The Book of the Damned

by Tanith Lee

  She nodded. "And the shuttle goes on the loom." She lowered her lashes. "The priest, he says it will stop as the child grows. It's not a demon, but the spirit is restless."

  Behind us, the woman swept the floor, up and down, and round and round.

  "But you've come here quite often," I said. "When he is here. The master of this ruin."

  She smiled. She would not look at me now.

  I got to my feet. "You must heat water and fetch it up to me," I said, "for the bath in the upper room. You understand me?"

  The child pushed the leather bottle away. He crowed. Ah! Philippe cried, reborn between a peasant's thighs, you see, here I am again to mock and torment you.

  But I turned and left the room quickly. I went back along the shore. Light pierced open-work windows like flights of arrows. Walls leaned as if about to come down. Birds were rising from trees on the farther bank; perhaps Scarabin rode there, on one of the black horses. Or were all the horses metamorphosed now to white?

  I wondered if the girl would obey me, but when I had climbed up again through the tower, she presently came with two buckets and filled the porcelain bath with scalding water and with warm.

  I made her remain in the chamber as I bathed. She was shy, and would not look at me, but she wandered about the room, more surely than I had done, now and then picking up some item, a brush, the razor from its bowl, an ivory pencil-case that lay under the window.

  "You're familiar with these things," I said. She did not answer. "And with that bed, also. He's had you. Is that not so?" She darted one glance at me. It was true. Was it jealousy that burned through me? No, it was a pang of horror at the vulgarity of it, that I had only been that, too. A woman had by him, and he, a man I had had.

  I dried myself, and put on again the costume of Paradys. There was not a stain on it, not a rent in its soft fabric. And I, stained like the church-glass of the unholy window, immutably, and rent by silver - I was damned because I had failed, had failed.

  "Come here," I said to the girl. "Brush my hair now."

  She brushed my hair, with long smooth strokes, more nicely than her fellow had swept the floor.

  "There," I said. "We're friends."

  I stood over her, some inches taller than she. I took her face in my hands and kissed her fresh mouth. He had kissed her, I kissed, deeply, and she leaned against me, letting me caress her, her flower-like skin, her warm breasts. As there had been Anna within me for Philippe, so Andre now sampled this girl on my behalf, for my sake, since Anthony had made love to her. She was like Philippe herself, as the child was. She and I, had by the same one, were, briefly, the same one. And I remembered the exaltation of my abandonment in the sexual climax of desire. Of course, it was nothing of any value at all.

  When I let her go, I asked her name. Shivering, her lambent eyes on mine, she said she was called Oula. I wondered then why I had asked. What did her name matter to me?

  There came a sharp clangour from below.

  "The child!" she cried. And turning from me ran away, out of the rooms and down the tower again. I hurried at her heels. And going by the window of the tears of blood, thought, Passed and repassed and so past. So it becomes a thing of no consequence. I am used to it, now.

  In the hall below, the woman had come back to work, with her broom, and had brought the child in the bag. His cobweb mane and anemone arms protruded from the wicker. Meanwhile, one of the three heavy silver crucifixes had been crashed from the mantel. Now another was rising, and wafted through the air, as if weightless. The woman watched it, stopped in her tracks but with no appearance of alarm. The girl Oula called out something in the dialect of the north, another language, which I did not know. The child gurgled and laughed.

  Oula ran across the floor and whirled him up. She lifted him high and shook him a little. The miniscule face was vivid with evil glee. The second crucifix too clanged on to the stone floor.

  I looked at the broom-woman and shouted: 'Take him. Take him out. Do as you're told, you bitch."

  She made a vague move towards the girl and the fiendish baby. Just then, the decanter rose from the table. It flung itself at me and instinctively I threw my hands before my face. With a stinging drizzle of lights, the glass smashed at my feet. The liquor spurted up, and I was splattercu, all over the fine old gown, as if with blood.

  I ran across and pushed my hand against the baby's laughing sneering face. "Yes, I remember the fight, and the cherries. Yes. Enough.

  Go away and forget. This isn't for you." And the face fell, enviously. Toothless gums tried to bite. "Give him to her," I indicated the woman to Oula as if they had never met. "He must be taken out."

  But the child had abruptly lapsed into a sullen exhaustion. It was borne away and put back into its bag. The older woman, having propped her broom on one of the pillars, taking the bag, and without a word, plodded to the door and down the steps.

  Would she walk into the tarn and sink there, becoming some aquatic animal? No, she simply trod her route along the shore to the causeway. Oula and I, standing in homely fashion in the door, watched her out of sight.

  Oula timidly put her hand on my waist. I removed it.

  Together we replaced the crucifixes. If they were an iota from their stations it would be sure to be noticed. "Sweep up the glass." She swept it up and took the fragments away.

  Drearily I stood before the hearth. What a barren place this was, when he was not in it.

  I did not properly believe that Oula's habitat, village or otherwise, existed. She, or any other, evolved and retreated to some secondary plane, inaccessible to me. There was therefore nowhere I might escape to. When he returned, whatever should we do, he and I? With Antonina, when it had been Antonina and Andre, the progression was unavoidable, rushing away downhill, tumbling forward into the pit of delicious darkness. But this. Dear God, suppose it should become domestic?

  But suppose too he did not return.

  Terror fastened on me. I lay against the hearth in fear and misery. And was aware, through these monstrous concussions, that I was glad of them.

  Just after sunset, I heard Oula laughing along the shore. I had been standing under the tower window, watching the light go out of it, to see if this happened in the way I had formerly described. Her laugh came like a flying thing, and flitted round me. Hearing it, I knew Anthony had come back, and was with her somewhere in the ruin.

  My eager foreboding drew me across the pillared hall, to the doorway. Here I looked out and saw smoke still tapering from the chimney of the kitchen room.

  The tarn was a bath of wine, the whole sky had become a red window, and made all the broken open wheel-windows red, the tower a black fire-iron against incorrigible space.

  On the threshold of the kitchen, some colourless flowers lay scattered. Inside, it was an oil on canvas, though not from Philippe's quirky brush. Pale Oula was kindling two hanging lamps, with alabaster arms highlighted, while dark Scarabin stood by the hearth.

  As I shut out the afterglow in the doorway, both looked at me and then away. They had formed a liaison against me. I was to be excluded.

  There was a table of wooden planks near one wall, and two wooden benches. Here I sat, as if at the Cockatrice or the Imago. After a moment he took a place at the table across from me, without a word or further look. Oula brought an earthenware jug and set it down, with a glass for him.

  "Bring a glass for me," I said.

  She went at once to a cupboard and extracted another glass and gave it me.

  He took up the jug and to my surprise, poured the drink firstly into my glass. Tonight the liquor was cloudily pale, an absinth that seared the mouth.

  During, and after this, we sat in silence, and the girl prepared a meal, moving to and from the fire and the ovens and here and there. Scarabin drank steadily. His expression was lazy, but his face held tensely in against the bones. His eyes were fixed far off. They looked sightless, so densely black, giving no access, having no floor. The mouth was sulky and crue
l. In the muddy lamplight, sometimes it seemed to me the face of a handsome man, sometimes of a beautiful woman.

  When the food was ready Oula brought it to the table. White meat and bread, and a dish of cheese and apples.

  "Sit down," he said to her then. The room quivered at his voice, as if a coin had been thrown into a well. When she only stood by him, he got hold of her and gently pulled her down at his side.

  Then, as if she were some clever clockwork doll, he began to feed her. It seemed he ate nothing, only drank the absinth, but her he fed, with infinite persuasion, persistence, and care. The attention, or the food, brought the blood into her cheeks. Even her hair pinkened, appearing to blush a little.

  Beyond the door, the dusk had drawn its curtain.

  "Why do we eat, Oula?" he said, "Why drink? Could we not do without sustenance, don't you suppose so?" But she had now ceased herself to eat, or he to feed her. She lay against him, her head on his shoulder, sometimes playing with the buttons of his coat. Her hands were gracious for a servant girl's, and the nails clean and trimmed. "What is reality after all," he said. "Did we not invent all this, are we not God, any and all of us?" He spread his own elegant hand on the table. "I could pass my hand through the wood as if through water. Any man, any woman, could do it. No chains, no bindings. It's a world of chaos restrained solely by the human mind, which then, afraid of itself, steps back and says, see this colossal machine over which I have no power at all."

  I said, "She won't understand you. And I already know it." But he ignored me.

  Soon after, he stood and drew the girl up with him. He said to her tenderly. "Where now?" And she murmured her laughter. They went away.

  The room, in which the fire still crackled, turned cold, solid, and deathly still.

  Stars were in the sky above the tarn, I could see them through the doorway, huge stars that blazed too brightly.

  I closed my eyes, and saw instead Philippe, a maddened child of eleven years, on the rocking-horse, riding faster and faster, with his head thrown back.

  I had nothing to write with. The hag with the broom and rags had finished cleaning off the stones of the hall when I left her unsupervis-ed. Write with my voice then, on air, or with my nails in the plank table. Or with fire, scour the kitchen out with arson.

  Plucking three of my own long, curling hairs, I wove them together with the black hair I had found in the bed. (What colour had my hair been, before the 'Martian' red of Paradys?) Then I burned the hair together.

  Water was sadness, air a vision, earth was thought. But fire, fire was the will.

  Since reality and the physical world were only chaos, illusorily subdued, I did not perhaps pass through night along the ground, or through ruined halls of stone. Ascending, what did I climb but the heights of meaning? Certainly the tower had grown taller. High up in it, I was on some rarefied and open summit, where the air was thin and chimed with ice. There were no dimensions, or they were different ones… No, they were the usual ones. A bedchamber lit by a few candles, a man and a woman embracing.

  I walked about them, round them, once, twice. They did not (did they?) know I was there. Hungrily they annexed each other with their mouths.

  I put my arms over hers, around him, and my hands on hers -and drew them down from his body. Standing at her back, I wrested her quietly from his grasp, and when I had her, putting my mouth to her ear, I whispered, "That is over. What are you doing here?"

  She opened her eyes, and looked at me with a somnambulist's smile. Then, in the way of a peasant girl released from some temporary office, she bobbed me a silly little curtsey, and drifted at once across the room. The candlelight made lace, a bridal veil, over her hair. She vanished through the doorway, or only altogether.

  He stood and looked at me, already in his shirt, a libertine's face of arousal, the eyes of dreaming death.

  "It is," he said, "all one. You, or she, will do. Come here, then."

  I went to him and said, as he took hold of me, "Not for this. Only I, or you, will do for this," and took hold of him as he had taken me.

  The bed received my body like a cloud. How low the candles burned, the room seemed full of a darker sunset… In the sunset of the cloud, his weight lay on me with the heat of fire. In the hell of ecstasy, the caverns below were flame, and the river molten. Down and down, fall down with me into the underworld of red forgetful night. I am the ferryman. Lethe is all lava. My mouth is at your throat as you press your face against the pillows and your hands clench upon me -

  And rising and sinking in the billows of shadow, the light was cleaved to crimson, crimson through and through, a dye never to be washed out, through the wounds of a redeemer might wash away all sins and stains. Crimson, crimson, the caves, the river, flowers and fruit and crystal and blood. Crimson the benediction; the waves, crimson, that never ended and were never begun, and were never begun or ended.

  And in the morning, he lay beside me still. He was not asleep; when I kissed his skin it was only faintly cold, all the coldness fading from it. There was no pulse in the wrists, no heartbeat in the architrave under the breast. The texture of his jaw was unaltered, today it would not require a razor - The long lids of the eyes, fast shut, harboured darknesses.

  A few drops of blood had spilled on the sheet. Under the left wrist, the blood had left an odd mark, but try as I would, I could not make it seem to resemble or suggest anything.

  I had not failed. Things were as they must be. Antonina with Andre. Anna with Anthony. First one, now the other, was lost. To say she or he was dead was a great simplification. The exquisite taste of his blood - did I even remember it? Had she remembered the taste of mine?

  I stretched myself along his body, and held him a brief while, reluctant to leave go.

  But the room itself, by barely perceptible little shifts of the light, by distilled mutterings of the wood and the bed-curtains, did not permit too long an indulgence. I might grieve if I wished - surely grief was in the order of these new emotions, euphoria and dread, a bacchanal needing no wine - but not here. I must run from here, as from any place in the future where this should elect to happen. Forests, hillsides, city avenues, such a wealth of them should see me in flight from this. What aisles of woods and masonry groves of rooms would shelter me.

  As I descended the tower, I recalled my agitation in Paradys, not knowing what I must feel or be or do. I had changed in more than gender. Eventually, perhaps, all these huge sensations would be worn down, or cauterised, and then must come a final act -

  But not yet.

  I ran along the shore. My pain tore from me like a birth. It pinned me to the earth and crushed me against the sky.

  Towards evening I went over the causeway, and down into the derelict deserted village. Which had come alive.

  I was not amazed to see it, the grass-grown lanes where now people walked, and the broken windows coined with lights. A shepherd drove his little flock of sheep across the slope under the trees. In the square, where only leaves had blown before, tables were set out, barrels and bottles and platters of food. Women were bringing oil lamps. Three wiry old men crouched near an open fire, one tuning a slender fiddle, one warming a drum-skin just clear of where the spits were roasting rabbits. The third worried a cloth through the notches of his pipes. It was to be a village feast. And there, a stout man in a good coat, with Oula on his arm, and a young man with bulging arm-muscles, and some gossiping wives. A handfasting, was it? Oula and her rustic swain.

  I paused on the edge of the ripening lamplight. There would always be helpers. Always to hand, slaves, victims, other characters in the play. One called them up like spirits, and, more reliably than spirits, they came at a need. This - well, it was straight from the etchings and aquatints of the City, the bucolic world as seen through the eyes of Paradys.

  When I moved forward, the villagers looked askance at me, but not in an unreceptive way. The stout man, Oula's sire or uncle, came up to me, handing me a russet rose.

  "For your
hair, mademoiselle. Here you are, for the celebration. You're most welcome."

  So I put the flower in my sash and sat at Oula's table.

  The beer and the sour potent wine gushed into the beakers. They crammed their mouths with food, and danced madly when the fiddle, pipe and drum struck up a wild and scrambling tune.

  All around, the sheer glare of fire on faces, and in the shadows young lovers running off to the fields beyond the lanes.

  A tallow moon rose.

  Oula danced with her beau, who, presumably, did not care she had been deflowered by the local landowner. The beefy arms swung her round and round. Beyond them, I saw a woman suckling a baby. She looked like no one that I knew, but the child was the child who moved things, and was perhaps possessed by Philippe. Oula dashed by in a dance of skirts.

  "Will you honour me?" said the stout father.

  I came to my feet. He took my hand and waist, and we danced. It was a paraphrase of the intimate dances of liberty, and rough.

  "The one who touched you last," he said. "What has become of him?"

  I looked up into the massive face, at its jowls which were hanging forward so earnestly, its uneasy eyes. Was it the face of the banker-baron, was it von Aaron in flighty disguise? He looked younger. He had no metallic lace at his cuffs, he smelled of garlic and tobacco.

  "Become of whom?" I asked, as he bore me round in the prancing dance.

  "Of him. Is it done? Has it taken place?"

  "Possibly. If I take your meaning."

  "Dear God," he said. He panted from the speed of the dance, and called a jolly greeting to Oula as she sped by. "We are all," he said, between his gasps, "in the mill-race of destiny."

  "I don't - believe in destiny."

  We plunged so fast now, both of us panted for breath.

  "Believe in it. You will perceive it, for all the facts are now before you, or almost all the facts. He hates what he becomes, that is his pleasure, the hate. And to punish the cause, and to avenge it. With her, the same."

  "Are you speaking of your daughter? Of a wayward son, perhaps."

  "Dance, dance," he cried.