In her face the diagram of bones formed a geometry of murder.
Nolan ran past across the terrace, his feet crushing the peacock feathers as Leonora laughed. We tried to stop Manuel, but he raced ahead up the slope. Stung by Leonora’s taunt, he skipped among the rocks, disappearing from sight in the darkening air. On the terrace a small crowd gathered to watch.
The yellow and tangerine glider rose into the sky and climbed across the face of the storm-cloud. Fifty yards from the dark billows it was buffeted by the shifting air, but Manuel soared in and began to cut away at the dark face. Drops of black rain fell across the terrace at our feet.
The first outline of a woman’s head appeared, satanic eyes lit by the open vents in the cloud, a sliding mouth like a dark smear as the huge billows boiled forwards. Nolan shouted in warning from the lake as he climbed into his glider. A moment later little Manuel’s craft was lifted by a powerful updraught and tossed over the roof of the cloud. Fighting the insane air, Manuel plunged the glider downwards and drove into the cloud again. Then its immense face opened, and in a sudden spasm the cloud surged forward and swallowed the glider.
There was silence on the terrace as the crushed body of the craft revolved in the centre of the cloud. It moved over our heads, dismembered pieces of the wings and fuselage churned about in the dissolving face. As it reached the lake the cloud began its violent end. Pieces of the face slewed sideways, the mouth was torn off, an eye exploded. It vanished in a last brief squall.
The pieces of Petit Manuel’s glider fell from the bright air.
Beatrice Lafferty and I drove across the lake to collect Manuel’s body. After the spectacle of his death within the exploding replica of their hostess’s face, the guests began to leave. Within minutes the drive was full of cars. Leonora watched them go, standing with Van Eyck among the deserted tables.
Beatrice said nothing as we drove out. The pieces of the shattered glider lay over the fused sand, tags of canvas and broken struts, control lines tied into knots. Ten yards from the cockpit I found Petit Manuel’s body, lying in a wet ball like a drowned monkey.
I carried him back to the sand-yacht.
‘Raymond!’ Beatrice pointed to the shore. Storm-clouds were massed along the entire length of the lake, and the first flashes of lightning were striking in the hills behind the mesa. In the electric air the villa had lost its glitter. Half a mile away a tornado was moving along the valley floor, its trunk swaying towards the lake.
The first gust of air struck the yacht. Beatrice shouted again: ‘Raymond! Nolan’s there – he’s flying inside it!’
Then I saw the black-winged glider circling under the umbrella of the tornado, Nolan himself riding in the whirlwind. His wings held steady in the revolving air around the funnel. Like a pilot fish he soared in, as if steering the tornado towards Leonora’s villa.
Twenty seconds later, when it struck the house, I lost sight of him. An explosion of dark air overwhelmed the villa, a churning centrifuge of shattered chairs and tiles that burst over the roof. Beatrice and I ran from the yacht, and lay together in a fault in the glass surface. As the tornado moved away, fading into the storm-filled sky, a dark squall hung over the wrecked villa, now and then flicking the debris into the air. Shreds of canvas and peacock feathers fell around us.
We waited half an hour before approaching the house. Hundreds of smashed glasses and broken chairs littered the terrace. At first I could see no signs of Leonora, although her face was everywhere, the portraits with their slashed profiles strewn on the damp tiles. An eddying smile floated towards me from the disturbed air, and wrapped itself around my leg.
Leonora’s body lay among the broken tables near the bandstand, half-wrapped in a bleeding canvas. Her face was as bruised now as the storm-cloud Manuel had tried to carve.
We found Van Eyck in the wreck of the marquee. He was suspended by the neck from a tangle of electric wiring, his pale face wreathed in a noose of light bulbs. The current flowed intermittently through the wiring, lighting up the coloured globes.
I leaned against the overturned Rolls, holding Beatrice’s shoulders. There’s no sign of Nolan – no pieces of his glider.’
‘Poor man. Raymond, he was driving that whirlwind here. Somehow he was controlling it.’
I walked across the damp terrace to where Leonora lay. I began to cover her with the shreds of canvas, the torn faces of herself.
I took Beatrice Lafferty to live with me in Nolan’s studio in the desert near Coral D. We heard no more of Nolan and never flew the gliders again. The clouds carry too many memories. Three months ago a man who saw the derelict gliders outside the studio stopped near Coral D and walked across to us. He told us he had seen a man flying a glider in the sky high above Red Beach, carving the strato-cirrus into images of jewels and children’s faces. Once there was a dwarf’s head.
On reflection, that sounds rather like Nolan, so perhaps he managed to get away from the tornado. In the evenings Beatrice and I sit among the sonic statues, listening to their voices as the fair-weather clouds rise above Coral D, waiting for a man in a dark-winged glider, perhaps painted like candy now, who will come in on the wind and carve for us images of seahorses and unicorns, dwarfs and jewels and children’s faces.
Prima Belladonna
I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.
Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.
We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer – we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level – yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.
One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.
‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’
When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’
Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’
I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.
‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’
I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.
‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’
‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’
Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked.
‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’
Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’
The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furnitur
e, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.
‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’
The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.
We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.
Five minutes later the singing started.
At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.
Harry and Tony frowned at me.
‘Your livestock’s unhappy about something,’ Tony told me. ‘Can you quieten it down?’
‘It’s not the plants,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be.’
The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges oft my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.
‘Steve, look out!’ Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.
I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.
‘What the hell’s the matter?’
Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.
‘That was close. You all right?’
‘It’s gone,’ Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.
‘What was it?’ I asked.
Harry peered at me closely. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.’ He sat down weakly on a beer crate. ‘Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.’
After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.
On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me.
I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.
There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing.
Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I had never discovered. Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr Mandel. As a young botanist of twenty-five Mandel had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by cross-breeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves.
Not that he had ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid.
That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resonating.
The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually – a backbreaking job with eighty tanks in the shop – when everything suddenly died away to a murmur.
I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘They must like you.’
She laughed pleasantly. ‘Hello. Weren’t they behaving?’
Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light.
She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them. The ferns reached out towards her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices.
‘Aren’t they sweet?’ she said, stroking the fronds gently. ‘They need so much affection.’
Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music.
‘I’ve just come to Vermilion Sands,’ she said, ‘and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.’
I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, brisk and businesslike. ‘What about something colourful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It looks rather cruel.’
‘Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO2 it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.’
She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly, her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying, she moved towards the display counter on which the Arachnid stood.
‘How beautiful it is,’ she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibrocalyx.
I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with colour and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out.
‘Beautiful, but evil,’ I said.
‘Evil?’ she repeated. ‘No, proud.’ She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly.
‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.’
‘Quiet,’ she said, waving me back. ‘I think it wants to sing.’
‘Those are only key fragments,’ I told her. ‘It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency –’
‘Listen!’ She held my arm and squeezed it tightly.
A low, rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself.
I had never heard
the Arachnid sing before. I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out towards her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabres.
I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. A faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.
The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.
‘Why did you turn it off?’ she asked heavily.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.’
She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx. One by one its leaves buckled and lost their colour.
‘How much is it?’ she asked me, opening her bag.
‘It’s not for sale,’ I said. ‘Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars –’
‘Will a thousand dollars be enough?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.
‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,’ I added, trying to smile, ‘that Arachmid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. ‘I was stupid.’ She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.
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