by Lee, Tanith
‘Angry, yes.’
That is something you must resolve with him. You and he are not like the rest of us. You and he are alike. He will come to you.’
‘Tell me his name,’ said Rachaela. Her mother had never named her father. He was only faceless darkness, rage.
‘Adamus,’ said Anna. ‘Adamus is his name. It’s very old. Traditional to the family.’
Rachaela did not accept the name. It rang on in her head like music in another room.
‘And he lives in the tower. Does he prowl the house in the darkness?’
‘What a perceptive question. Once he did. He is more rested now.’
Rachaela stared into the fire.
Had it been a dream, then? Had it been real? Or could it be—some vision, precognition, of the facts. The man in the dream was too young. Her father had ‘made her in the world’ when he was her age now. He would be almost sixty. Touched by age, by the markers of Stephan and Sylvian, Peter and Camillo.
Rachaela felt unable to ask anything more. The flurry of defiance had gone dead. The new flame burned in her. Adamus. The name of some saint or demon in a mystery play.
Walled up in the locked dark tower.
‘I’ll go to bed, Anna,’ Rachaela said.
Anna smiled again, and picking up her embroidery stitched in a flower like drops of blood.
In the night, Rachaela sat in the chair, where he had sat, sat in reality not dream. Her thoughts would not keep still. She saw him over and over. He was her father.
There was so much she wanted to say to him, cry out at him. She would in his presence be dumb, surely, gagged by all these sentences and accusations.
Her fire burned low and she put more wood on to it from the brass scuttle. All day long Scarabae’s servants came in and out of this room, dusting it so the dust flew up off one surface and resettled on another, seeing to the bed, the lamps and candles, the fire, the supply of little logs.
But at night he had come and used a key, for the door was locked.
If she had not woken would he only have sat here a while, watching her? She would never have realized he had been in the room. Had he come back and she not known?
The far-away clock struck. Rachaela looked at the black clock on the mantel. Two—it was one in the morning.
Rachaela stood up. She took the oil lamp with the green base, and opened her door.
As she had foreseen it would be, the lamp in the passage was extinguished. The corridor was black and her own light swung across it, startling things, the pictures, the carved wood of grapes and apples, into glimpsing life.
The Scarabae patrolled the house after midnight, she had heard them often enough.
And he too, despite Anna’s denial, for Anna’s denials sometimes meant the truth had been hit upon.
The lamp shook a little in her hand. She steadied it. After all, he was what she had feared all along. Not the house, the family, but him.
Where to start... why not at the tower door, where he himself would emerge.
She went down the passage, and came to the head of the stair. For a moment she was daunted, the entire area of the hall was in blackness. Then she made out a faint soft nothing-light from the drawing room—a lamp or candles there, alight.
She began to descend the stairs carefully, letting her light fall on the treads. How red the carpet looked under the pool of the lamp.
The nymph sprang out, holding up her empty lantern.
As Rachaela reached the level floor of the lobby, the light in the adjacent room went out suddenly, A last candle left burning, now guttered. No one there, for she heard no shuffling or clicking step, no rustle of a dress or scrape of a sleeve.
In the black the hall about her seemed enormous, pouring away from her light to infinity.
But any watchers, crouching unseen in the shadows, could see Rachaela clearly in her spotlight.
It was not unlikely there were watchers.
Rachaela’s imagination tried to vault the bounds of her mind. The hall was peopled by things, formless yet sentient, the spirits of the house, hungry as the Scarabae.
And then something came from the corridor and out into the blackness of the hall. It came unseen and noiseless, yet she felt it there. The little hairs of her body lifted erect. This was not imagination.
. Rachaela raised her lamp and a wing of the hall appeared, tilted. Two flat green eyes gleamed on nothingness.
A cat. Too high up to be a cat’s eyes.
Rachaela heard a soft and slipping step, like a feather brushing the floor.
She went cold and thrust the lamp the length of her arm.
A creature stood with her in the hall. It had the form of a cat, but it was the height of a labrador. Its hair was long, bushy and black, glittering at the light on darkness. Its great cat-shaped head was turned to her, and the eyes shone topaz now, thoughtless and intent and terrible.
Rachaela did not move. She did not dare. Such a thing was not possible, but there it stood, seeing her, so still that its springing would be too swift for her brain to take in. She would merely find herself beneath it, the wide paws planted on her, talons tearing, its teeth at her throat.
‘Don’t be afraid of him, he won’t hurt you.’
The madness of the voice came disembodied, from nowhere.
She did not dare to speak or move.
‘He knows you,’ said the voice. And then a man walked from the black, bringing blackness with him. He placed his pale hand on the head of the enormous cat, scratching it gently between the ears. The cat made no sound but its eyes half closed. It suffered the attention.
The man was Adamus, her father. He must have come from the tower door, or else from the corridor which led to the kitchen, the direction from which the cat had come.
He wore black trousers, a black pullover, ordinary contemporary garments. No rings on the long hands. The blackness came in about his head, the hair a rim on the wide forehead, outlining the bones of the face.
‘He catches your supper, didn’t you know?’ he asked idly. ‘The Scarabae let him hunt for them, only then he hunts for himself. He disdains the mice. He kills them for a hobby.’
Rachaela’s body involuntarily relaxed, gave way. She almost dropped the lamp.
‘Careful,’ he said.
He left the cat and came across to her, and the flickering light cast giant shadows from his tall spare body. He took the lamp from her hand.
‘And I thought,’ he said, ‘you would accept all the surprises here with equanimity.’
The cat watched them, then it turned and padded noiselessly through into the drawing room.
Rachaela remembered all the opened doors. She saw the cat going in and out. She saw it leap upon the gull, the rabbits feeding in the twilight of dawn.
‘And you can’t speak,’ he said.
She said, ‘What am I supposed to say?’
‘Whatever you like.’
The lamp blazed on his face. The two black eyes were alive and burning, not like the eyes of the Scarabae, nor as she had seen them last, those leaden tarns in the white structure of face. Now she could see the roughness of the male jaw: the mark of normal masculine shaving; the hair-fine lines about the eyes and lips; the individual black strokes of the heavy brows; the lashes beaded by light. The face was thirty years old, no more.
‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘But I told you, Rachaela.’
‘And I told you. Too young.’
‘The family tends to look younger than it is. How old do you think Anna is? Stephan? Add another hundred years, you might be right.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. She believed him. Anna, one hundred and eighty years. And Sylvian, older. ‘But,’ she said, ‘there’s still a discrepancy. If you are sixty years old and the rest of them two hundred, why the gap between you?’
‘There were others,’ he said, ‘they failed. They died.’
‘Leaving only you.’
‘And now you,’ he said.
He put a hand on her arm. Her nerves jumped violently at his touch. ‘Shall we go into the room there,’ he said.
She let him guide her.
In the drawing room a dull red lay dormant in the fireplace. He set her lamp on a table. They sat down facing each other in this oasis, the black all around no longer counting for anything. He was here. And the cat, like his symbol, had passed on into the night.
He threw a log into the grate with the careless vehemence of a young man. And as he turned his head she saw that his hair was not very short but only scraped back from his face, caught at the base of his skull, and falling from there in a coarse black silk rope down his back. A young man’s hair.
‘Perhaps you’ll tell me,’ she said, ‘why I’m wanted here. Was it you who typed the letter?’
A drift of amusement changed his face, was gone. ‘They fear the typewriter. A useful machine.’
Rachaela said, ‘Then you wanted to bring me here.’
‘It was the time for it.’
‘Anna talks like that. The time.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anna’s very crafty. You’ve no idea how beautiful she used to be. I must show you the photographs. Almost as good as you.’
A freezing heat went through her when he said this.
‘Strange,’ she said,’ a compliment from you.’
‘I don’t bother with compliments, Rachaela. A fact. The family is noted for its looks. At times it has been notorious for them.’
‘So you subscribe to it too, this tribal mystique.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Mad people and eccentrics, reckoning yourselves special.’
He said, ‘What did your mother tell you about me?’
Rachaela looked at the fire. Was she to betray her mother now, that bitter and frowning, heavy-handed woman.
‘Very little. You gave her little enough.’
‘Yes, little enough. I don’t know if she told you, Rachaela, I was only with her for three nights. Just three. Two in the beginning. One night three months later, when she was carrying you.’
‘Why did you go back?’
‘To see if she was pregnant, why else.’
‘And she was, and you left her.’
‘It was done. That was all there was to do.’
‘I think you’re saying,’ Rachaela stated, ‘that they let you go, your precious family, to sow your seed. And when you had, they summoned you back again.’
‘I came back. I could see by then the futility of anything else. This house is my prison, but I need it. The rest is rubbish. Haven’t you found it so?’
‘No,’ she lied again. ‘Actually I valued my freedom.’
He smiled. It was a cold and repellent smile, so that she wished she had not spoken. He intimidated her, but that was absurd. He was one with the Scarabae, a creature of the farce. Was there nothing she wanted to say, did she not want to tell him to be damned? But it was not feasible to think of him as her father. No, she did not credit it. This was some joke they played on her.
She was magnetized by his presence. She could not leave the fireside while he was there. She had never before confronted such an externalization of herself, terrifying and apt.
‘I agree,’ she said, ‘that the house is a sort of prison.’
‘Where,’ he said, ‘do you want to go instead? Who has prevented you? You’ve only to pack your bags and leave.’
‘Easier said than done. There’s no transport. The only telephone for miles is broken.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘They do mean you to stay.’
His face had drawn inward. The eyes were as she had seen them first, still and shadowed.
‘Didn’t you know?’ she said.
‘Oh, I expect I guessed. You’ve no choice then. You’ll have to remain.’
‘For what?’ she said quickly.
‘For whatever happens next.’
‘Don’t spy on me again,’ she said. ‘You have no right.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘rights.’ He said, ‘Put a chair under the doorknob if it worries you.’
‘Would that keep you out?’
‘I’ve seen you now,’ he said. ‘I’m satisfied.’
‘That the family line goes on.’
‘You’re mine,’ he said. ‘A natural curiosity.’
‘I’m not yours. How dare you say something so inappropriate. I’m nothing to you. My mother was nothing to you.’
‘There you are correct.’
‘Then you can’t make any claims.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘No claims at all. You’re still mine. I created you.’
‘Fucking nonsense,’ she said stonily. ‘You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that.’
‘I meant to make you,’ he said. ‘I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me. I knew she would. When I went back to her that night I knew what I’d find.’
‘All her life,’ said Rachaela, hearing the false desperation in her voice, ‘she hated you and what you’d done. It was a constant struggle. She made me pay for you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without expression. ‘But it’s over now, isn’t it?’
‘Why didn’t you leave me in peace?’
‘You’d had your peace long enough.’
‘You bastard,’ she said. But he was not her father. He was a man out of the night who held her there, not touching her, and the fire climbing the log, gilded both their faces. She could not leave. She rose. ‘I might as well go to bed.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sleep well, Rachaela.’
To her consternation tears scorched into her eyes. He spoke without tenderness, and he was nothing to her, and yet it was as if, across the twenty-nine years of her life, this simple and insincere wish had lain in waiting, gathering true sentiment.
She had no reply.
She took the lamp, and left him in the firelight, while the great cat hunted somewhere through the pitch-black night.
Through the lilies and the sunburst, she regarded herself in the winged mirror.
She was naked, framed in black hair.
Her white body, creamed of all its down, only the sable fleece at her groin. Long and slender, like something carved from a bone, but full-breasted, the little sweets of the nipples dilute-rose. A blue-green shadow reflected on the whiteness, something undersea.
She stared at her body, what she could make out of it portioned by the mirror, trying to know it as her own.
Rachaela had never seen her mother’s nakedness. Her sagging defeated frame had stayed swathed in zippered day clothes, and nighties and tent-like dressing-gowns. And once the knock on the bathroom door and her mother’s harsh frightened voice, ‘You can’t come in.’ Her mother had been scandalized that Rachaela slept naked. In the same way she had been scandalized at the frequent hair washing, and Rachaela’s habitual lateness at her places of work. All the same, all condemned.
Her daughter was a being from Venus.
She had bought Rachaela sensible nightdresses and marked the shampoo bottle and set the alarm clock in her own bedroom to wake her so that she might come in and shake Rachaela awake. ‘They won’t stand for it. Do you know you used almost the whole bottle when you washed your hair? Why don’t you get it cut and set?’
A lily stood up against Rachaela’s navel, its green glass stem bisecting her pubic fleece.
She turned from the mirror and got naked into the bed.
She had placed a chair under the doorknob.
This was foolish. He had seen her.
She did not sleep for a long time, and twice muted steps went through the passageway, and she thought of the great cat slipping past, brushing the door with its flank, something dead in its mouth.
Rachaela was standing at the base of the tower.
There was no light, but glass lilies grew between the treads of the stair, which was scarlet, moist, littered with f
eathers.
He stretched down his hand to her.
She would not take his hand.
She climbed up and up the tower. The ascent was endless. All the while some terror was tight in her throat. She meant to reach him and was afraid to do so.
At last she came into a wide round room under the cone of the roof. To her amazement there were windows of clear glass. They showed the woods, the cliff and the sea.
Adamus, if so she must call him, was not there. The room was vacant. And Rachaela began to cry.
❖
The picture in the corridor window was a dreadful one, a lion slaughtering a sheep, and its vivid colours were strewn everywhere by the excluded sunlight.
Rachaela was searching the house aimlessly.
The corridor was very long and it seemed to her it led to the library, but she could not recall for certain. Sylvian would be busy in the library, crossing out the words, or Alice would be there, scratching with a hat pin at the globe.
She saw the Scarabae hounded over the face of the globe. Burning houses glowed behind them as they fled in the snow, and the snow was red from firelight.
Someone was following her.
Was it the cat? How would she deal with the cat, alone? She would not dare to touch it.
The corridor was so very long. She had passed so many doors, some of which she tried, and they were locked.
What was behind the locked doors of the Scarabae?
She heard a rusty panting behind her, a giggling like that of a naughty child.
Camillo.
Was this a cause for relief? Lost in the byways of the house with a madman snuffling behind her. Did he have the sword?
The corridor turned, and rounding the turn, Rachaela saw it ended in a door.
The door was bound in black iron. Could it be another way into the tower? Locked also then.
At that moment Camillo’s steps became pronounced, flapping down on the carpet behind her. He was running. Running, this mad old man, to catch her up.
Rachaela shrank against the wall and naughty insane Uncle Camillo sprinted by. He giggled as he passed her, and ran up against the door.
He had a key, and with it he unlocked the door, and an oblong of blackness appeared, night in day.
Camillo bowed, holding open the door for Rachaela on the oblong of night.