Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  “Nanetta, do you mean?”

  “I mean, of course, Stronn. And the Frenchman.”

  Her neck, drooping, is the neck of a lily drenched by rain. He cannot see the mark of the bite.

  “I’ve displeased you.”

  Antoinelle can remember her subservient mother (the mother who later threw her out to her aunt’s house), fawning in this way on her father. (Who also threw her out.)

  But Vonderjan seems uninterested now. He stands looking instead down the corridor.

  Then he takes a step. Then he halts and says, “Go along to your room, Anna. Shut the door.”

  “Yes, Gregers.”

  In all their time together, they have never spoken in this way, in such platitudes, ciphers. Those things used freely by others.

  He thinks he has seen something at the turn of the corridor. But when he goes to that junction, nothing is there. And then he thinks, of course, what could be there?

  By then her door is shut.

  Alone, he walks to his own rooms, and goes in.

  The Island is alive tonight. Full of stirrings and displacements.

  He takes up a bottle of Hollands, and pours a triple measure.

  Beyond the window, the green-ringed eyes of the stars stare down at Bleumaneer, as if afraid.

  When she was a child, a little girl, Antoinelle had sometimes longed to go to bed, in order to be alone with her fantasies, which (then), were perhaps ‘ingenuous’. Or perhaps not.

  She had lain curled up, pretending to sleep, imagining that she had found a fairy creature in the garden of her parents’ house.

  The fairy was always in some difficulty, and she must rescue it – perhaps from drowning in the bird bath, where sparrows had attacked it. Bearing it indoors, she would care for it, washing it in a tea-cup, powdering it lightly with scented dust stolen from her mother’s box, dressing it in bits of lace, tied at the waist with strands of brightly coloured embroidery silk. Since it was seen naked in the tea-cup, it revealed it was neither male nor female, lacking both breasts and penis (she did not grossly investigate it further), although otherwise it appeared a full-grown specimen of its kind. But then, at that time, Antoinelle had never seen either the genital apparatus of a man or the mammalia of an adult woman.

  The fairy, kept in secret, was dependent totally upon Antoinelle. She would feed it on crumbs of cake and fruit. It drank from her chocolate in the morning. It would sleep on her pillow. She caressed it, with always a mounting sense of urgency, not knowing where the caresses could lead – and indeed they never led to anything. Its wings she did not touch. (She had been told, the wings of moths and butterflies were fragile.)

  Beyond Antoinelle’s life, all Europe had been at war with itself. Invasion, battle, death, these swept by the carefully closed doors of her parents’ house and by Antoinelle entirely. Through a combination of conspiracy and luck, she learned nothing of it, but no doubt those who protected her so assiduously reinforced the walls of Antoinelle’s self-involvement. Such lids were shut down on her, what else was she to do but make music with herself – play with herself.. .

  Sometimes in her fantasies, Antoinelle and the fairy quarrelled. Afterwards they would be reconciled, and the fairy would hover, kissing Antoinelle on the lips. Sometimes the fairy got inside her nightdress, tickling her all over until she thought she would die. Sometimes she tickled the fairy in turn with a goose-feather, reducing it to spasms identifiable (probably) only as hysteria.

  It never flew away.

  Yet, as her own body ripened and formed, Antoinelle began to lose interest in the fairy. Instead, she had strange waking dreams of a flesh-and-blood soldier she had once glimpsed under the window, who, in her picturings, had to save her – not from any of the wild armies then at large – but from an escaped bear. .. and later came the prototypes of Justus, who kissed her until she swooned.

  Now Antoinelle had gone back to her clandestine youth. Along, in the room, its door shut, she blew out the lamp. She threw wide her window. Standing in the darkness, she pulled off her garments and tossed them down.

  The heat of the night was like damp velvet. The tips of her breasts rose like tight buds that wished to open.

  Her husband was old. She was young. She felt her youngness, and remembered her childhood with an inappropriate nostalgia.

  Vonderjan had thought something might get in at the window. She sensed this might be true.

  Antoinelle imagined that something climbed slowly up the creeper.

  She began to tremble, and went and lay down on her bed.

  She lay on her back, her hands lying lightly over her breasts, her legs a little apart.

  Perhaps after all Vonderjan might ignore her denials and come in. She would let him. Yes, after all she had stopped menstruating. She would not mind his being here. He liked so much to do things to her, to render her helpless, gasping and abandoned, his hands on her making her into his instrument, making her utter sounds, noises, making her come over and over. And she too liked this best. She liked to do nothing, simply to be made to respond, and so give way. In some other life she might have become the ideal fanatic, falling before the Godhead in fits whose real, spurious nature only the most sceptical could ever suspect. Conversely, partnered with a more selfish and less accomplished lover, with an ignorant Justus, for example, she might have been forced to do more, learned more, liked less. But that now was hypothetical.

  A breeze whispered at the window. (What does it say?)

  That dream she had had. What had that been? Was it her husband? No, it had been a man with black skin. But she had seen no one so black. A blackness without any translucence, with no blood inside it.

  Antoinelle drifted, in a sort of trance.

  She had wandered into a huge room with a wooden floor. The only thing in it was a piano. The air was full of a rapturous smell, like blossom, something which bloomed yet burned.

  She ran her fingers over the piano. The notes sounded clearly, but each was a voice. A genderless yet sexual voice, crying out as she touched it – now softly, excitedly, now harsh and demanding and desperate.

  She was lying on the beach below the Island. The sea was coming in, wave by wave – glissandi – each one the ripples of the wire harp-strings under the piano lid, or keys rippling as fingers scattered touches across them.

  Antoinelle had drained Gregers Vonderjan of all he might give her. She had sucked him dry of everything but his blood. It was his own fault, exalting in his power over her, wanting to make her a doll that would dance on his fingers’ end, penis’s end, power’s end.

  Her eyes opened, and, against the glass windows, she saw the piano standing, its lids lifted, its keys gleaming like appetite, black and white.

  Should she get up and play music on it? The keys would feel like skin.

  Then she knew that if she only lay still, the piano would come to her. She was its instrument, as she had been Vonderjan’s.

  The curtain blew. The piano shifted, and moved, but as it did so, its shape altered. Now it was not only a piano, but an animal.

  (Notes: Pianimal.)

  It was a beast. And then it melted and stood up, and the form it had taken now was that of a man.

  Stronn walked around the courtyard, around its corners, past the dry Spanish fountain. Tonight the husks of flowers scratched in the bowl, and sounded like water. Or else nocturnal lizards darted about there.

  There was only one light he could see in Gregers Vonderjan’s big house, the few candles left undoused in the salon.

  The orange trees on the gallery smelled bitter-sweet. Stronn did not want to go to bed. He was wide awake. In the old days, he might have had a game of cards with some of the blacks, or even with Vonderjan. But those times had ceased to be.

  He had thought he heard the white horse earlier, its shod hoofs going along the track between the rhododendrons. But now there was no sign of it. Doubtless one of the people on the Island would catch the horse and keep it. As for the other animal, the
one said to have escaped from a passing ship, Stronn did not really think it existed, or if it did, it would be something of no great importance.

  Now and then he heard the tinkling noise of hudja bells the people had hung on the banana trees. Then a fragment like piano music, but it was the bells again. Some nights the sea breathed as loudly up here as in the bay. Or a shout from one of the huts two miles off might seem just over a wall.

  He could hear the vrouw, certainly. But he was used to hearing that. Her squeaks and yowls, fetching off as Vonderjan shafted her. But she was a slut. The way she had come in tonight proved it, in her bedclothes. And she had never given the meester a son, not even tried to give him a child, like the missus (Uteka) had that time, only she had lost it, but she was never very healthy.

  A low thin wind blew along the cane fields, and Stronn could smell the coffee trees and the hairy odour of kayar.

  He went out of the yard, carrying his gun, thinking he was still looking for the white horse.

  A statue of black obsidian might look like this, polished like this.

  The faint luminescence of night, with its storm choked within it, is behind the figure. Starlight describes the outline of it, but only as it turns, moving towards her, do details of its forward surface catch any illumination.

  Yet too, all the while, adapting to the camouflage of its environment, it grows subtly more human, that is, more recognizable.

  For not entirely – remotely – human is it.

  Does she comprehend?

  From the head, a black pelt of hair waterfalls away around it, folding down its back like a cloak –

  The wide flat pectorals are coined each side three times. It is six-nippled, like a panther.

  Its legs move, columnar, heavily muscled and immensely vital, capable of great leaps and astonishing bounds, but walking, they give it the grace of a dancer.

  At first there seems to be nothing at its groin, just as it seems to have no features set into its face . . . except that the light had slid, once, twice, on the long rows of perfect teeth.

  But now it is at the bed’s foot, and out of the dark it has evolved, or made itself whole.

  A man’s face.

  The face of a handsome Justus, and of a Vonderjan in his stellar youth. A face of improbable mythic beauty, and opening in it, like two vents revealing the inner burning core of it, eyes of grey ice, which each blaze like the planet Venus.

  She can see now, it has four upper arms. They too are strong and muscular, also beautiful, like the dancer’s legs.

  The penis is large and upright, without a sheath, the black lotus bulb on a thick black stem. No change of shade. (No light, no inner blood.) Only the mercury-flame inside it, which only the eyes show.

  Several of the side teeth, up and down, are pointed sharply. The tongue is black. The inside of the mouth is black. And the four black shapely hands, with their twenty long, flexible fingers, have palms that are black as the death of light.

  It bends towards Antoinelle. It has the smell of night and of the Island, and of the sea. And also the scent of hot-house flowers, that came out of the piano. And a carnivorous smell, like fresh meat.

  It stands there, looking at her, as she lies on the bed.

  And on the floor, emerging from the pelt that falls from its head, the long black tail strokes softly now this way, now that way.

  Then the first pair of hands stretch over on to the bed, and after them the second pair, and fluidly it lifts itself and pours itself forward up the sheet, and up over the body of the girl, looking down at her as it does so, from its water-pale eyes. And its smooth body rasps on her legs, as it advances, and the big hard firm organ knocks on her thighs, hot as the body is cool.

  He walked behind her, obedient and terrified. The Island frightened him, but it was more than that. Nanetta was now like his mother (when she was young and slim, dominant and brutal). Once she turned, glaring at him, with the eyes of a lynx. “Hush. “ “But I –” he started to say, and she shook her head again, raging at him without words.

  She trod so noiselessly on her bare feet, which were the indigo colour of the sky in its darkness. And he blundered, try as he would.

  The forest held them in its tentacles. The top-heavy plantains loomed, their blades of black-bronze sometimes quivering. Tree limbs like enormous plaited snakes rolled upwards. Occasionally, mystically, he thought, he heard the sea.

  She was taking him to her people, who grasped what menaced them, its value if not its actual being, and could keep them safe.

  Barefoot and stripped of her jewels, she was attempting to go back into the knowingness of her innocence and her beginnings. But he had always been over-aware and a fool.

  They came into a glade of wild tamarinds – could it be called that? A glade? It was an aperture among the trees, but only because trees had been cut down. There was an altar, very low, with frangi-pani flowers, scented like confectionary, and something killed that had been picked clean. The hudja bells chimed from a nearby bough, the first he had seen. They sounded like the sistra of ancient Egypt, as the cane fields had recalled to him the notion of a temple.

  Nanetta bowed to the altar and went on, and he found he had crossed himself, just as he had done when a boy in church.

  It made him feel better, doing that, as if he had quickly thrown up and got rid of some poison in his heart.

  Vau I’eau, Vonderjan thought. Which meant, going downstream, to wrack and ruin.

  He could not sleep, and turned on his side to stare out through the window. The stars were so unnaturally clear. Bleumaneer was in the eye of the storm, the aperture at its centre. When this passed, weather would resume, the ever- threatening presence of tempest.

  He thought of the white horse, galloping about the Island, down its long stairways of hills and rock and forest, to the shore.

  Half asleep, despite his insomnia, there was now a split second when he saw the keys of a piano, descending like the levels of many black and white terraces.

  Then he was fully awake again.

  Vonderjan got up. He reached for the bottle of schnapps, and found it was empty.

  Perhaps he should go to her bed. She might have changed her mind. No, he did not want her tonight. He did not want anything, except to be left in peace.

  It seemed to him that after all he would be glad to be rid of every bit of it. His wealth, his manipulative powers. To live here alone, as the house fell gradually apart, without servants, or any authority or commitments. And without Anna.

  Had he been glad when Uteka eventually died? Yes, she had suffered so. And he had never known her. She was like a book he had meant to read, had begun to read several times, only to put it aside, unable to remember those pages he had already laboriously gone through.

  With Anna it was easy, but then, she was not a book at all. She was a demon he had himself invented (Vonderjan did not realize this, that even for a moment, he thought in this way), an oasis, after Uteka’s sexual desert, and so, like any fantasy, she could be sloughed at once. He had masturbated over her long enough, this too-young girl, with her serpentine body (apple-tree and tempting snake together), and her idealized pleas always for more.

  Now he wanted to leave the banquet table. To get up and go away and sleep and grow old, without such distractions.

  He thought he could hear her, though. Hear her fast-starved feeding breathing, and for once, this did not arouse him. And in any case it might not be Anna, but only the gasping of the sea, hurling herself far away, on the rocks and beaches of the Island.

  It – he – paints her lips with its long and slender tongue, which is black. Then it paints the inside of her mouth. The tongue is very narrow, sensitive, incites her gums, making her want to yawn, except that is not what she needs to do – but she stretches her body irresistibly.

  The first set of hands settles on her breasts.

  The second set of hands on her ribcage.

  Something flicks, flicks, between her thighs . . . not
the staff of the penis, but something more like a second tongue ...

  Antoinelle’s legs open and her head falls back. She makes a sound, but it is a bestial grunting that almost offends her, yet there is no room in her body or mind for that.

  “No –” she tries to say.

  The No means yes, in the case of Antoinelle. It is addressed, not to her partner, but to normal life, anything that may intrude, and warns Don’t interrupt.

  The black tongue wends, waking nerves of taste and smell in the roof of her mouth. She scents lakoum, pepper, ambergris and myrrh.

  The lower tongue, which may be some extra weapon of the tail, licks at a point of flame it has discovered, fixing a triangle with the fire-points of her breasts.

  He – it – slips into her, forces into her, bulging and huge as thunder.

  And the tail grasps her, muscular as any of its limbs, and, thick as the phallus, also penetrates her.

  The thing holds Antoinelle as she detonates about it, faints and cascades into darkness.

  Not until she begins to revive does it do more.

  The terror is, she comes to already primed, more than eager, her body spangled with frantic need, as if the first cataclysm were only – foreplay.

  And now the creature moves, riding her and making her ride, and they gallop down the night, and Antoinelle grins and shrieks, clinging to its obsidian form, her hands slipping, gripping. And as the second detonation begins, its face leaves her face, her mouth, and grows itself faceless and only mouth. And the mouth half rings her throat, a crescent moon, and the many side teeth pierce her, both the veins of her neck.

  A necklace of emeralds was nothing to this.

  Antoinelle drops from one precipice to another. She screams, and her screams crash through the house called Blue View, like sheets of blue glass breaking.

  It holds her. As her consciousness again goes out, it holds her very tight.

  And somewhere in the limbo where she swirls, fire on oil, guttering but not quenched, Antoinelle is raucously laughing with triumph at finding this other one, not her parasite, but her twin. Able to devour her as she devours, able to eat her alive as she has eaten or tried to eat others alive. But where Antoinelle has bled them out, this only drinks. It wastes nothing, not even Antoinelle.