The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  here were the almond cakes bought especially, as he liked them, and some pâté that had been kept untouched and cool in the stone larder.

  Would he sit? No. Was he tired? No. But surely, he must be tired a little, after so long an excursion? No. One saw how he watched, amused, the fuss. How strong and brave he was, to have walked so long and still be walking about, and to have broken this rock which now he put down on the table there. How astonishing. How erudite he was, to have found it. To have known where.

  He spread the broken halves and showed the fossil, the little images, turned to stones, curling and perfect, ammonites, molluscs, from a sea long gone, in this afternoon of drought.

  “Look here.” They clustered for the lesson. So impressed by him, gasping. “Nobody has witnessed this before,” he said.

  It was true. They could not argue with him.

  Later, alone a moment, she cut the apple, showed it to Hāna. “Nobody,” said Ysabelle, “has witnessed this before.”

  “But, it’s only an apple. Many people—”

  “Not this apple. Nobody, save you and I, have witnessed the inside of this apple, before.”

  “Oh Ysabelle. You’re too clever – I’m afraid—”

  “Yes, yes, my darling. So am I.”

  This is Ernst’s house. Against the shadow mountains.

  In the evening, after the thick soup and the cheese and wine, his cigars, and looking at the brown mass settling on the sides of the heights. Darkness will come. Cannot be held back. Nobody has witnessed this before, not this night.

  “Oh, my good friend, yes, Le Rue. Of course, he has his life’s work at St Cailloux. A genius,” said Ernst, who had made the evening ‘go’, speaking, entertaining them, and even, in the case of Ysabelle, perhaps able to teach her somewhat. She was promising, Ysabelle. She might write up his notes for the paper on ammonites of the region. A fine clear hand. Her father was to be congratulated posthumously. “I’ve mentioned, he’s fascinated, Le Rue, by the surgical procedures of Ancient Egypt. But also of course by the most modern inventions. The X-ray now, what a wonder.”

  “Seeing inside,” Hāna said after, another moment alone, “Nothing is to be private.”

  But Ernst said, “We can’t pretend to be delicate. We’re monkeys, not angels. Descended from the apes. Not even you are an angel, Ysabelle.” He raised his glass, “So your appearance must be deceptive.”

  “Ernst telling us,” Ysabelle, writing later, in her clear hand, “with such costive glee, of a machine which can see the very bones inside a body. Nothing is left secret. And the fossils, asleep for centuries. What a pillager he is, raping his way over the foothills.”

  Taken home, in the trap. Ernst had insisted. Hāna left behind. Ernst. The moon high. They have sacrificed a goat in the woods for rain. The blood has splashed the moon. There are marks on it.

  “Ysabelle.”

  She sits silent, listening. At last she says, “Ernst – you flatter me. But – you frighten me, Ernst. I’ve never known a man so – powerful – so very wise. Even my father.”

  “Ysabelle, don’t be afraid of me. What has my intellect to do with this? You inflame me, Ysabelle.”

  “No, Ernst. I’m unworthy of you. I couldn’t bring myself-you’d be disappointed – how could I bear that? You would come to despise me. Oh, ten years ago, perhaps. Not now.”

  “Don’t suppose, Ysabelle, I’m done with you. I shan’t give up.”

  “Please. My dear friend. You must.”

  “One kiss.”

  “No, Ernst. I must be firm. What would you think if I had no honour?”

  In the house of white-painted wood, retching into the iron sink, spitting the bitter bile, his wine.

  He is tickled now. Soon he will be disillusioned.

  “Hāna, can’t we fly away on the white angel wings of your hair?”

  Ernst’s house stands there, at the top of the valley. It is well-maintained and there are many rooms. In the courtyard, the well has sweet water, which has almost run dry. It was once, this house, the domicile of a rich aristocrat. But that was long ago, before men learned they were descended from monkeys.

  Shutters hang by the windows, the colour the mountains become in the sinking heat of evening.

  Ysabelle looks at this house. Now she is often here. He has insisted. She must stay here, tonight, ftmust be the dominant one, not Ysabelle, who is a woman. There are more comforts here. And Hāna need not travel.

  Ysabelle does not like the house. It seems to her, everything is held inside this building, confined. Just as the land confines the valley. The clouds confine the rain.

  But they – can make rain.

  In the midst of arid dry compression, the spring leaps forth. Oh, yes, even once when he was below, doing one of the things he does, something with knives or pins, pushing him from thought, in the upper room, clinging, and that enough—

  But tonight, in the hot-brown, baked-closed-shutness of the house. For the cat is away. The cat is away again for one more night.

  Let us dance. I walked here, dancing. Never before has anyone witnessed the cream of your thighs, the fleece of silver-gold – I cut a curl, two, three, from this sacred place, as you slept, and the god slept inside you. I – robbed you – did I? Did I? No, not robbery. Only too shy to say. One day I will confess, show you. Ysabelle that you call clever. I clipped the little curls and put them in this locket of silver, snapping shut the face of it upon my souvenir. Its hinges . . . Unhinged.

  I have a lock of your hair in my locket, cold between my breasts, or is it boiling hot? I cut the curls so carefully I did not even wake you. Your gardens – your sweet breasts, small as a girl’s, your perfect face in its wreathes of angel wings. The centre of your life, your womb, behind its treasury silver-golden gate, soft as ermine.

  The house is watching, as Ysabelle climbs towards it, but she thinks that is only Hāna, watching from the upstairs window, where she has strewn perfume in the bed.

  Night after night, you loosed your hair. That greater river – dry, yet feeling wet to my thirst. But here there is no smell of cherries ripening. This house of his smells masculine, except for the sanctuary of your room, with the wild flowers in the vase, and the chocolate standing in its pot. You are my cherry-fruit.

  “He went to that awful – to the asylum.”

  “St Cailloux? St Stones . . .”

  “That man – Le Rue – Ernst is intrigued by the – what does he say? – the so-interesting patients. By the operations Le Rue discusses with him and wants to carry out. These disgusting things he says the physicians of the pharoahs did—”

  “Why are you talking of him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s because we are here. Tomorrow, after he comes back – make some excuse . . . I know, I shall forget my basket. Then you must bring it to me. Such a womanly thing. How can I manage without it.”

  “He’ll say I should send Gittel.”

  “Bring Gittel. She and Mireio love gossiping.”

  “Perhaps. He’s irritable. He calls you Juno. What is that?”

  “The wife of the king of the gods in Ancient Rome. She was frosty, sour. A nag – that dreadful thing women do because men won’t listen.”

  “Then he’s asked you for favours?”

  “Oh—”

  “And you put him off. Ysabelle!”

  “What? Do you want me to say yes?”

  “No – no – but he’s so proud—”

  “He’s a monster. He’ll grow tired of hunting me.”

  “He has begun to dislike you. Tonight he said to me, Be careful what you say to her.”

  “Then – I must flatter him more. Oh God,” said Ysabelle, “I’d even accept his caresses, if it were the only way.”

  They sat in silence. Why was the silence so strange? Of course, here there was no nightingale.

  “Perhaps,” said Ysabelle, “I can contrive to put some stupid pretty woman in his way, one that won’t recoil.”
<
br />   “Sometimes . . .” said Hāna, “when I was only ten, I had little breasts, and he tried and tried to see them. When I wouldn’t, he made up a story about me to our father. I don’t know what Ernst said, but my father had my nurse tie my hands together every night for three months. She used to cry as she did it. But she’d never explain.”

  Ysabelle got up. Before she could prevent herself, she retched violently. Hāna rushed to her. At the touch of Hāna the sickness was gone.

  “Dionysos,” said Ysabelle, “the god of wine and madness, the breaker of chains – do you see sometimes, in the woods, the pine cones piled up together into the form of another cone, the drawing of an eye on a tree or rock – that’s the Eye of the Mother, whom Dionysos sometimes represents. And they killed two goats, and they poured wine. Let’s run away, Hāna.”

  “How can we?” said Hāna.

  It was true. They were immovable, fixed. One to the man, his life. The other to a place. They did not properly see this, how they had been warped to fit and nailed home. And yet escape was closed by a deep invisible wall.

  Ysabelle thought, Perhaps he’ll die. An accident, thrown from the trap as the pony bolts at a flash of lightning, clap of moistureless thunder from the mountains. Or too much drink, a haemorrhage.

  But Hāna kisses her breasts and Ysabelle melts like wax, and flows down into the rose-red fire.

  Their clothes thrown away, murmuring in the stillness, cries choked back, not even a nightingale to shield them with her noisy song.

  Hinges. Unhinged.

  A locket? A door? Madness?

  The story, told locally, clandestinely, was that Ernst returned unexpectedly, after all, that night – perhaps a quarrel with his friend? The house was in darkness and silence, and so he went up quietly to bed, which does not seem very like him, one would imagine actually he would make a disturbance, rouse everyone up, want things done. Or could he have been suspicious?

  Passing – on tiptoe? Surely not – the door to Hāna’s room, he heard them whispering, and the creak of the wooden bed.

  He flung the door wide on its hinges and found them naked, hair down, uncorsetted, undone – his sister Hāna and Madame Ysabelle.

  This is not the case.

  Ernst rode home in the trap at about nine in the morning, from his country breakfast with Le Rue. There had been no quarrel, for Ernst and Le Rue enjoyed a perfect mutual respect and approbation, tinctured pleasantly for each by a wisp of well-concealed tolerance; he for Ernst’s slight blindness to the essentials of science, since Ernst was so bound up in theory, nature and the world; Ernst for Le Rue’s slight blindness to theory, nature and the world, since Le Rue was absorbed utterly by science.

  Ernst was not in an ill mood. Only the idea of Ysabelle’s having stayed with his sister that night was a small but tart irritant, that had begun to work on him directly he brought the trap on to the rough road, and saw her house before him under the mountains.

  Ysabelle was a tease, or a fool. He was beginning, frankly, to notice the failings she had pointed out to him in herself, the elements that made her, she said, unworthy of him. Her “fear” of him he was not, now, so certain of. For fear, to women, was of course a powerful aphrodisiac. It had seemed to him, some four days previously, that this might be the real fount of her desires – to be physically mastered. And so, entering her home on the pretext of requiring eggs from Mireio’s hens, he had ended by pressing Ysabelle harshly to the wall of her white wooden sitting room, brutally kissing her mouth, penetrating it with his tongue, while with his free hand he mounded her skirt and squeezed, through layers of clothing, her most interesting feature.

  She had somehow got away from him, and stood panting, her face as white as a china plate, her eyes inflamed. This might be arousal, and he approached her again, at which she hoarsely said, “I won’t be responsible for any harm.” And pulled a fire-iron up from the stone hearth.

  “If you keep on like this,” he said, “you’ll put me off.”

  “Get away from me,” she cried, like a peasant. But then she shook herself and said, putting down the nasty-looking implement, “Excuse me, Ernst. But I’m not for you. I can’t – expose myself to the tragedy of losing you, once you tire of me. You know how women are. This sort of liaison – will mean so much more to me.”

  “I’d think, from another woman, this was a demand for a bourgeois marriage.”

  Ysabelle threw back her head and laughed. She was hysterical and unappealing. Women were unhinged, one knew this, at certain times more so, and she was approaching that age when they were at their worst.

  Why had he fancied her? Well, this was a barren spot.

  He himself laughed shortly. “Then, good morning.”

  Outside, Mireio came sidling with a basket of eggs. It seemed to him she leered at his reddened mouth. Doubtless that other bitch thought she could get more out of him by frustrating him, but he was not of that sort. Besides, if ever he were to marry, he would want youth, for sons, and some money, too.

  His annoyance with Ysabelle did not abate as, mentally, he cast her off. He supposed this was a sexual matter. She had led him on, now would not accomodate him as she had hinted she would.

  He did not like her. No. He would rather she did not come any more into his house. And Hāna must be warned. Hāna was too trusting, and such women as Ysabelle were not to be trusted. Particularly by their own sex, for women were faithless, and nowhere more so than with each other, filling each other’s heads with idiocy, always jealous, treacherous.

  Seeing presently his own country house from the trap, Ernst thought that perhaps they might go back to the city. Le Rue could be invited to stay there, in a proper flat, say, with amenities, and efficient servants. Or perhaps not, for Hāna might well make eyes at him, as she had done before with their few male visitors, afterwards making out they had frightened her – familiar tale!

  Some way still from Ernst’s house, the pony, unsatisfactorily also his property, cast a shoe.

  Ernst got out, and stood cursing, damning the beast. Then he left it there, and went on foot towards his home, where Gittel must be sent to fetch a man for the horse from the village.

  So, he approached, walking, in a morning loud with bird song – even the nightgales that, here, had not used their voices through the night. A church bell was tolling too, in the next valley. This was for a burial.

  He saw them in a little nook, between the wall and a leaning wild cedar. Hāna’s hair was partly unpinned, but Ysabelle was dressed for her journey home along the upper valley. She wore her dark gown, as usual. She looked quite conventional, and conceivably, if he had met her like this, returning from the visit, as he would have done, a minute later, he would have thought her in fact very plain, of very little importance to himself.

  But now she moved to his sister Hāna, and concealed yet not concealed, down on the road, unannounced by the wheels of the trap and the pony’s homecoming trot, he watched them. He saw how they grew together, breast to breast, their arms around each other’s necks, thigh to thigh, lip to lip. They were an image and an image in a mirror, clasped.

  Really, it was not much. Women kissed. Friends might kiss. And yet, this passion. Smoke rose from their skins, the air about them trembled as later in the day the heat of the drought would make it do.

  Ernst ran. He ran straight at them. They heard him then, his gallop over the track, his blundering rush across the little scattered stones, and the dust rose round him. He was a whirlwind. He thrust them apart as they were themselves thrusting apart. Ysabelle fell back into the bole of the tree, slipped down it, sat in the dust, staring. Hāna he slapped, once, twice, across her face.

  He was roaring, like a lion, like a bull—

  His words – were there any words? Oh yes, jargon of streets and alleys, epithets old as humankind. But words? Were there any? Are there any, for such rage?

  Hāna attempted to speak. He raised his hand to strike her again and Ysabelle, staggering up, caught his arm,
hung on it, and so he flung her off, sprawling again, and this time heard her thin quick cry of pain.

  Now language assembled itself. Not whores – madwomen. They were mad. Their brains – diseased.

  He swept up Hāna and bore her off. Suddenly, it was so very visible, the differences in their size and strength, as if he and she were beings of two unlike species.

  Her arms outstretched, she called to Ysabelle – “No, don’t try to stop him—” And Ysabelle, her knee twisted by the violence of her fall to boneless water, could only lie on her side, as if indolent, observing this, observing Hāna borne along in a cloud of dust and hair, into the brown masculine house that smelled of maleness and cigars. While another cloud, purple as Hāna’s ribbons, covered the screech of the sun.

  Ysabelle walked home. That is, she limped, crawled. She fainted three times, the pain was so great. Finally she dropped on the road before her own house, and Mireio, who saw it, brought Jean, who carried Ysabelle inside. Thus, both women were carried into a house by a man, and helpless.

  “I fell, and twisted my leg.”

  This was exact, if not decorous. Or true.

  As she lay on her bed, her knee packed with the poultices of herbs, tightly bound, and beating like a drum, sometimes leaning to vomit in a chamber-pot, Ysabelle turned over in her mind what she should do. But she was feverish, and could not be sure what had happened. How could Ernst have deduced, from their parting embrace, so much? Yet he had. Indeed, it could not be denied. Of course, any woman who rejected him must be – unnatural. Already condemned. Hopeless.

  She would have gone to his door, limping, crawling, but the girl, Gittel, had run out. Gittel, terrified, heaving Ysabelle up and bending under her weight like a young willow. Her thick accent: “Go – go, Madame. She’ll calm him. She always does, the four years I’m with them.”

  And Gittel had pushed Ysabelle away. And from the male house, no sound issued. The birds sang on. The clouds passed intermittantly across the sun. Eclipses.

  It was Ysabelle he would condemn. She was a witch who had seduced—

  Hāna, so ignorant, naive, unable to judge, to see the deadly snare—