by Tanith Lee
On that last night in the house, it must have shown him the truth. I was not told how, but there would be ways, I imagine. Then he scored the mirror in fear, or anger, or some other emotion. His feelings were in thrall. Yet, he must have been swept by pangs of every kind. Even of excitement. There are plenty of hints of that. Then Tiy-Amonet came down the web to devour him.
When he went back to Vlok the following morning - for he did go back - Louis was already losing contact with his previous life, his own personality. He forgot how to dress himself, and how to use utensils of eating. He could not read. The toothbrush and the modern razor baffled him, he achieved their service by other means. Then he would lose speech for hours, then for days. He spoke unintelligibly, gibberish, a compound of his native phonetics and those of some otherwhere, or just of the brain's abstraction. Sometimes he seemed to be blind, dumb and deaf. He lay on the bed in his hotel-suite looking up at the ceiling, unblinking. He did not lack control of any other bodily function, only of the functions of society. He did not demonstrate distress, and only once a torrent of ferocity seemed to take him. During that, he smashed things, and snatching the unused razor appeared to be about to cut someone's throat. But Vlok and Curt overpowered him. Until then, and even then, Vlok half-suspected Louis was playing one of his jokes on them. However, after the razor, the doctor was again summoned. When he arrived, suddenly Louis was better. He talked and acted normally, implying it was Vlok who was inclined to jokes and exaggerations, putting the doctor en garde. Louis himself was worn out and charming. The physician, bewildered, fooled, left the hotel, and next Louis left it, by another way. He seemed to have recovered himself, had got hold of Curt, and learned from him where the female journalist frequented.
Louis went across the City, sometimes getting lost - Paradis had not been this way in the times of Tiy-Amonet. When Louis at length found his quarry, he and Tiy-Amonet found it as one. For of course, Tiy-Amonet had no objection to Louis' finding and lucidly conversing with this woman - myself. Indeed, had wanted her found, and conversed with. So I had seen that day before me a creature that was already two creatures, but mostly the creature it had not been and did not appear to be. Soulless also, behind its blind-blue eyes. For what was left of his soul after she had been at it, and what was left of hers? I had seen what he had seen in the dream, the young man swooning back in ecstasy on the runaway bicycle -
Then Vlok pushed in and in a quavering act of normalcy bore them away. Which was permitted. I had been made heir to the written diary. It was done.
After that, Louis vanished. Not outwardly that was, but totally within. By the time they reached the hotel, the body was speechless, and almost catatonic. Up in the hotel lift they went, theatricals, covering, and made him a prisoner in his suite. Summoned, but en garde, the doctor would not return, and seemed to have alerted besides his colleagues.
There is another meaning for the word Imago, this being the thing which emerges from the chrysalis.
When I was told he would last a week, she had apparently judged how long the rest of the transition would take, whatever its outward shows. On the seventh day, Louis' voice had spoken to Vlok one last sentence, over and over. He wanted to go back to the house in the Observatory. He must, he must. Over and over. Until the harassed Vlok agreed and took him there, with Curt at their heels. Presently, I arrived.
During our interchange, Vlok's and mine, Curt had naturally been unable to restrain "Louis", who had gone up to the attic. Here he wandered about, Curt wandering after, all nerves. When Vlok rejoined them, leaving me in the study, "Louis" - or could it have been Louis - had sat down under one of the dirty attic windows, smiling, playing with the silver earring.
Below, I had taken the diary up. And this must have registered throughout the web - which now, it seemed, had meshed all the house, and half the City. A few moments later, Louis rose, opened the attic window, climbed the sill in one step, and tipped himself out.
It may have been, I had begun to think so, the last surge of his persona trying to prevent what was to come, had come, upon it. To baulk and escape, after all.
But, by throwing himself from the attic, he had placed himself for the fall, in the magic condition, the correct one. He was between heaven and earth. In the air.
Vlok's face now was like the moon, idiotic, pale, expressionless. He spoke of things that had nothing to do with Vlok the agent, the man of his time. He said flatly, "You thought you saw him hanging from a rope, mademoiselle, but didn't you see how the rope was, how it vibrated and smoked? Even as he was falling, suddenly one of the windows broke below - the blue windows - and as that happened, a substance started to pour back and upward, out of Louis' neck, about the top of the spine. It was that stuff they called ectoplasm. I admit, I had to look it up to find out. A kind of flesh that isn't flesh. He was Tuamon, by then, you see, and Tuamon can do that, make a fleshly cord out of his own body. And the ectoplasmic rope shot back into the attic, and attached itself everywhere, to the walls, the floor, and it stopped his fall - not dangerously suddenly, but resiliently, like the safety net in the circus. And then I saw you looking out at it too, mademoiselle. At the time, I didn't know any more than you did, what was going on." (A touch of amusement, at his unenlightenment of then.) 'As for poor Curt, he was gibbering behind me like a monkey. And then you left the house, I believe, so you didn't see what took place. The rope of matter pulled Louis' body gently up, back into the attic, and presently he told me who he, or perhaps I should say, she, was. And at that Curt lost control of himself and ran away, and I've told you the rest of that."
There was a silence after this. Minutes passed again over the face of my clock, microcosm as it was, as all clocks are, of Time itself, that terrible enormous relentless thing we domesticate with porcelain and ormolu even while it preys upon us.
Eventually I said, with care only to Vlok, not to the other, "Why did you wait so long to come to me?"
"Till you had read the diary."
"You knew when I did?"
"Tuamon."
"Why is the name changed? Why not Tiy-Amonet?"
"Tuamon is the correct name. Tiy-Amonet was the name for the Roman's use. Of course, she'll want to be known by some other name now, of the City, the present day. For convenience."
"And a further question," I said. He waited as I swallowed more than once. "Why do I have to be told all this?"
'To finish."
The voice terrified me. It terrified me every time now. But I had to say: 'Finish - what?"
Another gap. Was it telepathy after all? Vlok said, as if instructed in the actual words, "He comes from Egypt. He was, and is, a sorcerer. You know about the hieroglyphs in their picture-writing? Well, mademoiselle, to an Egyptian sorcerer, writing is itself a magic, a sort of spell - '
"And old habits die hard," I said, "like mutilation for vengeance. Louis began to write about all this, and in all sorcery, every ritual must be completed for the safe-making of spell and mage."
"Exactly, mademoiselle."
"And so he - or she, you keep changing the gender now - wants me to complete the account. To write down what you've told me."
"Just so. Except it would be better if you begin at the beginning, that is, if you will re-write, or copy Louis' account. A broken sequence - it needs to be re-started, and then carried through as one. Also, you see, you are a professional at this - it is, if you will, j>oar special branch of magic. You assume therefore the place of the sorcerer himself." He waited, then said, "And I am to inform you that it doesn't in the least matter if your view of Tuamon is - unsympathetic. You are naturally afraid and averse to Tuamon, and he expects nothing else. You must write as you feel and see. It will be irrelevant to the ritual, or to the person of the sorcerer Tuamon."
"Yes. Very well, I do all that. Then what?"
He gazed at me. He put on a look, of an agent whose client may possibly have been exposed to a swindle.
"What could there be, mademoiselle?"
"No, I
'm not such a fool as to expect to be paid. I'm inquiring if I'm not to be killed when I've completed the task.
And then it - yes, it - it laughed.
This was so awful to me that I found myself on my feet, running towards the door - Vlok caught me. He must have caught Louis this way dozens of times, there was a distinct sense of practice.
"There's nothing to be alarmed at. She doesn't need your death."
"But if I refuse to obey the task, I'll be punished?"
Silence again.
In the end Vlok said, "There's one more thing that you have to be shown. Then you'll be left to yourself. You'll write everything down. Then publish, if you want to, or not. That isn't of any importance. Just the act of the writing. You can even burn the diary, and your manuscript, providing your own work is finished. Then nobody will trouble you, mademoiselle, ever again."
I might have asked him if he liked being its slave, or if he grieved over Louis, or Curt. Or a hundred things. But I did not, and did not care. I cared only to have it over with. I said so.
"Then I'll just step down into the street. Tuamon will show you. There's nothing to be afraid of'. Good night, mademoiselle." And so saying he nodded and walked out, closing my door behind him. I heard his feet go down the stairs as I stood alone in the room in the gas-light with that thing, and waited for the concluding revelation.
I had wanted the key to the mystery, or it had made me want it.
Before Vlok's footsteps had died away, it moved. The dull fire shone around the edges of the body which had been Louis de Jenier's body. It was taking off the woman's coat, her hat and gloves, her dress -
It was undressing itself in front of me, with no sensitivity.
I said nothing, made no protest. I sank back into my chair, and gripped my hands together. I already knew.
Louis' frankness in his descriptions of the costuming of his r61es had told me anything I needed to know about his quite-ordinarily handsome male body. In these split seconds I became aware that this spider-witch, capable of producing from its own fleshly case a string of ectoplasmic gossamer, could thereby reshape and refashion as it chose. The smallness of the hands and feet, the truthful appearance of the breasts -
A silken camisole, silk stockings, suede shoes. Every stitch.
Yes. Now I understood. Presumably that would please, that I understood, so that I would write it accurately, here.
Physically, Louis was a male. Temperamentally, emotionally, a male. Ethically, a female. He was like one of a pair of twins, boy and girl, torn apart at birth. The female twin had been lost to him. He recaptured her - not through male lovers, who offended the maleness of his body - but by clothing himself to her various possible forms. And in that way he had remade himself into the whole double blossom, both sexes.
But Tuamon had always been that. His presence, now the woman's garments were lying on the ground, was assertively masculine. The pose and the poise of him were masculine. Yet the face under the gleaming hood of hair was a girl's face, with only a boy's arrogance to the brows and lips, and the neck, the boyish shoulders and the arms and the firm apple breasts - a girl's. There was strength in the limbs, in those rounded arms, and the long, muscled legs, the flat belly. And there was strength in the loins, which the room's warmth, or the stillness, or arrogance itself, had caused to flower, so I should have no doubts. And then he - for it was, for all and everything, a man - he positioned himself, with no coyness or display, to let me view that the strong loins had also their vulnerability. That this man might be possessed as a woman, too.
Tuamon, taking the feminine name Tiy-Amonet to smooth the sensibilities of a Roman commander attracted to otherness. Tuamon was hermaphrodite. Male and female, in all particulars. The face and breasts of a girl, the essence of a man. The loins of both.
Timonie had been solely and only a woman. Outside and under the skin. She was discarded, and punished. But Louis, under the skin, under the skin of the soul, was potentially dual. He had been worth the centuries.
The gas was turning blue, and that part of the room where Tuamon stood became a vast hollow drum. I thought I glimpsed -lotus pillars, the dune-shaped sarcophagae of Egypt - but then I saw instead an azure sphere, flashing and dazzling with movement and with integral life. In the heart of it, the fabulous monster basked, its eyes like port-holes on a sea of sky, through which passed colossal waves, tidal clouds, while the evening star hung on its forehead, the crescent moon and the full hung one from either ear. And on the disc of the full moon, a blue spider depended from a thread of pulsing ether.
And I did not want the vision to end.
I did not want the safe drab darkness to come back.
And I thought of Louis, closed inside, the food of this power, and I did not feel anything but hunger.
Then it too was done. Over and done.
Reality flooded back to me, and I was ashamed and petrified. And in this state I sat, hugging close my mother's shawl. I sat and the shadow-of-night gathered up itself, and masked itself again, and went by me like a burning whisper, and was gone.
And after it was gone I remade the fire and turned up the lamp, and sitting at my desk, wrote this.