The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  “Nervous exhaustion.”

  “Then there’s nothing –”

  “Monsieur Vlok, the young man needs good food and rest. Get him out of the City as soon as you can. The coast, perhaps, or one of the pastoral areas.”

  Louis let go of them both and slept again. The sleep was beauteous, dreamless or amnesiac of dreams. Deep, reviving deaths.

  He had brought nothing away from the house but the clothes he put on his body when he took off it the gown and hair and breasts and physical soul of Timonie.

  Later, Vlok was murmuring to him nonsensically, anxiously, “The new costume has been damaged. But Curt will get that seen to. You told me there was a photograph taken?”

  “It’s been paid for.”

  “But the name of the shop.”

  “No.”

  “Louis, why must you be difficult.”

  “I’m ill.” Louis, the sick child, played his part suddenly to its full. “Don’t you want me to get better?”

  “Louis.”

  “Then let me rest, as the whiskery doctor told you.”

  He had brought nothing away. But Curt, dispatched on Rudolf Vlok’s orders, had scurried about the house, packed clothes and personal items, and included in his itinerary the Garb-Egyptian dress, wig and jewellery he had found lying on the study floor. Curt also tidily reinstated the broken-backed chair, and next had dust-sheets brought in and laid reverently over all the few furnishings, including the elaborate desk. Off this he had first taken the diary, but it was locked, and rather ingeniously, and in his inquisitive efforts to pry it open unobtrusively – which failed – Curt did not bother to clear any other matter from the desk. Also he forgot the two precious portraits by the mirror. Thus Anette and Lucine were left in residence, while the accoutrements of Timonie, even the violin, were borne away to Louis’ rooms at the hotel.

  Louis had not asked for this. If he had had a minute or so more to himself before he fainted, he might have thought to tell Vlok to leave everything in the house untouched. Vlok might have obeyed. Or he might not. The violin, for instance, was worth a very great many livres (it could be sold when Louis’ craze for it wore off), and as for Louis’ personal accumulation of cuff-links, tie-pins, and so forth, these too were worth a few pennies. Louis constantly abandoned one set of toys for another, and Vlok always sent Curt to pick up after him.

  Curt himself had not liked being in the house, especially alone. He would have seen no marks on the walls or floors, or heard anything unusual. He was not psychic or even sensitive in that way, but had a morbid dread of morbidity which occasionally put him right.

  “First of all, not a single engagement.” Vlok was idyllic in his selfless devotion. “You see, someone has painted a watercolour for their brochure. A residence, yes? Comfort and finesse. Total quiet and nourishing food. A little Paradise. Cream and cheese and fresh eggs. Fruit straight off the trees and fish from the waters.”

  “But the place is in the north. Away from this City?”

  “Miles away. No smoke, no noise, no river damps, no neurasthenic fancies. You’ll be bored but you must stick to it. A week at least, the doctor says. And you can tell me there, about your new girl.”

  “Never, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh Louis, so temperamental.”

  “Your placatory tone is always your least successful, Rudolf.”

  “Now, Louis.”

  “And why were there furniture-removers in the other room? Or did I dream that?”

  “Furniture-removers? Of course not.”

  “Someone bringing something in, dragging it across the floor. It sounded like a trunk.”

  “That might have been Curt, fetching up your things.”

  “Things.”

  “Everything you so carelessly and thoughtlessly discarded at the rented house.”

  A long silence. Noticeable pallor. Vlok grew nervous.

  “What’s wrong? Do you want more of those drops?”

  “I want to kill you,” said Louis, with a sweet, dazed smile. “Nevermind.” Then, after the Vlokian storm had calmed, “What exactly did he fetch? I seem to remember, you talked about the new costume. You’d seen it, then.”

  “And it is being repaired after your maltreatment. Very interesting. I’m not sure this one will work. I’d have to see you, how you manage it. What will you make her do? Monologue? More of that throaty singing, I suppose, but they like it, don’t they, your worshippers.”

  “What else, Rudolf, did Curt bring?”

  “He forgot the photographs and won’t go back alone. He’s avidly been reading all the accounts of that girl’s murder. I just hope she has no relatives concentrated somewhere. We don’t want any lawsuits over this impersonation.”

  “The violin?”

  “What about it? Oh yes. Naturally I had him get them to pack that and bring it here. Have you any conception of how much you paid for it –?”

  “And the jewellery.”

  “All the jewellery. Including a battered silver earring on a loop of wire. I believe it’s an earring?”

  “Where is that?”

  “You want it? Well, it was on a table in the outer room. Drink your champagne. I’ll fetch it.”

  Louis did not drink his invalid’s champagne. Vlok went into the sitting room of the suite, leaving the door ajar. In the stripe of the opening, as in an ultra-modern painting, Louis beheld the violin out of its case, leaning at a contrived angle, a plash of white muslin that had been part of Timonie’s gown and, nearly preposterously, the blonde wig poised on a wig-stand, a faceless wooden head, only waiting for its features to be filled in.

  Vlok was a long time.

  “You can’t find it,” Louis muttered.

  Then Vlok returned. “Here. The chambermaid must have moved it. It looks old so I suppose it is, but isn’t it reckoned to be a fake, Curt said … Something set in there, once, I’d have said.”

  Louis put out his hand and allowed the earring to be laid on the palm. It hardly mattered at last, contact.

  “What’s wrong now? Louis? Louis!”

  “Nothing at all. Everything is perfection.”

  “No, I don’t care for the sound of you now. You’re up to something. You were warned, Louis. You must stay in bed for another day at the very least.”

  “Yes, Rudolf.”

  “And now, I’m going down to dine. Try to have a little more of what’s on the tray there.”

  “So reminiscent,” said Louis, turning the silver disc, strengthlessly, uninterestedly, in his fingers, “of the farmer with the pet goose. Eat just a little more corn, my dear. Just a grain. We must get you fit and fine, for on Sunday I shall drive a pin through your brain and kill you for the feast.”

  Vlok pranced out. He slammed the intervening door, and presently the outer one.

  Louis reclined on his halted avalanche of pillows, in the constant light (the hotel was most contemporary and electric). Beyond the drapes, darkness lay on the City of Paradis like black bloom. There were the sounds of cars and carts and angry taxi-cabs, but the hotel’s upper corridors had stilled, for it was both the hour of dining and theatre-going. And in the ballrooms they would be striking up the tango, the dance of sin, which, like so many things, creeds and treasures and marching empires, plagues and mysteries and magics, and even the sun and moon themselves, had originally come out of the East.

  Of course, it might have been dislodged, when he cast it away across the blue room in panic. But not every gem, surely, not at once. Unless they were in some way moulded to each other. They had not seemed to be. The one stone, shaped and impressive in size – the body and head; the other smaller stones, thirty of them, the eight legs. All rested individually in the silver disc. Curt had never been shown the earring. He had simply picked it up off the floor. The identation where the sapphire spider had been had not, it seemed, concerned Curt, though he had read the description of it earlier. Safety in inattention, non-avowal.

  Louis seemed to understand it all, an
d there was undoubtedly nothing he could do. There had been a slight chance, now there was none.

  He lay back and closed his eyes in the bright light. He could smell the perfumes of the clean hotel room, hygenic fabrics, soap, and polish, and sometimes, from the partly-opened window, the City’s spring, gutters, soot and violets, and from a baker’s shop across the street, poppy-seeds and gingerbread.

  But the City’s sounds seemed to be drawing away. He waited, for the other sounds to begin, that dragging, that leaden revolving drum-drum, like a turntable. Perhaps this would not be possible here, away from the house. Then again, it might be, for Timonie had had her say. It was the turn of the other, now, and she had travelled wherever her earring travelled.

  It had fallen from his hand. He would not open his eyes to see where it was, or anything. He felt drowsy, ill again. The room was growing very warm, and he heard a pale dry little scratching. It was like the noise of a paper settling, stretching itself after it had been screwed up and thrown away.

  Louis opened his eyes, Blurred, heavy … The room seemed in shadow, the light must be faulty. Something moved on the bed, like a trick of tired vision.

  Yes, not Timonie, if ever it had been she. She was the recording shown to him, the moving picture. Because, of course, Timonie had summoned it, or attracted it, through the medium of the earring. In the end, it had killed her, and portioned her. There was some Egyptian occult rite, surely, to do with that – some method of revenge – so it had hated Timonie. And it should hate him, too. The sorceress Tiy-Amonet must now be hunting for Louis de Jenier, all out of time, across a landscape twenty centuries too late.

  The trick of tired vision was affecting both eyes now. It was moving steadily up across the counterpane, it was on the edge of the sheet. The light smeared and blinked on a hard surface of sapphire blue.

  The jewellery spider paused. It raised itself a fraction, the slightly shorter foremost legs, composed each of three gems, exploring the air. Then it lowered itself and walked quietly aside, the individual legs extending, overtaken by others, extending again. It crept quickly on to his right hand. And as it touched his flesh, it hesitated once more.

  It felt very cool to him, but the room was boiling, his skin feverish, he thought. The spider was full of poison. There must be a hollow in the larger jewel. She – Tiy-Amonet – had known how to release the poison, in order to facilitate her suicide. Perhaps there was a sort of pincering motion, crab-like, with the front legs, like that which it was making now – He felt the needlelike little nip from far away. He heard himself give a faint gasp, yet he was not startled. The gasp sank in a sigh. He began to sleep. To sleep and wake as if dozing in a drifting boat. The river was black again, and it had a riper scent. It smelled of crocodiles, papyrus and inundation, like the Nile of his imaginings, and of elder ages, of a primal state.

  He was lying flat, on a type of stretcher. His eyes were shut, but he saw upward through his lids with unimpeded clarity. Men were rowing the boat, two soldiers with dirty faces. Another, his helmet off and head wrapped in a bandage, crouched nearby. All three looked afraid. They must be the burial detail, or burning or drowning detail. The fighting was over and the witch was dead, so get rid of her, somewhere over there, outside the station and the wall of reason and law.

  His – Tiy-Amonet’s – hands were folded over her breasts. Yes, the swell of her small breasts was against his arms, which were also hers. There was no breathing, no heart-beat, no ability – or desire – to shift any of the limbs. Yet complete awareness. Was the throat useable? Suddenly he, or she, laughed. He heard and felt the laugh passing through the body, somehow without breath, to be emitted, an eerie warbling note, not laughlike, but audible.

  The three men heard it too. There were some seconds of fear and confusion. Then the bandaged man smote about him. “Keep rowing. It was over there. Sound carries. Only a fox.” Reluctantly, they rowed on.

  Tall reeds rose from the river, and next the boat passed around an islet. It seemed to Louis they were a great distance from the garrison-station of Par Dis.

  The body was clothed in its grainy Egyptian linen, and wrapped in a long cloak. All the ornaments were gone, even the metal spiders from the skirt. Someone, less scared than these three, had taken the hoard of the sorceress.

  Soon they would reach wherever it was they had been told to reach, and do whatever they had been told to do there, or not do it. It was immaterial. Even burning, in this instance, would not have mattered. The jewel mattered, and the jewel was secure. And the will mattered. But now the will must rest. How long would it continue, the waiting? Be indifferent to that. Sleep now. Rest now.

  The river lapped against the boat and the oars spooned it over. There never seemed to be a moon in the past.

  They slept together, he and she, a sleep of death.

  Curt had brought the leather diary to the hotel and Vlok, in search of business clues, had also attempted to open it, fruitlessly. Louis must have the key concealed somewhere. This was true. Louis had placed the key inside the tube of one of the unused pens on the desk in the study at the house.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Getting dressed. As you can see, can’t you?”

  “Don’t be such a fool, Louis.”

  But Louis went on tying his tie before the glass. He seemed relaxed and careless. He had breakfasted to a degree, been shaved and manicured.

  “Do you want to be ill again?” raged Vlok.

  “Hush now,” said Louis, “sound carries. It was only a fox on the near bank, not anybody laughing.”

  “What? Oh stop talking in riddles. Where do you propose to go?”

  “There’s something I want at the house. Curt, naturally, left all the important, useful things behind.”

  “Then, if you must, I’ll come with you.”

  Louis only put on his jacket.

  On the street, after a sufficient number of blocks, Louis feigned faintness and pleaded for a taxi back to the hotel. Vlok in smug dismay lurched in pursuit of one. Returning with it, he found Louis had given him the slip.

  Half an hour later, hammering at the door of the house in the Observatory Quarter, Vlok received no reply. Either Louis was ignoring him, or had postulated the venue of the house to throw Vlok off another, real, scent. Vlok inclined to the latter notion and stormed away.

  The house, chandelier-lit by sunshine, was peaceful. Birds skittered over its roofs and sang in nearby trees. A milkcart passed, and from the boulevards below and above wafted the songs of day.

  The diary unlocked, Louis wrote it up to date. Then added, “Timonie was murdered. I am permitted to live. That was Timonie’s anger, but it didn’t have the power to kill me. The other has no intention of killing me, though Timonie it killed. Indeed, I’m cajoled, invited, made party to private reveries of Tiy in her death hour. And I admit – she’s snared me. In the web. Depending and waiting. For this is not a reprieve. Only that I misheard the sentence.”

  After that, Louis made a note concerning a journalist who wrote in “one or two of the better journals. She – I’m sure it is a woman – writes under the male pseudonym St Jean. The invaluable Curt is finding out for me where this being dwells, or at least where she frequents.”

  He wanted to put his affairs in order. He wanted to leave a legacy of truth with someone he reckoned reputable, honourable. Not he, nor his diary, say why he wanted this.

  He was relaxed, as Vlok (and I myself) beheld him, in the condemned cell. Although he stipulates he has no idea what form the punishment may take, he was as accustomed to being under the sway of another persona as any actor. The supernatural wooed him; it had got endemically close to him as live human things never did. And in a way, too, he was playing, and I wonder if he even believed it, even at the last second, desperate as it was, entirely.

  Louis intended to leave the house and return to the hotel for the night. The sorcery had fragmented and was everywhere – the blue windows, the very source, being i
n the house, the violin, the disc of earring, the costume, they were at the hotel. The portrait of Timonie was at the photographer’s. The spider – that might be anywhere, even travelling in his clothing. Enwebbed, he was not intending to step outside the spell, only to move freely within it.

  But the desert quality of the house, the privacy, after his fresh term with Vlok, seduced Louis. And then there came a sense of danger, and he could not resist it. He would stay.

  He left the diary therefore unlocked on the unsheeted desk, ready to be found. He left Anette and Lucine, too, beside the convex mirror.

  There is only one further entry in the diary. It is almost illegible, but by this point, familiarity with the script enables a reader to attempt it. I remember how he was at our first and only meeting. I wonder if I should be appalled at the interrupted abandoned narrative, or only at his lazy perversity. How much choice was there?

  “Already” (he wrote) “it had happened. We see with our eyes, but cannot see our eyes, except in a mirror. In the mirror, looking, I scored it across with the small diamond in a ring – and was answered. The glass was scored again, back and forth – from inside. Magic. Symbol. There will be coherence in patches – A spider: female devouring male – and phases of speech like the moon. I must learn some lines for you, Mademoiselle St Jean. If I find you in time. No elbow-room allowed. To explain. Couldn’t anyway. You must guess. Or – but it slips. Slips, down and down.”

  Under this was written in a strange spiky jumble, almost like the writing of another: Caerulei mundi regna. I had seen it printed previously, and so could decipher it, now.

  That vanished poet, St Jean, who some schools of thought tell us died in a duel, mooted for his last words: “I have no last words.” He also said, Fire is Will, Water is Grief, Earth is Thought, Air a Vision. And though I had never seen Pliny the Other’s Latin, or read Galen through, I had once, in translation, come across a non-illuminating reference to Caerulei mundi regna (which Louis had managed to translate literally, as kingdoms of the sky-blue universe) – the Empires of Azure.