by Tanith Lee
“In the tower,” said Monsieur de Venne, “the steps lead up to a single round chamber. It’s locked tight, my father locked it. It was locked before that, over a century ago, and not opened. Out of fear.”
“Out of terror,” whispered mademoiselle.
They glanced at Rendart, to be sure he was attending, which he was. Then they continued.
Morcara Venka was strong and beautiful and rich, and, from the age of five, an orphan. Her guardians were on the timorous side; they had been chosen out of her father’s dying wisdom to be precisely so. He had benefitted from the horror writers of his day, and knew that a clever and powerful guardian will either seduce, dupe, or murder his female ward. Morcara’s guardians were straw, and before her burgeoning vitality and arrogance, they bent, snapped, and were flattened. Nothing stayed her. She grew and flowered, and no man stood against her, and so this was the lesson she learned: That no one could. Her hair was black, but the type of black that is black still when the sun shines on it. She did as she wished. She rode astride, as a man did, which then was thought very shocking. Indeed, she dressed as a man when it suited her, and memories were left over of how Morcara looked flaming white with some enthusiasm or rage, in her male britches, her waistcoat, the ruffled linen at her wrists, the black tide of hair down her back. And there were images too of Morcara in silver silk and diamonds, dancing. But once she picked a live coal off the fire and threw it in the lap of a woman who (she thought) had insulted her, and once she challenged a man to a duel, and when he did not go to it because, he said, he would not fight a woman, she visited him and cut him across the forehead with her rapier.
Like a rushing river, Morcara had only her own banks to check her, her own uneven moods to rein her in, and she was at all other times ungovernable.
She took lovers. She cast them off. Who was strong enough to charm her became weak at her eyes, under the lash of her words, became weak simply by wanting her in return.
Morcara desired only what she did not have, and lost desire for it when she had sampled it. Her dining room, they said, here at the mansion, surrounded then by her fields and forests – her dining room was littered by just-tasted dishes, plums bitten once and thrown away.
Some believed she was in league with the Devil, had the Evil Eye. Perhaps she had not grown jaded with that.
When she was twenty-four years of age, scandalous Morcara met a man two years her junior, at a house in the City she had charmed by visiting. He was the son of a banker, permitted in society but not lauded there, and he had, perhaps because of his situation, an extraordinary offhand and controlled arrogance that matched the flamboyant, careless arrogance of Morcara Venka. He too was rich, partly an outcast, and, incidentally, he was handsome; a portrait remains to establish this, although there are none of Morcara.
Morcara saw the young banker’s son, whose name was, curiously, Angelstein. She was too accustomed to her effect to make much of an advance to him. She merely, as was later reported, touched his gloved wrist with one feather of her fan, remarking, “Well, here we are, and where tomorrow?” But her eyes met his, she looked and so did he. In the minds and mouths of others he was, by the next day’s sunrise, her conquest and her lover. But in fact this did not happen. No, not at all.
During the following week, Morcara took care to be at those functions, those dinners and balls wherein Angelstein had been patronizingly allowed a part. She had only to enter to be admitted, such was her power, financial and otherwise.
She dined beside him at tables where swordfish lay in castles of ice and champagne jetted in fountains. She danced with him in her silver silk, with diamonds in her hair that was black as black under the candles. Angelstein was polite, but nothing more. At last, in an arbor very early in the morning, just before the dawn came, when the grass was drenched with dew, she propositioned him. She is supposed to have said something along the lines that if he were the woman and she the man he would long since have felt her weight. No one was certain, of course, for no one had chanced near enough properly to overhear. But some did see Angelstein, courteous as ever, disengage her snowy glove from his breast, her lips from his own. Saw the curt bow he gave her, heard the tone of his voice, a hint amused now, some regret at parting.
As he walked across the lawn, Morcara called after him, “You will come to me. I’ll make you. I shall wait.”
“No, mademoiselle,” he said dismissively. That was all, not even looking back. No, mademoiselle.
Then the sun came up, and Morcara Venka vanished, like the demon spirit she was said to be.
At home in her mansion amid the fields and forests, she waited for him one whole month. She had everything made beautiful for him. She was restless, always pacing, looking from the high windows to see him coming, riding a horse maybe, or in a carriage, but always coming toward her out of the distance. She climbed at last up into the highest part of the house to keep her vigils, the round chamber in the tower that once had been her father’s study, and by then was a store room only, with chests about the curving walls and an old nest under a beam, for the casement had broken in a storm and the glass had not been replaced. She preferred it that way, the round room. There was no emanation of her father, she had barely known him.
But when the month was over, and Angelstein had not ridden or driven to the house, Morcara Venka sent to him one letter. Its contents are unknown – he had the prudence, being prudent in all things, to destroy it.
Seven more days she awaited a reply. When there was no reply, she came down from the tower. She went into the house, next into the gardens, and she walked about for a while, looking at things, picking them up and examining them, a book, a little vase, a leaf, a stone.
Her servants, who were afraid of Morcara with complete justification, did not feel any pity or anxiety at her state of mind. One of the maids is supposed to have said, “She’ll go to the Devil now. She’ll do something that’ll bring the house down around our ears.”
But all Morcara did was to call the men to clear the chests from the chamber in the tower and to put into it instead a high-backed chair from her own apartment. When this was done she went to her bureau and, sitting down quietly, wrote something on a piece of paper. Again, one of the servants had a premonition at this that Morcara was invoking or bespelling something or someone.
But all Morcara did was light a candle in the settling dusk, put on her silver dress and comb out her hair, and go with the candle and the paper up into the tower.
There they left her well alone, and through the early portion of the night one or two beheld the wan flicker of the candle, but later it was out.
The new day began, and Morcara was not in her bed, and nowhere to be found in the house.
Then they decided she had better be sought, for after all she could only send them away again, but for lack of diligence she could chastise them. They were used to her angers and her sparkle, not to her absence.
When they came up the steps of the tower to the round room at the top, the door was shut fast, and to it was pinned a sheet of paper, with Morcara’s writing on it in black ink.
Not all the men on the stair could read, but one of them could and they brought him forward. He looked, read, and went white. “She’s put a curse on this room,’ he said. “Go back.” And he started down the steps. Just at that moment the steward came in and caught the fellow below, and asked him what had been discovered. The man blurted out then, loud enough they all heard, what was written on the paper. It said: All you who dare to enter here will die.
After that the men scattered, and what with Morcara’s half unearthly reputation, the steward could do nothing with them, and although he tried the door himself and knocked loudly, the way was secured and no one answered.
Four days later a priest was brought from the City, along with some lawyers and other officials. They approached the tower with trepidation. It was a hot and thundery afternoon, and reaching the steps, they hesitated. One of the lawyers turned faint there, an
d announced that he could smell, as he put it, death. Three men went up at last, the priest with them, and the strongest – since the men of the house still refused to touch the door – put his shoulder to it. After a great deal of hammering and heaving the inner lock burst, and carried by the momentum, this man stumbled a foot or so inside the room.
A most grisly sight met all their eyes, and his firstly. There in her chair sat Morcara Venka, in her silver dress and her long black hair, with diamonds at her throat and flowers in her hand, but she was a corpse, which because of the hot summer, had already begun to rot. The stench came fast on the heels of the vision of her crumbling flesh and its fish eyes and the white bone that jutted out at her cheek and brow, and the others in her fingers like the tines of a fan. The men fell back in horror, and the first one, who had stumbled into the room, he turned in mindless fright and dashed by them, and fell the length of the stair so his neck was dislocated and he died on the bottom step.
The others who witnessed Morcara’s finish survived it, but then, of course, they had not “dared” to enter Morcara’s room.
Old Monsieur de Venne, Morcara’s remote relative and indirect inheritor, stabbed at the fire with a poker. Sparks showered up and the wood sank, letting show two glaring hellish hearts.
“The room was locked and sealed, and the door of the tower itself was boarded up. The corpse they left to rot in the tomb it had chosen. That Morcara was the initial sacrifice to her own curse had doubtless been her design. The poor wretch who went in there by accident was its initial victim. There shouldn’t be any more. No one should enter. No one.”
“All you who dare to enter here will die,” repeated Mademoiselle de Venne, with shrinking relish; she clasped her agitated hands as if they might fly away.
Rendart sat looking at the fire with his hosts. He was savoring what he had been told, but not quite yet sprinkled with the condiment of belief. Finally he said, “But do you mean, monsieur, mademoiselle, that the remains of Morcara Venka are still up there, in the tower?”
“Just so,” said monsieur to the wickedness of the fire. “Just so.”
“It is,” said Rendart, carefully, “a marvelous and awful story. But surely by now, someone –” He paused, to choose his words with more tact. “Surely someone must have been drawn to take the risk, at least to undo the door and verify the tale from outside the threshold?”
“One did,” said monsieur, with a grim satisfaction that Rendart, then, found extremely convincing. “But only one.”
“Cesar,” murmured mademoiselle, “you mustn’t –”
“‘Mustn’t’ be fiddled,” said monsieur, and had another abrupt swipe of the brandy. As he raised the glass the fire caught it and his eyes and isolated teeth. He appeared wolfish, satanic. “Piddle,” he said, “on ‘mustn’t.’”
Rendart braced himself.
“You referred earlier to a certain Grisvold.…”
“Yes. So I did. Bloody Grisvold – Oh, stop your noise, you senile old hen. Am I to confess to the priest? Where is he? Hasn’t been near us in a twelvemonth. I could die tonight. Go up the stairs and open her door and enter into the room –”
“No, no, Cesar,” implored mademoiselle.
Rendart perceived it was a rite between them, that possibly they often acted it out, if infrequently with the benefit of an audience. These two, so adjacent and yet so hedged against death, she with her provisions for lightning and wet clothes, he with his preserving brandy. Unsatisfied, sere lives burned almost down, clawing at the wicks.
“Poor Grisvold,” said Rendart, temptingly.
“Poor Grisvold, yes,” said Monsieur de Venne.
Grisvold had been the son of their father’s cook. A wonderful cook she was too, and partially for that reason she had stayed with the family despite the birth of a child, who was not merely a bastard but an idiot as well. The illegitimacy was hushed up, and the cook equipped with a husband off at some war who was presently suitably killed during the enemy advance. The idiocy of the boy, conversely, was exaggerated, for he was retarded rather then moronic, and could tackle, despite bouts of illness, feverish and unidentified, a number of perfectly useful tasks, such as blacking boots, helping with the horses, of which at first there had been several, and so on.
In age Grisvold was six or seven years the senior of the nine-year-old Cesar de Venne, but mentally Grisvold was a year or two his junior. On this Cesar, a cruel and experimental boy, had played. Cesar had been, in his own case, very unhappy at the time. He was about to be sent away to school, far from his mama, whom he loved, and his elder sister, who irritated but admired him. Cesar had realized from the treatment his papa now and then gave out, to make of him a “man,” what was to be expected more regularly at the school. Nor was Cesar overjoyed at the prospects of study, which he disliked, or the ultimate goal which would be to create him a lawyer, an occupation for which he would have neither aptitude nor eagerness (and at being which he would eventually resoundingly fail).
Grisvold Cesar had always hated, but in a casual way. Cesar did not like mess, or messy things, and Grisvold’s mental messiness, as Cesar saw it, abraded. So Cesar would make Grisvold commit stupid and time-wasting actions, for which sometimes Grisvold would gain a beating – and that made the worse beating Cesar might then receive bearable.
One day, Cesar managed, fairly easily, to convince Grisvold that there was a monster, a beast of some sort, in the well from which the kitchen water was drawn. Up until this hour, Grisvold had always happily obtained water there when told to. Now he flatly and hysterically refused. A row presently ensued, and gazing over the kitchen roof from the fig tree that grew behind it, Cesar was enabled to observe Grisvold dragged screaming and wetting himself in terror to the well, there to be shown no monster existed – by the expedient of lowering and withdrawing the bucket, of leaning into the well, and of Grisvold’s being made to lean into the well, after which Grisvold puked, just barely not into the well, and was beaten on the bare buttocks with a switch. Soon after, however, the row progressed into the main areas of the house, and Cesar was hauled before his father, who, after a lecture, administered a beating the like of which his son had not yet undergone.
Sobbing in agony on his bed, Cesar de Venne plotted a revenge upon all mankind, but first and foremost upon the only one of its numbers he could hope to reach, hapless Grisvold.
To this end Cesar had sworn his sister to secrecy and collusion, for he was determined now that Grisvold should suffer and he, Cesar, go unscathed – although in Cesar’s opinion, “If he beat me like that again, I’d die, I’d die in front of him, and serve him right.”
Cesar’s sister had not entreated Cesar to reconsider what he meant to do. She was flattered to have been included in the villainy, which would involve her saying that she and her brother had been together during a particular time. She did not like the idiot either, and did not, naïve as she was, truly grasp what they were about.
Neither of them knew, indeed, exactly the nature of Morcara’s room in the old tower. All the firm information they had ever gleaned was that the tower was unsafe and full of rats, therefore to be avoided. But too there was a sort of rumoring among the servants, which everyone had somehow garnered, including Cesar, and including Grisvold, that a female ancestor had slain herself there and haunted it.
“I’ll make him go up,” said Cesar, “into the tower. Perhaps he’ll meet the ghost. That’ll show him.”
Given some supernatural choice, Cesar would doubtless have preferred to send his father to this shock and horror, but only Grisvold was available.
“You’ve always wanted to know what these words say,” said Cesar to Grisvold the following morning, when they met in the garden behind the kitchen. The words in question were engraved in the wall, and related to the shrubs and vegetables grown beneath, their order being strictly adhered to, since various poisonous items also willfully came up there. Grisvold had a strange kind of lust for reading, limited to things suddenly come on
or seen rather than to the mystery of books. “Well, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you slowly, so you learn, and then you can go in and say them to your mother, and won’t she like that, won’t she be proud?” Grisvold, who had been fooled this way on another occasion into saying something obscene before his mother, for which he was beaten, had already charitably forgotten that. He stared at the words in the wall. He was still pale and sweaty from his latest thrashing. He said, gently, “Tell me.”
“Not yet. You’ve got to do something first. Something so I’ll know you’re brave. Because you weren’t brave about the well, were you?”
“Mam says thee lied, there ain’t no monster down in it,” said Grisvold, doubtfully.
“Of course there is,” snapped Cesar, “and she’s impertinent to say I lie. Don’t you know you make a monster strong by being afraid of it? We all go to the well as if it’s nothing to fear, and then the monster can’t do anything. But you –”
Grisvold was abashed. He did not protest that Cesar had not explained before this salient point.
“Now,” went on Cesar, “I’ll let you prove you’re not a coward another way.”
“How’s that?” said Grisvold.
Cesar told him.
“But there’s a hant in the tower, thee knows it,” said Grisvold. “And the door’s boarded, and the top door’s locked.”
“The boards are all loose on the bottom door,” said Cesar; they were. “And I know where the key’s to be got.” He did. Prolonged observation of his father, his father’s routines and concealments, a study made like the other before him at school, perforce (know your enemy) had led Cesar one day to notice an enormous key that seemed constructed from stone, which hung in the west wine cellar. As it was not the key to the cellar itself, Cesar had pondered on it and decided at last it had to do with the west tower. He might have been wrong, but he was not wrong, and therefore once Grisvold had been got to take the key, peel off the rotted boards, and enter the tower, with Cesar, someone was in a position to undo the door of Morcara’s room.