by Tanith Lee
They moved away from the piano.
The wind came again, and petals fell again across the blackness of its carapace.
Jeanjacques courteously allowed the woman to precede him into the salon, then shut both doors quietly.
“What is this?”
She looked up at him sleepily, deceitfully.
“You called out.”
“Did I? I was asleep. A dream ...
“Now I’m here,” he said.
“No,” she said, moving a little way from him. “I’m so sleepy. Later.”
Vonderjan stood back from the bed. He gave a short laugh, at the absurdity of this. In the two years of their sexual marriage, she had never before said anything similar to him. (And he heard Uteka murmur sadly, “Please forgive me, Gregers. Please don’t be angry.”)
“Very well.”
Then Antoinelle turned and he saw the mark on her neck, glowing lushly scarlet as a flower or fruit, in the low lamplight.
“Something’s bitten you.” He was alarmed. He thought at once of the horses dying. “Let me see.”
“Bitten me? Oh, yes. And I scratched at it in my sleep, yes, I remember.”
“Is that why you called out, Anna?”
She was amused and secretive.
Picking up the lamp, he bent over her, staring at the place.
A little thread, like fire, still trickled from the wound, which was itself very small. There was the slightest bruising. It did not really look like a bite, more as if she had been stabbed on purpose by a hat-pin.
Where he had let her put him off sexually, he would not let her do so now. He went out and came back, to mop up the little wound with alcohol.
“Now you’ve made it sting. It didn’t before.”
“You said it itched you.”
“Yes, but it didn’t worry me.”
“I’ll close the window.”
“Why? It’s hot, so hot –”
“To keep out these things which bite.”
He noted her watching him. It was true she was mostly still asleep, yet despite this, and the air of deception and concealment which so oddly clung to her, for a moment he saw, in her eyes, that he was old.
When her husband had gone, Antoinelle lay on her front, her head turned, so the blood continued for a while to soak into her pillow.
She had dreamed the sort of dream she had sometimes dreamed before Vonderjan came into her life. Yet this had been much more intense. If she slept, would the dream return? But she slept quickly, and the dream did not happen.
Two hours later, when Vonderjan came back to her bed, he could not at first wake her. Then, although she seemed to welcome him, for the first time he was unable to satisfy her. She writhed and wriggled beneath him, then petulantly flung herself back. “Oh finish then. I can’t. I don’t want to.”
But he withdrew gently, and coaxed her. “What’s wrong, Anna? Aren’t you well tonight?”
“Wrong? I want what you usually give me.”
“Then let me give it to you.”
“No. I’m too tired.”
He tried to feel her forehead. She seemed too warm. Again, he had the thought of the horses, and he was uneasy. But she pulled away from him. “Oh, let me sleep, I must sleep.”
Before returning here, he had gone down and questioned his servants. He had asked them if they had brought the piano up on to the terrace, and where they had found it.
They were afraid, he could see that plainly. Afraid of unknown magic and the things they beheld in the leaves and on the wind, which he, Vonderjan, could not see and had never believed in. They were also afraid of a shadowy beast, which apparently they too had witnessed, and which he thought he had seen. And naturally, they were afraid of the piano, because it was out of its correct situation, because (and he already knew this perfectly well), they believed it had stolen by itself out of the forest, and run up on the terrace, and was the beast they had seen.
At midnight, he went back down, unable to sleep, with a lamp and a bottle, and pushed up both the lids of the piano with ease.
Petals showered away. And a wonderful perfume exploded from the inside of the instrument, and with it a dim cloud of dust, so he stepped off.
As the film cleared, Vonderjan began to see that something lay inside the piano. The greater hind lid had shut it in against the piano’s viscera of dulcimer hammers and brass-wire strings.
When all the film had smoked away, Vonderjan once more went close and held the lamp above the piano, leaning down to look, as he had with his wife’s bitten throat.
An embalmed mummy was curled up tight in the piano.
That is, a twisted knotted thing, blackened as if by fire, lay folded round there in a preserved and tarry skin, tough as any bitumen, out of which, here and there, the dull white star of a partial bone poked through.
This was not large enough, he thought, to be the remains of a normal adult. Yet the bones, so far as he could tell, were not those of a child, nor of an animal.
Yet, it was most like the burnt and twisted carcass of a beast.
He released and pushed down again upon the lid. He held the lid flat, as if it might lunge up and open again. Glancing at the keys, before he closed them away too, he saw a drop of vivid red, like a pearl of blood from his wife’s neck, but it was only a single red petal from the vine.
Soft and loud. In his sleep, the clerk kept hearing these words. They troubled him, so he shifted and turned, almost woke, sank back uneasily. Soft and loud – which was what Pianoforte meant ...
Jeanjacques’ mother, who had been accustomed to thrash him, struck him round the head. A loud blow, but she was soft with grown men, yielding, pliant. And with him, too, when grown, she would come to be soft and subserviently polite. But he never forgot the strap, and when she lay dying, he had gone nowhere near her. (His white half, from his father, had also made sure he went nowhere near his sire.)
Nanetta lay under a black, heavily-furred animal, a great cat, which kneaded her back and buttocks, purring. At first she was terrified, then she began to like it. Then she knew she would die.
Notes: The black keys are the black magic. The white keys are the white magic. (Both are evil.) Anything black, or white, must respond.
Even if half-black, half-white.
Notes: The living white horse has escaped. It gallops across the Island. It reaches the sea and finds the fans of the waves, snorting at them, and canters through the surf along the beaches, fish-white, and the sun begins to rise.
Gregers Vonderjan dreams he is looking down at his dead wife (Uteka), in the rain, as he did in Copenhagen that year she died. But in the dream she is not in a coffin, she is uncovered, and the soil is being thrown on to her vulnerable face. And he is sorry, because for all his wealth and personal magnitude, and power, he could not stop this happening to her. When the Island sunrise wakes him at Bleumaneer, the sorrow does not abate. He wishes now she had lived, and was here with him. (Nanetta would have eased him elsewhere, as she had often done in the past. Nanetta had been kind, and warm-blooded enough.) (Why speak of her as if she too were dead?)
Although awake, he does not want to move. He cannot be bothered with it, the eternal and repetitive affair of getting up. shaving and dressing, breakfasting, looking at the accounts, the lists the clerk has made, his possessions, which will shortly be gone.
How has he arrived at this? He had seemed always on a threshold. There is no time left now. The threshold is that of the exit. It is all over, or soon will be.
Almost all of them had left. The black servants and the white, from the kitchen and the lower rooms. The white housekeeper, despite her years and her pernickety adherences to the house. Vonderjan’s groom – he had let the last horse out, too, perhaps taken it with him.
Even the bird had been let out of its cage in Antoinelle’s boudoir, and had flown off.
Stronn stayed, Vonderjan’s man. His craggy indifferent face said, So, have they left?
And the young black
woman, Nanetta, she was still there, sitting with Antoinelle on the balcony, playing cards among the Spanish flowers, her silver and ruby earrings glittering.
“Why?” said Jeanjacques. But he knew.
“They’re superstitious,” Vonderjan, dismissive. “This sort of business has happened before.”
It was four in the afternoon. Mornings here were separate. They came in slices, divided off by sleep. Or else, one slept through them.
“Is that – is the piano still on the terrace? Did someone take it?” said Jeanjacques, giving away the fact he had been to look, and seen the piano was no longer there. Had he dreamed it?
“Some of them will have moved it,” said Vonderjan. He paced across the library. The windows stood open. The windows here were open so often, anything might easily get in.
The Island sweated, and the sky was golden lead.
“Who would move it?” persisted Jeanjacques.
Vonderjan shrugged. He said, “It wasn’t any longer worth anything. It had been in the sea. It must have washed up on the beach. Don’t worry about it.”
Jeanjacques thought, if he listened carefully, he could hear beaded piano notes, dripping in narrow streams through the house. He had heard them this morning, as he lay in bed, awake, somehow unable to get up. (There had seemed no point in getting up. Whatever would happen would happen, and he might as well lie and wait for it.) However, a lifetime of frantic early arising, of hiding in country barns and thatch, and up chimneys, a lifetime of running away, slowly curdled his guts and pushed him off the mattress. But by then it was past noon.
“Do they come back?”
“What? What did you say?” asked Vonderjan.
“Your servants. You said, they’d made off before. Presumably they returned.”
“Yes. Perhaps.”
Birds called raucously (but wordlessly) in the forest, and then grew silent.
“There was something inside that piano,” said Vonderjan, “a curiosity. I should have seen to it last night, when I found it.”
“What – what was it?”
“A body. Oh, don’t blanch. Here, drink this. Some freakish thing. A monkey, I’d say. I don’t know how it got there, but they’ll have been frightened by it.”
“But it smelled so sweet. Like roses –”
“Yes, it smelled of flowers. That’s a funny thing.” “Sometimes the dead do smell like that. Just before the smell changes.”
“I never heard of that.”
“No. It surprised me years ago, when I encountered it myself. Something fell through the sky – an hour. And now it was sunset.
Nanetta had put on an apron and cooked food in the kitchen. Antoinelle had not done anything to assist her, although, in her childhood, she had been taught how to make soups and bake bread, out of a sort of bourgeois pettiness.
In fact, Antoinelle had not even properly dressed herself. Tonight she came to the meal, which the black woman had meticulously set out, in a dressing-robe, tied about her waist by a brightly-coloured scarf. The neckline drooped, showing off her long neck and the tops of her round young breasts, and the flimsy improper thing she wore beneath. Her hair was also undressed, loose, gleaming and rushing about her with a water-wet sheen.
Stronn too came in tonight, to join them, sitting far down the table, and with a gun across his lap.
“What’s that for?” Vonderjan asked him.
“The blacks are saying there’s some beast about on the Island. It fell off a boat and swam ashore.”
“You believe them?”
“It’s possible, mijnheer, isn’t it. I knew of a dog that was thrown from a ship at Port-au-Roi, and reached Venice.”
“Did you indeed.”
Vonderjan looked smart, as always. The pallid topaz shone in his ring, his shirt was laundered and starched.
The main dish they had consisted of fish, with a kind of ragoût, with pieces of vegetable, and rice.
Nanetta had lit the candles, or some of them. Some repeatedly went out. Vonderjan remarked this was due to something in the atmosphere. The air had a thick, heavy saltiness, and for once there was no rumbling of thunder, and constellations showed, massed above the heights, once the light had gone, each star framed in a peculiar greenish circle.
After Vonderjan’s exchange with the man, Stronn, none of them spoke.
Without the storm, there seemed no sound at all, except that now and then, Jeanjacques heard thin little rills of musical notes.
At last he said, “What is that I can hear?”
Vonderjan was smoking one of his cigars. “What?”
It came again. Was it only in the clerk’s head? He did not think so, for the black girl could plainly hear it too. And oddly, when Vonderjan did not say anything else, it was she who said to Jeanjacques, “They hang things on the trees – to honour gods – wind gods, the gods of darkness.”
Jeanjacques said, “But it sounds like a piano.”
No one answered. Another candle sighed and died.
And then Antoinelle – laughed.
It was a horrible, terrible laugh. Riling and tinkling like the bells hung on the trees of the Island, or like the high notes of any piano. She did it for no apparent reason, and did not refer to it once she had finished. She should have done, she should have begged their pardon, as if she had belched raucously.
Vonderjan got up. He went to the doors and opened them on the terrace and the night.
Where the piano had rested itself against the wall, there was nothing, only shadow and the disarrangement of the vine, all its flower-cups broken and shed.
“Do you want some air, Anna?”
Antoinelle rose. She was demure now. She crossed to Vonderjan, and they moved out on to the terrace. But their walking together was unlike that compulsive, gliding inevitability of the earlier time. And, once out in the darkness, they only walked, loitering up and down.
She is mad, Jeanjacques thought. This was what he had seen in her face. That she was insane, unhinged and dangerous, her loveliness like vitriol thrown into the eyes of anyone who looked at her.
Stronn poured himself a brandy. He did not seem unnerved, or particularly en garde, despite the gun he had lugged in.
But Nanetta stood up. Unhooking the ruby ear-drops from her earlobes, she placed them beside her plate. As she went across the salon to the inner door, Jeanjacques noted her feet, which had been shod in city shoes, were now bare. They looked incongruous, those dark velvet paws with their nails of tawny coral, extending long and narrow from under her light gown; they looked lawless, in a way nothing of the rest of her did.
When she had gone out, Jeanjacques said to Stronn, “Why is she barefoot?”
‘Savages.”
Old rage slapped the inside of the clerk’s mind, like his mother’s hand. Though miles off, he must react. “Oh,” he said sullenly, “barbaric, do you mean? You think them barbarians, though they’ve been freed.”
Stronn said, “Unchained is what I mean. Wild like the forest. That’s what it means, that word, savage – forest.”
Stronn reached across the table and helped himself from Vonderjan’s box of cigars.
On the terrace, the husband and wife walked up and down. The doors stayed wide open.
Trees rustled below, and were still.
Jeanjacques too got up and followed the black woman out, and beyond the room he found her, still in the passage. She was standing on her bare feet, listening, with the silver rings in her eyes.
“What can you hear? “
“You hear it too.”
“Why are your feet bare?”
“So I can go back. So I can run away.”
Jeanjacques seized her wrist and they stood staring at each other in a mutual fear, of which each one made up some tiny element, but which otherwise surrounded them.
“What –” he said.
“Her pillow’s red with blood,” said Nanetta. “Did you see the hole in her neck?”
“No.”
�
�No. It closes up like a flower – a flower that eats flies. But she bled. And from her other place. White bed was red bed with her blood.”
He felt sick, but he kept hold of the wand of her wrist.
“There is something.”
“You know it too.”
Across the end of the passageway, then, where there was no light, something heavy and rapid, and yet slow, passed by. It was all darkness, but a fleer of pallor slid across its teeth. And the head of it one moment turned, and, without eyes, as it had before, it gazed at them.
The black girl sagged against the wall, and Jeanjacques leaned against and into her. Both panted harshly. They might have been copulating, as Vonderjan had with his wife.
Then the passage was free. They felt the passage draw in a breath.
“Was in my room,” the girl muttered, “was in my room that is too small anything so big get through the door. I wake, I see it there.”
“But it left you alone.”
“It not want me. Want her.”
“The white bitch.”
“Want her, have her. Eat her alive. Run to the forest,” said Nanetta, in the patois, but now he understood her, “run to the forest.” But neither of them moved.
“No, please, Gregers. Don’t be angry.”
The voice is not from the past. Not Uteka’s. It comes from a future now become the present.
“You said you have your courses. When did that prevent you before? I’ve told you, I don’t mind it.”
“No. Not this time.”
He lets her go. Lets go of her.
She did not seem anxious, asking him not to be angry. He is not angry. Rebuffed, Vonderjan is, to his own amazement, almost relieved.
“Draw the curtains round your bed. Anna. And shut your window.”
“Yes, Gregers.”
He looks, and sees her for the first time tonight, how she is dressed, or not dressed.
“Why did you come down like that?”
“I was hot... does it matter?”
“A whore in the brothel would put on something like that.” The crudeness of his language startles him. (Justus?) He checks. “I’m sorry, Anna. You meant nothing. But don’t dress like that in front of the others.”