The Book of the Damned

by Tanith Lee

  Jehanine thought: It will be a brothel.

  The voice spoke so softly.

  "You are at the gate of the Nunnery of the Angel. I will open the door at once. Don't be afraid."

  Jehanine had an urge to drag herself away. She looked about now to try to see the dwarf and to say, He knocked, not I. But the dwarf had disappeared again. Then the door was unlocked and one leaf of it swung inwards. A robed female shape, holding a pale lantern in a staring-pale gorget. A nun.

  Jehanine got up slowly, the Bride of Christ helping her, and the lantern enfolded them both and drew them in. Another robed, veiled nun locked shut the gate. Beyond the light was darkness, and the faint adrift dagger of a bell-tower. The rain stopped suddenly.

  "Come now," said the lantern-nun. "You're safe at last. Our Lord has brought you here."

  Jehanine laughed. God was male, Jesus a man.

  Black by night, the structure of the nunnery turned white by day.

  Jehanine woke to such whiteness, and the scent of lemons, and the distant female notes of a chant. Such things haunted this place.

  In a small wood oblong to the north of the gate, lay the six cells available to guests and itinerants, and Jehanine in one of them. Her chamber gave on to a cloistered yard with a well, and two lemon trees. Through an arch in the cloistering was visible a paved inner court, dominated by the church door and the implication of the tower. From the height of this, the bell tongued out mutedly over and over, at its three-hourly intervals night and day, and the nun-bees droned, punctual as the bell, their ghostly songs to God.

  As Jehanine had travelled to Paradys, she travelled through a light fever, through sleep and time, to an empty amazed awakening. As previously, she had not counted the days. But the same birds fluted, the same bells moaned, and there rose the same eerie singing.

  A young nun stood at the foot of the pallet. Her face was flatly suspended in her gorget. Below, subserviently waited her body in the robe of the order, which was fulvous, the autumn-leaf colour of a yellow fox.

  The nun asked Jehanine no pertinent questions. She merely said, "You are here. Do you remember where you are?"

  Jehanine gazed in silence.

  "The Nunnery of the Angel. You may stay or go, as you want."

  "I've nowhere to go."

  The nun said, "This is sometimes the case. We ask nothing from you, but you're strong and healthy, perhaps you will perform some small domestic services for the order, in return for sanctuary. Get up now. I'll take you to the refectory. You may wish to pray. I'll show you the chapel. Later the Mother may send for you."

  Jehanine, ignorant and uneasy, said, "If I remain, must I be a nun?"

  "That is your choice. The order never asks it."

  While Jehanine garbed herself in the bounty of the nuns - a shift, linen stockings and garters, a plain gown and worn cloth shoes without heels, the nun stood by like an icon, with averted eyes. (The male clothes had vanished, no comment had been made on them.)

  The nun conducted Jehanine from the yard and across the court, past the vault of the church door, into the refectory. The morning meal, served at seven o'clock after the office of Prima Hora, was done. But behind an angled wooden screen at one end of the long room, cup, spoon and platter had been laid on the table. Jehanine felt only an unspecified shame, then, seated, only a ravenous hunger, and devoured the warm porridge and black bread fiercely. While she ate, again the nun stood by, hands folded in her sleeves, her eyes concealed. Her forehead was smooth and her little chin firm and rounded. She could not be more than nineteen or twenty years. Yet she seemed old, set in her ways, perhaps wise.

  The jug contained water. Jehanine was disappointed, for the priest at home had drunk beer and milk and wine.

  "Are you concluded?" said the young-old nun. "You didn't thank God for the food. "Jehanine, whose tragedies far overbore such a minor omission, still coloured and bit her lip. But the nun said, "It isn't needful. But come to the church now. I will show you where you may pray."

  The food had made Jehanine drowsy again. She thought that in the church she might conceal herself and sleep once more. Or she might find some crevice in the garden that ran by the refectory and away into an orchard of plums.

  Beyond the garden, on the south side of the church, there was a massive cloister, where a fountain was standing dry on the sere sunny grass, but they went quickly through a small door into shadows. Within, the occluded windows of the church were high and narrow, perhaps for purposes of defence. Yet eastwards lay the altar, with metal things burning on it, and above a strange unearthly mirror hung in the dark air. Jehanine had not seen coloured glass before, and it bemused her. She had the impression of movement and force where there was none, only hues glamoured by light - with a wild shaft hammered down out of them, for the sun was now directly behind.

  The shaft fell unbroken into the quire, and caught in the slanted pillar of it, a white-robed figure seemed to levitate just above the floor.

  Jehanine halted. The figure filled her with awe - she turned instinctively to the nun for guidance. But the nun did not pause, only went gliding on into the nave. Turning back then, Jehanine saw that as the shaft of sunlight shifted and faded, the white image was no longer there.

  Nevertheless, on entering the quire, Jehanine stopped.

  "What are you looking at?" said the nun. "That is the Great Light."

  "What picture is that?" said Jehanine.

  "It is the Angel," said the nun, and as she spoke, she made a genuflection towards the altar, bowing knee and head, but also touching her hands to her forehead and breast.

  The Angel in the window flamed out of a sunburst of molten brass. His sunflower hair was rimmed by a halo like a coin of new gold, and in his white wings every feather was veined with fire. His gaze fixed downwards, and one foot rested on a shining globe. A sword of fire was in his hand. He was beautiful. It made her think of another… of Pierre. Jehanine's eyes scorched with water. She turned from the Angel in anger and pain.

  A small chapel stood north of the altar. Here the non-initiates might essay their orisons.

  Jehanine knelt on the stone floor dutifully. She did not notice anything else.

  For a long time she made pretence at humble prayer, then she glanced about and the guardian nun had left her.

  Jehanine rose. She had forgotten the idea of sleep. Her skin held tight to her bones. She thought of what she had done and what had been done to her, and that here she was in a kind of prison or trap which she could never leave. She found as she thought of these things, that she looked back towards the High Altar, to see if the shaft of light would fall again out of the window, but the moments of the light were past.

  Eyelets of saffron glass, merely, dappled the candlesticks and the cloth. Jehanine, seeing them, thought of the topaz crucifix Pierre had been given by Belnard her step-father.

  Then, in a sudden flaming thoughtless and inexpressible trance, she fell to her knees again. She offered up, unconsidered and patternless, her agony. It was neither plea nor prayer, it was not an acceptance. She was no saint, certainly no pure virgin, crowned with the snow roses of martyrdom.

  The bell, balanced far overhead, and sounding for the office of Tiers, startled her to her feet. She ran from the church like a guilty thing.

  Days passed, leaves that fell, birds that took flight.

  Jehanine served the Nunnery of the Angel. She swept its yards and scrubbed its flagstones alongside the girls, some younger than she, of the novitiate. The novices did not aspire to a habit but only wore plain gowns like her own, their hair bound up as hers was each in a bleached scarf. Sometimes they innocently giggled, told stories, or sang gentle sad songs as they worked. One was very pious. Her name was Osanne. She kept herself from the others, sweeping and scrubbing alone, muttering prayers, toiling until her knees were raw and her back stiff, for the glory of God.

  Sometimes they would work in the garden among the late-blooming bushes, pruning and weeding, picking plums, ber
rying, and gathering herbs for drying and flower-heads for pressing. They rinsed linen and tawny robes and hung them to sweeten in the sun. They hauled water from the two garden wells, one of which was ancient and brackish, fit only to wash floors or sluice the privies.

  Sometimes the novices went away into the House of the Novitiate, to learn from painted books, and left Jehanine alone. They spoke, even in daydreams, of their bridal, and the white Bride's robe embroidered with gold tears, the marriage once and for ever to their Lord, the Son of God. They were like any girls before their wedding. Half afraid, half lost in love-desire.

  Jehanine could not adventure with them. She was not to be a nun. Besides, they were of good birth, these girls, surplus daughters sent away. Jehanine was a peasant, from the north outlands. She could not read, and knew no songs. They allowed her their company, for she was couth enough, and in her tall slender blondness there glittered some truth they sensed but would not know.

  Jehanine feared and despised, admired and liked them. Osanne's fanatic hauteur seemed more natural, however, and if anything Jehanine was more comfortable in its presence.

  Beyond the thick walls of the nunnery, the City lived and had its being, too. Occasionally some noise came from it, and often the huge stenches of the falling year. Within and without the wall, the weather was the same. Should she wish to re-enter the City, the world, Jehanine had only to say so. But, having done that, self-exiled, she could not return.

  Had Pierre ever searched for her? At first it had seemed he might have done, and that he was afraid for her. But swiftly these hopes of love and renewal died. They were simply the pangs of healing. She knew quite soon that she was whole, though now scarred and crippled out of shape.

  She was not unhappy. The chores of the nunnery were nothing to the labour of the Belnard farm. The food, though less various and not always so fresh, was sure. And in the house of women, the threat of male wickedness and strength could not intrude.

  Now and then, playing their innocent ball or catcher's games in the south garden or the deserted hostel cloister, the novices elected Jehanine as the Boy. She must give judgement, she must threaten. Once or twice they kissed her. In much the same way one found an infrequent garland on the brow of the stone child, perhaps a boy, who held the bowl of the dry fountain.

  The Mother had never, after all, sent for Jehanine. Perhaps such orphans were beneath her notice. Jehanine had briefly believed it was the white figure of this Mother, this queen of the hive, that she had glimpsed light-pierced under the window. But on certain days, the Mother would enter the refectory and herself read passages of scripture as the nuns silently ate. Around the edge of the screen, Jehanine saw her, another fox-robe, a proud full face, and plump hands. The vision of light, therefore, unsolved, remained Jehanine's property: all she had.

  The garden and the trees turned brown.

  Here I have been, then, thought Jehanine, by which she meant she had lived there thirty days or more, though she could not reckon them. A season was nearly gone.

  She knew now by ear the call to all the offices, from Matines to the office of the evening star, Hesper, and to Complies which closed the day. She knew three ball games, and certain secular songs of the novices, though she did not sing them. She learned the uses of the herbs from the garden, and, by rote, paragraphs of herbal lore and myth, read from a book by an elderly lay-sister.

  Who had she been once?

  One twilight, she saw a white-robed woman walking before her down the roofed passage that ran between the church and the House of the Novitiate. At the opening of the passage the white robe blended out and was gone. Nobody was in the hostel cloister beyond. It was then, a ghost. Jehanine knew fear, and disappointment.

  In the hostel-cell where she still slept her few hours each night, she looked about. At a dying spray of vivid leaves in a cracked jar, a cross of wood on the wall and a pallet on the floor, a low straight chest which contained her cloak, and oddments of linen, and had on its top a comb and a small crock of water, in the shallows of which a fly had drowned. Such were her possessions, and two of them dead. She had never had anything much. A doll of her mother's when she was a child that the half-sisters broke, carved sticks and pebbles a boy called Pierre had given her, then retrieved.

  The ghost was common to all who could see it. It might harm her but was not hers.

  The bell rang for the office of Hesperus.

  That night the Mother entered the refectory. She opened the Bible on its stand and read these words: 'God so hated His Son, that He gave him to the world that the world might have him."

  In a dream, Jehanine was seeing the City by night, and it was like a wasteland of rocks. Nothing moved, no lights showed. The moon hung low. Then in the east there seemed to be a bright star rising, which sent its rays across the roofs, and lit their edges. Brighter and brighter the star became, and then it opened like the petals of a flower, and things rushed out of it.

  At first she thought they were insects, then birds, then men and women riding over the rooftops of Paradys. But on the church at home had been some rough-hewn gargoyles, and now she identified the galloping throng - they were demons, with the bodies of men, even sometimes with the breasts of women, but the horned heads of goats and snouts of lizards snapped and grimaced from their long wild hair. Their bodies were the colour of the tired low moon, and glimmered in the same way. The mounts they rode were of all manners: huge black dogs, winged baskets and poles, or other creatures like themselves -

  They were horrible, yet they laughed and called to each other, and filled the air with a robust foulness.

  Jehanine, dreaming, had a terror they would see and catch her up, but it was another they took, who had been standing waiting not far off. He leaped to join them, and in a moment he went by Jehanine, mounted on a monstrous beast part pig part bat. He was Pierre, but he did not see her and he rode away with the jolly host of Hell.

  "Jhanel' cried the dark. "Jhane!"

  "Jhane. Wake, Jhane."

  Jehanine opened her eyes and rose from sleep to fill them and her body.

  Before her, dark on dark, a figure leaned. Jehanine was terrified, then stupefied. No monster, but haughty Osanne, who of all the novices had never before abbreviated Jehanine's name in this way.

  "What do you want, dem'selle?"

  "Don't call me that. I'm to be a holy sister. Say that. Say, sister."

  "Sister."

  "You trouble me," said Osanne. She sat back now, beside the pallet. She wore a cloak over her shift, but her hair was unbound and coiled all about her restlessly. "Were you dreaming? Stop it. Attend. I want you to tell me why it is you won't come into the shelter of this order? Stubbornness. Your low birth, your unlearning - such things don't matter. Do you love God?"

  Jehanine was silent. Osanne breathed more quickly.

  "Answer me, girl - Do you love God?"

  "If I must," said Jehanine. How soft the night. Hell did not ride the roofs. The dream was dying.

  "Sinner! Evil sinner. How can God live except by love? Every such word hammers in the nails afresh."

  "Demoiselle - Sister Osanne - leave me alone."

  "No. I must save your soul. I know it now. God has revealed it to me. Get up at once. Kneel by me here."

  "Go away," said Jehanine.

  Til make you if I must. Stupid girl. Do you want to burn in the Pit for all eternity?"

  "What pit is that?"

  "Fool. The Pit of raging Hell. The cauldron of live fire where Lucifer is king. The torture never-ending. Didn't you hear the lesson tonight that the Mother read at supper? God loved the world so well he sent his only Son, Jesus, the Christ, to be our saviour."

  "But she said - ' began Jehanine. She stopped saying it.

  Osanne, unheeding, curved forward like a snake, and gripped her, pulling her up from under the cover. Suddenly Osanne had seized her prey. She wound her arms about Jehanine and buried her mouth, hot as the fire of which she warbled, in Jehanine's neck.

&
nbsp; "Jhane, Jhane, pray with me now. I'll save you. Dear sister in Christ. You have the marks of goodness on you. So fair, child-like, yet rough like a boy - put your arms about me, Jhane."

  Jehanine did so. Osanne fell upon her, and as they floundered on the pallet, enormous waves began to pour upon Jehanine, of alarm and physical pleasure and horror. The darkness of the room, half hiding everything, seemed to make all things foreign, removed and possible. Osanne squirmed and writhed. She lay beneath Jehanine now. She wrapped Jehanine with all her limbs, (a demon, mounted), and abruptly let out a hoarse mad cry, a moan, a grunt, and fell back.

  What have you done?" she gasped. She pushed Jehanine away. "You're evil. Dirty and foul. Possessed. A monster - one of the Devil's minions - oh let me go - '

  She crawled towards the open air, sobbing and gulping. The room seemed icy cold. How comfortless it would be in winter.

  When Osanne, her sounds enfeebled and muted by dread of discovery, had gone, Jehanine dressed herself. She trembled violently as she had not done at the rape of her step-father.

  Leaving the cell barefoot, she crossed through the yards into the south garden, and passed over it in the moonless nothing of the night. A small bakehouse, now seldom used, stood against the outer wall, and here a tree spread up, already leafless. Jehanine climbed it without effort, pulled herself atop the wall, and looked out not in dream, for the first time in those years of days, on Paradys.

  Where the nunnery was situated she had never properly known. Now she saw the locationless gullies of alleys, hills of masonry, no lights, and the stars' cooled clinker. Then she sprang from the wall, into an abyss two-and-a-half times her own height.

  She fell into harsh and lumpy softness - a pile of sacks, filled perhaps some by meal, and some by goose-feathers, for elements of such dust and fluff puffed out at her impact.

  "Well, you've made me wait," said a voice. "That's the only sly way, you see, that tree, then down. But I'd thought you would be sooner tired of them. Here. See what your friend has brought you."