by Lee, Tanith
An empty bookcase stood against the wall. She had already, to ease her nerves, unpacked and peopled it with books. She looked at them. They were hers, her own. How slight her possessions in the house of the Scarabae. How slight she herself against the rooms and corridors, the doors and annexes and inner chambers of this dense-built thing.
Twenty-one, the ancient beetles crept and slipped about their shadowy pursuits.
But she stood alone, compressed by architecture and unusual shapes.
Rachaela got into the white, white sheets and sat up on the clean white pillows, seeing the room framed now in bottle-green velvet.
The fire burned low.
Far away through the house she heard soft groanings of the wood, the breathing of its worn and living heart. The winter night was motionless beyond the window with the tree. The sea was faint.
Rachaela detected old footsteps brushing down her corridor. Then, presently, a woman’s round heels, slow and measured, not stopping.
The galloper had not come back.
How should she sleep?
She lay on her pillows, her body throbbing with tiredness. To sleep you must trust, let go. In this cradle she might lie awake a score of nights.
Rachaela heard a clock chiming walls and rooms away.
She had seen several clocks, none of which told the same time as another.
I can’t even read. She was afraid to take her eyes off the bedroom, its fireplace, its locked door.
Watch then. Watch all night.
Eventually sleep would be irresistible.
She thought of her flat. It was not hers. Had never existed.
The cat would have liked this house. She would have prowled, scratching lightly at the doors to be let in or out. She would have slept, curled there on the indigo coverlet.
Rachaela saw the cat stalking the death of the firelight.
No, she had dreamed for an instant. Going to sleep then after all.
She was safe. They were insane, but so was she to have come here.
‘Have nothing to do with them,’ said Rachaela’s mother, stark in a misremembered room of the past.
‘No, Mummy,’ said Rachaela.
She closed her eyes and beheld a tall male figure, faceless, black of hair, suspended between floor and ceiling. Rachaela slept.
Chapter Three
An incredible blitz of colour.
The woman in the bed opened her eyes and found herself drowned alive.
It was the window of stained glass, the light of day behind it now, casting down its panes.
Rachaela moved and a pool of blood and emerald slid along her body, turning the coverlet black and scarlet, dying her skin.
The room was splashed, dashed with dyes. A madness of green and red, magenta, gold and sapphire. Where the glass shone white it was opaque, and impenetrable. Nothing beyond the window showed through.
Rachaela saw the picture, hovering over her like a visitation. The tree clove the window, rising into a canopy of foliage from which blood-red apples scalded. Beneath the tree a man in golden armour with great wings tempted a naked woman to accept a fruit. From the extended apple a serpent coiled like a jewellery chain. Beyond the figures was a deep sky and the walks of a formal garden where animals, a gazelle, a lion, a unicorn, calmly reclined. In heaven a rayed sun looked on in rage.
Eve tempted in person by Lucifer?
It was stultifying to wake to it, this bomb-blast. The whole room was in its web. It gave no peace.
Why had they thought the tempting of Eve applicable to their guest? Or did the subject mean nothing? These pictured windows filled the house, she had noticed them in the drawing and dining rooms; outside another marked the turn of the passage.
She would have to live with Eve and Lucifer.
The clock at her bedside said ten o’clock. The black clock on the mantle told her it was eight-thirty. Which was correct she did not know, and even as she thought this, a clock chimed in the house far away. She counted: Five strokes.
Rachaela got out of her coloured bed, leaving the sheets awash. The face of Lucifer reflected on her pillow, eerie and exact. He had the pale and undefiled mask of a saint, this fallen angel.
In the dressing-table mirror among the lilies and the sun, she saw the tree behind her. She was sandwiched in by glass.
She walked to the bathroom. Its window was a sea with shells. She ran a bath.
As she bathed, brushed her teeth, she heard no sounds from the house beyond its continual soft croaks, its joists shifting, plaster cracking, tiles loosening. The house was filthy and in bad repair. Only its lunatic beauty and its twenty-one persons held it together.
As she came from the bathroom an old woman in a brown day dress of six previous decades hurried by, her head tucked in. She paid Rachaela no heed. They were not all interested then. To some she was a threat, maybe, a new varnished toy which might harm.
She dressed and rang the bell, a tail of frayed blue velvet, for Michael, Cheta, Maria or Carlo to come. It was Cheta who presented herself in her dark frock and without her brooch.
‘How can I help you, Miss Rachaela?’
‘I want breakfast,’ said Rachaela. ‘What must I do?’
‘I’ll bring you something, Miss Rachaela. Or you can breakfast with Mr Peter and Mr Dorian. They always take breakfast in the morning room.’
‘Bring me something here, please.’
It was a wonder they had not come en masse in the night to her room with knives and forks.
Toast it would seem was possible but not coffee. The family did not drink coffee. Tea, then.
‘How do you come by tea?’ Rachaela asked. ‘You don’t grow it?’
‘A van comes to the cottages, from the town. Carlo and I buy the groceries from the van.’
‘Are there cottages?’
Rachaela stumbled on an incoherent twist of hope, the world was not so far away. But the woman said, ‘Six miles off, Miss Rachaela. It’s a long rough walk, but we’re accustomed to it.’
Cheta’s eyes, if it were not inconceivable, would have assured Rachaela that the woman was blind. They were dark, like the eyes of all the people so far encountered in the house, but not sharp and bright; instead fixed, veiled-over, eyes that scarcely moved. Yet Cheta went from place to place with perfect precision. Coordinated, she manoeuvred through the panes of cracked syrupy window-light and went out.
The sound of the sea came and went in the house, vanishing at turns of the walls, behind pieces of furniture or long curtains. In places, conversely, the sea was suddenly loud, the crash of it on the rocks below. It was not to be seen from the house. Nothing was. Every window was of thick hectic glass. The panes were patterned, or they held still fifes: fruit, urns and trailing flowers and sides of crimson, saffron and salmon-pink, viridian and mauve like poisoned ivies, heaven-blue and smouldering red. The rooms were jigsawed with their interrupted reflections. Several of the larger windows contained pictures. Rachaela recognized uncanny and seemingly blasphemous parodies of the Bible: Cain killed by Abel perhaps, over his offering of grapes and wheat, and the slain deer hung around Abel’s hunter shoulders, the neck wound like cornelian. And other cornelians in a round window above the stairs where a prince at a wedding changed the yellow wine into blood.
Rachaela was coldly amused by the bad taste of these eccentric scenes, presumably designed to please the family at its inception in the house. Yet she longed for a chink, some square inch of clear ordinary glass, looking out. The house was a box, a church, shutting in. The awful colours submerged the rooms, making them liverish. Gems of fire hung in mid-air, rainbows caught on the dust.
There were carvings on all the wood.
The old woman Anna had assured Rachaela she must do as she wanted. Lacking anything better, Rachaela moved about the building, losing herself in its corridors, finding locked doors, and opening others which gave.
She saw into lavish bedchambers, but presently she discovered in this way two old men playing chess, beneath a window wi
th an angel in white and blue. The tines of their blue hands petrified on the board. The two old mummy faces moved about like rusty clockwork.
‘It’s her,’ said one old face.
‘Look at her hair,’ said the other.
She was not an intruder but an exhibit. She left them and shut their door.
In other places she came on the Scarabae, or their traces.
Some acknowledged her politely, their sharp eyes eating her up, one or two ignored her, pottering on some crazy mission through the house.
She had become used to these meetings, passings. Their names did not matter—though one stole up to her and said, ‘I am Miranda, and you are Rachaela.’ Being elements of a whole, the collective name, Scarabae, would do.
They reminded her now of insects, their skinny uprightness and bony quick hands.
It was no worse than being in a fantastic old people’s home. Better, for they were all independent and capable of individual governance.
One of them, an interested one, was following her, she became sure of that. Creeping behind her, scraping aside into some empty room should she retrace her steps.
She did not like to be followed, but what else could one expect?
The plan of the house eluded her. It was a shifting kaleidoscope of stained-glass and shadows. The rooms were far darker by day than by night.
Every clock she came on or heard told her of a different time.
Every mirror was choked and occluded. In one corridor a mirror of plain glass was being painted with a skilful if pedantic scene of groves and fountains, meadows and hills. Stacked neatly by the lost mirror were the artist’s impedimenta: the tray of paints, palette, brushes and turpentine, rags.
Elsewhere she had seen paintings; but she did not study them. In one a goat seemed to peer forth from a woman’s aproned belly.
So there is to be nothing sure here, no day, no time, no view of the self.
It was truly a madhouse.
Lacking time, only a vague hunger guided her. She found her way to the dining room and the long table was laid with ten places, and ten of the tribe were in position.
All looked up at her entry.
There were six old women in ancient dresses and four old men in mossy coats. They were all the same as Anna and Stephan, thick hair brushed back or piled up with pins. Ringed talons at work upon cold rabbit-pie and salad.
Rachaela recognized clothes and jewellery she had seen on her journey through the house—impossible to tell the faces and hairstyles apart. Could it be true that all these old women were herself in a hundred years time?
Should she sit down and eat the leftovers with them?
There was no place laid for Rachaela but a woman in a dark frock—her eyes were blind and bloomed-over and her hair was in a bun low on her neck, yet she was not Cheta, she must be Maria—was rectifying this, laying a place at the head of the table.
Rachaela sat down.
The tribe watched her take a slice of the pie and some tomatoes, lettuce.
No one spoke.
Then one of the old women, it was Miranda, said quaveringly, ‘We mustn’t stare.’
And reluctantly they ceased staring, returning to their plates, eating with the quick snapping agility of Anna and Stephan.
Rachaela did not try to make conversation. All this was a grim farce. She did not think that she could say anything that would remotely engage them, and yet they would stare at her again, twenty black eyes.
Anna and Stephan must be their leaders. Anna and Stephan were coherent, or almost, had not abandoned all pretence at normal social interaction. These were wild things dwelling in a stained-glass forest. They came to the pool to drink, ate berries and rabbit sitting upright, stared, considered, ran away or pursued. Was it one of these who had followed her?
She could think of no questions to put to any of them. In any case, would they be equipped to answer a question? Why am I so important to you? A feared treasure, food for your thought? They would tell her, if they told her anything, that she was supposed to be here. She was a part of them. Here was her destiny.
But actually she imagined them grubbing about her inquiry, pawing it, letting it lie.
They were so old no forms had consequence.
And Rachaela had never much bothered with the form of things, either.
She was not very hungry after all. The nursery of old ones pecked and gobbled, leaving their plates quite clean. They passed fruit between them. Their teeth, she had noticed, though discoloured, were still serviceable.
She listened to the noises of gnawing and sipping, the split of rinds and slicing of peels, spatter of pips.
They did not talk to each other even.
Even the old men at the chessboard had been quite silent.
The window, freed of its drapes, depicted a dragon fighting with a unicorn, but from the loudness of the sea, Rachaela guessed the window should have looked down towards the ocean.
Michael and Cheta came in with two teapots, and a plethora of fine china cups were set out.
Rachaela did not stay for the tea, and as she left the room, the forest creatures looked up and stared her away.
During what she supposed must be the afternoon, Rachaela found a chamber on the upper storey which contained a piano and an unstrung harp.
The harp was large and beautiful and sheathed in dust, the piano also. No one had played it for several years. Rachaela scooped the dust away and touched the keys. Their notes were surprisingly unsullied. She herself could not play. She was an audience not a creator. She longed for music in that moment, and thought of her radio brought from her case that morning. She had only one spare battery for the radio. When it was done, what then? She had seen no evidence here of radios let alone a record player.
How far away was the town? Was any transport credible? Would they let her hire a car and go to the town, or was she, fellow inmate, also now a prisoner?
She found the library too, during the afternoon, a massive room with high bookshelves, everything powdered by dust, but for a round table, polished from use. Here a pile of books was stacked ready, and an ebony ruler, inkwell and pen.
Rachaela went to the shelf and took a book at random, smoothing off the dust.
Opening it, she found that every line in the book was neatly crossed through.
She tried another book, with the same result. Another and another from different parts of the shelves. All the same.
Sylvian... busy in the library.
Nothing astonished her. She made one rotation of a defaced globe on the table, and left the library. She negotiated a way towards her room. At the intersection of two corridors, mistaking her direction, she came on a high window with a scene of a baby apparently being drowned among the bullrushes. Below stood a great taxidermist’s triumph of a stuffed horse with a man on its back in pieces of armour. The man shook a sword at her and giggled in a thin soprano.
Rachaela stopped.
‘Giddy-up,’ insisted the rider, kicking the sides of the stuffed animal so clouds of dust were released.
When she had passed him and gone on, she sensed his stealthy presence at her heels. It was this one, presumably, who had followed her, and this one who brought gifts of mice. Maybe he caught them himself. He was not exactly like the others, his hair worn very long under the helmet of the armour. He must have discarded that or she would have heard him clanking through the corridors.
Reaching her room at last she had a weakening sense of relief. She locked her door and lay down on her bed, conscious of the pure face of the Devil reflected on to her own. She slept almost at once, as if a spell had been put on her.
The window was dark and the black clock said seven-thirty. Firelight made the room clandestine.
There were matches by the bed, tapers on the mantelpiece, and she lit the candles, the lamps.
She prepared herself as before, for an intimate dinner with Anna and Stephan. After all there were questions she must ask. The needs of hygiene an
d vanity—toothpaste, powder. The matter of batteries for the radio. More books without lines ruled through them... If she was to stay she must — must—
In the corridor, over the undertow of the ocean, Rachaela heard a new step passing. It was not like the others, lighter and more swift. Something brushed against the door.
Rachaela held her breath. Something different was in the passage.
Then it was gone.
She could not make herself go to open the door for almost a minute, and when she did so, nothing, naturally, remained to demonstrate who, or what, had passed.
Add that to the questions, then.
There was a curious odour in the corridor. It reminded her of some pleasant thing. She could not recall.
‘You must give a list of what you require to Cheta. The van which comes to the cottages carries most things, most known brands.’ This, Anna, in response to the first question.
‘But I’d prefer to choose for myself,’ Rachaela said.
‘Oh no,’ said Anna, ‘could it be worth it, such a long and difficult walk. It’s heathland, you know, beyond the wood. Uphill. Cheta is very strong, aren’t you, Cheta?’
‘Yes, Miss Anna.’
‘But you are not used to such a trek. Seven miles.’
Rachaela noted that the distance seemed to have grown.
‘Couldn’t I hire a car to take me to the town?’
‘Oh, my dear—so expensive. The town is thirty-five miles away.’ Should Rachaela believe this? ‘Besides, so awkward to hire a car. We have no telephone at the house.’
‘But there was a car to meet me at the station.’
‘There is a public telephone in the village. Carlo called the company from there. It was still necessary to send them directions.’
Awkward then, but not completely beyond the bounds. But Anna was evidently discouraging her. Let it rest for now. The precious van would supply batteries perhaps, and other basic essentials.
Tonight five places had been laid at the long table. Only two other Scarabae had presented themselves, the two old men from the blue chessboard, Dorian and Peter. They ate voraciously as wasps and now and then stared at Rachaela, not wanting to miss more than a little of her presence. They did not speak beyond a word or two. She was glad she had not breakfasted with them.