by Tanith Lee
The angel-gladiator, the winged avenger.
The house spontaneously self-locked, doors, windows. My mother’s installation. No one could get in, at least not without a fight.
Perhaps he’d just wanted to rattle me. I thought I’d convinced him I was impervious; perhaps, therefore, guiltless. He’d just been testing me. He might not come back.
See you.
What had he said to the police, if he’d spoken to them? What had he said to the Hog, or Cassi’s servants, or the mailman?
Was there some signal he and Sand had had between them, something missing, by which he knew Sand was dead?
The day crawled by. The sun flared and went out and the night closed its blind over the sky. I closed Cassi’s casket in an empty drawer of my vanity table. Out of sight, out of mind? I sat in the parlor, so tense the muscles ached at the base of my skull, between my shoulder blades. I sat there and listened and waited. I couldn’t go out. He was out there, somewhere.
I could move away from Hammerhead. There were other wildernesses.
It’s so simple to find anyone you really want to. (Wherever they may be.)
See you.
* * *
* * *
When the morning sun came back, Jace Vincent hadn’t. He was making me wait, a master musician, for the crash of chords, the brazen blare of trumpets.
I showered and changed into a frock. I put on stockings and shoes, which I hardly wore around the house or on the Plateau.
The door had a lectro-alarm, one of those force bars you can trigger to keep anyone from crossing through the open door, save the occupants. It hadn’t been activated since my mother’s time, but now I jammed a battery in the slot and switched it on.
As I was standing by the door, I heard the growl of a vehicle taking the spin-off track from the road and gunning for the house.
The center of my body, everything that held me straight, seemed to gush away, but I was still standing.
I’d have to open the door. To leave the door shut would be an admission of fear, and if you were afraid, you went to the police. I couldn’t, and therefore I couldn’t reveal that I had any reason to. I had to play it that he was just a crazy event in my life that I’d cope with.
The vehicle pulled up, and then there was a pause, then feet, over the ground, up the steps. Feet heavy on the porch. A shadow blossomed on the door glass.
It wasn’t his shadow. I could tell immediately. In a way, I’d known they weren’t his footfalls.
The buzzer went. I walked stiffly to the door and opened it. A boy about fifteen, in white overalls, was on the porch. He carried a crystal box, a transparent coffin full of green Savior roses.
“Miss Kerwow?”
“That’s not my name.”
“It isn’t?” Concerned, the boy gazed at the docket on the box. His eyes had a puffy, almost tearful look of disorientation. He was at the age of confusion, when you can only get by through a series of previously planned moves dependent on predicted responses. A reaction out of sequence could derail. I’d been meant to cry out Why, yes, and make a balcony of my arms and breast for the flowers. Then he could have smiled (what a charming boy!) and we would both have been satisfied. But now he fumbled at the docket, two wheels off the track. “It says, it says Kerwow here.”
“Is there a sender’s name?” He didn’t guess his panic was one-ninetieth of mine.
“Sure is. J. Vincent.”
“Take them away.”
“But Miss Kerwow—”
“My name is not Kerwow.”
“Lady, they’re special delivery. They cost twenty-three credits, plus delivery charge—”
His eyes were bulging. He would never go. He would stand there forever, until the green blooms wilted into brown, and the natural-cloth overalls turned to skeletal rags on his body.
I made a balcony.
“All right. Give them to me—”
Something snapped. He didn’t need pre-planning for a second, indignation was enough.
“Well don’t do me any favors, lady.”
I didn’t tip him. I shut the door. He was fifteen and working on Mature Studies and he needed cash. But Jace had sent the flowers.
I put the transparent coffin on the floor. I had the same feeling I had with Cassi’s casket.
But nothing exploded, there wasn’t a message. Somehow, I didn’t need a message. You lay flowers on a grave.
They were beautiful, the roses. That was my problem, I wanted to destroy them because they came from him, they’re poison. But they were not poison, they were loveliness. So I siphoned out water and set them in one of my mother’s pottery bowls. I’d thank him graciously when he came.
I waited in the kitchen then. Through the blind of the kitchen window I could see the broken swing, the orange tree where the man beat and raped me and escaped alive. What was his name?
The flower vehicle had driven away, and now it seemed to come back and the buzzer went.
My hands were shaking, heart booming.
But still it was not his shadow on the door.
“Miss Kervak, I have a crate of wine for you.”
J. Vincent had sent me a crate of wine. It cost him two hundred credits. I wouldn’t let them in. I made them leave it on the porch. Before they drove off, I brought out the green roses in the pottery bowl and placed them by the crate. I didn’t deny that I was called Kervak. There was no message.
I sat on the wooden floor in the hall, to one side, out of the window splotch. I wasn’t thinking. My heart thudded slow and heavy. You drink wine at funerals.
The door buzzed.
“Miss Kweet?”
I broke. I laughed. It’s funny, it’s hilarious. And he’d sent me a three-foot white-velvet bear. You unpop the bear’s guts and a white flagon of scent emerges on a satin ledge. The bear’s eyes are cold; cold blue eyes. Like a snake’s.
I closed the door and doubled over and retched. But I was dried up inside, a burned-out ditch.
Presumably he wasn’t sure of me. I might be on the level, an honest nobody. I might yet call the police in Hammerlake. So he threatened me with gifts I can’t complain of. Fragrance to perfume the dead. Frankincense and myrrh.
Then I waited again. I waited all afternoon. Sometimes the house creaks and my pulses stumble. I could call the Hog: You’re the lawyer, Uncle. Well, there’s a man pestering me. The Hog wouldn’t want to know, or he’d want to know too much.
When he comes back, you’ll have to, Sabella. Have to kill him. Which means you act friendly, you watch the lodestone have its effect on him, as on all the others. All you have to do is briefly want him. Is it so hard? His skin is flawless golden wood and his hair is Jet. His blood’s blood-color. Air to breathe, Sabella, air.
But there’s something—something. He frightens me too much. I don’t want to touch him, go near him. He frightens me.
Think of the man under the orange tree. You could have taken him any time. You held off, not because you were afraid, though you were terrified, but because you didn’t want the guilt of his life. Remember?
You can kill this one. It’s guiltless. It’s self-defense.
When he comes back.
Out on the porch in the westering light, the wine bottles glinted, the roses withered, the white bear stared.
There was a wind blowing up, like the day I returned from Ares, the day before the night Sand found me.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, Sand to—sand.
But Jace wasn’t dust, isn’t sand, isn’t jet and wood and metal. He was skin and muscle, bone, fiber, juices, enzymes, atoms. Nobody made him up. He wasn’t like all the rest. He was real.
I won’t answer the door again.
I left the bar switched on, and I went up the stairs and lay down under the gauze curtains of my bed.
Paternoster. . .
* * *
* * *
Sleeping—suddenly the room was black. It was night, inside and out. There was a noise. Someone was knocking on the glass door below.
Glass doesn’t break anymore, unless it’s custom-built to do so. He’d know that. Why knock when the buzzer was there?
I lay quiet and waited for the knocking to cease. It didn’t, it went on and on. O.K., I can take the sound. Rap your bloody knuckles raw, you bastard.
Then, a girl’s voice was shrieking.
I sat up, swung my legs off the bed. Certain reactions have to be learned, like those of the fifteen-year-old boy. A girl shrieking on my porch may mean different trouble, worse trouble. Once, in Hammerlake, a police patrol questioned me on the street because two girls had been fighting in the bar I had walked out of. This one shrieks again, and now I can make out the single word: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”
My night vision was developed long ago, and starlight comes in to help me through the stained window above the stairs, showing me the door, and a white shadow this time, thrown close on the glass. She can’t see me, the shrieking girl. She knocks again, rat-tat.
He had sent her, this girl. She was out there with the wine and the flowers and the perfume-belly bear.
The fear was mounting up in me, the great orchestra.
The knocking, on and on and on, point counterpoint.
“Hey! Hey!”
I ran down the stairs; I didn’t mean to. As I ran, I hit my fist against the old-fashioned light switch, a nipple in a lily bud, on the wall. Light burst through the hall, against the glass door, and my pupils squeezed to dots, but I still saw her. It was me. Sabella, when she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, low-cut dress, white powdered flesh, bleached hair, red nails. A vamp (I perceived the ironic pun), a harlot from Hammerlake. How would he know what I looked like at seventeen?
I buttoned the door, and it swung wide, and I was face to face, eye to eye with Me. I don’t mean she was my double. She was my past, is all. My past, that never ended.
“Hey,” she said again, between perplexity and outrage, “Is this a party?”
Then she took in my face. Do I look like that? She backed a step and demanded loudly of the darkness: “Jay-yaice.”
They must have walked from the road, for there was no car on the track, shutting out the stairs. But as he moved from the lacework bench, he shut them out. He had on black again, but different clothes, no sunglasses, just the black glass eyes themselves.
“Why,” he said, “if it isn’t my friend Jezebel.”
I’m standing in the doorway. The lectro-chain’s switched on and he can see the faint glow of it, and that this is as far as he gets.
“Is she welcoming?” Jace Vincent inquired.
“I should say not,” said the bleached girl.
“What about my advance payment?” said Jace. “Why, I anticipated finding you, Jezebella, sipping my wine, carrying my roses, smelling like sixty credits a bottle. And look—” He showed me a wad of credits in his hand, the bills you rarely see in a world of check and auto-cards. “Down payment. More to come. For services to be rendered. Or have the charges gone up since my brother was here?”
I didn’t say anything.
The girl sensed abruptly that this candy had a bitter kernel.
“Jay-yaice? You said there’d be a pa-arty.”
“Shut up,” he told her companionably. “Unless you want to remind this lady of the going rate of whores.”
“Jay-yaice—”
“You scared she’ll call someone? A patrol, maybe. She won’t. Not my old friend Jezebella. My kid brother told me about this one. She’s hot stuff. She does it like nobody else.”
With strange profundity, his harlot told him, “Nobody does it like nobody else.”
Jace directed his hand, mildly, as if to reach in at me, and the lectro-chain sizzled up, prepared to block him. He smiled at me, as before, politely. Then he leaned and hefted the wine crate, agile, as if it weighed a quarter of what it did. He nodded to the girl. “The rest of it’s yours.”
“Oh,” said the girl, and her face was a child’s face. “Can I have the bear, too?”
“Sure,” he said.
She struggled and succeeded and had the bear and the roses, and she looked happy and very young. She’d forgotten me.
They walked away into the night as if nothing had happened, and he whistled a hymn tune, giving a lick to it it never had in church.
The car—Jace’s?—revved about two-thirds down the track.
Green petals rushed along the porch.
* * *
* * *
The sun came up in a great mulberry ball and golden razors lanced the blinds. I lay on my bed and listened to the sun raining on the house, the tindery crackle it made, hitting the joists, the paint, the emanations. I felt enormously calm because there was no point in anything else. I had something in the freezer that would keep me going two or three days more. I had hash grains and tobacco and fruit juice and air-conditioning and music. I didn’t need to go out. I didn’t need to open the door. I could lie there, taking my time, making up my mind. And when I was ready, I could invite him in. I’d be glad to, then.
When something cracked on my window, I thought of Easterly. Boys used to do that in Easterly, to wake you, little crumble stones flung at the glass.
“Oh, Miss Kwhore.”
His voice was more familiar than my mother’s, which had faded in my memory.
“Oh, Miss Kwhore, you have a very stylish residence.”
Something smashed. Breakable glass—a bottle left over from the wine crate? If he’d been close all night, I never heard him.
“Yes, Miss Kweer, I’d say you had a fine appreciating property.”
I half sat, then dropped back. I was going to look out at him. Silly.
The second time he spoke, he’d moved slightly, and then again, but I couldn’t hear his steps. He walked soft, the way I can walk, a hunter’s way.
And then he struck something with a stone, sounding it. It was away around the other side of the house, the tree side. I couldn’t think what he struck, but suddenly he was at my side again, under my window.
“You have some charming antiquated features here.”
And I knew what he’d struck, and slowly I sat up again, and I held my breath.
“Shit, Miss Kwack, you even have an incinerator.”
And now I understood what it’s like to be changed to stone. The limbs too heavy to move, the rib cage jammed so no oxygen will come, the eyes starting, the tongue grown into the roof of the mouth.
The silence outside told nothing. A stone can’t ask, can’t go to a window and see.
And then I heard his footsteps, he’d turned up the volume for my benefit. A deft crunching over the ground, and with it a low thin electronic humming, some machine that was trundling beside him up from the track. He walked with the machine, around to the back.
Suddenly the hum broke into a great chugging noise, a whoosh, and a vibration that ran through the frame of the house. And he too broke suddenly into a huge hoarse singing shout:
“Oh when we get there,
When we get there to that glor-yus town, o’gold
Jezus’ll be waiting,
Oh yes Jezus’ll be waiting—”
I picked up my stone body and moved.
Momma’s bedroom looks out toward the orange tree. I can remember her pale face watching me as I swung the swing. I hadn’t gone in her room for five years. I buttoned the door, and it was like cutting into a loaf of time, through a crust, through bread. And even though the dust-eaters and the air-conditioning did their work here as in the rest-of the house, the atmosphere was thick as bread. I didn’t look at anything. Only out the window, the one window that had no blind, merely the yellow gauze in fr
ont of it. The sunlight was like a knife, and the noise of the machine was roaring through the floor.
“Oh yeah, Jezus’ll be waitin’ as the Holy Book foretold.”
A black rubber pipe went in the earth ten feet from the kitchen door. It quivered. It was attached to a cube of machinery with a blow-out chimney on the top, and an open rear end. I couldn’t see Jace. I could see a haze of gray and black cinders showering out fine as pollen from the rear end of the machine. The machine was pumping out the belly of the pit under the incinerator.
. . . conturbata sunt omnia ossa mea . . .
I was running out of the room. No, not this way.
Brush your hair, Sabella. Straighten your dress. Put on your shoes. You look sick, Sabella, but for thirteen years I never saw you look less than beautiful. Pick up the half cigarette in the tray, light it. That’s it. Now, run.
I switched off the lectro-chain and went out into the molten clamor of the morning and around the house. As if I had all the hours there are.
This side of the machine, Jace was. He stripped to black jeans, his body like a living carving, the round brazen muscles gliding in his arms as he manually shoveled through the piles of settled cinders. He’d left off singing. His face was concentrated, but though I’d made no sound, he knew I’d come out, and he turned and straightened up, and then he grinned.
“Hallo, Miss Kerwale.”
“Hallo, Jace.”
His face didn’t alter, but he said, politely correcting me, “My name is Jason, Miss Kerwule. Only my friends call me Jace.”
“And my name is Sabella, Jason.”
Pleasantly he said, “Your name’s just shit to me.”
“Jason,” I said. I looked in his eyes. They were hard, like the sun. “What are you doing?”
“Just sorting your dry compost, Miss Kerville. You see, a lady on her own can eat only so much, particularly a skinny jane like you. But a lady and a man. Some things don’t burn. Metal tops, the check stamp on cartons, meat bones. I’d say you’d had a guest, Miss Kweele. Like my buddy the mailman told me.”