by Tanith Lee
Tall reeds rose from the river, and next the boat passed around an islet. It seemed to Louis they were a great distance from the garrison-station of Par Dis.
The body was clothed in its grainy Egyptian linen, and wrapped in a long cloak. All the ornaments were gone, even the metal spiders from the skirt. Someone, less scared than these three, had taken the hoard of the sorceress.
Soon they would reach wherever it was they had been told to reach, and do whatever they had been told to do there, or not do it. It was immaterial. Even burning, in this instance, would not have mattered. The jewel mattered, and the jewel was secure. And the will mattered. But now the will must rest. How long would it continue, the waiting? Be indifferent to that. Sleep now. Rest now.
The river lapped against the boat and the oars spooned it over. There never seemed to be a moon in the past.
They slept together, he and she, a sleep of death.
Curt had brought the leather diary to the hotel and Vlok, in search of business clues, had also attempted to open it, fruitlessly. Louis must have the key concealed somewhere. This was true. Louis had placed the key inside the tube of one of the unused pens on the desk in the study at the house.
"What in God's name are you doing?"
"Getting dressed. As you can see, can't you?"
"Don't be such a fool, Louis."
But Louis went on tying his tie before the glass. He seemed relaxed and careless. He had breakfasted to a degree, been shaved and manicured.
"Do you want to be ill again?" raged Vlok.
"Hush now," said Louis, "sound carries. It was only a fox on the near bank, not anybody laughing."
" What? Oh stop talking in riddles. Where do you propose to go?"
"There's something I want at the house. Curt, naturally, left all the important, useful things behind."
"Then, if you must, I'll come with you."
Louis only put on his jacket.
On the street, after a sufficient number of blocks, Louis feigned faintness and pleaded for a taxi back to the hotel. Vlok in smug dismay lurched in pursuit of one. Returning with it, he found Louis had given him the slip.
Half an hour later, hammering at the door of the house in the Observatory Quarter, Vlok received no reply. Either Louis was ignoring him, or had postulated the venue of the house to throw Vlok off another, real, scent. Vlok inclined to the latter notion and stormed away.
The house, chandelier-lit by sunshine, was peaceful. Birds skittered over its roofs and sang in nearby trees. A milkcart passed, and from the boulevards below and above wafted the songs of day.
The diary unlocked, Louis wrote it up to date. Then added, "Timonie was murdered. I am permitted to live. That was Timonie's anger, but it didn't have the power to kill me. The other has no intention of killing me, though Timonie it killed. Indeed, I'm cajoled, invited, made party to private reveries of Tiy in her death hour. And I admit - she's snared me. In the web. Depending and waiting. For this is not a reprieve. Only that I misheard the sentence."
After that, Louis made a note concerning a journalist who wrote in 'one or two of the better journals. She - I'm sure it is a woman - writes under the male pseudonym Stjean. The invaluable Curt is finding out for me where this being dwells, or at least where she frequents."
He wanted to put his affairs in order. He wanted to leave a legacy of truth with someone he reckoned reputable, honourable. Not he, nor his diary, say why he wanted this.
He was relaxed, as Vlok, (and I myself), beheld him, in the condemned cell. Although he stipulates he has no idea what form the punishment may take, he was as accustomed to being under the sway of another persona, as any actor.The supernatural wooed him; it had got endemically close to him as live human things never did. And in a way, too, he was playing, and I wonder if he even believed it, even at the last second, desperate as it was, entirely.
Louis intended to leave the house and return to the hotel for the night. The sorcery had fragmented and was everywhere - the blue windows, the very source, being in the house, the violin, the disc of earring, the costume, they were at the hotel. The portrait of Timonie was at the photographer's. The spider - that might be anywhere, even travelling in his clothing. Enwebbed, he was not intending to step outside the spell, only to move freely within it.
But the desert quality of the house, the privacy, after his fresh term with Vlok, seduced Louis. And then there came a sense of danger, and he could not resist it. He would stay.
He left the diary therefore unlocked on the unsheeted desk, ready to be found. He left Anette and Lucine, too, beside the convex mirror.
There is only one further entry in the diary. It is almost illegible, but by this point, familiarity with the script enables a reader to attempt it. I remember how he was at our first and only meeting. I wonder if I should be appalled at the interrupted abandoned narrative, or only at his lazy perversity. How much choice was there?
"Already' (he wrote) 'it had happened. We see with our eyes, but cannot see our eyes, except in a mirror. In the mirror, looking, I scored it across with the small diamond in a ring - and was answered. The glass was scored again, back and forth - from inside. Magic. Symbol. There will be coherence in patches - A spider: female devouring male - and phases of speech like the moon. I must learn some lines for you, Mademoiselle St Jean. If I find you in time. No elbow-room allowed. To explain. Couldn't anyway. You must guess. Or - but it slips. Slips, down and down."
Under this was written in a strange spiky jumble, almost like the writing of another: Caerulei mundi regna. I had seen it printed previously, and so could decipher it, now.
That vanished poet, St Jean, who some schools of thought tell us died in a duel, mooted for his last words: 'I have no last words." He also said, Fire is Will, Water is Grief, Earth is Thought, Air a Vision. And though I had never seen Pliny the Other's Latin, or read Galen through, I had once, in translation, come across a non-illuminating reference to Caerulei mundi regna, (which Louis had managed to translate literally, as kingdoms of the sky-blue universe) - the Empires of Azure.
Now, shivering all over as if with the influenza I had pretended, I reached the end of Louis de Jenier's diary none the wiser. I was confused and unnerved, (especially at being directly addressed!) and resentful, yes, very resentful. As if I had been reading, on another's recommendation, a rare detective novel, only to find the last pages - those with the solution - deliberately and neatly cut out.
He had approached me and coherently informed me of this material. Yet the material itself, implied to be completed before the approach, finished in nonsense. The mirror had been scratched by a diamond in his ring. And then itself had scratched back, unnaturally…
These facts I would not dispute. I had been present when doors slammed and windows shattered of themselves. But what else had gone on?
It was the awareness of anfinish that disturbed me more than anything. It made me jittery. As if I was being manipulated. I suppose I knew that a conclusion must be sought, or that it was seeking me.
By now it was early evening. I went downstairs, finding myself very nervous at emerging from my rooms, and assailed the landlady for her telephone. I called Thissot, but he did not answer, and then, in desperation, my editor at The Weathervane, but he too was absent. Quite what I wanted to say or ask I am unsure. A contact, a reassurance, is what I truly wanted. Both were unavailable.
So, out I went to my dinner in one of my three usual restaurants, trying to be jaunty and at ease. But I could not eat what I ordered, and the proprietor, who knew me, came over to enquire. "Oh, it's simply that I've had the influenza." He commiserated and sent complimentary brandy to my table. I wondered if I should confide in him, but the preamble of explanation daunted me and shut me up.
Nagging always at the back of my mind was the memory that Curt, who had a "knack for worming out… what was lost or in hiding" had been put on my trail in the first place by Louis. Would Curt abruptly arrive, and with Vlok? Would they attempt in some way to threate
n or blackmail me, or even to silence me? I had seen a man hanging by the neck in an abyss of air, and Vlok at least positively looking down at him - the other in the background had been too vague to see, but must have been Cjirt himself. Should I go to the police? "Why, mademoiselle, have you waited so long to come to us with this business?"
I began to have the wish to abandon Paradis altogether. Louis' beauty had enmeshed me, but he was dead, and the rest of it a weird nightmare, lacking even a proper ending. Let me take flight.
I walked home under the watery street-lamps. Rain struck the pavement all about me, dancing. The sky arched over the City and the world. It held so much, that vault, winds, vapours, clouds, distance, and colour. No wonder ancient belief had peopled it with elementals and powers. From there, lightning struck, and the sun blazed, and weather and angels fell. I pictured a teeming universe unseen behind the shields of blue or black. Then the vision left me, I went into the house and my landlady came flouncing out from her parlour. "Oh mademoiselle, a gentleman has been telephoning you every quarter of an hour." I thought with enormous relief, Ah, Thissot. I'll have
to tell him all of it and risk his scorn. And exactly then the bell whirred and she went to answer, saying to me, "That may be him again." Presently she waved me in and gave me the receiver. As usual, she began to busy herself about the room, listening.
Then a voice spoke in my ear, giving me my proper name. It was not the voice of Thissot.
"Who is that?" I demanded, but it was all I could do to stop my own voice from shaking.
"Rudolf Vlok, mademoiselle."
"I have nothing to say to you."
"Please, mademoiselle. I must - that is, it is essential that I see you. Tonight if possible."
"Don't be ridiculous. I have friends with me."
"Send them away." he said. "It must be alone."
"You must think me a fool," I said.
"I mean you no harm. But - there are things to be cleared up. You agree, don't you? You've read - that diary."
"Which diary?"
"Mademoiselle, I shall be at your apartment in ten minutes time."
"You'll find me gone," I said wildly.
(My landlady had run down into slow-motion, she was so intrigued.)
"Mademoiselle - it isn't - for myself. I have to say that if you refuse to see me now, there must be a meeting at another time. And that I'll do anything I can, and I have some influence, mademoiselle, to see to it."
"Why?"
"Only - only in order to settle things."
"You want the diary returned? I'll mail it to you at any address or office you wish."
"Mademoiselle - ' his voice had been, all the while, different. It was earnest and determined, and yet placatory. He had said, this call was not for himself. And he did sound to me, now, so much an underling. Someone had primed him. He was anxious not to displease them. It must be some backer I had not been told of, fearful of a mention in the diary, perhaps. Suddenly I thought, Let him come, I want to know. Maybe this can give me the key. It was, after all, still a social hour. The house was full of people who knew me, the rooms and streets well-lit. It would be safer to face it here, whatever it was. I broke in on his rambling insistence. "Very well. In ten minutes, as you said. If that is all right, madame?" I added loudly to my landlady, making her jump in her lethargic fiddling, letting Vlok know the world anticipated his visit.
When I got up to my rooms, I lit the gas, the oil-lamp on my desk, took off my coat and hat and gloves, and put round my shoulders a shawl of my mother's, which comforts me. I was glad I had had the brandy.
Minutes ticked by on my clock. It struck for nine, and I heard a noise below, and then footsteps ascending.
When the knock came on my door I went slowly to open it, and in one hand I took my lethal little paper-knife.
As I paused, only the door between us, I heard that special thick quiet of presence, of awaiting, and remembered the children's game: Who's there? Who's there? No one is there. Then ask Monsieur No One in. At that the hair rose on my scalp and I grasped the door-knob and dashed open my door in a sort of rage.
'Louisl'
The lights of my room burned against his face as it poised there above mine. Then I saw the eyes. The circlets of indigo, the centres falling miles deep, filled by darkness. I saw the eyes before I saw any of the rest of it, and giving a stupid small cry, I stepped back, and back, until the bookcase stopped me.
It came into my room then, what had been Louis, gliding and silent, with the faint perfume about it of sands and sweet resin, and with the shadow of night.
And after it, Vlok, his polite hat in his hands.
The creature had gone towards the fireplace. It stood there and did not move. It seemed to value the heat. Egypt was a hot country, and here, the north had been far warmer, then.
"Be calm, mademoiselle," Vlok said. His face had a still, solid look to it. Yes, he had been primed. He was the servant of the fiend. How much had it devoured of him, to make him so obedient? Not so much. He was in all other ways himself. Only, the jailor had become - the slave.
"I'm quite calm," I said. I added mundanely, "I saw Monsieur de Jenier hanged on a rope from an attic window. And his death was reported in all the papers. How can it be he's here now, and so convincingly in one of his r61es?"
And I made myself look at the creature. It did not seem to be angered that I did so. But I must be careful of those eyes. They were so horrible, I had nearly died of terror… The rest, if one did not know, was only a fashionable woman, tall and slender. She affected a contemporary coat with fur at the collar, a flattering hat. Her hair was blonde as ice. She did not wear earrings.
"No, mademoiselle, I'm here to explain all that, what you -thought that you saw."
I had already noticed that the feet and hands of the woman with Louis' face, feet and hands which give away the man and which Louis would have been careful to camouflage, needed no camouflage. They were not large, not masculine. And the line of the breasts under the coat, a gentle, mellifluous swelling, nothing false to it. Even the bones of the face, very fine, and the brows plucked, and no sheerest shading on the upper lip, the skin nowhere roughened by a razor.
"You say, a hanged man, dangling from a rope, out of the attic window. I'm afraid," said Vlok, "it was poor Curt who died. He fell down the stairs in running away - he was so frightened. And his neck was broken. It was a convenience to discover him - later -and to identify and bury him as Louis. Louis was not so well-known here. Not that he couldn't have been - we hadn't come to that. And Curt was nobody. It will save trouble in the future."
"Who then," I said, "who then is this?" And trembled so much I sat down and heard the paper-knife plop on to the rug.
Then, out of the silence, it spoke to me.
"Tuamon," it said. The voice was like a boy's, high, feminine, yet intently male. "Tiy-Amonet," modifyingly amended the voice.
The eyes were turning on me. I looked away. There was no extreme of heat or cold, and despite the pale fragrance of what I must take to be kuphi, this was no ghost, it was real. An altered reality.
It said, to Vlok now: 'You tell. Tell."
"As yet," Vlok said to me, fussily, with a curious pride, "she hasn't the grasp of our language. After he lost it - at first - but never mind that. I can see to that."
I thought, Why not let her talk herself, anyway? Let me hear what it sounded like, the tongue of the Ptolemies, the Greek Pharaohs, the land of Set. Or the Roman's Latin… But even from the thought I recoiled.
"I shall be ill if you stay here very long," I said, not looking at either of them. "If it's necessary - '
"Yes. I'll be quick then. But you must listen."
And the other voice repeated, "Listen," as she stood against my fire, all the light and darkness of the room upon her, but vague as something covered by centuries of dust.
Tiy-Amonet, who had been dust two thousand years, here in the flesh. Or had it been so long? Might she not have played her tric
k, whatever it was, before? Timonie had enraged her, for Timonie had not been suitable - since she was herself a female? And Tiy-Amonet rebuked Timonie, and dismembered her body as in the sub-rites of Osirus, depriving the soul of continuity in the afterlife, unless all the bits be gathered together. But then there entered Louis.
What had been done to Louis'? For Louis was here but Louis was not.
Vlok had seated himself, his hat on one knee. There was something silly about this, and about the way he then began to give me a lecture on the facts. He spoke prosaically, not even making, any more, those apologetic pauses of his over the odder revelations. He looked, and behaved, like a cheap lawyer. How she - it - how the thing called Tiy-Amonet or Tuamon - had informed him, I did not know. Perhaps the residue of Louis had been employed to do it. Before any slightest iota of Louis as we knew him ceased to remain.
It was all quite straightforward. And quite unbelievable. And it happened. Not only was the proof before me, but the air quivered with it - the magic air which the sky let down like a net upon the earth. I never doubted a word. Not even the ultimate ones, demonstrably.
The framework, as I had mentally positioned it, was correct. Then enter Louis. And when this occurred, the corner stone was laid.
Timonie had certainly been useless to the essence, the leftover, the spirit and will of the thing once known as Tiy-Amonet. But Louis was nearly perfect. There was a facial resemblance, as with the girl, and the eyes, blue to madness and absurdity - but it was much more than that. It was the mind and the psyche which counted.
The essence, electrified, reached out at once, and began its spinning all about him. Louis thought himself lured by the after-image of Timonie, but it was the spider-witch who worked on him, who showed him pictures of the dead girl, easing him on in stages, until allowing him to feel the recorded horror and fury of her death. By then, and long before the sapphire walked up his bed, its poison had entered him and was infinitesimally active.
The being killed the girl out of pique, but it did not want, primarily, to kill, only to have, itself, life. Louis represented that. And yes, it had had life in this way before Louis, but that was long, long ago. So long, it had been irked at the waiting.