by Tanith Lee
More – more – She can never have enough.
Then it tickles her with flame so she thrashes and yelps. Its fangs fastened in her, it bears her on, fastened in turn to it.
She is arched like a bridge, carrying the travelling shadow on her body. Pinned together, in eclipse, these dancers.
More –
It gives her more. And indescribably yet more.
If she were any longer human, she would be split and eviscerated, and her spine snapped along its centre three times.
Her hands have fast hold of it. Which – it or she – is the most tenacious? Where it travels, so will she.
But for all the more, there is no more thought. If ever there was thought.
When she was fourteen, she saw all this, in her prophetic mirror, saw what she was made for and must have.
Perhaps many thousands of us are only that, victim or predator, interchangeable.
Seen from above: Antoinelle is scarcely visible. Just the edges of her flailing feet, her contorted forehead and glistening strands of hair. And her clutching claws. (Shockingly, she makes the sounds of a pig, grunting, snorting.)
The rest of her is covered by darkness, by something most like a manta ray out of the sea, or some black amoeba.
Then she is growling and grunting so loudly, on and on, that the looking-glass breaks on her toilette table as if unable to stand the sound, while out in the night forest birds shrill and fly away.
More – always more. Don’t stop – Never stop.
There is no need to stop. It has killed her, she is dead, she is re-alive and death is lost on her, she is all she has ever wished to be – nothing.
“Dearest... are you awake?
He lifts his head from his arm. He has slept.
“What is it?” Who are you? Has she ever called him dear before?
“Here I am,” she says, whoever she is. But she is his Anna.
He does not want her. Never wanted her.
He thinks she is wearing the emerald necklace, something burning about her throat. She is white as bone. And her dark eyes – have paled to Venus eyes, watching him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Perhaps later.”
“I know.”
Vonderjan falls asleep again quickly, lying on his back. Then Antoinelle slides up on top of him. She is not heavy, but he is; it impedes his breathing, her little weight.
Finally she puts her face to his, her mouth over his.
She smothers him mostly with her face, closing off his nostrils with the pressure of her cheek, and one narrow hand, and her mouth sidelong to his, and her breasts on his heart.
He does not wake again. At last his body spasms sluggishly, like the last death-throe of orgasm. Nothing else.
After his breathing has ended, still she lies there, Venus-eyed, and the dawn begins to come. Antoinelle casts a black, black shadow. Like all shadows, it is attached to her. Attached very closely.
Is this her shadow, or is she the white shadow of it?
9
Having sat for ten minutes, no longer writing, holding her pen upright, Yse sighs, and drops it, like something unpleasant, dank or sticky.
The story’s erotographic motif, at first stimulating, had become, as it must, repulsive. Disgusting her – also as it should.
And the murder of Vonderjan, presented deliberately almost as an afterthought (stifled under the slight white pillar of his succubus wife).
Aloud, Yse says almost angrily, “Now surely I’ve used him up. All up. All over. Per Laszd, I can’t do another thing with you or to you. But then, you’ve used me up too, yes you did, you have, even though you’ve never been near me. Mutual annihilation. That Yse is over with.”
Then Yse rises, leaving the manuscript, and goes to make tea. But her generator, since the party, (when the music machine had been hooked into it by that madman, Carr) is skittish. The stove won’t work. She leaves it, and pours instead a warm soda from the now improperly-working fridge.
It is night time, or morning, about three-fifty a.m.
Yse switches on her small TV, which works on a solar battery and obliges.
And there, on the first of the fifteen mainland (upper city) channels, is he – is Per Laszd. Not in his persona of dead trampled Gregers Vonderjan, but that of his own dangerous self.
She stands on the floor, dumbfounded, yet not, not really. Of course, who else would come before her at this hour.
He looks well, healthy and tanned. He’s even shed some weight.
It seems to be a talk show, something normally Yse would avoid – they bore her. And the revelation of those she sometimes admires as over-ordinary or distasteful, disillusions and frustrates her.
But him she has always watched, on a screen, across a room when able, or in her own head. Him, she knows. He could not disillusion her, or put her off.
And tonight, there is something new. The talk has veered round to the other three guests – to whom she pays no attention – and so to music. And now the TV show’s host is asking Per Laszd to use the piano, that grand piano over there.
Per Laszd gets up and walks over to this studio piano, looking, Yse thinks, faintly irritated, because obviously this has been sprung on him and is not what he is about, or at least not publicly, but he will do it from a good showman’s common sense.
He plays well, some melody Yse knows, a popular song she can’t place. He improvises, his large hands and strong fingers jumping sure and finely-trained about the keyboard. Just the one short piece, concluded with a sarcastic flourish, after which he stands up again. The audience, delighted by any novelty, applauds madly, while the host and other guests are all calling encore! (more! More! Again – don’t stop –) But Laszd is not manipulable, not truly. Gracious yet immovable, he returns to his seat. And after that a pretty girl with an unimportant voice comes on to sing, and then the show is done.
Yse finds herself enraged. She switches off the set, and slams down the tepid soda. She paces this end of her loft. While by the doors, forty feet away, the piano dredged from the Sound still stands, balanced on its forefeet and its phallic tail, hung in shade and shadow. It has been here more than a month. It’s nearly invisible.
So why this now? This TV stunt put on by Fate? Why show her this, now? As if to congratulate her, giving her a horrible mean little failed-runner’s-up patronizing non-prize. Per Laszd can play the piano.
Damn Per Laszd.
She is sick of him. Perhaps in every sense. But of course, she still wants him. Always will.
And what now?
She will never sleep. It’s too late or early to go out.
She circles back to her writing, looks at it, sits, touches the page. But why bother to write any more?
Vonderjan was like the enchanter Prospero, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, shut up there on his sorcerous Island, infested with sprites and elementals. Prospero too kept close a strange young woman, who in the magician’s case had been his own daughter. But then arrived a shipwrecked prince out of the sea, to take the responsibility off Prospero’s hands.
(Per’s hands on the piano keys. Playing them. A wonderful amateur, all so facile, no trouble at all. He is married, and has been for twelve years. Yse has always known this.)
Far out on the Sound, a boat moos eerily.
Though she has frequently heard such a thing, Yse starts.
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
She can no longer smell the perfume, like night- blooming vines. When did that stop? (Don’t stop.)
Melted into air, into thin air ...
10: Passover
They had roped the hut-house round, outside and in, with their amulets and charms. There were coloured feathers and dried grasses, cogs of wood rough-carved, bones and sprinkles of salt and rum, and of blood, as in the Communion. When they reached the door, she on her bare, navy-blue feet, Jeanjacques felt all the forest press at their backs. And inside th
e hut, the silver-ringed eyes, staring in affright like the staring stars. But presently her people let her in, and let him in as well, without argument. And he thought of the houses of the Chosen in Egypt, their lintels marked by blood, to show the Angel of Death he must pass by.
He, as she did, sat down on the earth floor. (He noted the earth floor, and the contrasting wooden bed, with its elaborate posts. And the two shrines, one to the Virgin, and one to another female deity.)
Nothing was said beyond a scurry of whispered words in the patois. There were thirty other people crammed in the house, with a crèche of chickens and two goats. Fear smelled thick and hot, but there was something else, some vital possibility of courage and cohesion. They clung together soul to soul, their bodies only barely brushing, and Jeanjacques was glad to be in their midst, and when the fat woman came and gave him a gourd of liquor, he shed tears, and she patted his head, calming him a little, like a dog hiding under its mistress’s chair.
In the end he must have slept. He saw someone looking at him, the pale icy eyes blue as murder.
Waking with a start, he found everyone and thing in the hut tense and compressed, listening, as something circled round outside. Then it snorted and blew against the wall of the hut- house, and all the interior stars of eyes flashed with their terror. And Jeanjacques felt his heart clamp on to the side of his body, as if afraid to fall.
Even so, he knew what it was, and when all at once it retreated and galloped away on its shod hoofs, he said quietly, “His horse.”
But no one answered him, or took any notice of what he had said, and Jeanjacques discovered himself thinking. After all, it might take that form, a white horse. Or she might be riding on the white horse.
He began to ponder the way he must go in the morning, descending towards the bay. He should reach the sea well in advance of nightfall. The ship would come back, today or tomorrow. Soon. And there were the old buildings, on the beach, where he could make a shelter. He could even jump into the sea and swim out. There was a little reef, and rocks.
It had come from the sea, and would avoid going back to the sea, surely, at least for some while.
He knew it was not interested in him, knew that almost certainly it would not approach him with any purpose. But he could not bear to see it. That was the thing. And it seemed to him the people of the Island, and in the hut, even the chickens, the goats, and elsewhere the birds and fauna, felt as he did. They did not want to see it, even glimpse it. If the fabric of this world were tom open in one place on a black gaping hole of infinite darkness, you hid your eyes, you went far away.
After that, he started to notice bundles of possessions stacked up in comers. He realized not he alone would be going down the Island to the sea.
Dreaming again, he beheld animals swimming in waves away from shore, and birds flying away, as if from a zone of earthquake, or the presage of some volcanic eruption.
Nanetta nudged him.
“Will you take me to St Paul’s Island?”
“Yes.”
“I have a sister there.”
He had been here on a clerk’s errand. He thought, ridiculously, Now I won’t be paid. And he was glad at this wince of anxious annoyance. Its normalcy and reason.
11
Per Laszd played Bach very well, with just the right detached, solemn cheerfulness.
It was what she would have expected him to play. Something like this. Less so the snatch of a popular tune he had offered the talk show audience so flippantly. (But a piano does what you want, makes the sounds you make it give – even true, she thinks, should you make a mistake – for then that is what it gives you. Your mistake.)
As Yse raised her eyes, she saw across the dim sphere of her loft, still wrapped in the last flimsy paper of night, a lamp stood glowing by the piano, both of whose lids were raised. Her stomach jolted and the pain of shock rushed through her body.
“Lucius –?”
He was the only other who held a key to her loft. She trusted Lucius, who any way had never used the key, except once, when she was gone for a week, to enter and water her (dying) plants, and fill her (then operable) refrigerator with croissants, mangoes and white wine.
And Lucius didn’t play the piano. He had told her, once. His amouretta, as he called it, was the drum.
Besides, the piano player had not reacted when she called, not ceased his performance. Not until he brought the twinkling phrases to their finish.
Then the large hands stepped back off the keys, he pushed away the chair he must have carried there, and stood up.
The raised carapace of the piano’s hind lid still obscured him, all but that flame of light which veered across the shining pallor of his hair.
Yse had got to her feet. She felt incredibly young, light as thin air. The thick silk of her hair brushed round her face, her shoulders, and she pulled in her flat stomach and raised her head on its long throat. She was frightened by the excitement in herself, and excited by the fear. She wasn’t dreaming. She had always known, when she dreamed of him.
And there was no warning voice, because long ago she had left all such redundant noises behind.
Per Laszd walked around the piano. “Hallo, Yse,” he said.
She said nothing. Perhaps could not speak. There seemed no point. She had said so much.
But “Here I am,” he said.
There he was.
There was no doubt at all. The low lamp flung up against him. He wore the loose dark suit he had put on for the TV program, as if he had come straight here from the studio. He dwarfed everything in the loft.
“Why?” she said, after all.
She too was entitled to be flippant, surely.
“Why? Don’t you know? You brought me here.” He smiled. “Don’t you love me any more?”
He was wooing her.
She glanced around her, made herself see everything as she had left it, the washed plate and glass by the sink, the soda can on the table, her manuscript lying there, and the pen. Beyond an angle of a wall, a corridor to other rooms.
And below the floor, barracuda swimming through the girders of a flooded building.
But the thin air sparkled as if full of champagne.
“Well, Yse,” he said again, “here I am.”
“But you are not you. “
“You don’t say. Can you be certain? How am I different?”
“You’re what I’ve made, and conjured up.”
“I thought it was,” he said, in his dry amused voice she had never forgotten, “more personal than that.”
“He is somewhere miles off. In another country.”
“This is another country,” he said, “to me.”
She liked it, this breathless fencing with him. Liked his persuading her. Don’t stop.
The piano had not been able to open – or be opened – until he – or she – was ready. (Foreplay.) And out of the piano, came her demon. What was he? What?
She didn’t care. If it were not him, yet it was, him. So she said, archly, “And your wife?”
“As you see, she had another engagement.”
“With you, there. Wherever you are.”
“Let me tell you,” he said, “why I’ve called here.”
There was no break in the transmission of this scene, she saw him walk away from the piano, start across the floor, and she did the same. Then they were near the window-doors. He was standing over her. He was vast, overpowering, beautiful.
More beautiful, now she could see the strands of his hair, the pores of his skin, a hundred tiniest imperfections – and the whole exquisite manufacture of a human thing, so close. And she was rational enough to analyse all this, and his beauty, and his power over her; or pedantic enough. He smelled wonderful to her as well, more than his clean fitness and his masculinity, or any expensive cosmetic he had used (for her?) It was the scent discernable only by a lover, caused by her chemistry, not his. Unless she had made him want her, too.
But of course he wanted
her. She could see it in his eyes, their blue view bent only on her.
If he might have seemed old to an Antoinelle of barely sixteen, to Yse this man was simply her peer. And yet too he was like his younger self, clad again in that searing charisma which had later lessened, or changed its course.
He took her hand, picked it up. Toyed with her hand as Vonderjan had done with the hand of the girl Yse had permitted to destroy him.
“I’m here for you,” he said.
“But I don’t know you.”
“Backwards,” he said. “You’ve made it your business. You’ve bid for me,” he said, “and you’ve got me.”
“No,” she said, “no, no I haven’t.”
“Let me show you.”
She had known of that almost occult quality. With what he wanted in the sexual way, he could communicate some telepathic echo of his desires. As his mouth covered and clasped hers, this delirium was what she felt, combining with her own.
She had always known his kisses would be like this, the ground flying off from her feet, swept up and held only by him in the midst of a spinning void, where she became part of him and wanted nothing else, where she became what she had always wanted... nothing.
To be nothing, borne by this flooding sea, no thought, no anchor, and no chains.
So Antoinelle, as her vampire penetrated, drank, emptied, reformed her.
So Yse, in her vampire’s arms.
It’s how they make us feel.
“No,” she murmurs, sinking deeper and deeper into his body, drowning as the island will, one day (five years, twenty).
None of us escape, do we?
Dawn is often very short and ineffectual here, as if to recompense the dark for those long sunsets we have.
Lucius, bringing his boat in to West Ridge from a night’s fishing and drinking out in the Sound, sees a light still burning up there, bright as the quick green dawn. All Yse’s blinds are up, showing the glass loft, translucent, like a jewel. Over the terrace the snake tree hangs its hair in the water and ribbons of apple-green light tremble through its coils.