by Tanith Lee
Nothing moved. Then, below, lights broke out on the open space, a servant shouted shrilly in the patois.
Vonderjan shouted down, saying it was nothing. “Go back inside.” He turned and looked at the two women and the man in the salon. “Some animal.” He banged the doors shut.
“It – looked like a lion,” Jeanjacques stammered. But no. It had been like a shark, a fish, which bounded on two or three legs, and stooping low.
The servants must have seen it too. Alarmed and alerted, they were still disturbed, and generally calling out now. Another woman screamed, and then there was the crash of glass.
“Fools,” said Vonderjan, without any expression or contempt. He nodded at the housekeeper. “Go and tell them I say it’s all right.”
The woman dithered, then scurried away – by the house door; avoiding the terrace. Nanaetta too had stood up and her eyes had their silver rings. They, more even than the thing which ran across the window, terrified Jeanjacques.
“What was it? Was it a wild pig?” asked the clerk, aware he sounded like a scared child.
“A pig. What pig? No. Where could it go?”
“Has it climbed up the wall?” Jeanjacques rasped.
The black woman began to speak the patois in a singsong and the hair crawled on Jeanjacques’ scalp.
“Tell her to stop it, can’t you.”
“Be quiet, Nanette,” said Vonderjan.
She was silent.
They stood there.
Outside the closed windows, in the closed dark, the disturbed noises below were dying off.
Had it had eyes? Where had it gone to?
Jeanjacques remembered a story of Paris, how the guillotine would leave its station by night, and patrol the streets, searching for yet more blood. And during a siege of antique Rome, a giant phantom wolf had stalked the seven hills, tearing out the throats of citizens. These things were not real, even though they had been witnessed and attested, even though evidence and bodies were left in their wake. And, although unreal, yet they existed. They grew, such things, out of the material of the rational world, as maggots appeared spontaneously in a corpse, or fungus formed on damp.
The black woman had been keeping quiet. Now she made a tiny sound.
They turned their heads.
Beyond the windows – dark blotted dark, night on night.
“It’s there.”
A second time Vonderjan flung open the doors, and light flooded, by some trick of reflection in their glass, out across the place beyond.
It crouches by the wall, where yester eve the man carnally had his wife, where a creeper grows, partly rent away by their movements.
“In God’s sight,” Vonderjan says, startled finally, but not afraid.
He walks out, straight out, and they see the beast by the wall does not move, either to attack him or to flee.
Jeanjacques can smell roses, honeysuckle. The wine glass drops out of his hand.
Antoinelle dreams, now.
She is back in the house of her aunt, where no one would allow her to speak, or to play the piano. But she has slunk down in the dead of night, into the sitting-room, and rebelliously lifted the piano’s lid.
A wonderful sweet smell comes up from the keys, and she strokes them a moment, soundlessly. They feel... like skin. The skin of a man, over muscle, young, hard, smooth. Is it Justus she feels? (She knows this is very childish. Even her sexuality, although perhaps she does not know this, has the wanton ravening quality of the child’s single-minded demands.)
There is a shell the inclement aunt keeps on top of the piano, along with some small framed miniatures of ugly relatives.
Antoinelle lifts the shell, and puts it to her ear, listens to hear the sound of the sea. But instead, she hears a piano playing, softly and far off.
The music, Antoinelle thinks, is a piece by Rameau, for the harpsichord, transposed.
She looks at the keys. She has not touched them, or not enough to make them sound.
Rameau’s music dies away.
Antoinelle finds she is playing four single notes on the keys, she does not know why, neither the notes, nor the word they spell, mean anything to her.
And then, even in the piano-dream, she is aware her husband, Gregers Vonderjan, is in the bed with her, lying behind her, although in her dream she is standing upright.
They would not let her speak or play the piano – they would not let her have what she must have, or make the sounds that she must make.
Now she is a piano.
He fingers her keys, gentle, next a little rough, next sensually, next with the crepitation of a feather. And, at each caress, she sounds, Antoinelle, who is a piano, a different note. His hands are over her breasts. (In the dream too, she realizes, she has come into the room naked.) His fingers are on her naked breasts, fondling and describing, itching the buds at their centres. Antoinelle is being played. She gives off, note by note and chord by chord, her music.
Still cupping, circling her breasts with his hungry hands, somehow his scalding tongue is on her spine. He is licking up and up the keys of her vertebrae, through her silk-thin skin.
Standing upright, he is pressed behind her. While lying in the bed, he has rolled her over, crushing her breasts into his hands beneath her, lying on her back, his weight keeping her pinned, breathless.
And now he is entering her body, his penis like a tower on fire.
She spreads, opens, melts, dissolves for him. No matter how large, and he is now enormous, she will make way, then grip fierce and terrible upon him, her toothless springy lower mouth biting and cramming itself full of him, as if never to let go-
They are swimming strongly together for the shore.
How piercing the pleasure at her core, all through her now, the hammers hitting with a golden quake on every nerve- string.
And then, like a beast (a cat? A lion?), he has caught her by the throat, one side of her neck.
As with the other entry, at her sex, her body gives way to allow him room. And, as at the very first, her virgin’s cry of pain changes almost at once into a wail of delight.
Antoinelle begins to come (to enter, to arrive).
Huge thick rollers of deliciousness, purple and crimson, dark and blazing, tumble rhythmically as dense waves upwards, from her spine’s base to the windowed dome of her skull.
Glorious starvation couples with feasting, itching with rubbing, constricting, bursting, with implosion, the architecture of her pelvis rocks, punches, roaring and spinning in eating movements and swallowing gulps –
If only this sensation might last and last.
It lasts. It lasts.
Antoinelle is burning bright. She is changing into stars. Her stars explode and shatter. There are greater stars she can make. She is going to make them. She does so. And greater. Still she is coming, entering, arriving.
She has screamed. She has screamed until she no longer has any breath. Now she screams silently. Her nails gouge the bed-sheets. She feels the blood of her virginity falling drop by drop. She is the shell and her blood her sounding sea, and the sea is rising up and another mouth, the mouth of night, is taking it all, and she is made of silver for the night which devours her, and this will never end.
And then she screams again, a terrible divine scream, dredged independently up from the depths of her concerto of ecstasy. And vaguely, as she flies crucified on the wings of the storm, she knows the body upon her body (its teeth in her throat), is not the body of Vonderjan, and that the fire-filled hands upon her breasts, the flaming stem within her, are black, not as black is black, but black as outer space, which she is filling now with her millions of wheeling, howling stars.
7
The bird which cries Shadily! Shadily! flies over the island above the boiling afternoon lofts, and is gone, back to the upper city mainland, where there are more trees, more shade.
In the branches of the snake-willow, a wind-chime tinkles, once.
Yse’s terrace is full of people, si
tting and standing, with bottles, glasses, cans, and laughing. Yse has thrown a party. Someone, drunk, is dog-paddling in the alley of water.
Lucius, in his violet shirt, looks at the people. Sometimes Yse appears. She’s slim and ash-pale, with long, shining hair, about twenty-five. Closer, thirty-five, maybe.
“Good party, Yse. Why you throw a party?”
“I had to throw something. Throw a plate, or myself away. Or something.”
Carr and the fat man, they got the two lids up off the piano by now.
It won’t play, everyone knew it wouldn’t. Half the notes will not sound. Instead, a music centre, straddled between the piano’s legs, rigged via Yse’s generator, uncoils the blues.
And this in turn has made the refrigerator temperamental. Twice people have gone to neighbours to get ice. And in turn these neighbours have been invited to the party.
A new batch of lobsters bake on the griddle. Green grapes and yellow pineapples are pulled apart.
“I was bored,” she says. “I couldn’t get on with it, that vampire story.”
“Let me read it.”
“You won’t decipher my handwriting.”
“Some. Enough.”
“You think so? All right. But don’t make criticisms, don’t tell me what to do, Lucius, all right?”
“Deal. How would I know?”
He sits in the shady corner (Shadily! the bird cried mockingly (J’ai des lits) from Yse’s roof), and now he reads. He can read her handwriting, it’s easier than she thinks.
Sunset spreads an awning.
Some of the guests go home, or go elsewhere, but still crowds sit along the wall, or on the steps, and in the loft people are dancing now to a rock band on the music centre.
“Hey this piano don’t play!” accusingly calls Big Eye, a late learner.
Lucius takes a polite puff of a joint someone passes, and passes it on. He sits thinking.
Sunset darkens, claret colour, and now the music centre plays Mozart.
Yse sits down by Lucius on the wall.
“Tell me, Yse, how does he get all his energy, this rich guy. He’s forty, you say, but you say that was like fifty, then. And he’s big, heavy. And he porks this Anna three, four times a night, and then goes on back for more.”
“Oh that. Vonderjan and Antoinelle. It’s to do with obsession. They’re obsessive. When you have a kink for something, you can do more, go on and on. Straight sex is never like that. It’s the perversity – so-called perversity. That revs it up.”
“Strong guy, though.”
“Yes.”
“Too strong for you?”
“Too strong for me.”
Lucius knew nothing about Yse’s ‘obsession’ with Per Laszd. But by now he knows there is something. There has never been a man in Yse’s life that Lucius has had to explain to that he, Lucius, is her friend only. Come to that, not any women in her life, either. But he has come across her work, read a little of it – never much – seen this image before, this big blond man. And the sex, for always, unlike the life of Yse, her books are full of it.
Lucius says suddenly, “You liked him but you never got to have him, this feller.”
She nods. As the light softens, she’s not a day over thirty, even from two feet away.
“No. But I’m used to that.”
“What is it then? You have a bone to pick with him for him getting old?”
“The real living man you mean? He’s not old. About fifty-five, I suppose. He looks pretty wonderful to me still.”
“You see him?” Lucius is surprised. “I see him on TV. And he looks great. But he was – well, fabulous when he was younger. I mean actually like a man out of a fable, a myth.” She’s forgotten, he thinks, that she never confided like this in Lucius. Still though, she keeps back the name.
Lucius doesn’t ask for the name.
A name no longer matters, if it ever did.
“You never want to try another guy?”
“Who? Who’s offering?” And she is angry, he sees it. Obviously, he is no use to her that way. But then, did she make a friendship with Lucius for just that reason?
“You look good, Yse.”
“Thank you.” Cold. Better let her be. For a moment. A heavenly, unearthly scent is stealing over the evening air.
Lucius has never seen the plant someone must have put in to produce this scent. Nothing grows on the terrace but for the snake-willow, and tonight people, lobster, pineapple, empty bottles.
“This’ll be a mess to get straight,” he says.
“Are you volunteering?”
“Just condoling, Yse.”
The sunset totally fades. Stars light up. It’s so clear, you can see the Abacus Tower, like a Christmas tree, on the mainland.
“What colour are his eyes, Yse?”
“... Eyes? Blue. It’s in the story.”
“No, girl, the other one.”
“Which –? Oh, that one. The vampire. I don’t know. Your vampire had yellow eyes, you said.”
“I said, he made me feel like a king. But the sex was good, then it was over. Not as you describe it, extended play.”
“I did ask you not to criticise my work.”
“No way. It’s sexy. But tell me his eyes’ colour?”
“Black, maybe. Or even white. The vampire is like the piano.”
“Yeah. I don’t see that. Yse, why is it a piano?”
“It could have been anything. The characters are the hotbed, and the vampire grows out of that. It just happens to form as a piano – a sort of piano. Like dropping a glass of wine, like a cloud – the stain, the cloud, just happen to take on a shape, randomly, that seems to resemble some familiar thing.”
“Or is it because you can play it?”
“Yes, that too.”
“And it’s an animal.”
“And a man. Or male. A male body.”
“Black as black is black. Not skin-black.”
“Blacker. As black as black can be.”
He says quietly, “La Danse aux Vampires.”
A glass breaks in the loft and wine spills on the wooden floor – shapelessly? Yse doesn’t bat an eyelash.
“You used to fuss about your things.”
“They’re only things.”
“We’re all only things, Yse. What about the horses?” “You mean Vonderjan’s horses. This is turning into a real interrogation. All right. The last one, the white one like a fish, escapes, and gallops about the Island.”
“You don’t seem stuck, Yse. You seem to know plenty enough to go on.”
“Perhaps I’m tired of going on.”
“Looked in the mirror?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look in the mirror, Yse.”
“Oh that. It’s not real. It won’t last.”
“I never saw a woman could do that before, get fifteen years younger in a month. Grow her hair fifty times as thick and twenty times longer. Lose forty pounds without trying, and nothing loose. How do you feel, Yse?”
“All right.”
“But do you feel good?”
“I feel all right.”
“It’s how they make you feel, Yse. You said it. They’re not beautiful, they don’t smell like flowers or the sea. They come out of the grave, out of beds of earth, out of the cesspit shit at the bottom of your soul’s id. It’s how they make you feel, what they can do to change you. Hudja-magica. Not them. What they can do to you. “
“You are crazy, Lucius. There’ve been some funny smokes on offer up here tonight.”
He gets up.
“Yse, did I say, the one I followed, when he went into his grave under the headstone, he say to me, You come in with me, Luce. Don’t mind the dark. I make sure you never notice it.”
“And you said no.”
“I took to my hot heels and ran for my fucking life.”
“Then you didn’t love him, Lucius.”
“I loved my fucking life.”
She smiles,
the white girl at his side. Hair and skin so ivory pale, white dress and shimmering eyes, and who in hell is she?
“Take care, Yse.”
“Night, Lucius. Sweet dreams.”
The spilled wine on the floor has spilled a random shape that looks like a screwed-up sock.
Her loft is empty. They have all gone.
She lights the lamp on her desk, puts out the others, sits, looking at the piano from the Sound, forty feet away, its hind lid and its fore lid now raised, eyes and mouth.
Then she gets up and goes to the piano, and taps out on the keys four notes.
Each one sounds.
D, then E, then A. And then again D.
It would be mort in French, dood in Dutch, tod in German. Danish, Czech, she isn’t sure . . . but it would not work.
I saw in the mirror.
PianO. O, pain.
But, it doesn’t hurt.
8: Danse Macabre
A wind blew from the sea, and waxy petals fell from the vine, scattering the lid of the piano as it stood there, by the house wall.
None of them spoke.
Jeanjacques felt the dry parched cinnamon breath of Nanetta scorching on his neck, as she waited behind him. And in front of him was Vonderjan, examining the thing on the terrace.
“How did it get up here?” Jeanjacques asked, stupidly. He knew he was being stupid. The piano was supernatural. It had run up here.
“Someone carried it. Hew else?” replied Vonderjan.
Did he believe this? Yes, it seemed so.
Just then a stifled cry occurred above, detached itself and floated over them. For a moment none of them reacted to it; they had heard it so many times and in so many forms.
But abruptly Vonderjan’s blond head went up, his eyes wide. He turned and strode away, half running. Reaching a stair that went to the gallery above, he bounded up it.
It was the noise his wife made, of course. But she made it when he was with her (inside her). And he had been here –
Neither Nanetta nor Jeanjacques went after Gregers Vonderjan, and neither of them went any nearer the piano.
“Could someone have carried it up here?” Jeanjacques asked the black woman, in French.
“Of course.” But as she said this, she vehemently shook her head.