by Tanith Lee
“Who is Julie d’Is?” asked Sandrine, in such a voice that he knew she recalled perfectly.
“A dear little girl,” he said, “with whom you used, once, to play. Now a woman, looking I’m afraid a great deal older than you or her years. In rather impoverished circumstances. Retiring.”
“I remember …” said Sandrine. “… Julie d’Is.” She went slowly very pale. Chorgeh watched, interested. “I haven’t seen her since I was ten.”
“But your playmate.”
“Never,” said Sandrine vehemently. She shuddered. “Even now, at the very thought.” She got up, paced over the room, and back again, and standing there before him said dramatically, “That child was a beast, a hobgoblin. Ugh! We were all terrified of her. She could make you die. She’s done it. She never said so. She never said anything. To the adults it was all May I and Thank you. When she was with us, she would just sit there. She was older. Her eyes were down. She had horrible eyes, small and sharp, cold and colorless. And long lashes, not beautiful, but like a sort of fence, as if to stop anything getting by. Then her mother would call for her, such a poor silly woman. We had a rhyme – how did it go? I can’t think – but it was about Julie d’Is whisking you down to Hell if you didn’t watch out.”
“How did you know she was a hobgoblin? Apart, of course, from her eyes.”
“Because the kittens died. And then Alyse, and Lucie. Surely you’ve heard?”
“But why a hobgoblin? Wasn’t she just a poisoner?”
“A child who poisons?”
“Why not?” said Chorgeh. As a child, he had once or twice considered the method.
“There was a story,” said Sandrine, at the fireplace where the dried flowers still stood petrified, stiff on their stalks as she now was on her stalk of dress. “Julie d’Is was a changeling.”
“Ah,” said Chorgeh.
“You can laugh” (he had not) “but when they were in the East, the silly mother offended a sorcerer. He was an old man who came to the kitchen door in rags, and she had the servants chase him off. But he was powerful, it was all a test or prank. If she’d been nice to him he would have blessed her, but she wasn’t, so he exuded a curse. Madame d’Is was carrying two babies, twins. But when she gave birth, one baby vanished. And the baby that was left was changed. It stopped being wholesome and like a baby. It became this awful cold-eyed stony little toad. It became Julie.”
“Yes,” said Chorgeh. “But what about the other twin?”
“I suppose Julie killed it,” said Sandrine flatly, “and they wrapped it in a shawl and the nurse took it and threw it in a reedy swamp. They couldn’t tell anyone. It was too disgusting.”
“Yes,” Chorgeh said again. He imagined the two little girls lying in their cradle under the mosquito net on some veranda, the one child in the stasis of death, the other in the static condition of concentrated being that Julie d’Is so oddly evidenced. And then from Sandrine’s facile and foolish words he contrived the exact perfect image, the nurse-woman with eyes of slanting slate, bearing the dead bundle, casting it in like a failed Moses, for the gurgling mud to have, and the frogs chirruping and the strange orient pearl of the moon watching from the trees. Through its curiosity this last picture was made to seem true. He believed it, even though knowing how and why he was convinced.
“How is it you suppose she manages her crimes?” he said to Sandrine.
“Oh,” she said, simply, “it’s Julie herself, isn’t it. She’s poisonous. Like certain substances – if you’re near them, they can kill you. Julie is like that.”
They had little cakes, and he thought of Olizette, and that he would be late to see her today, but never mind, he would stay with her until dinnertime. He had seen some bright flowers for sale, to his townsman’s eye fresh from the country, and he would take her those, and perhaps some wine. He was growing faintly bored with Olizette, in the most gentle and patient of ways. After all, she was almost well, and had yielded no clues, and what could they talk about?
When he was sufficiently bored with Sandrine, which happened fairly soon after the cakes, Chorgeh made charming excuses and left. Sandrine seemed disappointed, and he realized with surprise that she had really not believed in his mission at all, she imagined Julie d’Is to have been only an impulsive ploy to visit.
With Julie d’Is he was not bored at all. He felt for her a wild sheer loathing quite novel to him, quite energizing.
When he reached the apartment house of Olizette, among the pots and steps, the sun was on the edge of the City, hesitating for a moment. The shape-changer light of dusk already flooded the street. Chorgeh saw the doctor’s carriage there in it, like a stone in a river. Somehow Chorgeh was not startled by this. He felt a sinking in his belly, but it was neither alarm nor regret.
He went up, and met the doctor again on the landing. The doctor regarded him with dislike, resentful of an added burden. “You must prepare yourself, monsieur, for very bad news indeed.”
“She’s dead,” said Chorgeh.
“A sudden relapse. The woman called for me as soon as she saw what went on.”
“Did the girl have a priest?” Chorgeh asked anxiously, for he had learned enough of Olizette to realize she would have wanted one.
“Yes. He is there now.”
Chorgeh went into the room, and when the priest glanced up Chorgeh said directly, “Please understand, Father, that the young lady was befriended by me, nothing more,” for now getting the facts of her chastity straight seemed imperative for her sake.
She looked shrunken and elderly as she lay in the bed. Worse, she looked like nothing at all, like discarded washing, an old dress.
Chorgeh stared at her with heartbreaking sympathy.
The priest began to try to comfort him, and Chorgeh, perturbed, went away at once. It seemed there was a brother-in-law who had been summoned, and all the arrangements now were in hand. Even the priest had known Olizette, her character and means – there had not needed to be, after all, any embarrassing explanations.
On reaching home, Chorgeh found his mother had filled the house with guests. They were everywhere, like a plague of well-dressed mice, squeaking and waving their paws. Of the writer “uncle” there was no sign, however, and Chorgeh was consumed by the detestation of a man whose last bolt hole had been soiled and overturned.
“Good evening, dear. Do change your clothes and join us.”
He wanted to seize his mother by the throat, shouting in her face that she had ruined him, how dare she – But she had all the rights, and he none.
“I’ve a terrible headache,” said Chorgeh. “I must lie down. If I’m better, I’ll make my entrance later.”
He went to his room and locked the door from the outside, to mislead anyone who came to seek him. Then he removed to his father’s study and shut himself in there.
There was a faint odor of leather, tobacco from a sacred jar. The room was protective of Chorgeh, securing him. In a closed drawer, skillfully negotiated, Chorgeh found what he was looking for. Prior to dying, the father had initiated the son into a number of the male mysteries. If he had lived, possibly they would not have got on at all, but death had flung a glamorous veil over their parting and their relationship. Everything that Chorgeh’s father had ever said to him or taught him, Chorgeh remembered vividly.
When he had completed his transaction, he went back to his room and locked himself inside. Beyond, the noises of the guests ebbed and flowed. He visualized Julie d’Is arriving, floating among them in a pale gown and padded hair, some of it loose on her white snake’s neck. Here she touched and here she breathed, and once or twice she merely looked, and the mark of death was on them. Chorgeh patted his pillow, beneath which lay something hard and cold now. Smiling, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed of Olizette’s burial at a tiny church in the fields, a grave with a willow, mourning doves. He did not feel sad for her, asleep. He threw the flowers on her mound, and drank the wine from the bottle cheerfully, and bought a cake from a tree.
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The next day Chorgeh rose early and went out. His hours were often premature, for his business in the City was that of a sightseer, flighty and opportune. No one had remarked anything unusual.
When he reached the street of Julie d’Is, Chorgeh positioned himself as he had grown accustomed to do, almost opposite the apartment building where she lived. There was a portico there, into which he could conveniently slip and be hidden. It was a morning when, generally, she would go out, attend to her minuscule amounts of shopping, and then perambulate the park. No one was about, the day was lowering and rainy, and now and then a sharp report of thunder came. It was made for him, this day, and he only feared it would put her off; perhaps she dreaded storms. But no, the door opened, and out stepped the creature of the legend, the serpent, clad in her squalid coat and coiled, unbecoming hat, with an umbrella to ward off the scimitars of heaven.
Chorgeh followed her, without undue caution, just as before. No one had ever noted him; she herself, the demoness, had never turned on him, never even looked over her shoulder. She went into a draper’s shop, into a shop that sold cold meats and cheeses. Did she eat these things? What did she do? He had never fathomed, no one had ever said, he had never seen her, crouched in her room, the spider in her web, grooming herself and preening, smacking her lips over her kills. He was inclined to think she went into a cupboard in her apartment, and stayed there, like a lead soldier in its box. Whatever it was, he would never know.
In the park, which he had thought she might avoid but which she entered as ever, the black trees dripped and hissed, the paths were wet. Everything was noise, flashes and rushes and the crack of the thunder. When Chorgeh shot Julie d’Is with his father’s pistol, the thunder obligingly roared and the lightning sparkled. The reek of powder was crushed in rain. He had been fifteen feet from her back and the bullet had gone in under her hat. There was a painterly wash of blood on the path, but it flushed away. Her purchases lay scattered, sodden in their paper wrappings. She was a pathetic heap of old clothes, as Olizette had seemed, a scarecrow. Chorgeh did not approach, but kept to his plan. He knew she was quite dead, for presumably she could be slaughtered in the normal fashion, and the bullet must have entered her brain. He hurried away, feeling nothing, only a little bit sick, but then he had taken no breakfast, it was probably only that.
Rain fell steadily for a week, then on the first clear day, the writer came to call on Chorgeh’s mother. She was taken aback, not having seen him for months. After a while, almost surreptitiously, the writer climbed the house, and knocked on the door of the study-shrine of Chorgeh’s father.
“Yes, you may come in,” said Chorgeh.
He sat in the leather armchair, while the writer tactfully passed about the room, examining items with the cunning reserve of a man in a museum. Presently the writer sat down also. The fire was lit. They stretched their legs to it.
“Had you heard?” said the writer.
“That the Beautiful Lady had been killed? Yes. There was a small passage in some of the journals. I was only waiting for you to come and ask.”
“What did the journals say?”
“Couldn’t you read them?”
“I never read them. Nasty things. I have my knowledge from another source.”
“Naturally. Likely you know much more than the rest of us. All that the journals said was that a Mademoiselle Julie d’Is had been bizarrely shot in a garden near the Temple-Church. That there were no witnesses. That nothing at all was known. They did add, a pair of them, that unpleasing speculation had surrounded Mademoiselle d’Is in her youth. But that nothing had been said against her latterly, she seemed to have neither relatives nor friends, no one in fact with a reason or wish to slay her.”
“We may always rely on our relatives and friends for that,” said the writer.
“Tell me all the rest of it, then,” said Chorgeh, apparently intrigued.
Under cover of his porcelain exterior he held himself tight. He knew perfectly well the “uncle” was here in his literary capacity only. He supposed that it was Chorgeh who had murdered Julie d’Is, maybe he had no doubts. Although such pistols as Chorgeh’s father’s were common, although Chorgeh, even Olizette, had no glaring link to Julie d’Is, and although the writer indeed knew nothing at all of the ultimate involvement of the pastry shop, yet he had deduced the obvious. Though the police would never attach Chorgeh to the killing, the writer did, and the writer was here solely as that, to observe him, to see how Chorgeh went on. And it was possible, if Chorgeh gave himself away to the writer, that the “uncle” might take over from the writer, and feel obliged to give Chorgeh up to the authorities. Chorgeh had known this moment would come, and he had prepared for it. He was a practiced deceiver, and his youngness was on his side, for with the widespread fault of the middle-aged, the writer coupled youngness with inexperience.
“I know very slightly more,” said the writer to Chorgeh. “I know there was, of course, a post-mortem. I know the result of this was the news that Julie d’Is died because of the entry of a bullet into her brain, which was evident from the first. I know that a few of her erstwhile familiars were questioned. But none of them had seen her for years. It seemed to me,” said the writer, uncrossing his legs, and lighting, without permission, a cigarette, “it seemed to me that you and I, say, were worthier of an interrogation. We’d been watching the woman and discussing her fairly recently.”
“Oh, not so recently as all that,” said Chorgeh. “I say, I’m very sorry, but you mustn’t smoke in here. Mother would fly into a fit. It’s awful isn’t it?”
The writer cast his cigarette into the fire and smiled. Chorgeh had revealed an arch-cleverness. The writer could not last for more than ten minutes longer without a cigarette. He would have to go out, and why should Chorgeh, plainly intent on his father’s books, go with him?
“You haven’t, then,” said the writer, “been following Julie d’Is?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because she fascinated you.”
“That’s true. Then I found someone else who fascinated me even more. You recollect how skittish I can be.”
“What do you think of it, though?” said the writer.
“Of what?”
“Of her death.”
“I think it’s ideal,” said Chorgeh. “I think it’s inevitable.”
“Since she had no life?”
Chorgeh did not fall into the trap.
“Well, she may have done,” he said, “for all we know.”
When the writer “uncle” withdrew, tapping his cigarette case, seemingly quite delighted with Chorgeh’s acting or innocence, not entirely sure now either way, Chorgeh relapsed, looking at the fire, himself overseeing what he had said. He had made no slip, yet he had been truthful in his pronouncement. The death of such a beast was both ideal and inevitable. He felt himself no hero, and no villain, for seeing to it. It was a shame the post-mortem had shown nothing of significance, but perhaps it had and the “uncle” merely had not learned in his prying what it was. Some things would be hushed up. Chorgeh constructed for himself something more fanciful than the spike in the ring. He saw one of Julie’s bony fingers, and out from under the nail a sort of talon extruded. It pricked the plump hand of Olizette, finer than a needle. But the bullet had not been fine, it had been harsh and shattering. He had taken no chances, aiming for the head. Her hat was so unalluring, it really served her right. For he would have found her more difficult to kill if she had been lovely and dressed with taste. He would not have wanted to spoil her appearance, and perhaps must have risked going close with a stiletto. She had fallen straight over, directly down, and her soul went deeper yet, diving into Hell. Chorgeh considered the twin of Julie d’Is, the sister she was supposed to have had, and to have killed in babyhood. He saw the cradle again under the netting, and the nurse-woman throwing out the bundle into the mud. Was that what had decided him, or was it only Olizette?
Chorgeh sat back in the chair and com
posed himself for a nap. He would be sensible to avoid the writer for a month or so – until any ideas or fresh rumors ceased after the postmortem and the burial. The firelight glittered, and went from under Chorgeh’s eyelids, and he heard his mother’s operatic laugh rill through the house. Everything was well.
God and men pass over the battleground, prizing great gems and silver bullets from the helms of the fallen. Then the rats come in gray, smooth coats and find the secrets of the labyrinth.
There was nothing ratlike to the appearance or manner of Monsieur Tritte, who was tall and plump, with the large and capable hands of a country doctor. He had a baritone voice, a balding head, a face at once handsome and benign. The watchman of the morgue, he was the exact antithesis of what such a man was reckoned to be and frequently was. Tritte was abstemious and sober, without perversity or cruelness. He pitied his charges, with a dignity that became him, yet he found them on occasion interesting. He was himself capable of scientific investigation, having studied at the elbows of eminent practitioners, unflinching, and uncareless, as they sometimes were not.
It had happened that the men laboring at the morgue had known the name Julie d’Is. They had therefore had great pains over her. Though the corpse had lain on its slab for a day and a half before any work commenced, precautions were taken. Not an inch of skin, other than that of the face, was presented to the cadaver, which was then gone over minutely for a hidden armament. None was found. Weighed, pierced, portionally dissected, the poor dead thing offered no answers. To Tritte this was only what he would have expected. Her method of inflicting fatality, whatever it was, had lost its potence in the moment of her death. He had no doubt, as did not the scientists in the chamber, that Julie d’Is had been executed by one she had wronged with the sickness or demise of a lover or family member. That the police had failed to curtail her had after all given the public some rights in this matter. It was only surprising the sentence had been so long in its enactment. The killer might be discovered through a mistake, or a confession, but there were so many potential assassins, among them even victims who had recovered, that apprehension on evidence alone would seem to be hopeless.