by Tanith Lee
• • •
Years after, in a little French town, an elderly lady spoke to me of this, which she had come across in my more obscure writing. I can’t now, after so many years, recollect exactly how we got to it. But I tried to tell her—untellably, as I do you. And finally I left off, apologizing. “I wish,” I said, “I might show you what I saw. For that matter, I wish I might again show it to myself.”
She said, “Oh, but, though you cannot, nor can I understand it, even so, now we meet, I see it.”
“How?” I whispered.
“Ah, mon cher monsieur,” she answered. “I see it in your eyes.”
• • •
The author is indebted for the Latin translation to Aline Lonneville.
Snow-Drop
CRISTENA’S HUSBAND LEFT her after a month of marriage, and went away on business to a distant country. She had known, when she married him, that this would be the arrangement, that she would frequently be alone. Her function was to live in the handsome house above the lake, like the blue center of a clockwork eye. The house cleaned and scented itself, cooked meals to order from the groceries which were delivered twice a week, did the laundry, even kept the sweep of garden, pruning the trees, digging the earth and planting, and offering up cut irises and denim roses to match with Cristena’s bright blue clothes. Cristena, her blond hair wound about her head, was a physically lazy, mentally active woman. She liked to read, watch television, listen to music, and sometimes she would write a slim wild novel without any effort, which would sell well for a year or two, and then slip from view. The house suited her ideally. She had always wanted such a house, and such a life. Even the long absences of her husband were actually perfect. They left her time for herself, and would give every homecoming excitement, every leave-taking the drama of high romance.
However.
Before he had married Cristena, her husband had lived with another woman, in the house. This woman, some years his senior, had been dark, passionate, and energetically creative, an artist. She had died alone in the house, under rather dubious circumstances of wine and pills. She left behind no trace of her being, for the house had fastidiously washed and redecorated itself after the funeral, and given her clothes and treasures to charities. All that remained were some small water-color paintings, very graceful and fine, and in fact worth quite an amount of money, for the artist had been highly esteemed. These paintings were to be found in every room, along every corridor. The subject was virtually the same in each of them. It was a young girl, about fourteen years of age. She was slender and eloquent, sometimes depicted sitting, and sometimes standing, often in an expanse of pure snow. Her skin was white as that snow, and her long smooth hair was black as wood. She had a pale red mouth.
At first Cristena barely noticed the paintings. They did not interest her very much—she preferred landscapes—and besides were all so alike that it seemed if you had looked at one you need never look at any of the others.
As the summer days passed, though, the lake darkened and the birches in the garden turned mellow, the coldness of the pictures, like little oblongs of winter brought indoors, began to annoy Cristena. They ached at the edge of her eyes, distracting her at her books and her Shostakovich. In the roomy passageways, they went by like white sentinels. They reflected in mirrors, duplicating themselves. They were even in the bedroom. Cristena removed them from there and hung instead two warm violet prints of hills.
• • •
The initial homecoming of Cristena’s husband was not so astonishing as she had thought it would be.
He brought her a sapphire ring, which was very nice, although it did not quite fit, but rather than ardent he was tired and irascible. He spoke of business throughout their candlelit dinner. In bed, he kissed her, turned away and fell unconscious. He snored. Cristena found she could not sleep. At last, near morning, when she had managed to doze, her husband woke her up with insistent lasciviousness. He made love to her in a sort of drunken somnambulism, and while he did not hurt or distress her, he gave her no pleasure either. He fell asleep again on her breast, and she almost smothered until eventually she had prized herself out from under him. She achieved an hour’s slumber on the brink of the mattress, where his bulk had gradually pushed her, for he too, apparently, was more used to sleeping alone.
At breakfast, a very ornate and sparkling one she had arranged for the house to prepare, Cristena’s husband read papers and documents and made verbal notes on his pocket recorder.
Finally he looked up.
“Where are her paintings from the bedroom?”
“Oh, I didn’t think you’d seen . . . I took them down. The prints are much more in keeping with the colors of the room.”
“Maybe, but not a hundredth the value. She was famous, you know.”
It was only in this way that he ever referred to his previous liaison, her fame. He did not like to discuss her as a person.
“Well, if you want,” said Cristena, “I can put them back. Personally—”
“Yes, I’d prefer that.”
Irritated, Cristena said, to irk him in turn, “They’re all the same, aren’t they. That girl. Self-portraits?”
Her husband grunted. “She wanted children,” he said.
“You mean it’s the fantasy portrait of a daughter she couldn’t have?”
He frowned and did not reply.
He was quite ugly in the morning, Cristena thought, and he had put on weight which did not suit him.
She took the two pictures of the artist’s unborn daughter out of the house storage, and set them back on the bedroom wall. Now she stared at them a long time. They had assumed a macabre importance, expressions of barren desire. No wonder they were capable of projecting such a horrid animation of their own.
That night Cristena wore her hair loose and a low-necked dress of midnight blue. Her husband seemed bemused, but nevertheless he made love to her on the rug before the fire, knocking over a brandy glass in the process, which the following day the house would have to clean with an odorless acid preparation. Cristena found after all she was not going to enjoy this sexual union any more than the first. In contempt, she pretended, and her husband floundered into a relieved climax. In bed they both swallowed sleeping capsules. Cristena woke at dawn with the white pictures shining above her head like two slices of ice, and all the covers pulled off her, leaving her peculiarly vulnerable in the draughtless room.
• • •
Cristena’s husband only spent ten days at the house, before he had to leave the country again. On the afternoon of his departure Cristena did indeed weep. They were tears of nervous thankfulness. But he was enraged by the scene, shouting that he did not want a clinging vine. He would be gone five months.
• • •
In the weeks which followed, winter came. The garden and the landscape, the road which led to the city, and up which the delivery vehicle still beat its way on heated runners, turned snow white. The lake froze to a silver tray. The daylight shrank, and by night the sky flickered with luminescent coils of phantom hair.
The house was of a faultless temperature, airy and bright, all its mechanisms performing helpfully. But Cristena began to feel threatened. She was anxious, and found it difficult, for the first time in her life, to concentrate on her books and music. A novel she had begun grew sluggish and contrived, and she left it.
She tried not to look at the pictures of the artist’s unborn child, but they glowed on the walls and in the mirrors. A snow girl, nivea skin and ebony tresses and red water-ice mouth. As Cristena sat in the rooms of the house, she felt the pictures watching her, and when she walked through the corridors, the pictures blinked past like eyes.
Cristena removed the two pictures from the bedroom again, and the larger picture from her bathroom, and all the pictures from the living room. She put them into the house storage and ordered other pictures
from a catalog, and hung up those.
But now it seemed to be too late. The artist’s paintings had left an imprint on the atmosphere of the rooms where they had hung, and in the places where they hung still they seemed to have amassed a greater strength.
The winter light too, which shone in penetratingly through all the clear windows, left drops of whiteness as if fresh water-colors depended there.
There was nobody to talk to. This had never before mattered.
Cristena took down all the paintings, every one, and put them into the storage. The blank marks on the walls where they had been glimmered like candles.
Cristena kept the blinds lowered and the curtains drawn and the lights burned day and night, and television fluttered and sang in every space. She had to be stern with herself, as she went along the passageways.
• • •
On the morning that it happened, Cristena was making up in her dressing room.
She had decided to travel to the city in an automatic hire car, to shop, eat her lunch in a restaurant, visit the theater. The idea of going among people nearly frightened her, she had been alone so long, but also she was exhilarated, and she had poured a little vodka into her tea.
The dressing room was very attractive to Cristena. It was hyacinth with accents of gold. In the tall cupboards hung elegant dresses her husband had bought her, and in the drawers, folded among perfumes, undergarments of bones and lace, stockings embroidered with flowers, erotic items that once she had put on eagerly to please him, when he had been her lover. Cristena ignored these articles, as she ignored the jewels her husband had given her, especially the sapphire ring which was too small, and so almost insulting.
She dressed her face carefully, and it was as she was applying her dark blue mascara that she glimpsed behind her—something. Something white and slim and girl-shaped, standing between the mirror and the wall, there, on the carpet, visible.
Cristena lowered the mascara with a painful slowness. She glared into the mirror through a blue hedge.
The snow girl was about three meters away, over Cristena’s shoulder. She was quite distinct. She wore the same white, seamless, vaguely form-fitting garment she wore in the paintings, and her snowy skin that matched it, and the long glissade of wood-black hair. Her lips were red.
Cristena screamed. She jumped up and spun around.
The room was empty of the artist’s unborn child. Only a white gown gleamed from a half open door, with a mass of dark shadow above and a transparent scarlet rose sewn on its sleeve.
Swinging sharply back, Cristena took up a steel ornament and smashed the mirror. Fragments of glass tore off and flew about the room. The house would clear it all up.
Cristena pulled the white dress off its peg and crumpled it into the disposal shoot. It was carried away with a disapproving hiss.
She was trembling but angry. She realized the anger had lain dormant in her and now it sought release. She ran out of the dressing room, through the bedroom, along the passage and down the stairs. All the way, flashing razor glimpses, like a migraine attack, assailed her eyes; the spots where the pictures had hung of the artist’s daughter.
When she reached the living room, Cristena pressed the button and the blinds flew up with the noise of furious wings.
Outside was the unearthly snow, and there in the garden under the birches stood the snow child, the dark of a pine her hair, a single red berry her mouth.
At that moment the door called tunefully.
Confused, Cristena flung up her head. There was no delivery today.
“What is it?”
“A man is at the door. He carries no weapons.”
Cristena drifted in a trance into the hall. She signaled the door to open. Beyond the security bar stood a large and powerful young man, who beamed at her. He was incredibly ordinary, and real. Cristena had no notion as to who he was, or what he was doing there, but her awareness fixed on him voraciously. He was here for a purpose: Hers.
“Lady,” he said directly, “I’m a photo-hunter. Look at this.”
And into the hallway over the bar leaped a wolf, which stood looking at her with its beautiful eyes. It was a holostet the young man had constructed from photographs taken in the woods the far side of the lake, so he explained. It could be hers for a reasonable sum. For a fraction extra, it could be fixed to run about the house and howl.
“I can’t buy the wolf,” said Cristena. The young man looked sorry. “But come in. There’s something you can do.”
After she had plied him with alcohol, and resisted his amorous advances, which plainly were what he supposed she wanted, Cristena, lit by vodka and hot tea, had him pile up on the lawn the many water-colors of the artist’s daughter. The house was programmed not to harm its own possessions, but he, with a large gardening implement, smashed these pictures and mashed them. After which, together, they burned them all, and the yellow flames rose glamorously up into the winter sky. When it was done, not a crumb remained of the snow child, not a flake or shard. The young photo-hunter dug the snow over the black wound of the fire. Cristena gave him some money, and he went whistling away along the road, with his holostetic wolf leaping about him.
And that was the end of it. The end.
And that night, Cristena’s husband called from a sky-scraping mansion countless miles off, having clinched some deal. He was a little drunk, too.
“I’ve destroyed them,” said Cristena. “All of them.”
“Good. All what?”
“The icons of her bloody child that she never had.”
“What icons?”
Cristena shrieked into the phone: “The ice maiden. Her pictures. I burned them.”
Cristena’s husband was in the wrong place to make a noisy fuss. He told her she had lost him thousands of international dollars. Cristena laughed. He should have, she said, all the royalties of her next novel.
When he had rung off, she put on a disk of Shostakovich and filled the house with it. She let the windows blaze toward the lake. She sat late working out a scenario for the house to redecorate itself again, in saffron and blue. All the furniture should be moved around, and she would buy new drapes in the city. When her husband returned, he would wonder where he was.
• • •
In two weeks the house was changed to a gas flame, azure and yellow. There were new pictures and prints in all the corridors and rooms. Cristena had spent two or three days in the city, choosing blueberry and primrose curtains. The contact with people, of whom the photo-hunter had been the herald, hardened and revived her. At length she was ready to withdraw again into her mental vase of music, books and television.
Outside, the world stayed obdurately white, the lake shiny black beneath its ice. Cristena had had the berries stripped off all the bushes.
• • •
Cristena had almost finished her novel, the first part of which she had limpidly and easily rewritten. She sat working on the couch she had had reupholstered, her back supported by flaxen cushions. The television fluted faintly in the corner of the room. Something about the picture summoned Cristena’s attention, and she looked up. The snow had filled the screen. It was utterly white. Cristena frowned. She was about to press the adjustment control when the whiteness opened out into a petal, and so into a single flower, and then the camera sprang back and there was a girl dressed in white and holding the white flower. She bowed low, and her long black hair, smooth as poured ink, fell forward to the ground. Cristena sat bolt upright, and her writing smacked on the carpet. Without knowing what she did, she turned up the volume.
“And here is Snow-Drop,” said the voice of the television, “one of the stars of the circus.”
The girl wore a short white costume and white tights that covered her from neck to toe to wrist, but described every inch of her young pliancy. The whiteness was coruscated by spangles. When she s
prang suddenly over in a somersault, she glittered like a firework, and her hair sprayed out in a fantastic smoke.
Seven small figures ran across the space, which seemed to be that of a large arena. They wore red and black. Cristena thought they were children, but their thick dark hair, muscular faces and forearms, enlightened her. They were dwarfs. They formed a pyramid and tumbled down, rolling expertly to the white satin feet of the girl called Snow-Drop. She then arched over backward, making a hoop, and they trotted in a train under her. Next they lifted her up high and raced along carrying her, in the way ants carry a leaf.
There was a familial resemblance. Cristena wondered if Snow-Drop was related to the dwarfs. Although perfectly proportioned, she was very slight and petite. She looked about fourteen years old.
The dwarfs set Snow-Drop down. She coiled herself up into a cross-legged snake, while her seven companions bounced into position about her. In tableau, the dwarfs grinned. They had poised, good-looking faces, and seemed quite composed and happy with their lot. The girl also smiled.
This image was replaced by a garish sign, the fiery neon of the circus, which was performing in the city. Snow-Drop and the dwarfs were to be seen every night.
The television reverted to a rather sedentary play.
Cristena switched it off.
She walked uneasily about the room. She felt a strange excited dread. For it was as if she herself had conjured up Snow-Drop in the mirror of the television. As if, by breaking and burning Snow-Drop’s image, she, Cristena, who had never wanted children, had given Snow-Drop life. For Snow-Drop was the artist’s unborn daughter, correct in each detail, even to her pale red mouth.
• • •
Every evening, for several nights, the same advertisement came on the television, and Cristena watched it. Sometimes other circus acts were shown as well, a man who swallowed clocks, a woman who danced extravagantly on the head of a pole. But Snow-Drop was always there, bowing, somersaulting, making herself into an arch, carried by the ant-like dwarfs, sitting in their midst. Beyond her name, which was probably any way false, no information was given.