Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  The drone of her was deadly, hoarse, yet after all divine. She knew where she had come.

  He played an old tune, perhaps a thousand years of age. My love, you are leaving.

  Yes, she was sounding like a siren, like an enchantress, Circe...

  The bitch. It was not for her husband. But for him. The demon.

  The black dog had waddled close, like a barrel on legs. It seemed to enjoy the music. Its coat was coarse velour, but there were scars below the collar, as if another dog had once assaulted it.

  Roman played on.

  The usual madness came from his vrouzv.

  And then he heard the door flung wide above.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Standing on the stair, Malach beckoned. Roman ceased playing, and the vrouw gave a stuttering groan, a woman stopped before she could come. Carrying her, Roman ascended, and followed Malach into the great square room, the black dog padding after.

  ‘Don’t let Kraai worry you. He’s gentle enough now.’

  Roman glanced back at the dog—Crow—called for the castle.

  ‘I remember him, Mijnheer. He was fierce then.’

  ‘He’s still a fighter. But not with my friends.’

  Roman bowed.

  He set the hurdy-gurdy down neatly on the large table of heavily polished wood. A carpet lay across it, old red, and on this sat a pewter plate and a tall goblet of green glass from the sixteenth century. The castle itself went back, Roman believed, to the 1300s.

  The room was high, the ceiling crossed by a huge, black, mother beam, from which depended a brass orb, stemmed with candles. Even so, there was electric light, if rarely used.

  The black-and-white floor was very clean. The ancient cabinets and the painted chest showing Venus and Mercury, in fourteenth-century Dutch garments, shone like molasses.

  There were swords on the white walls, and one seventeenth-century painting, of a strange field, that disturbed Roman always, for heads were being harvested from it.

  Few objects littered the room otherwise. A burnished globe was on the wooden overhang of the fireplace, which was itself tiled with blue and white animals, goats and boars and hares. Brass candlesticks, glittering, ranged there with the thick white candles in them.

  One of the wolfhounds lay on a green velvet window-seat, before the window that looked, through small squared panes of soft white, smoky blue and glaucous green, out to the windmill Mina, and the pines.

  Malach crossed to a cabinet, opened it, and poured Roman a glass of French brandy.

  A faultless host, and so dangerous.

  The scent of limitless things was on Malach, and now too he seemed more lively.

  That spring, the last time, he had been like something dying. Roman had wondered. They did die, Malach’s kind, although it took more than age to do it. Pain, sometimes, pain of the soul, the very sort that killed ordinary men.

  Malach’s beauty too would have made Roman laugh, if he had not been Malach.

  Such a face was absurd. Yet it was a true face, carven out and set with those icy scorched-blue eyes. He wore shabby modern clothes, once very expensive, shirt, pants, shoes, nothing for the era of time or the cold which jointly filled the castle at the breath of wipter. And his winter hair poured over him. The hair of women could not match it. Except, of course, their women. Scarabae women.

  ‘Another brandy?’

  ‘Thank you, Mijnheer. But I must give you this.’

  Roman held out the envelope.

  ‘Sit, please,’ Malach said.

  He went to the window where the dog lay, and absently smoothed the creature’s head. It was Enki, the paler hound. Kraai the crow jumped up on the seat. Malach caressed him too. The rings on Malach’s left hand flashed as he slit the manilla.

  He read, in silence.

  Then he turned. There seemed to be no change.

  ‘You must have your brandy now.’

  He filled up Roman’s glass—costly warped grey crystal some hundreds of years old.

  Through the other door then came the rest of the dogs. Oskar the second wolfhound, Tarash and Firs, the two ruffed wolf-like mongrels.

  They went to Malach and stood about him. Enki came also. The crow dog was the last to realize. Then he sprang down and joined them. They were Malach’s guard, powerless, but formed ready to defend, to slay, to console.

  Something terrible, then, the news. They would know.

  His hand on the brandy had been steady. Malach had not paled. But yet, his face had drawn in on the bones. In the light of the cold grand room, where once counsels had been held and judgements given, he had that look of age they had only when their appearance was young. A thousand years. A skull with white hair and frozen eyes.

  Malach walked, easily, through the dogs, to the chest. Took the black key from its hook and unlocked the antique lock. He removed a handful of money, many fifty-guilder notes.

  ‘This is too much, Mijnheer. Always—too much—’

  ‘No. It’s my pleasure.’

  The notes were chilled from Malach’s hand, or only from the winter castle.

  Roman must go now. The long journey back. Sometimes Malach would invite him to remain. They would eat, drink wine. She would be played. She would purr, and the dogs would lie on their feet before the firelight, or in the honey-dust of summer evening.

  But not today.

  Roman said, ‘I am at your service. If you need.’

  ‘I know it. Thank you. Go carefully.’

  Roman went away.

  He moved through his fortress of crows, a thought in its stony brain-case. The dogs followed, its feral dreams.

  He saw the wooden chairs, sternly carved, the tapestries of maidens and knights, the cupboards with secret locks. On walls plaques of polished granite, a mediaeval woman’s face, her lips rouged, a headdress like segments of an apple.

  Stone floors, and the floors of black-and-white chessboards. The hooded fireplace of the other great room, with its pig-roaster and iron chains, flanked by caryatids of marble, their faces chipped, then stroked over again by time. In the corridor were the glass cases, old china in palest blue, like sea mixed with milk, funeral fans, a doll’s house of evil black-clad dolls. Glasses of bloody green. Old books bound in leather, with clasps of bronze torn by rubies.

  In the bedchamber, the box of a bed, its inner ceiling painted with birds, crows feeding on cherries, and fish for fertility, and a white dog for faithfulness.

  Beyond that place, the other room, kept for a woman.

  The bed curtains here were of damask, the pillows covered with embroidery. Nearby, the painted cradle.

  Bed, cradle, empty.

  This room smelled of powdery flowers, herbs. On the wall were a golden sun and a silver moon.

  Through the armoury he went, too, where the chainmail hung, the maces nick-named Goodnight, and the spiritless robot metal men of the armour.

  The dogs paced after.

  Sometimes Firs or Kraai ran to sniff at something. They were the youngest.

  The others were stiff, concentrated.

  Below in the red stone-flagged kitchen, the copper kettles and warming-pans and china bowls. And the modern refrigerator, where Jutka would leave for him cooked chickens and hams, smoked fish, a little cheese, and wine. The beer kegs lined up against the wall. And on a plate lay the winter berries she had brought.

  Jutka was old, and lived in an exquisite modern house across the pastures. Her garden in summer was like a garland; the house, narcissus yellow edged in white icing.

  Jutka would come regularly, but when Malach was walking in the trees with his dogs, or sleeping. Then, silently, she worked upon the castle, mopping its floors, polishing its wood.

  She baked bread and brought it, like a woman of old, in a broad basket. Her husband hefted the beer and wine.

  It had been in their family for centuries; service to the castle.

  Having reached the kitchen, Malach fed the dogs with meat.

  Enki whined.r />
  ‘Yes, I am going away for tonight.’

  Then Kraai whined, and Oskar turned and licked Kraai.

  Kraai came from under the earth, up from the pit. And now Malach must go down again, into Hell.

  A door led from the kitchen into the subway that Jutka used, going under the moat as the other passage did, and so up into the sombre water garden on the farther bank.

  The garden had been someone’s pride, once, but they were long dead. Clipped hedges and trees, an orchard, a channel of water. Now the evergreens grew together, over the water, closing it with drowned emerald. The orchard Malach had outlived. It too was dead, but for one tree, a ruined quince, that produced, every three or five years, some black and bitter travesty of fruits.

  A snake wall held espaliers, bare as bones.

  Here Malach unlocked the door to the world beyond. The world he did not want and seldom visited.

  Shimmer from the rain clad the woods and pastures. Mina the windmill rose like an anthill crossed by sails.

  Malach walked away, back towards the wooded road where, in a hidden barn, the car waited, topped up and gleaming from the ministrations of Jutka’s husband.

  It was dark there, under the pines. Malach raised his head and shouted, without words or thought, at the branches and the endless sky.

  Crows cawed. From the road came the rush of vehicles.

  Malach touched the button in the barn wall.

  The city by night. Filigree towers, warm windows. The lamps, the red neons. Against the deepening sky were arrayed the two-dimensional façades, cut-outs of intricate architecture. The tram-lines glowed. Pewter perished in the canals and fire reflected there.

  Bolivian musicians were playing in the square. He listened to their music, and when they had played and came, graciously, for money, he too gave them guilders.

  Then he went into the bar. He drank beer, then Jenever. He ordered two extra glasses of the spicy gin, which he did not drink.

  Over the small bar were battered copper pots, a bull’s head, and skulls with horns. Terracotta bottles stood under the red-and-yellow windows. He ate an Israeli orange from a basket.

  Beyond the bar, in the long street called for a queen, where the trams rattled, he sat down under windows of red and green that had lost their light.

  A goat’s head of wood was on this wall, rimmed by wooden grapes and lilies.

  She would have liked that, liked the horned skulls.

  He sat by the fireplace, obscured by black and white tiles with pictures of churches, harbours, castles.

  An auburn dachshund came to look at him, but would not stay.

  Malach ordered their meal.

  For him, the baked tuna and the creamed potatoes. For her, the green pea-soup with smoked sausage, the shrimps, the haché with apple. And to follow, little pancakes with sugar.

  They had two bottles of a white wine brought from under the street.

  She did not, obviously, touch her meal, or drink her wine, as she had not drunk her Jenever.

  She was not there.

  The waiter came. He asked if everything had been satisfactory.

  Malach assented.

  The waiter said, ‘She isn’t joining you?’

  ‘No.’

  Malach took the flower from the table. A white last rose.

  He bore it away with him, when he had paid for their meal, into the brilliance of the night.

  Where the street narrowed, the engorged neons offered many things. Malach passed inside the light.

  ‘Ah, good evening. Would you care to see the show?’

  ‘The Jewess,’ Malach said.

  The man’s face altered.

  ‘Is she expecting you?’

  ‘She’ll see me.’

  ‘Go up. I warn you, no trouble.’

  Malach laughed shortly.

  He went up the stair, thin and twisted as a child’s broken spine.

  When he knocked, he heard her. She rasped, her clothing, her lungs.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Malach.’

  The door was opened.

  The room was filthy and it stank. One half-open window looked out, as if desperate, upon the street with its lit signs of girls, beer, hot dogs, and Indonesian cuisine.

  Among the muffled furniture, lay plates with sticky, reeking crumbs on them, and tall lager glasses with the dregs of wine. He handed her the rose.

  ‘You burn,’ she said. ‘Always you burn. Sit there. Your fire will consume my chamber.’

  ‘No, my darling. Only me.’

  ‘Not only you, you devil.’ She spoke in Yiddish a moment, as if to compose herself. She said, ‘But I like to look at you.’

  Malach said, ‘Honour me. Look.’

  The Jewess laughed in turn.

  She was hideous. Fat and crumpled, as if the food she gorged on trampled her in its progress through her body. Her fat face, ringed by chins, sank on her swollen, drooping dugs. Even her eyes, dark as the wood of ancient, polished cupboards, were sunk in pouches of waxen flesh. She was a great psychic. He had used her before. Indeed he recalled when she had been young, a waist like a wand and black hair to her hips, which hair now frayed down like dry grizzled straw.

  ‘What do you want, my wit minnaar? Do you want my blood at last? Drink me, a shit on you, and make me a girl again.’

  ‘You’re too useful, lady,’ Malach said.

  The Jewess lifted her fat shoulders in their greasy, shapeless jumper. ‘Then?’

  ‘I told you about the woman.’

  ‘Your lost love, lost all over again.’

  ‘I left her,’ he said, ‘and she died.’

  ‘Died of love? We all die of love for you, Beautiful.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘A knife through her heart. I told you then.’

  ‘Yes. I remember. I saw her. A woman killed her. Do you want that woman now?’

  ‘You said, she would come back.’

  ‘Into another body?’ said the Jewess. She reached for a left-over glass of stale wine, and drank, smacking her lips.

  ‘She did so.’ He said, ‘Her name’s Anna.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Jewess.

  Malach said, ‘Now someone has taken her.’

  ‘Before you were ready to do it? Oh, you should have hurried, Whiteness. You should have had her, quick.’

  ‘She was a child,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said the abominable witch. ‘No. She grew up. She ran towards you.’

  ‘Tell me where she is,’ he said, ‘or I’ll break your neck.’

  The Jewess assumed vast dignity. ‘You don’t harm women. I fear nothing from you. Sham. Impostor.’

  Malach said, ‘There’s money here.’

  ‘I want your blood,’ she said. ‘Like the last time. It didn’t work for me. But maybe it will.’

  Malach said, idly, ‘Perhaps. When I know.’

  He flexed his wrist, held it out. Withdrew it.

  The Jewess got up and moved, cumbersome, to her cluttered table. The tarot was there, the Khartis, a quartz sphere, a ouija board. Paraphernalia.

  She pushed them aside and leaned forward, her foul hair smoking in the cobwebs and muck.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Aah.’

  He did not speak.

  She said, ‘You’ll let me drink from your vein for a whole minute?’

  ‘If you want. My blood will poison you.’

  ‘You’re not so rotten as that, my Prince. Listen. Her hair is white, like yours.’

  ‘I know. Someone has told me.’

  ‘Well, now, beloved. Her hair has covered over the hills.’ The witch snatched a coated bottle up. ‘Here’s white brandy. Will you have ice?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Although it was not really the time of year for it, there was a khamsin blowing, as could happen, the wind of fifty days. The windows were fast shut and the blinds pulled down, yet everywhere in the tarnished luxury of the hotel room, fine grit had gathered. He had swept it from the desk with irritation.
And, over the insectile stirring of the fan, sometimes he heard his daughter cough from her bedroom.

  He wished she would be quiet.

  Paul-Luc Lebas completed his notes in his careful, closed hand-writing and impeccably grammatical French. He shut the calf-skin binding of the book and reached for his attaché case.

  Outside, the almost ceaseless uproar of the city went on. Shouts, imprecations, cars and carts competing, the laughter of donkeys. Up in the narrow streets alongside the hotel, fruit sellers and pedlars of sweets, bangles and sexual perversion, still squatted, hopefully cackling and calling. Along the corniche above the river, vehicles drove and the evening populace walked. The racket would not let up until the last hours before dawn. Even the flail of the desert, Set’s scorpion wind, could not quell it.

  Paul-Luc Lebas unlocked the case and reached into the secret compartment. He drew out the map.

  He spread it before him, on the desk.

  It was no bigger than a photograph, a snap, the paper not strong, nor local. It had been made about 1900 he supposed. It was not a fake, but then, European and so young, that scarcely mattered. Either it showed truth—or a lie.

  He had been excited at first, in his cool way. Then he doubted. But there had always been stories...

  Paul-Luc had dabbled in archeology for twenty years. He had attended the sites of other men’s triumphs, always making enemies there, not especially through his jealousy, but merely because he believed in total discipline, had a dedicated contempt for Arab workers (scum), and would trust no one, nor do anything that did not seem reasonable and mathematical.

  Now this chance had come his way, expensively enough bought. The seller had promptly disappeared with his French francs and American dollars. (What else could one expect of scum?)

  Paul-Luc, travelling with his little daughter, brought them inland.

  It was a nuisance, dealing with the child. But, when she was older, she would have profited from all this, and he foresaw a time when she might even be useful, a secretary he could burden with esoteric knowledge hidden from others.

  It would be pleasant too, once she had been trained, to have a woman on hand to type his manuscripts, the articles and criticisms he wrote on literature and the classical theatre. She would need to learn Latin too, however, and perhaps Greek, even something of hieroglyphics. And women were so poor at these languages. Even Berenice’s English was halting although she was almost seven, and had been learning for two years.