Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  Yse is there, just inside the wall of glass above the terrace, standing with a tall heavy-set man, whose hair is almost white.

  He’s kissing her, on and on, and then they draw apart, and still she holds on to him, her head tilted back like a serpent’s, bonelessly, staring up into his face.

  From down in the channel between the lofts and towerettes, Lucius can’t make out the features of her lover. But then neither can he make out Yse’s facial features, only the tilt of her neck and the lush satin hair hanging down her back.

  Lucius sits in the boat, not paddling now, watching. His eyes are still and opaque.

  “What you doing, girl?”

  He knows perfectly well.

  And then they turn back, the two of them, further into the loft where the light still burns, although the light of dawn has gone, leaving only a salty stormy dusk.

  They will hardly make themselves separate from each other. They are together again and again, as if growing into one another.

  Lucius sees the piano, or that which had been a piano, has vanished from the loft. And after that he sees how the light of the guttering lamp hits suddenly up, like a striking cobra. And in the ray of the lamp, striking, the bulky figure of the man, with his black clothes and blond hair, becomes transparent as the glass sheets of the doors. It is possible to see directly, too, through him, clothes, hair, body, directly through to Yse, as she stands there, still holding on to what is now actually invisible, drawing it on, in, away, just before the lamp goes out and a shadow fills the room like night.

  As he is paddling away along the channel, Lucius thinks he hears a remote crash, out of time, like glass smashing in many pieces, but yesterday, or tomorrow.

  Things break.

  Just about sunset, the police come to find Lucius. They understand he has a key to the loft of a woman called Yse, (which they pronounce Jizz.)

  When they get to the loft, Lucius is aware they did not need the key, since the glass doors have both been blown outwards and down into the water-alley below. Huge shards and fragments decorate the terrace, and some are caught in the snake-willow like stars.

  A bored detective stands about, drinking coffee someone has made him on Yse’s reluctant stove. (The refrigerator has shut off, and is leaking a lake on the floor.)

  Lucius appears dismayed but innocuous. He goes about looking for something, which the other searchers, having dismissed him, are too involved to mark.

  There is no sign of Yse. The whole loft is vacant. There is no sign either of any disturbance, beyond the damaged doors which, they say to Lucius and each other, were smashed outwards but not by an explosive.

  “What are you looking for?” the detective asks Lucius, suddenly grasping what Lucius is at.

  “Huh?”

  “She have something of yours?”

  Lucius sees the detective is waking up. “No. Her book. She was writing.”

  “Oh, yeah? What kind of thing was that?”

  Lucius explains, and the detective loses interest again. He says they have seen nothing like that.

  And Lucius doesn’t find her manuscript, which he would have anticipated, any way, seeing instantly on her work-table. He does find a note – they say it is a note, a letter of some sort, although addressed to no one. It’s in her bed area, on the rug, which has been floated under the bed by escaped refrigerator fluid.

  ‘Why go on writing?’ asks the note, or letter, of the no one it has not addressed. ‘All your life waiting, and having to invent another life, or other lives, to make up for not having a life. Is that what God’s problem is?’

  Hearing this read at him. Lucius’ dead eyes reveal for a second they are not dead, only covered by a protective film. They all miss this.

  The detective flatly reads the note out, like a kid bad at reading, embarrassed and standing up in class. Where his feet are planted is the stain from the party, which, to Lucius’ for-a-moment-not-dead eyes, has the shape of a swimming, three-legged fish.

  “And she says, ‘I want more.’”

  ‘I want the terror and the passion, the power and the glory – not this low-key crap played only with one hand. Let me point out to someone, Yse is an anagram of Yes. I’ll drown my book. ‘

  “I guess,” says the detective, “she didn’t sell.”

  They let Lucius go with some kind of veiled threat he knows is only offered to make themselves feel safe.

  He takes the water-bus over to the Café Blonde, and as the sunset ends and night becomes, tells one or two what he saw, as he has not told the cops from the tide-less upper city.

  Lucius has met them all. Angels, demons.

  “As the light went through him, he wasn’t there. He’s like glass.”

  Carr says, slyly (inappropriately – or with deadly perception?), “No vampire gonna reflect in a glass.”

  12: Carried Away

  When the ship came, they took the people out, rowing them in groups, in the two boats. The man Stronn had also appeared, looking dazed, and the old housekeeper, and others. No questions were asked of them. The ship took the livestock, too.

  Jeanjacques was glad they were so amenable, the black haughty master wanting conscientiously to assist his own, and so helping the rest.

  All the time they had sheltered in the rickety customs buildings of the old port, a storm banged round the coast. This kept other things away, it must have done. They saw nothing but the feathers of palm boughs blown through the air and crashing trunks that toppled in the high surf, which was grey as smashed glass.

  In the metallic after-storm morning, Jeanjacques walked down the beach, the last to leave, waiting for the last boat, confident.

  Activity went on at the sea’s edge, sailors rolling a barrel, Nanetta standing straight under a yellow sunshade, a fine lady, barefoot but proud. (She had shown him the jewels she had after all brought with her, squeezed in her sash, not the ruby earrings, but a golden hairpin, and the emerald necklace that had belonged to Vonderjan’s vrouw.)

  He never thought, now, to see anything, Jeanjacques, so clever, so accomplished at survival.

  But he saw it.

  Where the forest came down on to the beach, and caves opened under the limestone, and then rocks reared up, white rocks and black, with the curiously quiescent waves glimmering in and out around them.

  There had been nothing. He would have sworn to that. As if the reality of the coarse storm had scoured all such stuff away.

  And then, there she was, sitting on the rock.

  She shone in a way that, perhaps one and a quarter centuries after, could have been described as radioactively.

  Jeanjacques did not know that word. He decided that she gleamed. Her hard pale skin and mass of pale hair, gleaming.

  She looked old. Yet she looked too young. She was not human-looking, nor animal.

  Her legs were spread wide in the skirt of her white dress. So loose was the gown at her bosom, that he could see much of her breasts. She was doing nothing at all, only sitting there, alone, and she grinned at him, all her white teeth, so even, and her black eyes like slits in the world.

  But she cast a black shadow, and gradually the shadow was embracing her. And he saw her turning over into it like the moon into eclipse. If she had any blood left in her, if she had ever been Antoinelle – these things he ignored. But her grinning and her eyes and the shadow and her turning inside out within the shadow – from these things he ran away.

  He ran to the line of breakers, where the barrels were being rolled into a boat. To Nanetta’s sunflower sunshade. And he seemed to burst through a sort of curtain, and his muscles gave way. He fell nearby, and she glanced at him, the black woman, and shrank away.

  “It’s all right –” he cried. He thought she must not see what he had seen, and that they might leave him here. “I missed my footing,” he whined, “that’s all.”

  And when the boat went out, they let him go with it.

  The great sails shouldered up into the sky. The master lo
oked Jeanjacques over, before moving his gaze after Nanetta. (Stronn had avoided them. The other whites, and the housekeeper, had hidden themselves somewhere below, like stowaways.)

  “How did you find him, that Dutchman?” the master asked idly.

  “As you said. Vonderjan was falling.”

  “What was the other trouble here? They act like it was a plague, but that’s not so.” (Malignly Jeanjacques noted the master too was excluded from the empathy of the Island people.) “No,” the master went on, bombastically, “if you sick, I’d never take you on, none of you.”

  Jeanjacques felt a little better. “The Island’s gone bad,” he muttered. He would look, though, only up into the sails. They were another sort of white to the white thing he had seen on the rock. As the master was another sort of black.

  “Gone bad? They do. Land does go bad. Like men.”

  Are they setting sail? Every grain of sand on the beach behind is rising up. Every mote of light, buzzing –

  Oh God – Pater noster – libera me –

  The ship strode from the bay. She carved her path into the deep sea, and through his inner ear, Jeanjacques hears the small bells singing. Yet that is little enough, to carry away from such a place.

  13

  Seven months after, he heard the story, and some of the newspapers had it too. A piano had been washed up off the Sound, on the beach at the Abacus Tower. And inside the lid, when they hacked it open, a woman’s body was curled up, tiny, and hard as iron. She was Caucasian, middle-aged, rather heavy when alive, now not heavy at all, since there was no blood, and not a single whole bone, left inside her.

  Sharks, they said. Sharks are clever. They can get inside a closed piano and out again. And they bite.

  As for the piano, it was missing – vandals had destroyed it, burned it, taken it off.

  Sometimes strangers ask Lucius where Yse went to. He has nothing to tell them. (“She disappears?” they ask him again. And Lucius once more says nothing.)

  And in that way, resembling her last book, Yse disappeared, disappears, is disappearing. Which can happen, in any tense you like.

  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 Jeanjacques sees her, the woman, sitting on the rock, her white dress and 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.’

  The Isle is Full of Noises

  Chosen by Sarah Singleton

  In essence, “The Isle is Full of Noises” is a novella about a vampire piano. Around this unlikely kernel is wrapped a complex, erotic, surreal and lyrical meditation about desire, imagination, frustration and the power of creativity – specifically, about writing. It is also, in my reading, an intensely personal story and within its arcane twists, word-play and the many oceanic fathoms of its depths, I see Tanith, and I hear her voice, and her exploration of what it means to write and the boundaries, or lack of them, between the creations of the imagination and the experience of an objective reality.

  This thoroughly postmodern novella introduces the main character, Yse, a writer living in an island-apartment in an inundated city of the near future, and the process of her creation of a story – about another island, an unspecific post-colonial Caribbean island, in the (probably) first half of the 19th century. Two texts are referenced: Wide Sargasso Sea is woven into the fabric of Yse’s story, with Rhys’s ‘madwoman’ Antoinette becoming Antoinelle, and, of course, The Tempest, from which the story takes not only its title, the island location, but also the explicit reference to Prospero, the ageing magician-creator. The framing story is told in the present tense and here we are aware of the voice of an omniscient narrator (‘Best to describe Yse at this point…’) so even as we engage with the fictional writer and read the story this fictional author is writing, there is another, exterior voice reminding us this is all a fabulous construct.

  It is difficult for me not to picture the writer Yse as Lee herself, even down to the physical description, and this is compounded by the appearance of the man Per Laszd, an actor Yse has long been obsessed with. Yse uses him in her writing, recreates and controls him, giving him life in the character of Gregers Vonderjan. In interviews, Lee has mentioned her obsession with Dutch actor Rutger Hauer (Vonderjan – tall, powerful, his hair ‘a mass of silvery blond’) and explained how she has cast Hauer in her novels (Malach in ‘Personal Darkness’, Hassinger in ‘When the Lights Go Out’) in just the same way. So into the layers – Rutger Hauer becomes Per Laszd, who is cast as Vonderjan (who is also Rochester and Prospero ‘shut up on his enchanted island’).

  Yse feels ‘slight guilt’ for using the fictional Per Laszd in her stories (and destroying him in this one) and it is hard not to wonder if Lee felt the same with the way she ‘used’ Hauer. And yet, at the end of the framing narrative, Yse has her wish come true. Her (fictional) reality breaks down and Per Laszd appears, fulfilling her fantasy and sweeping her into his arms. At this point she disappears from the story and the invented inundated world. Her final thoughts – ‘None of us escape, do we?’ – are deliberately ambiguous. Are they hers, or do they come from the omniscient narrator? From Lee?

  Yse’s friend Lucius picks up a note that was left behind, and again it is hard for me not to hear Lee’s own voice, and her frustration (perhaps my projection, as I read this first when she was already struggling with ill-health, and it has a terrible poignancy for me): “Why go on writing?... All your life waiting, and having to invent another life, or other lives, to make up for not having a life. Is that what God’s problem is?” And then: ‘I want more. I want the terror and the passion, the power and the glory – not this low-key crap played only with one hand.’

  I could write so much about this story – the complex imagery, the use of colour (particularly black and white) the intense eroticism, a feminist reading, a post-colonial reading – but more than anything, it is this sense I have of Lee’s own voice, thoughts and passion that makes it so moving. Those reviews of it I have read have not been effusive; some reviewers have found it overly complex or even dull – but for me, it is a story of beauty, depth, inventiveness, passion and searing honesty.

  – Sarah Singleton

  Publisher’s Acknowledgement

  Thank you to all who have made this project possible; to Craig Gidney, Mavis Haut, Stephen Jones, Vera Nazarian, Sarah Singleton, Kari Sperring, Sam Stone, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Freda Warrington, and Nadia Van Der Westerhuizen for their careful selections and fascinating story notes, to Storm Constantine for both her choice and her constant support, to Allison Rich for her selection and her keen editorial eye, and to John Kaiine, not only for his artwork and his story choice but also for his willingness to see this volume come into being.

  Most of all, of course, thank you to Tanith Lee, who continues to populate the world with her words and her wonder.

  – Ian Whates

  NewCon Press

  Colder Greyer Stones

  Tanith Lee

  1. Introduction

  2. Clockatrice

  3. Malicious Springs

  4. The Greyve

  5. The Heart of Ice

  6. Calinnen

  7. En Forêt Noire

  8. Fr’eulogy

  9. The God Orkrem

  10. In the Country of the Blind

  11. My Heart: A Stone

  12. Killing Her

  13. The Frost Watcher

  About the Author

  A unique collection of twelve stories from Britain’s foremost Mistress of the Fantastic; all are previously uncollected, two have never appeared in print before and six stories are wholly original to this collection., including the bon
us novelette “The Frost Watcher”. The first paperback edition of Colder Greyer Stones was released in November 2013 to commemorate the author being honoured at that year’s World Fantasy Convention with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’.

  Available now from NewCon Press

  A5 paperback: £9.99

  www.newconpress.co.uk

  Splinters of Truth

  Storm Constantine

  Storm Constantine is one of our finest writers of genre fiction. This new collection, Splinters of Truth, features fifteen stories, four of them original to this volume, that transport the reader to richly imagined realms one moment and shine a light on our own world’s darkest corners the next. A writer of rare passion, Storm delivers here some of her most accomplished work to date.

  “Constantine’s talent for twisting the mundane and making it dark and delicious shines out on each page”

  – Starburst

  Cover art by Danielle Lainton

  “Storm Constantine is a myth-making Gothic queen. Her stories are poetic, involving, delightful and depraved. I wouldn’t swap her for a dozen Anne Rices.” – Neil Gaiman

  “Storm Constantine… is a daring romantic sensualist, as well as a fine storyteller.” – Poppy Z Brite

  “Storm Constantine is a literary fantasist of outstanding power and originality. Her work is rich, idiosyncratic and completely engaging. Her themes have much in common with Philip K Dick – the nature of identify, the nature of reality, the creative power of the human imagination – while her sensibility reminds me of Angela Carter at her most inventive.” – Michael Moorcock