The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  Having gained the house by a side entry, to which the hag had given him a key, Raoulin set himself to master the building.

  He had determined to recover the ghost’s corridor, and all through the hot post-noon he sought it, and, wide-awake, finally found it, too. The corridor seemed redolent yet of her ghostly fragrance. And shivering slightly, he started along in the direction she had chosen. Soon enough it gave on a further flight of ascending steps – perhaps the spectre had a lair … But the solitary door above was disappointingly jammed – or secured – Raoulin could only concede that this kept up the best traditions of romance.

  Then came another fall of stairs leading down, with, at their head, a slit of window covered by a ‘grill’. Looking out, Raoulin realised himself to be in a tall tower of the house. He saw the pebbled slope of roofs, and, to his surprise, noticed the distant miniature of the Temple-Church adrift like a promontory in soft haze.

  Taking the downward stair, he next arrived against a low door, which for an amazement opened.

  There lay a garden, walled apart from the rest.

  It had been made for a woman, he supposed; even through the riot of weeds and ivy, a map of vestal symmetry was apparent. A garden of more southern climes, modelled, maybe, on the classical courts of the Roman. Clipped ilex and conifer that had burst from shape, a tank of marble all green with lichen and with a green velvet scum upon it. The wrecks of arbours were visible, and a charming statue, a young girl in a graceful tunic, holding up an archaic oil-lamp which once it had been possible to kindle.

  Raoulin trod down paths, breaking the skeins of creeper with his elegant shoes, the ivy trying to detain him by clutching at the points of his sleeves and hose.

  No birds sang in that garden of emerald green. He knew it had been made for her – or that she had made it her own.

  Therefore, he was not startled, reaching the end of an avenue, to confront the bank of yew in which gaped a black frontage: the arched portico of a mausoleum.

  The tomb was not very big, nor very old, quite fresh. He read with ease the name on the arch in its bannering of stone. While, student-scholar that he was, he had no trouble either with the Latin underneath.

  Helise d’Uscaret

  Brought a bride to this House

  Now at the court of Death below

  A huge lock maintained the entrance of the tomb. But, thought Raoulin, leaning on a tree, a ghost could pass straight through all walls, of wood, iron or granite.

  Useless then to fasten up his own chamber. Even had he dreamed of doing so.

  He wished to be served his supper that night in his rooms. He did not question the hag. He told her nothing. He did not even note she had put some morsels of beef into his stew, as requested.

  During the evening, he glanced upon a few books, and partly turned his mind towards the morning. But the Sachrist had lost its stature.

  In a strange condition he took himself early to bed, soon after the City bells had rung the Hesperus. (He would need to rise at Prima Hora.)

  He lay on his back, besieged by sensuality, and lovely listless desires that had no need to exert themselves or to hold back. Lethargy stole slowly but certainly upon him, the harbinger. Sleep came in drifts, easily, totally, before the window had quite darkened.

  But she, she did not come at all.

  Though he had been trained to be something of a thinker, Raoulin was not properly a dreamer. Where he inclined to poetry, it was the cadence of the moment.

  The ghost had failed to keep their assignation, and continued to fail.

  Within a month, unsupplied by anything further uncanny, and by then thoroughly embroiled in the student life of the university, Raoulin had put the green-eyed haunt aside. It is true that he referred privately to the house as “bewitched” and even once in conversation with a fellow student had described his address as “d’Uscaret the ghost mansion.” But the fellow student had only absently remarked that among the desuetudinous old houses of Ducal times, there were scarcely any that did not have either a phantom or a curse.

  By day the university, which was run rather on the classical lines, worked its claws into his brain, and Raoulin caught a fever of learning only before intimated. By night he had now friends of the same feather, unlike his leery brothers, with whom to go debating and drinking. More often than not, as the first month enlarged to a plural, Raoulin did not bother to sup at his lodging, but dined in some cheap tavern with his comrades, went to a cock-fight, or to watch in their season the street players, who would set up their stages under the walls of the Sacrifice, or such commemorative plague churches as Our Lady of Ashes. His head was either burnished with wine or bright with ideas, the licence or strictures of Petronius, Petrarch, and Pliny the Other, the miracles of Galen. Raoulin was aware he was happy, but wisely, like a superstitious savage in some travelogue of the Caesars, did not name his state.

  With the wine-shops and bookshops and passing shows, temporal or religious, he was soon familiar. Not so after all with the brothels. Some caution from home had stuck, concerning dread diseases, and heartless females intent only on robbery. Raoulin had been accustomed to the wholesome but difficult girls of the village, or to celibacy perforce.

  The ghost had fired his blood, but that was only to be expected. Women were the Devil’s, and if dead or damned, their power must be irresistible. You could not be blamed for fancying a ghost.

  But the phantom came no more to tickle him in helpless sleep.

  Instead it was Joseph who caught his arm and said, “Tomorrow is a Holy Day.”

  “Good. Let us be holy,” replied Raoulin.

  Joseph laughed, and the dark sunlight of evening glinted on his eye-glasses and the silver tags of his points – for Joseph was not poor.

  “I had another notion in mind. Over the river is a tavern, by name the Black Smith. Behind lies a house which calls itself the Sweet Cup.”

  “Ah ha,” said Raoulin cautiously.

  “The girls are clean, you have my word,” said Joseph. “I’ve been there.”

  “I have a treatise on the fifth humour –”

  “First come and console the possibly non-existent other four. The world is for man’s enjoyment.”

  On the board of the tavern was a mighty Nubian – the eponymous smith – who, swinging high his hammer, was about to crush the noddle of a fallen enemy sprawled across the anvil. Raoulin regarded this sign with interest, disfavour, and amusement. They drank no more than a token goblet, however, before going through a hind door and out across a yard. Here a ladder had been fixed, seeming to ascend into a hayloft. “What kind of pastoral cubby is this?” demanded Raoulin jollily: the one goblet had been of the strong kind. “Never fear, you shall see wonders,” answered Joseph.

  They managed the ladder and so got into the loft. It seemed bare, and they crossed in near blackness.

  The far end of the loft gave them a shut door. Joseph knocked loudly in five spaced raps.

  Presently a tiny aperture, like the spy-hole of a nunnery, was opened, and someone looked out at them invisibly. A woman’s voice inquired: “Who is there?”

  “Two men.”

  “Are you thirsty?” asked the voice.

  “For a sweet cup,” said Joseph.

  Apparently all this was in the nature of a password. The door of the brothel came unbarred, and they were let through.

  Raoulin stared. He was in a lobby, the plaster of whose walls was covered by paintings of a vivid and obscene nature.

  There a shepherd disrobed a shepherdess by means of his crook, there a minstrel, his curvaceous viol put by, gently bowed the naked breasts of a lady instead – and there a priapic faun frolicked with two dryads in garlands of grapes and vine leaves. Swerving about from this, Raoulin encountered the door-keeper herself, who was startlingly clad in the draped garment of an antique Roman lady, a thing of such fine gauze that through it every contour, glint and shade of her otherwise nudity might be seen.

  This nymph greeted them
with an Eastern flourish.

  “Will you drink of the bowl of joy?”

  “We will,” said Joseph.

  The nymph ran her glance across Raoulin. Her eyes were edged with kohl and her cheeks powdered. Her face had on more clothing than her body.

  “Do you know the custom of the house?”

  Joseph nodded. Raoulin, his blood thundering in his ears, was prepared to learn it.

  From a pedestal the nymph raised a large cup of white ceramic. She held it out before them.

  Joseph reached in a hand, and plucked something forth.

  “Take a counter,” he said to Raoulin. “That’s how you select your girl.”

  “What? Unseen? Suppose she’s not to my taste –”

  The nymph said to him smoothly, flirtatiously, “Every one of our damsels is beautiful.”

  “Whose word do I have?” (Joseph wriggled uneasily.) “What if,” said Raoulin, primed still by the one strong goblet, “I prefer you?”

  But just then he became aware of a man stirring in the shadow of a curtain beyond the paintings. Big and black he looked, like the smith off the tavern sign. So Raoulin shrugged, paid as Joseph did what he was asked, and took a small square counter like a die from the cup.

  The nymph, while she had not responded to his sally, did not seem to dislike him for it. She said to Joseph, “You know the way, sieur. I’ll guide your friend.”

  Then the curtain was drawn aside (the bully had effaced himself) and they entered a corridor. It appeared to run back a long way, and its sides were made mostly of high wooden screens which creaked mysteriously and emitted driblets of light. Although the screens were occlusive, weird shadows had been flung up on the low uneven ceiling, tangles of writhing knots, like serpents. And there were sounds too, perhaps like the noises in Hell, gasps and grunts, squeals and moans, and now and then a cry, a blasphemy, a prayer.

  Raoulin was filled by apprehension as by lust. They had long since become, these two emotions, mutually conducive.

  Suddenly Joseph slunk aside. He went through one of the screens and was consumed into the abyss.

  The door-keeper had not looked at the counter Raoulin selected, perhaps it made no difference. She led him unerringly, and all at once the corridor was crossed by a pair of aisles. These were both of them in darkness. The nymph halted, and pointed to the left-hand way.

  “Yes?” said Raoulin uncertainly.

  “Yes, m’sieur,” said the door-keeper. And reaching up, she kissed him on the lips with a little snake’s flicker of the tongue. “The very last of the doors. It’s marked with the same mark as on the counter. For you, something special.”

  Then she was gone, leaving him alight with the thirst of the house.

  He went into the corridor and saw that it did indeed have doors rather than screens. The last of these, blundered on in the gloom, was marked with – what was it? A sort of mask … He did not wait for more, but pushed at the barrier. It swung open with a lubricious croak.

  Again, Raoulin had pause.

  There was a pale-washed room with an Eastern carpet on one wall, the floor very clean, and lightly strewn with colourless flower-heads picked for their scent, as in a lady’s chamber. One felt one had stumbled into the wrong house. Against another wall stood a couch, perhaps too wide for virginity; yet otherwise this was all the stuff of a well-to-do and pure girl’s bedroom – even to the straightbacked chair and the little footstool. These, turned a fraction away from the door, were occupied.

  Raoulin’s heart, ready engorged like his loins, took a leap. Was it all some jest – some mischief – but how would Joseph have known –?

  Raoulin closed the door with stealth, and began to walk silently forward, his heart noisy, and prepared for anything –

  As he circled like a fox, the posed picture came visible, the chair and the girl seated in it, her blonde head slightly bent, her face dippered into shadow …

  She wore a black gown, but its lacing, at the bosom not the back, had been loosed, and under it there was no modest “breast-plate” of embroidered linen or silk, only the silken pressure of two breasts. Her feet were bare upon the stool, and nearly all one leg, the skirt of the gown caught up as if through negligence. Her left hand lay idly at her throat, just above the portion of white flesh that rose, swelled and tugged at the laces of the bosom, and sank down, leaving them slackened. The right hand rested upon an object which nestled at her belly. It was a skull.

  Here was a maiden discovered alone and untrammelled, her hem carelessly raised, but in the most solemn act of contemplation advocated by the church: dwelling upon the martyrdom of the saints, and on the personal death. To this shall you come.

  But her face – whose face was it?

  At that instant, as if quietly wakening from a dream, she lifted her head.

  Despite the blondness, and the skull, she was not Helise d’Uscaret.

  Raoulin shuddered. He was dreadfully relieved and sorry.

  It was a pretty face, too innocent, with a weak kissable mouth, and cool weasel eyes that knew everything.

  She had seen him shudder, and she said in a whisper, “Thinking of death makes me remember life.”

  And she took his hands and put one upon the skull and the other upon her left breast.

  So warm one, and beating itself with a heart, and the other as cold and hard as a stone.

  “We’re only mortal,” said the girl. “How constricting are these laces –”

  For a moment he could not unclamp his hands, from the icy apple of corruption, the hot fluttering apple of quickness.

  But she released him and drew his fingers to her laces.

  Then, the skull had rolled down into the flowers and he knelt between the bared limb and the covered one, his hands sliding on the treasures of Eve, and her hands, not those of a maiden, everywhere upon him, so he could hardly bear it.

  She showed him how he might have her in the chair, if he wished, and he could not wait another second.

  As he united with her, the whole room seemed to thunder. He had not had a girl for half a year.

  She urged him on with wild cries that, in his tumult, he believed. As the spasm shook him, he kicked the damnable skull, and it rattled away across the floor.

  “Have I pleased you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then … will you give me a little gift –?”

  Raoulin frowned. He had paid at the door and reckoned this unsuitable. But then again, perhaps they robbed their girls here, and it had been very good. If he tipped her, she might let him have her again, although she had already gone behind a curtain to wash, and she came back with her laces tied, and he supposed his time with her was up.

  He put a coin between her breasts, and leaned to kiss her. She allowed it. But then she said, “I regret. The Mother’s strict.”

  “Mother – what, of your nunnery?”

  The blonde whore lowered her eyes. But she removed his hands.

  “Unkindness,” he said. “No charity.”

  “It isn’t my choice. In a minute I shall be wanted.”

  “And if I protest, that hulk of a door-fellow will throw me out.”

  She said nothing.

  Raoulin straightened his clothes and did up his points with surly tardiness. “This is a churlish place. I won’t come back. Even the old hag’s more friendly at d’Uscaret.”

  No sooner had he uttered this than he was puzzled at having done so. To name his lodging to a chance harlot would not, even in the nicest circumstances, have seemed sensible to him. But there, too late, it was said.

  He expected no response. Perhaps she would have the grace to be deaf.

  But then she asked, in a peculiar tone, “How is it called?”

  “What?”

  “Your lodging is it? There?”

  “Where?” And now he looked up with a merry smile – and met the eyes of a terrified animal in a trap. “Why – what’s up with you?”

  “D’Uscaret?” she said. “Is i
t there?”

  “Possibly I may have –”

  “You lodge there?”

  She was so insistent she seemed to drive him.

  “Very well, I do. But don’t try to make anything of it –”

  Before he had even finished, she began to scream.

  He stood astounded, without a thought in his head. It seemed to be occurring in another room, this appalling outcry and madness – for while she screamed she ran about, threw herself at the walls, tore at herself with her nails in the most horrible way – dragged down the costly carpet from the plaster and writhed with it on the ground.

  As had to happen next, the door burst open. Two roughs, one with drawn dagger, came shouldering through. The larger, unarmed, man seized Raoulin, while his companion laid the dagger under Raoulin’s ear.

  Raoulin kept quite still. He said firmly, “I did nothing to her that wasn’t natural. We were talking after – and then this!” He had to raise his voice, for she went on shrieking, though now her vocal chords cracked. The doorway filled with clusters of frightened or curious male and female faces. A girl, clad only in a shift, pushed by and ran to the blonde harlot, tried to take hold of her and quieten her. It was beyond her powers. Two others hastened to join the struggle, calling the blonde pet names as they ripped her ripping hands from her hair and breasts –

  Then the proprietress, the “Mother,” was in the room, a pockmarked frump one would not turn to regard once on the street.

  “Explain this hubbub.”

  Her presence bore such authority, even the demented creature on the floor grew abruptly mute, and then began to weep. The three other girls cradled her.

  The Mother turned her unadorable gaze on Raoulin.

  “Well?”

  Raoulin thought quickly. Only the bizarre truth would do. He reluctantly rendered it. “– And when I told her d’Uscaret –”

  “D’Uscaret!” exclaimed the woman. Her face had altered. She did not look afraid, but a wily sort of blankness was stealing over her, the appearance she would put on for the confessional.

  Raoulin took heart. He said boldly, “This isn’t what I called here for.”