The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Understanding, before understanding reached him, Armand quickened his pace again, to match his heartbeats, but already it was too late. The apparition had vanished.

  Gaining the lamp, he quested about for her, vainly. He even called to her once, his voice echoing mournfully, mockingly: “Mademoiselle Fantome—”

  He did not search very long. The nausea of hunger was coming over him, prompting him to seek, not food, but wine, warmth, the company of others.

  Ten strides off the bridge, beyond the lamp, he swiftly glanced back—only the mist, the unravelling gauze of light, the darkness emptied on the water.

  The Cafe Vule on the Rue Mort was crowded, a raucous cave, its walls springing with black-stockinged dancers, its tables scattered by cards, papers, dice, and red wine. The drinkers sprawled, talked, pounded woodwork and each other, all washed by a shrill gamboge illumination, or else in the terracotta twilight to be found under the barrel-vaulting to the rear.

  In this twilight, Etiens Corbeau-Marc, half blinded by his fair hair and by the drizzle of one dull candle, sat sketching anything in the cafe. The strokes of the charcoal were spare and penetrating, with a slight distortion that tended to aid rather than dismiss reality.

  (One day, such sketches will sell for hundreds of American dollars. But Corbeau-Marc will be safely shut in the earth by then.)

  “I receive your shadow on my paper, Armand, without thanks. Please sit down or go away. Simply get out of my light.”

  “My shadow and the shadow of a wine bottle. An improvement?”

  “Oh, we are rich tonight?”

  “Oh, we are poor. But we can also be drunk. And here the bottle comes.”

  “But yes. Sit, generous friend. You see that woman? She has the face of a horse-fly. Do you think she would come and pose for me in my room?”

  “Why not? All the other flies do.” Armand poured wine in two murky glasses and drank from one thirstily, closing his eyes. He seemed to wait a moment, as if for some rush of sensation that did not arrive. His voice was melancholy and listless when he spoke again. “I saw a woman by the river tonight that you really should paint, Etiens.”

  “Give her my address, provided she doesn’t want to be paid.”

  “I think”—Armand raised his lids, found the world, the glass, and drank again—“she would want to be paid in blood.”

  “A vampire. Excellent.”

  Etiens left his sketches and drank.

  “Armand, you’re very irritating. Are you going to elaborate or not? Or is this some dream you’ve been having? When did you last eat?”

  “Yesterday, I think. Or the day before. A dream? I don’t dream any more, asleep or awake.” Armand put his arms on the table and laid his head on them. He said something inaudible.

  “I can’t hear you. You’ve stopped me working; at least you can entertain me.”

  “I said I burned my latest disaster this morning. A moment before noon. The clock struck just after, and then I went out and over the river. When I came back, it was dark. The lamp was alight at the end of the bridge, and there was a woman standing there in black velvet and gas-colour gloves, with the face of the virgin mother of Monsieur.”

  “What? Oh, you mean the Devil. Did you speak to her?”

  “No.”

  “Afraid of disillusion? No doubt wise. She was probably some luckless little whore.”

  Armand refilled his yawning glass from habit. It seemed to him he might have been drinking water. Only a distant throbbing in his temples conveyed the idea that it might be wine.

  “It’s strange. At first she surprised me. But then—I think I saw her once before. Or twice. She vanished, Etiens. Like a blown-out flame.”

  “There was, perhaps, a mist.”

  “Not in the mist.”

  “Tonight,” said Etiens, “I will buy some cheese and a loaf. I shall sit sternly over you while you eat.”

  “Food makes me ill,” said Armand.

  “Of course it does. Your stomach’s forgotten what food is for. You eat every tenth day and your inside cries: Help! What is this alien substance? I am poisoned.”

  “The woman,” said Armand. “I know who she must be.”

  Etiens Corbeau-Marc had produced another scrap of paper and begun to draw again. This, at last, was nothing in the Cafe Vule. Armand, turning to him abruptly, hesitated.

  An urchin girl stood on the paper, slender as a pen, wafted by hair blond as the hair of Etiens, perhaps more blond. Her eyes became white streaks in the cinnamon paper as he delicately scratched it away with his fingernail, as if he would blind her, or uncover her true eyes.

  “And who is that?”

  “Dear Armand, I can scarcely remember. A small wraith of my childhood. For some reason I just now recollected her—”

  “One day, such sketches will be worth sheafs of francs, boxes full of American dollars. When you are safely dead, Etiens, in a pauper’s grave.”

  Armand looked up, although Etiens did not, and found between them both, red-haired in the heavy reddish shadow, like the dusk of Mars, the occasional third member of this table in the Cafe Vule.

  “Little bird,” said Etiens, “sweet France, you are in my light. Move the candle, move yourself, move the earth—but do it quickly.”

  “The earth has been moved,” said France, taking a seat around the table and pouring himself a glass of wine. He had already been drinking and the long upper lids of his eyes were partly lowered like fine white blinds. “Well, well, I’m here for refuge, not earthquakes. I have had earthquakes enough in my room.”

  “What trouble are you in now, beloved angel? Can it be Jeannette has at last come to her senses and abandoned you?”

  “Jeannette has been gone a month. She was becoming like a wife, a mother. Eat this, sit here, be home by such. Everything mended, the place horribly clean and so showing every wretched item of its meanness. And ragout. All she would cook for me—ragout. And two glasses of wine, no more. And tears. Who were you with? Where have you been? Say that you love me. Why don’t you love me? And my piano—Oh God, God, God. What did she do?”

  “Well, what?” exclaimed Etiens.

  “Armand, you are not listening to me.”

  “I am listening.”

  “My piano—she brought in a man to value it.”

  Etiens clapped one hand on the rickety table. Armand let out a stilted snarl of amusement.

  “Well, it would fetch some money, I suppose.”

  “Her own words. You never play it, she said to me. Where are the concertos, the preludes ... You make music only in the beds of other women. While we starve.” France drank wine, directly from the bottle now. He stared at them. “I threw her clothes from the window. And her damnable flowers in pots. I very nearly threw her after them, but she ran out shrieking.”

  “Poor little girl,” said Etiens. “But then, she was a fool to live with you. You use your women like rags.”

  “There’s another rag now.”

  Armand retrieved the bottle. The wine was gone. He shut his eyes again, the length of the lashes on his cheeks making him look like an exhausted child.

  “This latest one,” said France, “she seemed to understand, and she had a little money. Now she says to me: ‘I’m not jealous of your women. I am jealous of the music in your head. I’m jealous of your Negro mistress, the piano. You sit and fondle her, but you’re tiled of me.’ Which is true. She’s dreary. I threw her out.”

  “From the window?” said Etiens. “I do hope not.”

  “No, no, in God’s name. Who has money for more wine?”

  “Wine and bread,” said Etiens.

  “You are rich now?” France demanded.

  “Someone bought a painting. Oh, a very modest sale. A couple of francs.”

  France turned to Armand.

  “Drink, food. Wake up. Be happy! Dance on the table.”

  “Be happy? When I can’t write any more?”

  “What rubbish.”

  “I can�
��t, I tell you.”

  “Nor can I write a note,” said France. “Jeannette’s whining did that to me. And Clairisse, with her craziness. A melody comes—it’s another man’s melody. The development limps, falls down, expires. But do you see me? Look. I’ll go on. It will come back.”

  “Wine used to help me,” Armand muttered. “Before that—I can hardly believe it when I think back—just to be alone, and to walk somewhere—anywhere. The visions would rise and flow, like breathing. I could barely restrain the ideas, barely stop myself shouting aloud in the street with pure ecstasy. Now, nothing. A void. I need something more than drink, or solitude. I need something, some sort of searing acid, to release what’s inside me. It’s there. I can feel it, tapping on the inside of my mind like a bird in a cage. My God. What will become of me?”

  “Be quiet,” France grumbled. “You’re annoying me now. You begin to sound like Jeannette.”

  The wine came, the bread and cheese.

  Etiens moved his sketches. That of the strange urchin girl slid to the floor under the table, where feet, unknowingly, scuffed it.

  The group itself had become one of Etiens’ paintings. Theatrically dashed by light and shade, highlighted by a gem of candle-fire in the wine bottle, the three young men ripping bread savagely in pieces.

  How alike each of them was to the others, in some uncoordinated, extraordinary way. Not a likeness of the flesh, though in some respects they were alike, slender in their squalid clothing, which in France was also garish, like his hair; their faces hollowed and desperate, leaning inwards like three aspects of one whole. Poverty, anger, tenacity, despair, and possibly genius. But who, at this hour, could be sure of that? The Artist, the Composer, the Poet. Blond, auburn, dark—like chess pieces of some three-handed game.

  “Where’s your sketch?” France asked suddenly.

  They looked for it, the white-eyed gamine ... Some boot had borne her away on the sole. France swore. Armand offered to search the packed and riotous cafe.

  “No matter,” Etiens waved them down. “I’m glad it has gone. It wasn’t as I wanted it. Or else, too much as I wanted it.”

  “It put me in mind of that old rhyme,” said France, drinking from the second bottle. “I’ve no notion why. But you recall the one I mean? A sort of game. A circle and three figures, and should you come against them at the end of the saw, you’re out of the play. How is it? Elle est trois—Soit! Soit! Soit!”

  Armand glanced at him:

  “Mais La Voleuse, La Seductrice—”

  “That’s it!” France shouted, a pale flush on his white cheekbones. “La Seductrice et Madame Tueuse—”

  “Ne cherchez pas,” Etiens finished.

  France rose, graceful and barbaric, raising the bottle, now his alone. He bellowed through the cafe, sporadically cursed, while here and there a woman giggled, or a voice joined him.

  “Elle est trois.

  “Soit! Soit! Soit!

  “Mais La Voleuse,

  “La Seductrice

  “Et Madame Tueuse

  “Ne cherchez pas!

  “Ne cherchez pas!”

  France slid back into his seat. He pressed the empty wine bottle lovingly on Armand.

  “What in hell does it mean?”

  Etiens, who was not drunk, said sadly, “It means death.”

  Elle est trois ... She is three.

  Fine! (One.) Fine! (Two.) Fine! (Three.)

  But the Thief—

  The Thief.

  The spring rain, cold as the city’s glass-like blood, was falling viciously in splinters on the streets and Etiens walked towards his lodging. His fair hair, rat-coloured now, plastered itself to his eyes; his shoes were full of water. It was midnight, the clock of the cathedral was striking, a wolf’s howl across the river. Our Lady of Lights, with the little candles fluttering out and dying in her stony womb.

  It was a lie about the sale of the picture. But it had seemed necessary to make a contribution of food. What did it matter? Etiens considered the beautiful words jammed behind the dam of Armand’s fear, the sonatas trapped by France’s appetites and lack of human-feeling. But yet, Armand saw visions on the bridge, France touched the battered piano and notes leapt in the air.

  (And I, I can build pictures on leaves of paper and canvas, pictures good or bad, but ceaseless, responsive, nourishing. Life. Life.)

  Yes, but he could still remember La Voleuse.

  How old had he been then? Perhaps six, or seven. Probably seven. And he had been ill; this was a vivid yet curiously disjointed memory. He recollected the onset of the illness—some childish fever—as a bizarre uninterest in everything about him and a bewildered lack of comprehension in himself as to why this should be. Then came a patchy area of monochromes, shadows limned by light, and light too bright to be borne, a murmur of voices, and his mother’s harried irritability that, in the midst of penury, filth, and hopelessness, she must also nurse an ailing child. He recaptured the most, for some reason, definite incident of all: that of being given water in a little spoon because he was too weak to lift his head. He had not been afraid, of course. The self-absorption of childhood, its blind reliance, obviated any qualms. He had not been aware of mortality, though mortality in some form must surely have come hovering about the attic, with its odours of garlic and rotten wood. Mortality at this time, perhaps, in the shape of a huge brown moth, had visited him by night, peering over into his unconscious face with its glittering pins of eyes.

  Beyond the narrow attic windows, at the back of the house, was an unusual feature, a balcony with balustrade of wrought iron, like a black spiderweb. Here a cracked pot or two with dead geraniums vied with blown washing tied across the rail. The dirty, uninspiring roofs and skylights clustered close, and five floors below stared a cobbled yard of an uncompromising hardness and lack of beauty.

  His first awareness of the other child came, in some way, from this meagre balcony beyond the window.

  Who is she? How did she get in? For here she sat in the pane of moonlight that sometimes evolved on the floor between the window and his bed. The stove was alight, but now it was out. Behind a screen across the room the mother and father snored and sighed.

  The female child sat unblinkingly on in the flat container of moonlight, watching him.

  He saw her only a moment. Then he slept again.

  In the morning she was gone, and when he spoke of her he was told he had been dreaming.

  The attic was often full also of the smell of cabbage soup, which Etiens recalled with slight loathing, aware that as a child of seven it had not offended him.

  Adult head down against the rain, he crossed a square. He thought of La Voleuse, the Thief.

  He saw her many times after that.

  At first, she remained near to the window, and was expressionless. Then she came somewhat closer and she began to have an expression. Suddenly she smiled at him, and he became alert to her. Her skin was brownish, her hair a bleached rag. Her clothes, too, were bleached of colour, and ragged, but in a most formal way, as if holes had been carefully cut in them rather than torn or worn. In some respects she was like a tiny scandalised version of a Pierrette, and indeed now she was actually clowning. She scampered about the attic noiselessly, balanced on her hands, cartwheeled, turned a somersault, all with an astonished insouciance, so he had to stifle his laughter with an edge of the blanket. It was only when she was very close that he noticed her eyes were almost all white, except for the two small black dots of the pupils. Her eyes frightened him for a moment, making him think of those of a blind dog on the Rue Dantine. But, as she could obviously see perfectly well, his fear soon vanished.

  After a long time of performing for him, she laughed soundlessly and ran away straight through the attic window and was gone. This did not seem peculiar. He would assume, if it were essential for him to assume anything, that she had a rope, and by means of this climbed down from the balcony. She was so agile that, even in adult recollection, it appeared partly feasib
le.

  The convalescent child was disappointed. He had wanted to join in the play. Will she come back?

  As if to tantalise him, she failed to return for a number of nights. He was by now at that stage of convalescence where he was horribly bored, still rather too weak to be about and occupy himself, but mentally fretful, anxious for diversion. And tonight his parents had left him alone, for he was thought well enough now to fend for himself. It was a wedding they had gone to. There would be gateaux and wine. His mother had promised to bring him home a bag of pastries, but he had come to distrust her promises.

  He had been dozing when he heard the clock strike from across the river: nine o’clock. The stove was unlit and it was cold as well as dark. The child Etiens prepared to huddle more deeply in the blankets, when he saw the other child, the pale Pierrette, step through the window. And for the first time he realized that now, as in all other instances, the window had been, was, closed.

  He wanted to ask her what she meant by it, but she forestalled him, dancing towards him in her neatly punctured rags. He was so amused, so captivated, he said nothing. The reward was immediate. She capered. She performed incredible tricks. She bent backward in a white hoop, then elevated herself, balancing first on her hands, next only on her fingertips. Coming down she sprang—her spring was like a cat’s—and landed on the table-top. She spun, whirled over the edge, arrived on the back of a chair and ran along it—sprang again , and came to rest, on the ball of one foot, standing on the stove like a statue on a pedestal, her arms outflung. And from this position, motionless and in total equilibrium, she offered him the second reward. She beckoned.

  He could hardly believe it. He had been invited to join in the fun. He knew she would teach him her tricks. They looked so easy that, although so far, practising alone and without strength in a corner, he had not mastered them, he was certain that with her guidance, her mere approval, he would learn them all.