by Tanith Lee
Now, shivering all over as if with the influenza I had pretended, I reached the end of Louis de Jenier’s diary none the wiser. I was confused and unnerved (especially at being directly addressed!) and resentful, yes, very resentful. As if I had been reading, on another’s recommendation, a rare detective novel, only to find the last pages – those with the solution – deliberately and neatly cut out.
He had approached me and coherently informed me of this material. Yet the material itself, implied to be completed before the approach, finished in nonsense. The mirror had been scratched by a diamond in his ring. And then itself had scratched back, unnaturally … These facts I would not dispute. I had been present when doors slammed and windows shattered of themselves. But what else had gone on?
It was the awareness of unfinish that disturbed me more than anything. It made me jittery. As if I was being manipulated. I suppose I knew that a conclusion must be sought, or that it was seeking me.
By now it was early evening. I went downstairs, finding myself very nervous at emerging from my rooms, and assailed the landlady for her telephone. I called Thissot, but he did not answer, and then, in desperation, my editor at The Weathervane, but he too was absent. Quite what I wanted to say or ask I am unsure. A contact, a reassurance, is what I truly wanted. Both were unavailable.
So, out I went to my dinner in one of my three usual restaurants, trying to be jaunty and at ease. But I could not eat what I ordered, and the proprietor, who knew me, came over to enquire. “Oh, it’s simply that I’ve had the influenza.” He commiserated and sent complimentary brandy to my table. I wondered if I should confide in him, but the preamble of explanation daunted me and shut me up.
Nagging always at the back of my mind was the memory that Curt, who had a “knack for worming out … what was lost or in hiding” had been put on my trail in the first place by Louis. Would Curt abruptly arrive, and with Vlok? Would they attempt in some way to threaten or blackmail me, or even to silence me? I had seen a man hanging by the neck in an abyss of air, and Vlok at least positively looking down at him – the other in the background had been too vague to see, but must have been Curt himself. Should I go to the police? “Why, mademoiselle, have you waited so long to come to us with this business?”
I began to have the wish to abandon Paradis altogether. Louis’ beauty had enmeshed me, but he was dead, and the rest of it a weird nightmare, lacking even a proper ending. Let me take flight.
I walked home under the watery street-lamps. Rain struck the pavement all about me, dancing. The sky arched over the City and the world. It held so much, that vault, winds, vapours, clouds, distance, and colour. No wonder ancient belief had peopled it with elementals and powers. From there, lightning struck, and the sun blazed, and weather and angels fell. I pictured a teeming universe unseen behind the shields of blue or black. Then the vision left me, I went into the house and my landlady came flouncing out from her parlour. “Oh mademoiselle, a gentleman has been telephoning you every quarter of an hour.” I thought with enormous relief, Ah, Thissot. I’ll have to tell him all of it and risk his scorn. And exactly then the bell whirred and she went to answer, saying to me, “That may be him again.” Presently she waved me in and gave me the receiver. As usual, she began to busy herself about the room, listening.
Then a voice spoke in my ear, giving me my proper name. It was not the voice of Thissot.
“Who is that?” I demanded, but it was all I could do to stop my own voice from shaking.
“Rudolf Vlok, mademoiselle.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Please, mademoiselle. I must – that is, it is essential that I see you. Tonight if possible.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I have friends with me.”
“Send them away.” he said. “It must be alone.”
“You must think me a fool,” I said.
“I mean you no harm. But – there are things to be cleared up. You agree, don’t you? You’ve read – that diary.”
“Which diary?”
“Mademoiselle, I shall be at your apartment in ten minutes time.”
“You’ll find me gone,” I said wildly.
(My landlady had run down into slow-motion, she was so intrigued.)
“Mademoiselle – it isn’t – for myself. I have to say that if you refuse to see me now, there must be a meeting at another time. And that I’ll do anything I can, and I have some influence, mademoiselle, to see to it.”
“Why?”
“Only – only in order to settle things.”
“You want the diary returned? I’ll mail it to you at any address or office you wish.”
“Mademoiselle –” His voice had been, all the while, different. It was earnest and determined, and yet placatory. He had said, this call was not for himself. And he did sound to me, now, so much an underling. Someone had primed him. He was anxious not to displease them. It must be some backer I had not been told of, fearful of a mention in the diary, perhaps. Suddenly I thought, Let him come, I want to know. Maybe this can give me the key. It was, after all, still a social hour. The house was full of people who knew me, the rooms and streets well-lit. It would be safer to face it here, whatever it was. I broke in on his rambling insistence. “Very well. In ten minutes, as you said. If that is all right, madame?” I added loudly to my landlady, making her jump in her lethargic fiddling, letting Vlok know the world anticipated his visit.
When I got up to my rooms, I lit the gas, the oil-lamp on my desk, took off my coat and hat and gloves, and put round my shoulders a shawl of my mother’s, which comforts me. I was glad I had had the brandy.
Minutes ticked by on my clock. It struck for nine, and I heard a noise below, and then footsteps ascending.
When the knock came on my door I went slowly to open it, and in one hand I took my lethal little paper-knife.
As I paused, only the door between us, I heard that special thick quiet of presence, of awaiting, and remembered the children’s game: Who’s there? Who’s there? No one is there. Then ask Monsieur No One in. At that the hair rose on my scalp and I grasped the door-knob and dashed open my door in a sort of rage.
“Louis!”
The lights of my room burned against his face as it poised there above mine. Then I saw the eyes. The circlets of indigo, the centres falling miles deep, filled by darkness. I saw the eyes before I saw any of the rest of it, and giving a stupid small cry, I stepped back, and back, until the bookcase stopped me.
It came into my room then, what had been Louis, gliding and silent, with the faint perfume about it of sands and sweet resin, and with the shadow of night.
And after it, Vlok, his polite hat in his hands.
The creature had gone towards the fireplace. It stood there and did not move. It seemed to value the heat. Egypt was a hot country, and here, the north had been far warmer, then.
“Be calm, mademoiselle,” Vlok said. His face had a still, solid look to it. Yes, he had been primed. He was the servant of the fiend. How much had it devoured of him, to make him so obedient? Not so much. He was in all other ways himself. Only, the jailor had become – the slave.
“I’m quite calm,” I said. I added mundanely, “I saw Monsieur de Jenier hanged on a rope from an attic window. And his death was reported in all the papers. How can it be he’s here now, and so convincingly in one of his rôles?”
And I made myself look at the creature. It did not seem to be angered that I did so. But I must be careful of those eyes. They were so horrible, I had nearly died of terror … The rest, if one did not know, was only a fashionable woman, tall and slender. She affected a contemporary coat with fur at the collar, a flattering hat. Her hair was blonde as ice. She did not wear earrings.
“No, mademoiselle, I’m here to explain all that, what you – thought that you saw.”
I had already noticed that the feet and hands of the woman with Louis’ face, feet and hands which give away the man and which Louis would have been careful to camouflage, need
ed no camouflage. They were not large, not masculine. And the line of the breasts under the coat, a gentle, mellifluous swelling, nothing false to it. Even the bones of the face, very fine, and the brows plucked, and no sheerest shading on the upper lip, the skin nowhere roughened by a razor.
“You say, a hanged man, dangling from a rope, out of the attic window. I’m afraid,” said Vlok, “it was poor Curt who died. He fell down the stairs in running away – he was so frightened. And his neck was broken. It was a convenience to discover him – later – and to identify and bury him as Louis. Louis was not so well-known here. Not that he couldn’t have been – we hadn’t come to that. And Curt was nobody. It will save trouble in the future.”
“Who then,” I said, “who then is this?” And trembled so much I sat down and heard the paper-knife plop on to the rug.
Then, out of the silence, it spoke to me.
“Tuamon,” it said. The voice was like a boy’s, high, feminine, yet intently male. “Tiy-Amonet,” modifyingly amended the voice.
The eyes were turning on me. I looked away. There was no extreme of heat or cold, and despite the pale fragrance of what I must take to be kuphi, this was no ghost, it was real. An altered reality.
It said, to Vlok now: “You tell. Tell.”
“As yet,” Vlok said to me, fussily, with a curious pride, “she hasn’t the grasp of our language. After he lost it – at first – but never mind that. I can see to that.”
I thought, Why not let her talk herself, anyway? Let me hear what it sounded like, the tongue of the Ptolemies, the Greek Pharaohs, the land of Set. Or the Roman’s Latin … But even from the thought I recoiled.
“I shall be ill if you stay here very long,” I said, not looking at either of them. “If it’s necessary –”
“Yes. I’ll be quick then. But you must listen.”
And the other voice repeated, “Listen,” as she stood against my fire, all the light and darkness of the room upon her, but vague as something covered by centuries of dust.
Tiy-Amonet, who had been dust two thousand years, here in the flesh. Or had it been so long? Might she not have played her trick, whatever it was, before? Timonie had enraged her, for Timonie had not been suitable – since she was herself a female? And Tiy-Amonet rebuked Timonie, and dismembered her body as in the sub-rites of Osirus, depriving the soul of continuity in the after-life, unless all the bits be gathered together. But then there entered Louis.
What had been done to Louis? For Louis was here but Louis was not.
Vlok had seated himself, his hat on one knee. There was something silly about this, and about the way he then began to give me a lecture on the facts. He spoke prosaically, not even making, any more, those apologetic pauses of his over the odder revelations. He looked, and behaved, like a cheap lawyer. How she – it – how the thing called Tiy-Amonet or Tuamon – had informed him, I did not know. Perhaps the residue of Louis had been employed to do it. Before any slightest iota of Louis as we knew him ceased to remain.
It was all quite straightforward. And quite unbelievable. And it happened. Not only was the proof before me, but the air quivered with it – the magic air which the sky let down like a net upon the earth. I never doubted a word. Not even the ultimate ones, demonstrably.
The framework, as I had mentally positioned it, was correct. Then enter Louis. And when this occurred, the corner stone was laid.
Timonie had certainly been useless to the essence, the leftover, the spirit and will of the thing once known as Tiy-Amonet. But Louis was nearly perfect. There was a facial resemblance, as with the girl, and the eyes, blue to madness and absurdity – but it was much more than that. It was the mind and the psyche which counted.
The essence, electrified, reached out at once, and began its spinning all about him. Louis thought himself lured by the after-image of Timonie, but it was the spider-witch who worked on him, who showed him pictures of the dead girl, easing him on in stages, until allowing him to feel the recorded horror and fury of her death. By then, and long before the sapphire walked up his bed, its poison had entered him and was infinitesimally active.
The being killed the girl out of pique, but it did not want, primarily, to kill, only to have, itself, life. Louis represented that. And yes, it had had life in this way before Louis, but that was long, long ago. So long, it had been irked at the waiting.
On that last night in the house, it must have shown him the truth. I was not told how, but there would be ways, I imagine. Then he scored the mirror in fear, or anger, or some other emotion. His feelings were in thrall. Yet, he must have been swept by pangs of every kind. Even of excitement. There are plenty of hints of that. Then Tiy-Amonet came down the web to devour him.
When he went back to Vlok the following morning – for he did go back – Louis was already losing contact with his previous life, his own personality. He forgot how to dress himself, and how to use utensils of eating. He could not read. The toothbrush and the modern razor baffled him, he achieved their service by other means. Then he would lose speech for hours, then for days. He spoke unintelligibly, gibberish, a compound of his native phonetics and those of some otherwhere, or just of the brain’s abstraction. Sometimes he seemed to be blind, dumb and deaf. He lay on the bed in his hotel-suite looking up at the ceiling, unblinking. He did not lack control of any other bodily function, only of the functions of society. He did not demonstrate distress, and only once a torrent of ferocity seemed to take him. During that, he smashed things, and snatching the unused razor appeared to be about to cut someone’s throat. But Vlok and Curt overpowered him. Until then, and even then, Vlok half-suspected Louis was playing one of his jokes on them. However, after the razor, the doctor was again summoned. When he arrived, suddenly Louis was better. He talked and acted normally, implying it was Vlok who was inclined to jokes and exaggerations, putting the doctor en garde. Louis himself was worn out and charming. The physician, bewildered, fooled, left the hotel, and next Louis left it, by another way. He seemed to have recovered himself, had got hold of Curt, and learned from him where the female journalist frequented.
Louis went across the City, sometimes getting lost – Paradis had not been this way in the times of Tiy-Amonet. When Louis at length found his quarry, he and Tiy-Amonet found it as one. For of course, Tiy-Amonet had no objection to Louis’ finding and lucidly conversing with this woman – myself. Indeed, had wanted her found, and conversed with. So I had seen that day before me a creature that was already two creatures, but mostly the creature it had not been and did not appear to be. Soulless also, behind its blind-blue eyes. For what was left of his soul after she had been at it, and what was left of hers? I had seen what he had seen in the dream, the young man swooning back in ecstasy on the runaway bicycle –
Then Vlok pushed in and in a quavering act of normalcy bore them away. Which was permitted. I had been made heir to the written diary. It was done.
After that, Louis vanished. Not outwardly that was, but totally within. By the time they reached the hotel, the body was speechless, and almost catatonic. Up in the hotel lift they went, theatricals, covering, and made him a prisoner in his suite. Summoned, but en garde, the doctor would not return, and seemed to have alerted besides his colleagues.
There is another meaning for the word Imago, this being the thing which emerges from the chrysalis.
When I was told he would last a week, she had apparently judged how long the rest of the transition would take, whatever its outward shows. On the seventh day, Louis’ voice had spoken to Vlok one last sentence, over and over. He wanted to go back to the house in the Observatory. He must, he must. Over and over. Until the harassed Vlok agreed and took him there, with Curt at their heels. Presently, I arrived.
During our interchange, Vlok’s and mine, Curt had naturally been unable to restrain “Louis,” who had gone up to the attic. Here he wandered about, Curt wandering after, all nerves. When Vlok rejoined them, leaving me in the study, “Louis” – or could it have been Louis – had
sat down under one of the dirty attic windows, smiling, playing with the silver earring.
Below, I had taken the diary up. And this must have registered throughout the web – which now, it seemed, had meshed all the house, and half the City. A few moments later, Louis rose, opened the attic window, climbed the sill in one step, and tipped himself out.
It may have been, I had begun to think so, the last surge of his persona trying to prevent what was to come, had come, upon it. To baulk and escape, after all.
But, by throwing himself from the attic, he had placed himself for the fall, in the magic condition, the correct one. He was between heaven and earth. In the air.
Vlok’s face now was like the moon, idiotic, pale, expressionless. He spoke of things that had nothing to do with Vlok the agent, the man of his time. He said flatly, “You thought you saw him hanging from a rope, mademoiselle, but didn’t you see how the rope was, how it vibrated and smoked? Even as he was falling, suddenly one of the windows broke below – the blue windows – and as that happened, a substance started to pour back and upward, out of Louis’ neck, about the top of the spine. It was that stuff they called ectoplasm. I admit, I had to look it up to find out. A kind of flesh that isn’t flesh. He was Tuamon, by then, you see, and Tuamon can do that, make a fleshly cord out of his own body. And the ectoplasmic rope shot back into the attic, and attached itself everywhere, to the walls, the floor, and it stopped his fall – not dangerously suddenly, but resiliently, like the safety net in the circus. And then I saw you looking out at it too, mademoiselle. At the time, I didn’t know any more than you did, what was going on.” (A touch of amusement, at his unenlightenment of then.) “As for poor Curt, he was gibbering behind me like a monkey. And then you left the house, I believe, so you didn’t see what took place. The rope of matter pulled Louis’ body gently up, back into the attic, and presently he told me who he, or perhaps I should say, she, was. And at that Curt lost control of himself and ran away, and I’ve told you the rest of that.”