by Tanith Lee
It had been four hours, going home, carrying Sand. I’d had to lower him to the ground many times. Gradually he ceased to be handsome, pitiful, and important. He became a sack of beans I had to haul, my penance, unhuman. I moved a mile or so off the road, because one of the patrolmen was sure to come looking for me or radio for others. As I staggered the last steps toward the house, the brink of the sky was rinsing itself colorless ready for sunrise.
I bore him to the chute. I pushed the igniter to feed the flame inside, and sat down while the furnace heated. I held him in my lap, and we were the Pietà.
Then, when the furnace was ready, I fed him in, let the outer door close, and heard the inner door open and the flames rush up as he dove through into them.
So callously she burned his body, the evidence which might condemn her.
There is no way I can prove it wasn’t like that. If you held a knife, would you stick it in your heart, or would you throw it away? Sand had become a knife. But, no. The knife is also your child.
The smoke from the chimney was blue, and the sun came up in it.
The heat from the proofed incinerator was slight, but greater than I had ever known it, even in my adolescence, when my mother burned her old dresses from Easterly, and those albums she and my father had kept together, stills of their wedding and their two anniversaries and my birth. We all go up in flames.
I’m cold, Sabella.
Not anymore, my love.
The ash and melted residue was shunted away beneath into an underground pit. Here it slowly amalgamated with the soil, and if you dug down at the farther opening of the pit, ten feet from the kitchen door, there was an ashy compost. But we had never needed it.
I’m not leaving you, Sabella.
The jewel between my breasts, catching the sun, was the color of a dying rose.
* * *
* * *
Five days later, I walked down to the delivery box at the edge of the road.
I’d heard nothing. No one had come to the house. I’d been listening to all the news bulletins as I hadn’t done for years. But even the local news from Smokey Tower hadn’t carried word of a ghost-girl and a car, or a young man who’d been out this way and vanished. It had occurred to me that perhaps Sand had informed no one that he was following me to my very doorstep; that possibly the car dealer in Ares had mislaid Sand’s name. Snatches of Sand’s reveries came back to me. Possibly not everything was true, or legal. Possibly they’d never trace him through to me anyway. I’d remembered the mailman by then, who’d seen Sand’s car parked at the end of the track. But if he’d been sure of a search or of his facts presumably by now he would have spoken out. His manner had registered as sly, a personal antagonism. When he came again, I’d know. As for the Hog, Sand had told him he was related to Trim. And in fact, the only definite potentially damning link between Sand and myself was Cassi’s servant, John. And again, his personal and suppressed form of malice might hold him silent and stultified.
There was a letter in the box, an unregistered letter.
When I opened it, I saw it was from the Hog. There was some grist about having sent me the papers I should sign if I wanted him to deal with my credits. There was a pompously sentimental footnote. He knew I’d be very sorry to hear that John Trim, Cassilda’s manservant, had suffered a fatal stroke on the second night after the funeral.
I sat on the ground and read these sentences over. I think I laughed a little. Because, for once, the dead had aided me.
Perhaps it was the shock of seeing the whore-murderess in person that killed John. He had seemed remote, disinterested, in my vicinity; it must have cost him dear, boiling underneath for vengeance, justice. He was older than Cassi, he had looked ephemeral. Revenge had been too big a legacy to leave him.
Cassi, you failed. The prime agent is removed from the stage. And Sand—
My pendant is clear white, Sand. And all night the pain in my belly comes at me like the wolves. I’m living on diluted concentrates and the blood of fruits.
Your metal and your silk are cinders, trash.
And if you lay here dead, right now, I’d burn you again.
* * *
* * *
The tenth night I hunted, on the hills. The wolves were singing like broken silver saws.
The next night, I went to Angel Meadow, north of Hammerlake, the cemetery where my mother is buried.
Cassi didn’t come to my mother’s funeral. Nobody came but me, though curiously enough someone else was being buried at precisely the same hour in a neighboring plot, with a somber crowd, and an incredible importation of horses and carriages, emanations of that earlier world the colony planets cling to. It wasn’t, in either case, a Revivalist burial. In theirs show took the place of religion. Soil rained on the coffin, and white flowers rained on it, and women desperately rained tears. Twenty paces off, the polished horses stamped. I’d never seen a horse before, certainly not with plumes. There were torches, too, though why these people also needed the night for their burying, I didn’t know.
I hadn’t cried over my mother’s grave, though I cried in Cassi’s chapel. Maybe my tears are the sweat of my calumny, and I had not yet learned I was utterly to blame for everything. I was eighteen. I was still blonde.
Obviously the gates were long shut that midnight when I revisited, but the wall was accessible. The cross leaned a fraction over her gray bed. I had never brought her flowers. I didn’t pray or stupidly, humanly, attempt to speak to her; I just sat there on the turf, and I could smell aniseed grass, somewhere, like the lawn at Easterly.
When I came back over the wall, and started home, I had the urge to look behind me several times. There was never anyone there, and I think I imagined it. The pursuit had not yet begun.
Part Two
The Avenger
I
TWO MONTHS AFTER the smoke from the incinerator faded, a new mailman called at the house.
It was noon, the light hitting the walls like a frozen explosion, the tinted reflections of the blinds stamped in a patchwork on the floor. I’d been on the hills that night, and though I wasn’t sleeping, I was lying on the parlor sofa with the music deck playing, when the buzzer from the porch drilled through. The Hammerhead mail might be delivered any time of day, for traditionally service to the Plateau wilderness is constant but erratic. But the buzz was like voltage going through me, for a moment, before my nerves dimmed down. For I was about-to find out if this other enemy of mine remembered Sand’s car parked on the track.
Yet, when I went to the door, even through the smoked glass, I could see it wasn’t who I anticipated.
I opened the door, and he turned around slowly, like some big animal turning at a noise it doesn’t fear.
“Mail,” he said in a flat friendly drawl. He held a square package in one hand.
Behind him, pink noon heat shimmered, land and sky flowed over into each other. He stood out on the glare as if drawn on it and then blocked in with rich heavy color. He was six feet two. His skin was tanned like a brown-gold wood, and with the same sheened finish to it. His hair was black, and his pants and his shirt were black, and he wore black lenses over his eyes just as I did. It was as if we had both dressed in the same uniform in order to contend in some duel, in which, perhaps, sunglasses would actually become weapons. Certainly he wasn’t wearing the uniform of the mail service.
“A very fancy order, lady,” he said. “All the way from Flamingo.” And he grinned. His teeth were beautiful, as if he had filled his mouth with winter snow.
“I didn’t order anything from Flamingo.”
He lifted the box. Black hair on hands and forearms and chest: each hair neatly done as if each were painted on with a fine brush and coal-black ink.
“Miss Ritter,” he said.
“No. I’m afraid you have a wrong address,” I said.
“It says here, Miss Rit
ter. You’re Miss Ritter?”
“No.”
“You have to be Miss Ritter.”
The heavy colors of him, the heat that seemed to focus through him from the sun beyond, were becoming oppressive, almost frightening.
“Print here, please, Miss Ritter.”
Like a scent, I could smell that strange odor which an intelligence gives off, a biting, honed intelligence, playing dumb.
“My name isn’t Ritter.”
Again he smiled. He invited me.
“What is your name then, lady?”
“My name is Quey.”
“K-A-Y.”
“Q-U-E-Y.”
“Qwee?”
“Quey.”
“O.K. Hannah Qway.”
“Quey. Sabella Quey.”
“That’s sure a pretty name,” he said. “Sabella. Still think this package is for you. Maybe you go in for made-up names.”
I put my hand toward the door button. I can move quickly. He moved quicker. He was in the doorway, and the door wouldn’t close on him. He didn’t come into the hall, he stayed in the doorway. He looked immovable, in or out. He held out the package.
“Why don’t you open it, Miss Qway?”
“It isn’t for me.”
“Look at the label and make sure.”
“I don’t need to look at the label.”
“Ah, please.”
So I glanced at the package. It had no label on at all.
“There’s no label.”
“Maybe there is, and you just can’t see it.”
I was afraid of him. Why? I’d met the pushy kind. I’d handled them. Handled some into the earth. My voice didn’t show my fear.
“I can see there’s no label.”
“If you took off your sunglasses,” he said, trying to help me, “maybe you’d see better.”
“Get out,” I said.
My heart hit my throat twice every second.
Then he took off his own dark glasses, and raised his head, smiling, and the glow of the stained-glass window revealed to me his eyes. They were like mahogany, but they shone. The black lashes were thick, almost coarse in their thickness. And because he was laughing at me, the outer corners of the eyes were scarred with hair-thin silver cracks in the gold.
“Ever play the imitation game, Miss Qwee?” he asked me. “I do it, and now you do it.”
“You’re not with the mail service.”
“Then you’d better call the police.”
The long silence filled the hall. The glare streaming around the edges of him was a crucifixion.
“What do I have to do,” I said, “to make you get out. You want money?”
“It’s true what the man said.”
A pause. He continued to smile at me.
“He said you never answer the door with your clothes on.”
I was not in my wrapper, but in a floor-length black smock, with an ornamental button-up, the top four buttons of which were undone.
“How about jewelry,” he said, and I know he’d seen the glint of the pendant.
“What you’re looking at is glass. You’d get twenty credits for it. There’s nothing else.”
“There’s you.”
When he said that, a constriction of terror came up through me. We know I’m not innocent. We know for me it’s as if they comb my hair, rough or tender, no more than that. So why terror?
He’d been fraternizing with the mailman. He had a box he wanted me to open. I took it abruptly from his hands, ripped off the plasti-cover and the card reinforcer. One side of the interior gives, and something drops out onto the wooden floor with a clack.
It was the ivory casket, closed by its gold lock as when I had first seen it, and the key on the ribbon, the casket Cassi’s heirloom had been in, and her poison-pen letter. I’d left it behind in the house at Ares. Now this man, who was eight inches taller than me and weighed around seventy pounds more, had brought the casket to my door. (Sabella, his height and weight don’t matter. You aren’t scared of those. What looms so great is the look on his face, in his eyes, that sense of a coiled spring. A thousand yards of coil ready to unwind like a whiplash.)
“You say this came from Flamingo.” I sounded calm. I sounded indifferent. He knew I wasn’t, but the control might throw him a little, not that he’d show that any more than I was showing my own emotions.
“Flamingo? Did I say that? Ares.”
“Who gave it to you to give to me?”
“Who gave it to me to give to you? The mail service, ma’am.”
Now he was abruptly the simple dumbbell again; the dope, worried about his job, worried that I might misunderstand. I stood ossified, and he said, “My buddy is sick, ma’am. Something he ate. So I offered to bring this package out to your house. He couldn’t make it, ma’am. He was puking. Real bad puking. Puking to left of him, ma’am. Puking to right of him. Volley and thunder . . . ma’am.”
The mailman had gabbled about me. This one, this new enemy, intrigued, had persuaded or coerced the other into letting him bring me my package instead. Could it be that straightforward? Did they really gamble that I was so deep into shady dealings that I wouldn’t complain? And why no label on the package, which seemed to have been opened and resealed? And why the ploy with a false name and an erroneous city, as if I must declare myself and my connections? There was no letter in with the casket.
“Just need your thumbprint now,” he softly reminded me. Soft, his voice was almost a mumble, lazy, a beast purring.
But he didn’t have the nail block for prints. Instead he extended his hand to me, well-formed, hirsute, with its sinews of fire under the skin. The gesture was another invitation. Then suddenly he grabbed my fingers into his. His hand was hot and dry like the desert in the sun.
He wrung my fist into a knot, as if he meant to break the bones, and all the while he went on smiling. But his eyes were cold. I couldn’t tell if he was merely a sadist, if he was enjoying this. No, it wasn’t that. There was more. Only I couldn’t read it.
Then he let me go. He saluted me and sauntered out onto the porch. I walked slowly to the door button. I’d learned, for he’d already taught me, that he could be swift enough to negate that action if he wanted. At the top step, he paused.
“While I’m on the premises,” he said, “maybe you can help me. I’m making inquiries, you see, Miss Keyway. About my brother.”
I didn’t even blink. But then I hung by a thread.
“Could there possibly be two of you?”
He laughed. He made a meal of laughing. He rocked around and clapped his hard palm against the porch rail. He knew I wouldn’t close the door.
“Nice, Miss Ker-woo. Nice. Well, Miss Ker-wuk, I’m looking for my kid brother, Sand. Sand Vincent. I guess you never heard of him.”
Falling.
“I guess I never did.”
“Your loss, Miss Ker-wak. Your loss.” He swung down the steps. There was no car visible, not even on the road below, where the genuine mailman parks. When he turned once more, he had his sunglasses on again. “See you,” he said, “Jezebella.”
* * *
* * *
Why can’t I take the sun, even the rays of a health-lamp? No, it’s no part of a myth. The sun harms me. I think it’s my blood. My blood is built of blood, purer, less opaque than human plasma, and more vulnerable. The sun affects all blood. In the daylight, the cells of mine begin to break down, shatter. The radiation of the sun, which would kill you if you were close enough to it, can kill me from a distance.
I moved around behind the blue and violet blinds all afternoon, all around the house, downstairs, upper floor, the attics, looking out through the blue and violet glare, checking to see that he had gone, that he hadn’t come back.
He went toward Hammerlake, walking. Ev
en through the blinds, he was definite, indissoluble. He must have known I’d be watching. He didn’t glance over his shoulder.
Jace Vincent couldn’t have known what was in the packet, not till he opened it. Someone had come on the casket in Cassi’s bedroom, closed and locked it and mailed it to me, perhaps an unfriendly, painfully honest, self-effacing servant, hence the lack of a covering letter. Or Jace had taken the letter out and destroyed it, or lost it. . . . How had Jace found me? It’s so simple to find anyone you really want to. I pictured Jace at Cassi’s house, or with the Hog; with the patrolmen from the roadblock. Perhaps it was less complex than that. Perhaps Sand had kept in touch with his big brother (real brother) and there was a communication which mentioned me and Hammerhead. And what does everyone get? Mail. Jace and the mailman, a league of gentlemen against that dreaded witch, a woman alone. A woman who opened the door in her wrapper, who had visitors in cars with Ares digit panels.
And did any of that matter?
What mattered was that Jace Vincent had followed Sand to me. Probably from off-planet, for he had a glaze on him of recent other places, other globes. (Gall Vulcan, where he had nursed and sweated Sand out of the mescadrine D.T.’s?) Again, extraneous. He was here.
What now?
He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t know Sand was in trouble, let alone dead. But Sand had often been in trouble. How did Jace know that anything at all was seriously wrong? Force of habit?
An itch in his brother-bone?
See you, he said.
And I couldn’t call for help. I’d have to help myself. But there was only one way I knew of, and I couldn’t return to that. I was being punished for that now.