Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  In this way, just before they took him from the room, and so that very afternoon to his execution, Olvero saw drawn in ink on artist’s paper a sketch of the body of the slaughtered Governor. The corpse seemed covered in black curlicues and chirographic decorations – and these were the slashes, punctures, slicing, bites and tears the Vampire had performed. While entangled in their centre – with slight effort Olvero came to perceive three words, which were also made of wounds, and also ornamentally defined. They were black as blackness, and might be discerned by any seeing, literate eye. Olvero the Scholar, they read.

  Time passes. Some one hundred and forty years after, various manuscripts of Olvero’s were accidentally located. They caused a sensation and shot to fame. To this day several of his plays are still performed, if necessary in translation, in many of the great theatres of the world. His poetry is included in erudite volumes, and quoted by modern writers of acknowledged talent; even taught in universities. Certain sources claim his two unfinished novels have had nearly as many reprintings as the most popular of the wonderful works of Defoe.

  As to the stories that surround Olvero’s defamation and death, they are ascribed to superstition and moronic inanity. The slow will always try to pull down the faster runner. In this instance, seemingly, they succeeded.

  And the Word was made flesh

  Gospel of John, Ch.1, V. 14.

  Taken At His Word

  Chosen by Ian Whates

  Trying to select a favourite Tanith Lee story is one of those impossible choices designed to stump an AI or flummox the Sphynx. It’s a bit like asking me to choose a favourite beer, or cheese, or author… There are so many excellent options. In the end, I resolved the dilemma by being selfish; I chose a story that mattered to me, for reasons that will mean little to anyone else but a very great deal to yours truly.

  You see, back in 2009 it was announced that World Horrorcon was coming to the UK, Brighton to be precise. To mark the occasion, I decided to put together an anthology of original vampire stories, The Bitten Word. John Kaiine and Les Edwards provided two brilliant and very different images for the front and back covers, and all manner of very talented authors contributed stories – several of whom (Storm, Freda, Sarah, Sam) have subsequently contributed to this book. Then, of course, there was Tanith.

  In compiling The Bitten Word I was seeking to deliver a collection of stories that gave a twist to the vampire myth, confounding the reader’s expectations while adhering to the central tenet. Most of the stories did precisely that, but none managed to do so quite as Tanith’s did. Here was an author who had written so many vampire stories, how could she possibly have anything fresh or different to say on such a familiar theme?

  When I finished reading “Taken at His Word” I was grinning from ear to ear, delighted with the piece: a story about a thwarted writer whose very words become the vampire. In one deft stroke Tanith delivered a play on the book’s title that reworked the classic trope with panache and joyful wickedness, bringing a whole new dimension to the project.

  So wonderful, so delicious, so Tanith.

  – Ian Whates

  The Isle is Full of Noises

  ... and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  – Nietzsche

  1

  It is an island here, now.

  At the clearest moments of the day – usually late in the morning, occasionally after noon, and at night when the lights come on – a distant coastline is sometimes discernible. This coast is the higher area of the city, that part which still remains intact above water.

  The city was flooded a decade ago. The Sound possessed it. The facts had been predicted some while, and various things were done in readiness, mostly comprising a mass desertion.

  They say the lower levels of those buildings which now form the island will begin to give way in five years. But they were saying that too five years back.

  Also there are the sunsets. (Something stirred up in the atmosphere apparently, by the influx of water, some generation of heat or cold or vapour.) They start, or appear to do so, the sunsets, about three o’clock in the afternoon, and continue until the sun actually goes under the horizon, which in summer can be as late as seven forty-five.

  For hours the roof terraces, towerettes and glass-lofts of the island catch a deepening blood-and-copper light, turning to new bronze, raw amber, cubes of hot pink ice.

  Yse lives on West Ridge, in a glass-loft. She has, like most of the island residents, only one level, but there’s plenty of space. (Below, if anyone remembers, lies a great warehouse, with fish, even sometimes barracuda, gliding between the girders.)

  Beyond her glass west wall, a freak tree has rooted in the terrace. Now nine years old, it towers up over the loft, and the surrounding towers and lofts, while its serpentine branches dip down into the water. Trees are unusual here. This tree, which Yse calls Snake (for the branches), seems un-phased by the salt content of the water. It may be a sort of willow, a willow crossed with a snake.

  Sometimes Yse watches fish glimmering through the tree’s long hair that floats just under the surface. This appeals to her, as the whole notion of the island does. Then one morning she comes out and finds, caught in the coils of her snake-willow, a piano.

  Best to describe Yse, at this point, which is not easy. She might well have said herself, (being a writer by trade but also by desire) that she doesn’t want you to be disappointed, that you should hold on to the idea that what you get at first, here, may not be what is to be offered later.

  Then again, there is a disparity between what Yse seems to be, or is, and what Yse also seems to be, or is.

  Her name, however, as she has often had to explain, is pronounced to rhyme with ‘please’ – more correctly, pleeze:

  Eeze. Is it French? Or some sport from Latin-Spanish? God knows.

  Yse is in her middle years, not tall, rather heavy, dumpy. Her fair, greying hair is too fine, and so she cuts it very short. Yse is also slender, taller, and her long hair, (still fair, still greying) hangs in thick silken hanks down her back. One constant, grey eye.

  She keeps only a single mirror, in the bathroom above the wash basin. Looking in it is always a surprise for Yse: Who on earth is that? But she never lingers, soon she is away from it and back to herself. And in this way too, she deals with Per Laszd, the lover she has never had.

  Yse had brought the coffee-pot and some peaches on to the terrace. It is a fine morning, and she is considering walking along the bridge-way to the boat-stop, and going over to the cafés on East Heights. There are always things on at the cafés, psychic fairs, art shows, theatre. And she needs some more lamp oil.

  Having placed the coffee and fruit, Yse looks up and sees the piano.

  “Oh, “ says Yse, aloud.

  She is very, very startled, and there are good reasons for this, beyond the obvious oddity itself.

  She goes to the edge of the terrace and leans over, where the tree leans over, and looks at the snake arms which hold the piano fast, tilted only slightly, and fringed by rippling leaves.

  The piano is old, huge, a type of pianoforte, its two lids fast shut, concealing both the keys and its inner parts.

  Water swirls round it idly. It is intensely black, scarcely marked by its swim.

  And has it been swimming? Probably it was jettisoned from some apartment on the mainland (the upper city). Then, stretching out its three strong legs, it set off savagely for the island, determined not to go down.

  Yse has reasons, too, for thinking in this way.

  She reaches out, but cannot quite touch the piano.

  There are tides about the island, variable, sometimes rough. If she leaves the piano where it is, the evening tide may be a rough one, and lift it away, and she will lose it.

  She knows it must have swum here.

  Yse goes to the table and sits, drinking coffee, looking at the piano. As she does this a breeze comes in off the Sound, and stirs her phantom long heavy soft
hair, so it brushes her face and neck and the sides of her arms. And the piano makes a faint twanging, she thinks perhaps it does, up through its shut lids that are like closed eyes and lips together.

  “What makes a vampire seductive?” Yse asks Lucius, at the Cafe Blonde. “I mean, irresistible?”

  “His beauty,” says Lucius. He laughs, showing his teeth. “I knew a vampire, once. No, make that twice. I met him twice.”

  “Yes?” asks Yse cautiously. Lucius has met them all, ghosts, demons, angels. She partly believes it to be so, yet knows he mixes lies with the truths; a kind of test, or trap, for the listener. “Well, what happened?”

  “We walk, talk, drink, make love. He bites me. Here, see?” Lucius moves aside his long locks (luxurious, but greying, as are her own). On his coal-dark neck, no longer young, but strong as a column, an old scar.

  “You told me once before,” says Yse, “a shark did that.”

  “To reassure you. But it was a vampire.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I say to him, Watch out, monsieur.”

  “And then?”

  “He watched out. Next night, I met him again. He had yellow eyes, like a cat.”

  “He was undead?”

  “The undeadest thing I ever laid.”

  He laughs. Yse laughs, thoughtfully. “A piano’s caught in my terrace tree.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Lucius, the perhaps arch liar.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “What is your thing about vampires?”

  “I’m writing about a vampire.”

  “Let me read your book.”

  “Someday. But Lucius – it isn’t their charisma. Not their beauty that makes them irresistible –”

  “No?”

  “Think what they must be like . . . skin in rags, dead but walking. Stinking of the grave –”

  “They use their hudja-magica to take all that away.”

  “It’s how they make us feel.”

  “Yeah, Yse. You got it.”

  “What they can do to us.”

  “Dance all night,” says Lucius, reminiscent. He watches a handsome youth across the cafe, juggling mirrors that flash unnervingly, his skin the colour of an island twilight.

  “Lucius, will you help me shift the piano into my loft?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Not tomorrow, or next month. I mean, could we do it today, before sunset starts?”

  “I love you, Yse. Because of you, I shall go to Heaven.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Shit piano,” he says. “I could have slept in my boat. I could have paddled over to Venezule. I could have watched the thought of Venus rise through the grey brain of the sky. Piano huh, piano. Who shall I bring to help me? That boy, he looks strong, look at those mirrors go.”

  The beast had swum to shore, to the beach, through the pale, transparent urges of the waves, when the star Venus was in the brain-grey sky. But not here.

  There.

  In the dark before star-rise and dawn, more than two centuries ago. First the rifts, the lilts of the dark sea, and in them these mysterious thrusts and pushes, the limbs like those of some huge swimmer, part man and part lion and part crab – but also, a manta ray.

  Then, the lid breaks for a second through the fans of water, under the dawn star’s piercing steel. Wet as black mirror, the closed lid of the piano, as it strives, on three powerful beast- legs, for the beach.

  This Island is an island of sands, then of trees, the sombre sullen palms that sweep the shore. Inland, heights, vegetation, plantations, some of coffee and sugar and rubber, and one of imported kayar. An invented island, a composite.

  Does it crawl on to the sand, the legs still moving, crouching low like a beast? Does it rest on the sand, under the sway of the palm trees, as a sun rises?

  The Island has a name, like the house which is up there, unseen, on the inner heights. Bleumaneer.

  (Notes: Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth ...)

  The piano crouched stilly at the edge of the beach, the sea retreating from it, and the dark of night falling away ...

  It’s sunset.

  Lucius, in the bloody light, with two men from the Café Blonde from the (neither the juggler), juggle the black piano from the possessive tentacles of the snake-willow.

  With a rattle, a shattering of sounds (like slung cutlery), it, fetches up on the terrace. The men stand perplexed, looking at it. Yse watches from her glass wall.

  “Broke the cock thing.”

  “No way to move it. Shoulda tooka crane.”

  They prowl about the piano, while the red light blooms across its shade.

  Lucius tries delicately to raise the lid from the keys. The lid does not move. The other two, they wrench at the other lid, the piano’s top (pate, shell). This too is fastened stuck. (Yse had made half a move, as if to stop them. Then her arm fell lax.)

  “Damn ol’ thing. What she wan’ this ol’ thing for?”

  They back away. One makes a kicking movement. Lucius shakes his head; his long locks jangle across the flaming sky.

  “Do you want this, girl?” Lucius asks Yse by her glass.

  “Yes.” Shortly. “I said I did.”

  “‘S all broke up. Won’t play you none,” sings the light-eyed man, Carr, who wants to kick the piano, even now his loose leg pawing in its jeans.

  Trails of water slip away from the piano, over the terrace, like chains.

  Yse opens her wide glass doors. The men carry the piano in, and set it on her bare wooden floor.

  Yse brings them, now docile as their maid, white rum, while Lucius shares out the bills.

  “Hurt my back,” whinges Carr the kicker.

  “Piano,” says Lucius, drinking, “pian – o – O pain!”

  He says to her at the doors (as the men scramble back into their boat), “That vampire I danced with. Where he bit me. Still feel him there, biting me, some nights. Like a piece of broken bottle in my neck. I followed him, did I say to you? I followed him and saw him climb in under his grave just before the sun came up. A marble marker up on top. It shifted easy as breathe, settles back like a sigh. But he was beautiful, that boy with yellow eyes. Made me feel like a king, with him. Young as a lion, with him. Old as him, too. A thousand years in a skin of smoothest suede.”

  Yse nods.

  She watches Lucius away into the sunset, of which three hours are still left.

  Yse scatters two bags of porous litter-chips, which are used all over the island, to absorb the spillages and seepages of the

  Sound, to mop up the wet that slowly showers from the piano. She does not touch it. Except with her right hand, for a second, flat on the top of it.

  The wood feels ancient and hollow, and she thinks it hasn’t, perhaps, a metal frame.

  As the redness folds over deeper and deeper, Yse lights the oil lamp on her work-table, and sits there, looking forty feet across the loft, at the piano on the sunset. Under her right hand now, the pages she has already written, in her fast untidy scrawl.

  Piano-o. O pain.

  Shush, says the Sound-tide, flooding the city, pulsing through the walls, struts and girders below.

  Yse thinks distinctly, suddenly – it is always this way – about Per Laszd. But then another man’s memory taps at her mind.

  Yse picks up her pen, almost absently. She writes:

  ‘Like those hallucinations which sometimes come at the edge of sleep, so that you wake, thinking two or three words have been spoken close to your ear, or that a tall figure stands in the corner... like this, the image now and then appears before him.

  ‘Then he sees her, the woman, sitting on the rock, her white dress and her ivory-coloured hair, hard-gleaming in a post-storm sunlight. Impossible to tell her age. A desiccated young girl, or unlined old woman. And the transparent sea lapping in across the sand ...

  ‘But he has said, the Island is quite deserted now.’

  2:
Antoinette’s Courtship

  Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth.

  In this way, she knew nothing about them, the grave losses to come, but then they had been married only a few months. She knew little enough about him, either.

  Antoinelle was raised among staunch and secretive people. Until she was fourteen, she had thought herself ugly, and after that, beautiful. A sunset revelation had put her right, the westering glow pouring in sideways to paint the face in her mirror, on its slim, long throat. She found too she had shoulders, and cheekbones. Hands, whose tendons flexed in fans. With the knowledge of beauty, Antoinelle began to hope for something. Armed with her beauty she began to fall madly in love – with young officers in the army, with figures encountered in dreams.

  One evening at a parochial ball, the two situations became confused.

  The glamorous young man led Antoinelle out into a summer garden. It was a garden of Europe, with tall dense trees of twisted trunks, foliage massed on a lilac northern sky.

  Antoinelle gave herself. That is, not only was she prepared to give of herself sexually, but to give herself up to this male person, of whom she knew no more than that he was beautiful.

  Some scruple – solely for himself, the possible consequences – made him check at last.

  “No – no –” she cried softly, as he forcibly released her and stood back, angrily panting.

  The beautiful young man concluded (officially to himself), that Antoinelle was ‘loose’, and therefore valueless. She was not rich enough to marry, and besides, he despised her family.

  Presently he had told his brother officers all about this girl, and her ‘looseness’.

  “She would have done anything,” he said.

  “She’s a whore,” said another, and smiled.

  Fastidiously, Antoinelle’s lover remarked, “No, worse than a whore. A whore does it honestly, for money. It’s her work. This one simply does it.”

  Antoinelle’s reputation was soon in tatters, which blew about that little town of trees and societal pillars, like the tom flag of a destroyed regiment.