Darkness, I

by Tanith Lee

  By then, she was in a waking dream, and since they put her in a handsome wheelchair, it was easy to be will-less.

  They did not go among the crowds, but through a deserted corridor and a small room where some official spoke to the suited man in French. After this there were further corridors, walkways, and an ascent into the plane, a torpedo of power, all vacant, but for them.

  A stewardess in another suit, cream with pink piping, brought them drinks, more sandwiches. They were belted in, Anna by the red-lipped girl.

  Taste your wine,’ she said. ‘It will be a long flight.’

  Anna did not ask how long, and she would never know. After she had sipped the wine, rollers of sleep came in on her.

  They had taken off, for Red-lips was undoing Anna’s seat-belt. Red-lips encouraged Anna to lie down on the three seats, cushions under her head. Anna slept with the roar of the jet, in a womb of steel and sky.

  The landing was bumpy. Anna had already looked from the window. She saw an extraordinary view, bare brown mountains carved from hardened fudge, cut by white roads and distant spoons of salt. They came down in a desert.

  When they alighted from the plane, there was a singing in the ears, not the drug, a new type of silence.

  A natural flatness had provided an expansive runway. They were in an arena, held by brown rocks. Above, a golden sky, blue only at its apex.

  Another plane, a twin to the jet, rested about a hundred yards away. It looked white to Anna, with markings that made no sense, for the heat caused them to vibrate, and she did not care.

  Two covered jeeps stood alongside the runway. They were the colour of brown sand, with machete mounts on their sides, radio ariels stuck up like silver antennae, and mounted M60s pointed out from their backs like cannon.

  There were also what Anna took to be soldiers, informally dressed in the universal brown. Ruger P85s in their shirts.

  They were fit and agile, these men, young, and some good-looking.

  Two of them came over to greet the red-lipped girl and the man. One spoke in French. He said something about a delay. Then, he half turned to Anna, glanced at her under his lashes. Anna said, ‘Comment allez-vous, monsieur?’ Her speech was still slurred, but not impossibly.

  He smiled. He nodded. ‘Très bien, mademoiselle. Enchanté de faire votre connaissance.’

  Anna said, in English, ‘What gun is that?’

  And in English, touching the long shape of the M16, he told her.

  Anna said, ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘The desert, mademoiselle.’

  The suited man said, ‘How long must we wait?’

  Then they spoke in Spanish.

  Anna stared about her at the brown mountains. They did not seem so far away as perhaps they were, and she had been able to speak. The drug they had given her was less. But that would not pose any awkwardness. They could always give her another dose.

  Besides, where could she run to, now?

  The soldier conducted them into the shade of a brown awning. Presently, from a portable kitchen, some more food was brought, hamburgers in buns with a hot sauce, bottles of Perrier.

  Anna ate. She was hungry.

  Red-lips did not eat all her bun. Of course, she would watch her figure.

  After the meal—breakfast, lunch, whatever it was—Anna slept again on a mattress under the awning.

  She dreamed as she always did. Of fragments, voices, rooms, mazes, sounds.

  When she woke up, there were more hamburgers, tortillas, and fruit.

  A sunset began. It was unearthly, the way only things of the earth can be. Flaming boulders of cloud stacked over a sea green screen that sank, in radioactive bands of topaz, iris and mauve, among the rocks.

  Across the scrub that edged the basin of their arena, lizards went scuttling. Red-lips pointed out the trail of a snake that had passed near them, undetected.

  The delay was over, and they went to the second plane.

  In the cabin, Red-lips handed Anna a pill.

  ‘It will help you sleep again. Otherwise, so boring. I’ll take one too. I hate long flights.’

  She proved it by swallowing her sleeping pill before Anna’s eyes. Or pretending to.

  But Anna did not take the pill.

  She watched from the window as the jet surged up into the stars, and later there were the stars of cities below. But blackness came, and she slept any way.

  She dreamed a man stood before her in a tunnel of the dark. His hair was white as her own and clotted him round. His eyes were like jewels.

  Something moved in Anna.

  Her heart, perhaps. Or something more profound.

  They refuelled somewhere. She smelled the oils pumping into the plane. It sucked the tubes dry, a vampire.

  Perhaps a day came and went. Or not. Maybe Red-lips had coaxed a somnolent Anna to take the sleeping pill. It was gone.

  And then again, the girl was leaning over her. ‘We will be landing in fifteen minutes.’

  Again, Anna visited the lavatory. She had not bathed, it seemed to her, for weeks. She wanted to wash her hair and clean her teeth.

  It was strange. She would have thought the Scarabae, so attentive as they had always seemed in Althene’s tales, in Rachaela’s mutterings, would have provided such items as toothbrushes, even shampoo—

  Then they were down.

  Cloud had obscured the windows. Anna had not seen very much, until the plain appeared.

  Hills far off, not like the mountains of the desert. Hills clad in wind-bitten turf.

  And the blown sky.

  When the doors were opened, it was cold.

  ‘Where is this?’ she said.

  Red-lips said, ‘The tip of the world.’

  Anna said no more.

  There was a long hut, and in it a primitive but operational shower that ran scalding hot. Soap and shampoo were provided, toothbrush and paste of an American brand. Nothing more.

  Anna found, outside the shower cubicle, a pile of clothing. They had told her she must put it on.

  There were thermal undergarments, a one-piece jumpsuit in dark blue, a fleece waistcoat, a parka, pants, insulating bands for the neck, head, wrists, ankles, thermal socks, and boots, a hood and hat, a jacket packed solid as if already filled with flesh.

  Outside, amid the windy landscape, a beast of a plane, a black Ilyushin-76, bulked on the runway.

  Another man came to Anna. He was dressed very much as she was, but he had a gun across his shoulder.

  ‘Miss Anna. Will you board the transport, please?’

  She went with him.

  Red-lips and the other man were gone.

  Across the air-field, against the watered sky and the hills, a little stone thing stood up. It reminded her of the cemetery. A tomb? The statue of a child-girl, classical... Her face was cold and unkind and at her feet someone had laid a sheath of blood red flowers.

  The plane had no windows.

  Undersea muddy light.

  A little boy, who had been sitting in the aisle, playing with a giant woolly llama, looked up at Anna. He too was dressed as she was, but his clothes were miniscule and rosy.

  ‘I’m Andy.’ He corrected himself: ‘Andrew.’

  Anna looked at him. Still a child, and always a mature woman, she did not respond to his youngness, or his pleasing face.

  She liked the llama. It was a pale soft ashy shade, with tassels on its neck that had bits of mirror in them.

  ‘Where are we going, Andrew?’

  ‘Are you going too? All right,’ said Andrew, thoughtfully. ‘We’re going to my Uncle Kay—’ Andrew broke off, as if trying to add something to the name, but not able to.

  ‘Why?’ said Anna, although she knew it was no use.

  ‘It’ll be great,’ said Andrew.

  He had a South London accent, but not consistently. His hair was feathery dark.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve had a great time,’ said Andrew. ‘I watched funny telly, and they played me
music. And I’ve got this llama, he’s brilliant. I drink wine now.’ Then he said, ‘Albescent.’ And then, ‘Snow-White.’

  The man in the matching clothes came into the plane. He told them they should sit down now in the seats and fasten their belts. He would see to Andrew’s belt. And the llama too, since Andrew desired the llama to be safely belted in.

  It was not a long journey. Not far, now.

  ‘My Uncle Kay has a huge house,’ said Andrew. ‘Mum’s coming, later.’

  The Ilyushin rose like a heavy can of clanking metal, and they the belted peas inside.

  ‘Forty-five minutes is all,’ said the escort. ‘Then another little flight. Half an hour, perhaps.’

  Someone came with lemonade and cookies.

  They plunged down in a place of snow. Across a slide of water, ships of ice sailed blue-green across the green-blue sky.

  The little boy made snow balls, but did not throw them.

  ‘The summer is coming,’ said the man, smiling into the burning kiss of the cold.

  Anna thought, whither thou goest I will go. Who had said that?

  The sky throbbed. The snow-white snow stretched, soul-less, away and away and away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The cemetery was planted with cedars, holly, conifers. Its ambience, even at the onset of winter, was dark green. Laurels grew in tubs along the paths, speckled with glassy yellow. The graves were dark iron or toothily clean and white, streaked only faintly with weather. Brown statues kneeled in ivy.

  Roman was sweeping up the leaves of the birches, and overhead, revealed by the trees’ bareness, hung enormous abandoned nests, blot-black on the flat sky.

  Roman came to a marble grave. Hier rust Magdalena Einer. Roman stopped, and checked that the big china dog was in his right place, guarding dead Magdalena. The dog had a sad but not a tragic look. He understood his duty. Roman leaned down and touched his head. ‘Good friend.’

  Roman was seventy years of age. He appeared to be fifty, but for his eyes. Held in the long taut stone-brown mask of his face, they were the colour of the wooden instrument he played. Unlike the dog, Roman’s face had tragedy in it. Not an expression. The tragedy had formed the flesh.

  Leaving Magdelena’s tomb, Roman passed down the gravel, and stopped again, to watch a red squirrel investigating under a bush.

  The death garden was full of life. In spring, there were also flowers, daffodils, pansies, tulips, pots of hydrangeas.

  The squirrel finished and flew up a tree, lighter than a bird.

  Roman went on. Behind the cedars, where the cemetery folded over to the river, the tall reeds stood petrified to umber already by the cold. He leaned his broom on a moss-grown trunk.

  Roman took a packet of Gauloise from his coat, and lit a cigarette with a match. He smoked, looking over the reflecting water, in which, now, a little breakage of rain began to fall.

  The man soon came along the bank; it was the one called Vonk. Vonk was fat and seemed dirty, although he was not. His unshaven pig’s face broke into a smile.

  ‘Roman. You devil.’

  Roman shrugged. His Dutch had always remained heavily accented, and he spoke little. As he stretched out his hand to take the envelope from Vonk, the tattoo on Roman’s hand pulled with the dried skin. They had done it when he was young.

  ‘For him?’ said Roman.

  ‘For him. For the Prince.’

  ‘He is not,’ said Roman.

  Vonk shrugged now.

  That was all: Vonk went off along the bank, whistling.

  Roman retrieved his broom and crushed the cigarette in the bank. He walked back into the cemetery, and there stored the broom in the building by the naked stone goddess. Here he located also his bicycle, and wheeled it out.

  From the top of the basket he took a flapping dun raincoat, and pulled a beret on to his long head. In her waterproof, the hurdy-gurdy lay now alone.

  She would be a bitch today. The rain. His vrouw, as the bagpipes were a man. Nut brown, made from old furniture, her strings and wheel, her keys in their box. Bitch.

  Roman got on the bicycle.

  Under the raincoat, in which he had carefully stored the unmarked envelope, his feet were just visible plodding on the pedals.

  He swung, like an old bent-wheeled moth, out of the death garden, up the picturesque slope, by the river and the poles of the trees with yellowing leaves. Towards the concrete bridge.

  A dog barked on a boat.

  At the back of the sea, in front of the half-circle of her canals, Atlantis, Amstelredam, the city of Amsterdam.

  His bicycle one of a million others, Roman wove through the coiling tram-lines.

  Down the straight streets between the banked shops, the French cafés, the bars, under the bannered signs (cineac, Marlboro). The dainty dark tower of the Vestertoven was playing its music-box tune, Waar de blanke top dev duinen.

  Roman pedalled through on to the grid of canals, bumping over the cobbles. Late florist flowers were on the pavements under bare trees smelling of smoke. The bridges made their immemorial O’s of reflection. Water buses honked.

  Then off the grid, dancing with the yellow trams, and so out alone on to the ruled wet highways running from the city.

  The deluge poured now. The roads like the canals.

  Cars sped by, angel-winged with spray.

  A pink glare was in the sky over the level green of wintering grassland.

  Roman’s back was hunched up, and before him the hurdy-gurdy lay wrapped in her basket like a portion of severed body.

  Some kilometres out, Roman turned away along a veering, tree-columned lane.

  The Prince.

  It irritated Roman when Vonk or the others said that. But it was only their respect.

  And what was the Prince to Roman? A demon—maybe.

  That first image. Roman would never mislay it, and saw it now, stamping on the pedals through the gasping wet.

  Fire then, not water. A wall of burning houses, and a shape rising up, black on ruby red, from the corpse of a German soldier.

  He had thought, Roman, one of them had murdered its own, for the figure wore a German uniform, that of some high-ranking officer. But then the man, the killer, spoke to Roman, in the purest Dutch. And from the collar of the coat, in which he had tucked it, slid one amazing snake of death-white hair.

  It was how he would do it. Prey on them, under cover first of the fires they had created, and later in the cloak of their night. One by one, like a leopard, he took them. They would think him theirs. His German was flawless. He seemed to them Aryan, the perfect type, white-blond, blue-eyed. He would soothe, even fondle. Then he broke their necks, or tore out their throats.

  He would vanish at once. That night he took Roman with him.

  And that was the beginning of their association, if such it could be termed.

  Other lanes slanted off from the first. The grassy fields lay all around, dotted with impervious wet black-and-white cows. Ditches of water sliced between, hung with willows.

  Then the chestnuts gathered. And behind these, the pines.

  A magpie, matching the cows, sat arguing with the rain on a bough.

  Roman pedalled under an old crumbling stone arch with a notice on it warning that there was no entry.

  On the far side he pushed up through the wood, and emerged on the tabled pasture before the castle.

  Kraaienslot.

  To uphold its name, a murder of crows was circling over it, beating against the rain.

  Four round towers, their turrets, and the conical cap of the gatehouse, aching blue against the storm. Walls that in summer or autumn had a mellow painterly glow, now blocks of shadow, and the window-places skull-eyed. Behind, half a mile off over the castle’s shoulder, the ghost of the windmill called Mina was visible, before the pines resumed.

  Surrounding Kraaienslot was a wide moat, alchemically bubbling. On calm days, two or three piebald, red-beaked ducks would swim there. No ducks today. Never any drawbrid
ge. No way across.

  Roman put his bicycle against a mature tree, out of the rain, and lifted his vrouw from the basket.

  At the wood’s edge jutted a tree stump, with ivy growing on it. It had not been tampered with since last year’s spring.

  Roman knelt by the stump and felt under the ivy for the concealed button. He pressed, and a small shudder shook through the wood as the inner weight was shifted aside. Easily then, Roman lifted the hollow stump-head off the opening to the tunnel. A cunning Swiss design.

  When he was down on the steps, where the dim overhead electric light began, he drew the stump back into place.

  Carrying his musical instrument, Roman walked along the tunnel, whose walls dripped and whose floor was always paved with liquid from the moat.

  It took three minutes to reach the other flight of stairs, where occluded daylight came in from the iron gate above. The automatic lights switched off.

  Roman climbed out of the tunnel, slipping a little, and pushed wide the gate.

  A burnt-black dog sat there, like Cerberus, some unsocial breed. He recalled it slightly. It wore a collar of leather with knobs of silver.

  ‘You are his dog,’ said Roman in Polish. Then he said, in Dutch, for probably the dog was not familiar with Polish, ‘I am his dog.’

  The dog simply sat, and regarded him.

  It made no aggressive move, and he went by.

  The courtyard of the castle was cobbled, and in the middle was a well, surmounted by a sort of iron bird cage.

  On all sides, high, the oblong windows, arched over at the tops, leaded-blind, gazed sightless down.

  The main chambers were to the back, where the stairway was with the carved stone crows.

  Aloft, the living crows had begun to fight.

  An inky feather floated to the earth.

  Bad omen.

  The rain had eased.

  Roman detached the hurdy-gurdy from her packaging. He sat by the wall.

  The instrument gleamed under a mist of damp. She would have a damp voice, contralto, today.

  She and her kind had been banned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Turning her handle turned the brain.

  Roman started to turn the handle.

  He tuned her by the notes of the city’s trams, and the noises of the streets.