The Book of the Damned

by Tanith Lee

  Then - silence. In the silence, a cold glow seeped out between and under the doors. It was blue, like daylight through the glass.

  Louis had a premonition the doors were after all about to open, and stepped back. He had been correct, they did so and forcefully, banging against the wall to either side. A gale went by him. This was not cold, but burning hot.

  The scene in the room was done in blues and whites and greys, lit, not by the windows, not by anything visible. There was a sofa, a sort of chaise-longue, not a possession of Louis' own, and on it lay a young woman. She wore only a silk robe, and that barely. From her position and her expression, you saw at once what she had been doing to elicit her outcry - not of pain, presumably, but pleasure. Her face, which was very beautiful, was also slack, and still wanton, the white-blonde hair falling all over it.

  She stared directly at Louis, and though she was a psychic recording, what is termed a ghost, she seemed to see him.

  And, "I know you're there," she said. "I know you are."

  Louis, cynical enough to accept most things, was not alarmed, merely unnerved. But besides that, the physical aspect of the manifestation, those extremes of heat and cold that were now coming in waves out of the room, were making him ill. Nevertheless he did not retreat, thought he though it useless to go forward, let alone answer.

  "I made you come here," she said. "I can do-that, can't I? Did you like it, seeing me doing that? Better than with any of them, those toads. They can't give me that, not one of them." Then she moved her body, slim, firm and young, stroking it, its skin and hair. She said, "Why don't you come close to me? I know you can. I've got you." She shook her head, and through the pale strands, one silver earring flashed.

  Then the other noises started up again all round her, the heavy dragging, the dull throb. The girl seemed to hear them for the first. She looked about, and as she did so, a last wave, of utter black, came boiling through the room. It poured over the girl and the light and they went out. The wave poured on, over Louis. It was almost palpable. It was an emotion, incredibly strong. Yet indecipherable. It seemed to go through him as well as over him, and then there was only night in the empty house. He was dizzy and leaned on the wall a moment before going back to bed. There he lay down and heard a distant car-horn in the streets, the bell from the Sacrifice, and later birds singing.

  Drained, he slept. When he woke it was midday, the sun standing on the roof.

  When he went back to the blue room, it was undisturbed, except that the sapphire spider-earring was lying, not where he had left it, but out again on the floor.

  That afternoon Vlok, and his dark, pretty assistant, Curt, arrived at the house.

  There was a furious drama, during which Louis remained quiet.

  On this occasion, the tracking process had not been easy for the jailor. The jailor was in a rage, which increased on meeting no opposition.

  Finally rage resolved into resolve. They would take him, the captive, to their grand hotel. Then, tomorrow, on. Some of the cancelled northern dates might yet be salvaged.

  "No," the captive then said. "You don't understand. I intend to stay. I meet a girl here."

  Volk volleyed out a string of profanities.

  Physically-sexually, de Jenier was dormant, or non-existent. His sexual engagements had been with men, overtures received and complied with indifferently. Emotionally-sexually he responded to women, but as he had no wish to form a union, let alone consummate it, he had learned early on to limit his company, words, glances and caresses. At last, prompted by a promoter more seedy though no less ambitious than Vlok, Louis had discovered how to create all he wanted from himself. His minutes and hours as a woman, women, lightly padded to their shape, wigged and dressed and painted and gemmed for them, afforded him a transcendent excitement, not merely sensual, or if it was, then also a sensuality of the mind. He swam strongly in the sweetness of it. But it did not disturb him. That vital element, a sort of guilt or shame, had passed him by. The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid. By-standers, particularly those able to cash in on aberration, tend to encourage and expect the latter state.

  "Girl? When did you want girls? My dear Louis. I'll forgive you your antics on the train, my money wasted and my time. Tomorrow, we shall go north together. My God, if you want to, bring the fancy bit with you. A boy, yes? Dressed up as you do it? I thought your taste was otherwise."

  All these entirely inappropriate comments on Louis' sexual life, which he heard without a flicker, were prompted by ignorance, awareness that the guilt-shame should be present, and an undercurrent of resentment that it was not.

  "How you bother me, Rudolf," said Louis. "I can't invite her with me. She's indigenous, I imagine. A ghost."

  Vlok shrugged. Louis often cried wolf, or inventively lied from boredom.

  Til send for the luggage from the hotel. If you won't move, we'll stay here with you."

  "Oh please, .don't."

  "Introduce me to the ghost."

  "Where shall I sign, Rudolf, and what?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "To terminate our agreement."

  An hour later, at the foot of the staircase, Vlok shouted: 'You need me, and you know it quite well. Squander another week, then. But you'll be watched. If you take flight again, my bird, I'll be after you. Depend on it." The front door slammed.

  In another hour, Curt, having received a secret signal, returned to the house. Louis entertained him with white wine in a downstairs room bare of anything but for bottles, a bowl of peeled almonds, and a pot of forced white camelias.

  Curt was the slave of both, Vlok's in the matter of finances, and Louis' in the sense of feelings. He betrayed one to the other as need demanded. Now he accepted Louis' errand. It seemed no threat to business enterprise. Curt had also brought^ in a small case, the framed photographs of Louis' two most admired animas: Anette, Lucine. Louis permitted Curt to put them up in the "study", either side of the mirror. Across the blue room Curt passed with scarcely a look. He had torn off a camelia for his buttonhole.

  "Perhaps you'll let me sleep on a sofa one night. I've never seen a ghost. I'd die of terror."

  "I couldn't allow you to die. No. I won't let you stay here."

  When Louis returned alone from dining, about eleven-thirty, he felt at once, on opening the door, that the house was waiting for him. During the day it seemed to sleep, the way a night-animal must, for it had grown busy after dark.

  The moment he closed the door, was shut in with it, its life began, as if, now, mechanical.

  He heard from above a violin, that was the first sound.

  Not a melody, but three or four quivering wails, then a spasm of tuneless plucked pizzicato. He had not yet bought the violin. He anticipated the unbought cittern next, but instead there came again that deep throbbing, the turntable of the imaginary gramophone let run down. Light started to billow slowly down the stairs, in a plume, like phosphorescent smoke. Nothing was adrift in the light-plume. There was time, if he wanted, to open the front door and get out.

  Louis walked into the light, which had now spread all through the channel of the stair, and climbed upwards. He became aware of a faint smell, rather cloying, like a kind of joss-stick.

  Nothing else happened, just the light and the throbbing noise, until he got up to the landing of the blue room. The doors were open, and the familiar wave of cold drove out and drank up all his body-warmth. The dead needed that, a live temperature drunk in, to make their show. But before, there had also been heat. And what was that for?

  Then the girl was there, in the room.

  Her hair was cut in a new way, and the earring glimmered from her right ear. She wore a long skirt of some pleated translucent stuff, held up by a type of silver braces. Her small breasts were bare and her long slender arms and ankles. It was that style known as Garb-Egyptian, taken to extremes, but she looked less oriental and classical than like some art
ist's model, a bijou waif… All but her eyes, of soaking, starving indigo. She stared right at him. It was a terrible stare.

  "Are you there?" she said. "Is anyone out there?" A reverse of what the still-mortal thing is supposed to say when questioning a presence.

  Then the wave of heat came. It almost knocked the breath from his body. When it passed, or when he had accommodated it, he began to go forward, slowly, looking at her, wondering all the while, though he knew she could not, if she really did see him, and if it would be possible to touch her.

  He had drunk, for him, a lot of wine at dinner, preparing for this. It was what Vlok would call a "loosener".

  "Who," he said to her, "are you? Were you? - Is that more politic? Won't you tell me your name?"

  But she was only a recording, a photograph on the room. Time had not somehow slipped. No, he could see it in her starving eyes. She and he were of a height, so the eyes fixed direcdy into his. They fixed in and on him, and through him, still looking for something. He had got very close to her now, wondering what he would feel. There was a slight disturbance in the air about her, even inside the spectral light. And a sort of clammy quality, the aura of fever.

  "Why won't you?" she said. "You tease. You know you meant me to have the earring." And coaxingly, "Are we the same?"

  Are we the same? How odd. There was a resemblance. Not only the eyes… He put out one hand, letting it alight on her breast, something he would never dare do with a woman of flesh and blood, who would then expect more. This one did not seem to register the caress, and he saw, as in all the supernatural cliches, that his hand, insisting, presently passed right through her.

  For some reason it was that which turned his stomach.

  He drew back.

  "Who are you?" he said.

  "Are you there?" she said.

  And abruptly they both burst out laughing bitterly.

  It was nothing shared, only a coincidence, caused by a fluke of their characters, a similarity of reactions.

  "Go away then," he said.

  He did not think such an exorcism could work and was dismayed when suddenly she disappeared from in front of him.

  The light went out also, and the throbbing ceased, came back -and was only the jumble of his own pulses in his ears.

  The violin had been the strangest part. But that did not mean she had read his mind. He did not know what it meant.

  Near morning he wakened, and thought he heard her again, walking about nearby, on bare feet. He thought too he would have to be careful. There might sometime be a genuine break-in, and he, complacent, would assume it was only his pet ghost-girl. Then he wondered if, recorded thoughtless phantom or not, she would pursue him to the bedroom. He experienced then a sort of sexual stirring to which he was quite unaccustomed. He lay on his belly, floating in the sensation that was between dreamy anomia and dreamier lust, half awaiting her fingers on his neck, his spine - passing through him, and how would that feel?

  Then he slept until Curt woke him about ten, rapping insistently on the front door below.

  It was a blowing day, a febrile wind tore about the street, coated with rent blossoms. Wilted, one more broken stem, Curt was propped in the doorway.

  He had brought, as required, scattered and scribbled through a notebook, "as much' as he could 'reasonably get' on the previous tenant of the house. Curt had a knack of worming out information, of finding what was in hiding.

  Curt followed Louis back upstairs.

  "Did you see it again?"

  "What, Curt?"

  'Her."

  Louis would not reply, and finally Curt grew tired of watching him returned to and lying in bed, drinking mineral water and reading yesterday's papers. There seemed no chance of communication or breakfast. Even the notebook lay unviewed.

  "Were you just telling lies again?" said Curt. "Rudolf says he's through with you. Every hour brings another tantrum. We're to go south, without you. He has plans to sue."

  "He's actually planning to come over here again. Keep him away, Curt, please. And I'll buy you a present. What about that jacket you said you saw? Yes, that jacket. Now go to your hotel and pour laudanum and aspirin into Rudolfs coffee."

  "Well, you'd better buy me the jacket." Curt smoothed his collar, thinking of collars to come. "You haven't bothered to read my notes, there. You should be contrite. It's a gruesome tale. I need soothing."

  When Curt was gone, Louis opened the notebook. He kept these notes, in appalling shorthand, making a precis in the diary later.

  Female, blonde, rich, she had been noted also for her unusually blue eyes. She had no family, and appeared in the City in the way of such beings, as if from thin air.

  For a while she moved from apartment to hotel to apartment, incurring the wrath of each establishment by late and licentious celebrations, drunk guests, lovers of all sexes, drugs and loud music. She was also subject to crazes. A craze to paint the walls and ceiling of one apartment black, a craze of enormous plants. Later came a bicycling craze, during which she might be seen flying up and down the steeps of Paradis, generally attended by bicycling young men. On one occasion, one of these attendants escalated down Clock Hill into a hospital bed. Later yet, there was a monkey craze. That ended in a rescue by a zoological organisation. For, like the paint, plants, bicycles, young men, once a craze ebbed, its constituents were neglected.

  At length, she had taken the house in the Observatory Quarter, and put in the cobalt stained glass. She was now in another epoch, where she had begun to call herself Timonie.

  This ultimate craze, (it was to be her last), seemed to commence with her purchase of an antique earring. A City museum had been forced to offer for auction certain treasures. In with a stash of

  Roman marbles and lamp-stands dug from the river mud came one jewel. The catalogue presumed it had been the property of the Egyptian mistress of a Roman commander then in charge of the river fort. She was remarkable for being of the Greek Alexandrian strain, blonde and blue-eyed, but skilled in the old temple arts.

  The modern girl in her sleek day-gown, lace gloves, high-heels and flowered hat, bid for and claimed the antique earring of the sorceress-mistress, whose name the catalogue gave as Tiyamonet.

  Garb-Egyptian was then coming into vogue, and Timonie entered the vogue by throwing "Egyptian" orgies at her new house. They drank thick beer, and burned fake kuphi, the temple incense of the Pharaohs. Timonie often appeared at these gatherings in dresses of transparent gauffered linen that sometimes left bare the breasts.

  Then the orgies ended. The doors were closed. After some while, two cleaning women, unable to gain customary entry, called the police.

  No one was amazed at Timonie's death, even at the manner of it, (listed by Curt). As moths to candle-flames, so a Timonie to a ritual butchering.

  "I performed a test then." (Louis, writing in the diary.) 'I went into the room, where the earring was still lying under the window. It was easy enough to take it to the small garden at the back of the house. Here I buried it about a quarter of a metre down in the soil, and marked the place with a lump of stone. During that afternoon I wrote this, and I paste it in here:

  Timonie. Self-obsessed. But unable to clarify, externalise, and so centre, as someone taught me to do. "Lovers of all sexes," says Curt. He even alludes here to the monkeys — and, wilder, the bicycles. Unlikely, not human. As I saw her it was love before a mirror or an invisible audience. Passion so strong it forms the print of an astral photograph on that room. Who is she inviting? She said - Tease. You meant me to have the earring. Are we the same? It must be the other, then, Tiy-Amonet. Waiting and coaxing an Egyptian sorceress. And so the earring becomes all-important and acts like the photographer's silverfixative. Now I've put the fix into the earth. What will happen tonight?

  "And that night nothing happened, except a foolish telegram came from Rudolf. And in the restaurant I was taken up by yet another stranger, my bill paid, and I barely got away with a whole skin.

  "But in
the house complete silence and absence. Unable to sleep. I lay awake all night.

  "Then the plan came, to steal her from herself. Timonie. A rape, the usual way. How to dress her, more decorously as I should have to, for the obvious reasons. And how the hair should be done. Planning it, I could see more and more a likeness between us, or how one could be created. I liked the sexlessness of her disembodiment. All look, no substance. I would have to catch that too."

  Coming back from expeditions along Sacrifice Hill, in a booming dusk scraped by the flails of winds, Louis encountered Curt, bent and bowed at the corner of the street.

  "Curt. Good news of your coat. Go for a fitting tomorrow."

  But Curt curiously was not cheered.

  "Horrible dreams, Louis. That girl. That house must be full of it. Don't stay there."

  "She won't harm me. If it even happens."

  "Perhaps it happens in your head."

  Louis smiled, for he had considered that too, and did not find it threatening.

  "Where have you been?" said Curt in a whine.

  "You can tell Rudolf," said Louis, "that I'm creating a new character, very exotic. That's why I need the privacy."

  "Her."

  "The same."

  "Don't," said Curt.

  "Hush, Curt. You'll adore her. You'll rush me to a photographers', again, to have her immortalised."

  "I kept dreaming," said Curt, "pale blue flesh - the way she was - after - '

  "She wouldn't like you to conjure her up that way. She seems to want to be seen all in one elegant piece. I don't think she remembers the murder. No, she's stopped her life before that point."

  Curt abruptly extended a page of print. He had torn it from a book in the library of a museum. He explained this with a foolish pride, and how he had felt it needful to undertake this unasked extra of research.

  "It tells you about the other one, the Egyptian."

  "That was Timonie's interest. Not mine. My interest is only Timonie."

  Curt stood in the stream of the wind, his eyes watering and teeth clenched. He said, "I don't like spiders. The jewel in the earring is a spider, and there's a thing about it there. When I was a kid, they used to drop on my face where I slept. I used to wake up screaming and my father beat me with his belt. If you pull off their legs, they grow another one. Eight legs. It's happening in your head, and it happened in her head. But it can get out of your head, it can get out." Curt whimpered. Then he straightened up and turned his back to the wind. "Don't tell Vlok what I said."