The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  There had not been an exhibition of her work for two decades, and then they had said, “Leocadia’s senile. Does that still happen? Look, how repetitious and trifling.”

  Nanice’s one great masterpiece was still at the academy near the Observatory, the modern building with the dragon of bronze on its roof, and antique graves paving the garden at its foot.

  Leocadia would cackle when she though of Nanice. After all, Leocadia was now ninety years of age, and to cackle, finally, was quite becoming. Her gray hair was still thick, and still kept its obstreperous curl. She wore it loose to her waist. The rest had gone the way of all flesh, shrunken and fallen. And yet a young photographer who had come to visit in the autumn had obviously found her beautiful, not sexually, but spiritually, in her second youth before the coming of age of death.

  Leocadia did not miss sex, she had had so much of it – precisely enough, in fact – in her earlier years. Only during her sojourn at the Residence had she been celibate, and that omission had only lasted nine months, the length of a pregnancy.

  The scales had dropped from her eyes. And what scales! After she had painted the penguin and the ice floes on the wall. A day, two days, ten, went by, and gradually, softly, it came to her that everything had been a delusion. She discovered her canvases then, stacked up among the books in the alcove library, where she must have placed them, hidden them from herself, pretending that Van Orles had done it as a punishment. Indeed, it was Van Orles who congratulated her on the wall painting. He had followed her work for years, and this, he said, was an honor for them, and a great pleasure, to have an original landscape by Leocadia le Vey to enhance the room. It would be therapeutic for whoever was lucky enough to be put in here.

  Van Orles was not ugly. Nor were any of the other doctors. Saume’s teeth were even and white, Leibiche did not have pimples, only one coy beauty spot beside his mouth. Duval was extremely, nearly stupidly handsome. What had she been seeing? She asked them.

  “Ah, we were your enemies, posing as friends. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Your line of defense, mademoiselle, was to remake us as monsters.”

  When she told Duval she had found him ugly (which she could not resist doing), he blushed, like a plain woman complimented on loveliness. Obviously, no one could ever have said this to him before.

  When Leocadia had not drunk anything alcoholic for seventeen days, they urged her to take a little wine. Her system was not ready for such drastic deprivation after the influx that had gone before. So then she had a glass of wine with her dinner, and a little gin in the afternoon. She fancied gin. It was totally pure, colorless, not like the liquid that had been in the mysterious brown bottle.

  They were intrigued by the bottle. Sometimes, they said, the Residence guests did find things of historic interest. Did she wish to keep the bottle? Leocadia kept it.

  They began to let her go for walks in the countryside, and presently to journey by car to the City. A doctor always went with her. When she could, she chose Van Orles. She had begun to find him very attractive, better than Duval, who was like a classical god, a sweet too pretty to eat. Van Orles was muscular and brawny, with thick dark hair. He did not speak in the peculiar threatening way she had believed, and when they talked, answered her freely, offering his past among a family of cooks, and how he had made his way with difficulty into his profession. No white neon, like a rampant moon, shone around him now, nor did it with the others. She did not know what the light had been, save it was a warning – of her own misjudgment, presumably. She could not be sure how much she had only imagined, although evidently many scenes had not occurred at all. She thought this entertaining rather than unnerving. Perhaps things had taken place on some other plane, in some parallel world. There Van Orles had harassed her, and there she had made a fool of him. But not, certainly, here. Now Leocadia did try to seduce Van Orles. And she began by telling him of the delusion, what she thought she had done, baring her breast and forcing him into a premature ejaculation that had spoilt his trousers. Van Orles lowered his eyes. “Naughty Leocadia,” he said. And then, when she kissed him, gently, “You’re a wonderful woman, and I’ll admit I’ve had a crush on you for years, before even we met. But how can I now? You’ve been, and still are, my patient. I’m selfish. I’d lose everything. And you’d only laugh.” He did kiss her back. She never forgot his kiss. It was strong, courteous, amorous, frightened. “Of course I’m afraid,” he said, “Look what could happen, out in this field.” For she had made the car stop on the way to Paradis. She did not do so again.

  She briefly hated the City. It looked unfamiliar, as if it had been up to something while she was away.

  “For a long while,” he said, “you’ve been out of touch with yourself, and everything.”

  She insisted she had not killed Asra. But recalling the episodes of accusation swathed in light, she did not think he would say that she had. And he said, “No. Unfortunately the murderer has never been found. But it wasn’t ever thought to be you. You seemed to think so, from time to time. But even your cousin, Nanice le Vey, was quite belligerent on the matter of your innocence.”

  The pastel cravats suited him, mild on his tanned, bold shyness.

  She had misinterpreted everything, but something in the painting of the penguin and the snow had released her. Why and how? They spoke to her of projection, of unknown country being the cipher for death and so of rebirth. She knew the moment she had begun to be reborn – or at least the moment of death. Nanice had done that for her, by taking Leocadia’s role. They would not admit they had tried to use Nanice as a catalyst, only that she had been an insistent visitor they had at last allowed to call.

  Leocadia herself experimented with the others, the bizarre people of the Residence. Mademoiselle Varc had reached the end of her treatment, which she had been receiving for a premature senility. She was now quite sane. Soon she would travel far away. She sat in the summerhouse with the white and cinnamon windows, and held Leocadia’s hand. “You were so patient with me. Do you know, I’m a journalist? It’s almost a surprise to me, I can tell you. I can’t wait to get back, I’ve missed so much. Thank God, they’ve made me myself again. And did I call you Lucie? She was a dear child. No, not my friend – my daughter, who died. But yes, there are five others. Each has a different father, and all are fascinating. But there, the proud mother.”

  Leocadia mentioned the wooden dolls and the amber necklace Mademoiselle Varc had drawn from the rubbish tip in the yards of the old asylum.

  “But I believed you put them there – for me!”

  Leocadia said, “Oh. You’ve found me out.”

  It was then that truly she began to slot together all the pieces. Having no guide, she did not know for sixty years what they formed.

  She only said to Van Orles, then, “The asylum itself is mad.”

  “What else?” he said.

  Thomas the Warrior would no longer speak to her, and perhaps never had. Van Orles explained that Thomas was a war hero from a campaign seldom spoken of, erased from government files. He was almost unreachable, but he feared dogs. He would never reveal why. He also feared high towers, apparently.

  The spider man, too, was not as Leocadia had thought him. His odd way of moving was due to a spinal injury that had proved incurable. He was afraid of anyone who walked upright – almost everyone – and Leocadia found that if she sat down immediately he appeared, he would come and talk to her. He was a poet, and the most exquisite phrases poured from his lips. One evening, before the sun had quite gone and they were expected to go back to their rooms, Leocadia lay in his arms under a cedar tree, out of sight of everything but the biscuit blocks of the old madhouse. Nothing happened, but she knew she had made him glad. She knew, greedily, he would put her into a poem.

  For by now she was greedy. She ate roast chicken and potatoes with cream, mandarin tarts, orange caviar.

  They let her go in the very early spring, before anything but bark was on the trees.

  She had by then
heard about Nanice.

  Leocadia’s cousin, who had taken on Leocadia’s life, living in Leocadia’s house, adorning herself as an artist, painting in the studio, drinking in Leocadia’s style. She had been infected, as if the house were full of a plague called Leocadia. Poor Nanice, she had led such an exemplary and careful existence until then, incarcerating Leocadia from moral concern, or was it moral jealousy and wild hunger?

  Nanice, in her Leocadia role, was painting in the attic one day, dead drunk. Her works were a disaster, she had no talent, but Nanice had not noticed this. Nor did she notice in her inebriated confusion that the bottle she gripped contained white spirit and not vodka. She had drained it. There was no hint she had intended suicide. Her lover, a young woman of slight mind, had told how Nanice was full of life. By which it was thought she meant full of money.

  In the death seizure, however, Nanice fell headlong onto her current canvas, and the resultant chaos, when it was peeled from beneath the corpse, had become a sensation of the City.

  It was exhibited at the academy, and popular acclaim kept it there. In its queer and ragged runnels, its smears and gobs of color, Paradis read impassioned and macabre secrets. Dead, Nanice became one of the most famous artists of her era, far eclipsing Leocadia le Vey.

  Even so, the house near to the old wall was left vacant, and Leocadia moved back into it, and her inheritance returned to her without hindrance. There had been no plot. Asra’s death had driven her out of doors from an already wavering mind. Though why was in some ways a dilemma. Again, sixty years would need to elapse before it would seem that possibly she had had to go mad, had been needed to go mad, in order that she enter the Residence, and there perform the magical spell upon the wall.

  Emerging from the asylum was far worse, more uncomfortable than emerging from insanity. Now she must leave her true friends who were not her enemies. She did so. She shut them all out.

  She scoured all trace of others from the house. She made it white, with sofas and drapes of snow, carpets of simulated polar bear fur, mirrors like glaciers. Her studio she filled with treated ice sculptures that did not melt, holding ivory daisies, marigolds, lilies, ivy.

  It was said in Paradis she was still mad, had got worse.

  Although she took lovers and ate dinners and strolled in the City, she closed herself in, every month more and more. She painted huge canvases of a land of ice, with mountains of ice. And as she picked her way across this snowy id, she reached the sea, and there she painted the meeting of a black-haired queen with a young girl who carried in her arms a child. And Leocadia painted also ships with carrot sails, and seals, and dancers, and butterflies. And still, she did not know why.

  The photographer who came to Leocadia in what she supposed must be her old age was in love with her painting (like Van Orles – now, alas, long dead) and with a little novel she had published, about a land she called Penguin.

  They sat in Leocadia’s white salon, drinking orange-flower tea and tiny goblets of crystalline gin.

  She showed him the brown bottle with the four-sided throat and the label.

  “Is it awfully old?” he asked.

  “Older than I am.”

  “Oh,” he said, “but you’re young.”

  “It was the time I went mad,” she said. “I found it in the grounds of the lunatic asylum.”

  He said, “You’re one of the truly sane.”

  She showed him the pictures, all the views of Penguin, some with proper penguins stamping humorously about the ice. And sometimes there was a tiger-colored moon, very bright.

  “Have you heard about the penguin spirit, Koodjanuk?” he said. “I think you must have. The ice peoples invoke him to heal the sick.”

  “Yes, I must have,” said Leocadia. Something clicked loudly inside her skull. One of her elderly bones shifting, perhaps. “Also a vengeful spirit,” she said vaguely.

  “Maybe all spirits are, if you go against them.” He smiled at the penguins, which were small and playful. “And who is this girl – may I ask? – with ginger hair?”

  “I saw her once,” said Leocadia firmly. “She must have died, because she was a ghost.”

  And Leocadia thought, How wise and elegant I’ve become, with ninety years. And again, click.

  “But here she is too,” said the young photographer, “and here, dancing with a young child – it’s charming.”

  “God knows who she is,” said Leocadia. She thought, But I know her really. She’s the young virgin at the Sabbat, before the cocks crow. Through her the power comes, to remake things.

  She thought, And through me. Something I did. I made a world. I gave it life. And the sun and the moon.

  Leocadia dreamed that one day she would be painting among her solid statues of ice and flowers that did not die, and a touch would come on her shoulder, or something harmless would be thrown at her neck. And she would turn to find the path into Penguin, which she had earned, and which was, presumably, only the afterlife.

  When the photographer went away, bubbling with fizzy youth, to write a whole book about her, Leocadia went up to her studio, unhaunted by the deaths of Nanice and Asra.

  She stood among the canvases and considered. Possibly death did not matter. Possibly stupidity and cruelty, banality and rheumatism (which even the best drugs could not quite dispel) did not count.

  What counted, then?

  Why, what we want. What we truly desire.

  “Write,” said Leocadia, “in the great fat tome of time. Real desire, of any sort, is what counts.”

  And when she was one hundred and five and a half, Leocadia was painting the Penguin Land in her studio, slowly, because her hand was stiff. When in the ice sculpture before her, beyond the picture, she caught an image.

  It was of a girl – two girls, but one not long ago a child. And both had marmalade hair.

  She heard their laughter like distant bells.

  Leocadia imagined that behind her the wall had opened, and there lay heaven, with snow and flowers, a sea of golden wine, a penguin king and a queen in a crown of ice.

  If she means it, the minx, she’ll throw a snowball at me. Then I’ll look round and it will be there, and I can go in.

  And Leocadia would be young. And though it might not be forever, it would be, at least, for one long, shining day.

  And then the snowball, which was warm as toast, struck her shoulder.

  PRAISE FOR THE SECRET BOOKS OF PARADYS

  “Fatalistic explorations of a city so sinister it makes H.P. Lovecraft look suburban … a high-quality mixing of eroticism, horror, and aestheticism…. Superb.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Tanith Lee is an elegant, ironic stylist… one of our very best authors. The prose is powerful, as well as stylish, and the characterizations are acute.

  —Locus

  “Gorgeous, intoxicating, appalling … Paradys brings to mind M. John Harrison’s Viroonium and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandra.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Top-notch demonology and atmosphere … it is Lee’s talent for realizing an exquisite and appalling mingling of lust and horror, sexual pleasure and loathing, yearning and revulsion, that drives the book and its readers form cover to cover… Enthralling.”

  —Kirkus (Starred Review)