And then the lamps were lit. Not from the gas, surely, for he never heard its unmistakable hiss, the spat of a match, the ignition. Instead the gas-bulbs were full of some other light, the dying corpse-glow gas-glim of the spell in the riverside dream. Timonie’s light, and by it – by it? No, nothing. She was not there, her mutilated body, the several bits of it. Yet on the floor, a pool of viscous liquid ran in a strange way, ran along and along the polished floor, gleaming black under glowing blue.

  The black blood was running towards him. He got up. The forward motion ceased. There came a delicate movement at its edge, as if some tiny creature played there in the blood. Then, a gleaming mark appeared on the floor, and another; another and another. They circled away from the pool, returned to and skirted it: paused, resumed. The shape, each time, made in wet black, was of two narrow naked feet.

  He stood and watched them. He could not take his eyes off them, these perambulating footprints. The steps of Timonie’s dismembered feet. There was a stillness and a silence that enclosed the room. He realised, in these extreme moments, that he could hear nothing from the City. The sealed chamber had dropped through the basement of the universe.

  It was searingly hot, even to breathe exhausted him, but he had begun to shift towards the doors. He was not convinced he would be able to open them, but before long he must lose consciousness. Then the footprints began to come towards him, to cut across his exit. Louis drew back to the wall.

  Something struck the wall very suddenly, near to his face. Then again and again. He looked, and saw there some smeared, wet handprints.

  “Timonie.”

  He had decided he must speak aloud. Must try to reason with the reasonless unreasonable.

  “Timonie, what do you want? Shall I take off the costume? Is it an affront? What do you want me to do?”

  Then one of the invisible hands struck his face. It was freezing cold, wet with blood – he cried out in revulsion, and pulled the earring from his ear by its loop of silver wire, flinging it away across the room.

  It was like throwing a pebble into water. The air of
the room seemed to smash into fragments and whirl up at him.

  He ran then, for the doors, directly through all of it. They would not move. He shook them, and pieces of wet stinging flesh slapped and clawed at him – he plunged away, and cast himself against the door of the study. To his amazement it gave. He had some notion of hurling something and smashing the skylight, and somehow climbing out on to the roof and so to the drainpipes. He had a distinct inspiration that he must get into the air, off the earth or anything that passed for it. Then he stumbled against the chair beside the desk, fell with it and broke its back, and finding himself down, earthed on the Persian rug, at once all the strength left him.

  In that second, everything stopped.

  He felt the house settle, as if dropping back a few inches from the sky. After that, there was nothing to be felt at all.

  He wanted frantically to get up and escape the place, but had no energy. He lay on the floor and heard the Sacrifice ringing the four o’clock bell. And next some drunken boys or women singing, fifty streets away, the sound carrying on stillness like a leaf on the wind. And then he thought how cool it was, how warm, and that everything was over and he could sleep now, and so he slept there, lying face down on the carpet among the wood of the broken chair, and clothed rather like the dead girl but for the spider-earring he had thrown away.

  Louis entered Vlok’s hotel-suite the following afternoon. He was unshaven, his clothes thrown on, and Vlok, taking one look at him, exclaimed: “You’re ill! What’s the matter with you?”

  “An acute attack of wanting to please you,” said Louis amiably, dropping into a chair. “I’m finished with that house. Let’s go north. Or wherever you like.”

  The next thing he was conscious of was of being in bed as it seemed in Vlok’s room, but actually in an adjoining suite. A satisfied physician was asking him moustached questions to which he, the physician, already knew every answer, and so was sometimes helpful enough to prompt his patient.