by Tanith Lee
She’d had nobody she could confide in. Those years ate her away. The three years when it was starting in Easterly, and the four years on Hammerhead Plateau. Did I say she had no one to confide in? That wasn’t strictly accurate. Sister Cassi was permanently on-planet by then, living with her husband in Ares, and him building up the Koberman Corporation. Momma must have written Cassi quite a lot. I don’t think she spelled it out, the huge unbelieved terror that lowered over her days and her nights. But I suppose it was there, if you’d looked through the written lines at the howling fear behind. Cassi hadn’t looked, then. Cassi had been tuned in to her man and his money, though she wrote so seldom we didn’t really know about that. (She never even wrote us when he died.) Only at the end had Cassi presumably reread my mother’s letters or re-dreamed them. And the angels had told her what I was, and she’d accepted their word.
The house at Easterly was isolated, twenty miles from Hammerlake, and five from the nearest flyer-halt. And it was only semi-mechanized. The ordinary mail came once a month, unless you went to town for it, but there wasn’t much mail. Only registered parcels (few) and stellas (none) came to the door. The rest was left lying in the mail basket with the groceries half a mile off, where the road goes by. Hammerhead was a wild place, too. Wolves on the uplands, a dam project and dredging complex on the rim of the lake town, and bars like yellow musical boxes and those girls that somehow nobody ever properly legalized here, who still copy vamps of centuries ago, red nails, tinsel hair, winter eyes.
My mother chose the house from a catalog. Did she realize how cunning she was to choose just this house in this spot, or did she hide away the cunning, too?
There wasn’t much cash left by then, enough to get by and to add a handful of improvements, button-doors, air-conditioning, dust-eaters. (There was dust in Cassi’s library. By now, dust also is fashionable again.) I got my tape deck. I’d lie on the parlor floor and listen. Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Vaeder, Nils. My music frightened my mother. It was the emanation, to her, or stimulus of my madness. She couldn’t see it as balm, analgesic. She’d move to the other end of the house when I played music.
She’d try to get me to eat. I must have anorexia nervosa, now. She thought I made myself sick deliberately. I found ways to pretend, and she let herself be fooled. I’d take meals in my room, and tip them in a plastic box I kept for the purpose under the bed, and later I’d empty the box in the primitive incinerator resident behind the kitchen. School finishes on the pink planet at about thirteen or fourteen anyway, and after that you go on to mature studies at your own discretion. That could be done in the house with mailed library tapes and TV. That was safe. In the back yard, under the fifteen-foot orange tree, there was an old swing. Momma used to sit at her bedroom window and stare down at me, my nighttime insomniac swinging, swinging. When the swing was empty, she’d search the house. Often, the swing was empty.
I could run for miles on the ridges and over the star-blanched sands, among the rifts and through the fern-clotted, shade-thick canyons. I was never afraid. It was country I could comprehend, where no one knew me. Big cities are the same, you see. I learned how to hunt in the wilderness, the corridors of night, and on the things I hunted, I learned how not to kill, though it’s harder with the animals, who sense the hunter from afar off, who, even when they lie down helpless in the pools of your eyes, are tensed to fly. And besides, there’s no sexual communion to bind them, it has to be an act of sabotage.
One day when I was fifteen, they were repairing the road to Hammerlake Halt, and working half a mile down the slope from the house. My bedroom faced that way, and I’d looked through the blue blind, and the blued dust haze, and made out their shadows, the two men with their robot equipment. Then came this dulled-over day, sky a deep rose parasol against the sun, and I went down the road and sat on a stone, and watched. Perhaps they’d heard about a girl in the house and were keyed up to it. They turned their copper-skinned male bodies and they looked at me, and they smiled and offered me a beer.
It happens very naturally. If there are two, one is drawn more readily than the other, whichever I want the most. His name was Frank. He came back after it got dark, whistling softly, in a clean shirt. We went up into the hills, up head-on into the crushed powder of starshine. I liked him. He was thoughtful and curiously well-mannered. He told me I was Shakespeare’s Juliet and I killed him and I was sorry. It was because he was the first, after so long. I couldn’t stop myself. And—I liked the power over him, what happened to him, the way he clung to me.
I sat and cried, holding his hand, but his white upturned eyeballs glared like parodies of the stars.
I’d frequently heard the wolves. You can always hear them from the house. At certain seasons they fill the hills like blown sand, at others they drift away toward Brade, or westward to Montiba. But that night they were suddenly all around me, just red star clusters under the white.
I wasn’t afraid of, them. I didn’t put it in a sentence in my head, but I understood nevertheless. They and I. Cassi had it right. One of the wolves, Sabella.
Delicate as clouds, they began to shiver down to me, and like a cloud they settled on Frank, and hid him and what they did.
Earth-imported animals don’t feed on the dead. But the wolves of Novo Mars will take a fresh kill, at least from me.
The local TV news had it: Young robot-ganger savaged by wolves.
The wolves will kill, anyway. People have died through the wolves. Periodically men stray with a weapon which doesn’t fire, or in ignorance without, to meet a girl. Later, other men hunt the wolves, and the night sky leers with gun flashes.
When I was sixteen, Aunt Cassi sent me a check.
I bought some dresses and a box of face paint. I bleached my hair. I could get to town in three hours, running. I can run, a slow run, a lope, for hours. And I could look like a free-lance bar-girl. I went with the itinerants where I could, men who wouldn’t be missed. We rode back in solar jeeps, in runners, in old-fashioned gas-tanked mobiles, into the wide spaces of Hammerhead. But soon I learned to take a little, only that, and then I learned the other thing, that they’d come after me for more, they’d beg me. They thought they were begging to screw me, but they were begging to die. Only three ever tracked me to the house. One beat me. He slashed me across my back and stomach, yelling. He pulled me under the orange tree and raped me and somehow I didn’t touch him, and he got up roaring I was no frecking good anymore, and he went away. My mother was in the house, on her knees. I’d had a toy, one of those loose-limbed things children cart around. Somehow she’d found it, and there she knelt, hugging it to her, and crying, and she said to me, “What you’re doing to yourself—oh, Bel, Bel, what you’re doing.” But she was speaking to the toy. And not so long after, she died and fell down in the crimson blood pool of the old window. Momma. Momma.
* * *
* * *
I walked home from the Halt through the morning. I felt strong. I could take the sun because I was appeased. But around three-quarters of an hour on the road, in the shining pink dusts, filed my nerves. There was a gas storm up over Smokey, the mountain that holds up the sky beyond Montiba. The gas storms start when the oxygen filler sufficiently irritates the Martian stratos, generally at the level where high lands probe the upper air. The sky veiled over a little, and claps sounded, and a big pale wind blew across my left cheek.
When I approached the house, I was bone-weary. When I’d seen the shape of it, the tall blind-sealed windows, the orange tree in a marigold of bloom, it was as if I’d been away a year. The tension went out of my sinews and I could have dropped.
I tabbed the door, but before I went in, I sat a minute on the porch on the lacework bench. The storm was building, a storm by Vaeder or Stravinsky. Dust creamed by the house, the wind made a sound like a sea, or as a sea sounds to me who has only heard it on a tape: Audioscapes of Earth. Vol. 2. There might be rain later. Rain, but nothing else.
The guilt wasn’t so bad now, because there was no need for too much guilt, and presently the gnawing, the need, would go away, as Sand’s need for me would go.
I went in, and closed up, and I was really secure at last.
My bed is a copy of an old four-poster. Carved doves and pineapples decorate these posts, and navy gauzes hang down. There is only space else in the room for the vanity table blocking the window with its litter and its mirror. I can see myself in mirrors. The idea that I might not comes from the same myth that says vampires cast no shadow. Shadow and mirror image are both primitive ciphers for the soul. The myth implies a vampire has no soul. Maybe I haven’t, but I’ve met others who surely haven’t too. We all cast shadows, we all show in glass.
On the other plaster wall, where I could see it through the gauze, was the picture.
It was the reproduction of a holy picture, painted by a medieval artist in the days when there was only one world, and they thought it was flat. It depicts Mara, the mother of Christ. Her name means bitterness. But God is telling her she is going to conceive immaculately, and the artist has used the then-popular symbol of the pencil-thin ray of light piercing the crystal goblet in her hands—piercing but not breaking. The analogy is flawless and beautiful. Her head’s tilted back and she’s so happy, so exalted, but it won’t last. Mara-bitter. Her child will suffer. A mother always takes it hard.
* * *
* * *
I woke in the initial blush of night. The storm was over. The utter stillness of the wilderness hung like a velvet canopy on the house, the land.
I had a vague cramp in my stomach, but that was nothing, and would pass. But as I lay there in the deep dark, I could see starlight through the blinds, licking the oddments on the vanity table. And I recalled it was Cassi’s birthday check that bought me my disguise as a bar-girl. Then I wondered about the credits again, but pushed them mentally aside, because she’d gone crazy, and that was why she’d threatened with one hand, gifted with the other.
And then I wondered about the town, the neons, and the boys who called after me, and the way my tongue burned as if a drop of flame were on the tip of it. I thought of how I had them. How I drank them. Breathed them. I thought of Sand.
I got up and shivered, and went downstairs in antique Earth-model jeans and shirt. Perhaps I’ll go out tonight. Perhaps the deer are running, Montiba way, where the corrals lie like supper tables on the rouge-black rocky meadows.
I got some real orange juice from the freezer and put it through the thaw box and drank it. I took a cigarette from the carton. They had each a couple of grains of the synthetic hash you can buy at any druggist’s. I smoked, and the cramp dulled in my belly.
My coffee-black hair showed natural highlights like pale brass reflecting in the windows. Remember when it was acid-drop blonde, Sabella?
The stone glittered between my breasts. It was only rosewater then, pallid, dying, the rich scarlet sunk away. Faithful barometer. Once it was always red, sometimes so red it was a coal, a wolf’s eye.
I put a tone poem by Nils on the music deck.
I shut my eyes, and saw myself alone in this house for sixty years.
I waited till the Nils was done, then switched off the deck. I crossed the hall and buttoned open the door and stepped out on the porch.
And as I stood there, facing down the slope toward the road, I saw a pinprick of light ghosting along the road’s surface, coming from the east, from Hammer-lake.
Traffic goes by on that road at night, not often, now and then. But this car came level with the dirt track that swivels up from the road, and the car swiveled with it. The car was coming for me.
The headlight threw a blank page of light across the house and went out. The car parked about forty yards away where the road flickers back into scrub grass.
It was my uncle, the Hog. He wanted me to sign his goddamn papers.
The car door lifted. Someone got out, the door closed.
Somewhere, there was a whisper of cicadas.
He was poised in the darkness with only starlight to see by.
It was Sand.
“Here I am,” he said. He said it not boldly but with shyness. A bag hung from his hand. “I had to see you again, Bella. I didn’t believe it when I woke up and you’d gone. Why did you? Sabella?”
“How did you find me?” I said, having to say something.
The cicadas, who rarely speak around the Plateau, intimidated by our larger voices, had crushed themselves again to silence.
“It’s so simple to find anyone you really want to.”
The Hog knew where I was, maybe others of Cassi’s circle. Sand had followed me to Cassi’s house before. Maybe Sand had paid the servants a visit and just been plausible enough to elicit information.
I want you, baby, said the night with a hundred voices (So many? Less? More?), the men who had returned for me. Not twenty yards away, a man had torn into me under the orange tree. Why hadn’t I killed him? He had earned it.
“Sand,” I said. My voice was husky.
Sand, I don’t want you. You make me sick. I hate your body and the way you lay me and Sand—and Sand—
“Bella,” he said. His voice was one caress. He made my name magic.
“I don’t want you here.”
“Yes you do. You do want me. Maybe we both should be honest, for once. But then, it goes beyond honesty, Sabella.”
He dropped his bag and came to me and grasped me against him, and he was breathing as if he’d swum for shore from some treacherous river, and I was the shore, and now he was home, he was safe.
“Don’t cry, Sabella. Why are you crying?”
“I don’t want you.”
But I was pulling at his arm. We were actually scrambling over the porch, into the house.
The door was still open. The night leans on the door, staring.
Sand pinned me against the wall.
Flesh was grass.
He couldn’t wait for me. He didn’t know he would react quite like that. He apologized even as he ripped my shirt.
Centuries ago, men dying of tuberculosis were discovered to have a high sexual drive.
Incubus and succubus imparted such exquisite pleasure to their victims during intercourse that the victims could not resist them, shunning their human partners for the embrace of death.
Be patient. Don’t kill him.
You will, but not yet.
He won’t come back, of course. Another myth, vampiric resurrection. He won’t rise from the grave. He’ll lie in it. And all his amber and bronze and sable will combine to form decay.
He cried out, and then the whirlpool choked him and swept him under. He only thought he’d escaped the river.
And I breathe again.
* * *
* * *
We had three nights, two days between, some hours more. All the while I wanted to baby him, care for him. Don’t turn away. Quid est veritas? This is mine. All the time I was killing him I wanted him to live. I wanted to help him. Perhaps others do this. Kill each other, but always wanting to restore. But he was a drug to me, I to him. Of the two, he was the more importunate. He didn’t know for a long while, almost to the last, what I was doing to him. Sometimes they never knew.
We didn’t go out of the house. We—he—made love. And I used his lovemaking. I fixed him meals, after I’d dialed groceries from town. My mother taught me to cook. I cook well. I gave him steaks and wholewheat bread, green vegetables, red fruits, clear wines like morning. I pumped vitamins into him. He wasn’t truly weak until the ultimate night.
You’re thinking of the farmer who fattens his pig for the kill.
Did you ever eat the pig?
It’s love that made me preserve. Guilt, despair.
He talked a lot about his brother. That was the subconscious again. It be
came apparent from his dialogues concerning this man, his brother, that Sand had been rescued by him many times. Not only from the mescadrine trip on Gall Vulcan, but from petty crimes years before, a dangerous liaison or two, debts. Sand was born a victim. I say this not to excuse myself, for it does not excuse me. But he’d traveled twisting ways, and snares had molded to him. Sand was a prophetic name. Sand that blows and forms many configurations, that can never settle, that is a mere residue of rock. Then I began to wonder if his mind was clouding, if he were hallucinating, for Sand’s brother became a massive figure on the skyline of everything Sand said, an angel with blazing wings. Was it that the subconscious, anxious to provide another rescue for Sand in this extreme cul-de-sac, kept supplying the illusion of a brother? Possibly the brother was not real and had never been.
The second morning, the mailman came. I’d forgotten about mail. He brought the registered packet which contained my certificate of holdings and my uncle’s drawn-up documents whereby I could sign the investment paraphernalia over to him. The Hog was taking a fee, naturally. His letter assured me he had to, to see things legal. But I looked at all this days later.