by Tanith Lee
I could feel my mouth idiotically form into a grin.
Yes, I believe I am exhibiting the symptoms of drug addiction and deprivation, sufficient anyway to convince him, whose brother screamed and rolled on the floor from a lack of mescadrine.
“So I’ll finally tell you I murdered Sand, and then you’ll kill me.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You have religion. I’ll let you pray first.”
“That’s very kind.” But he had already turned. “Suppose,” I said, “suppose I have a secret stash of whatever drug it is you think I’m using, up here in this room?”
He turned back, and in his helpful voice he said, “If you do, then you’ll use it, and that way I’ll know. Then I’ll rip the room apart and I’ll find it. And then we’ll wait till you start to need again.” He went out, and from the place beyond the broken swinging door he said, “On the other hand, I reckon you have it ready-mixed in your freezer, like any store-minded junkie.”
Don’t flinch, don’t move. Don’t say a word.
Five minutes later, I hear cans explosing in the kitchen below, and the glub-glub of the waste-pipe, drinking the fruit juice he’s pouring away. When the glass container falls, I hear that too. Unlike the glass of doors or windows or goblets, the container is disposable and smashes, and the red eau de vie will be gliding on the kitchen floor, amid the fragments of the glass. Presently the sun will dry the substance into a rich raw stain, just like blood.
“Say good-bye,” he called up to me.
I said good-bye.
* * *
* * *
I need, I need. Every part of me is a hurt, my joints, my stomach, my tongue, my glands, my eyes. The sun took and I can’t replace the sun’s taking. I’m dying. No, not yet.
I lay on the bed. The sun was out. (Where did the day go to?) Sometime earlier he went down by the road where his car was parked, and brought back a pack of ready-food, which he heated in momma’s old microwave-heater. Then he brought me a dish of this amalgam and urged me cheerfully to eat it. He only removed the plate when I informed him what would happen if he didn’t. He offered me wine, too. Wine, he pointed out solicitously, would blunt the edge of the knife in my guts, for a while. His sadism was affectionate and intense, and under it he was a blank, not enjoying it at all, just using it, like the rack, the jump-chair, to get my confession.
Two hours after sunset, the first wolf let out his whistling howl, high on the razor-back hills in the star storm of night.
When I heard the howl my whole body began to jerk and tremble. I started to groan aloud and couldn’t hold the sounds inside myself as agony and craving flung me about the bed. Then all the wolves in the world were howling out there, as if they called to me: Come, come, come to us, why do you wait?
Soon he reappeared in my door, dark on darkness, one glowing star caught between his lips.
“Charming cigarettes you have,” he said. White smoke curled from his mouth as he spoke, and I smelled the incense smell of the loaded tobacco. He crossed to the window, passed by the mirror, raised the blind, and buttoned up the glass. The tide of wolf voices sang into the room, making it tingle, sparkle, like winter frost forming on everything.
Jace watched me.
“You like that sound?”
“Yes.”
He moved around the bed and offered me the cigarette.
“No.” I turned my head aside.
“You’re hurting, honey,” he said. “Very bad. Aren’t you?”
“You know I am.”
“Say a little prayer,” he said, and he went away again.
Why can’t I get over this unseen barrier and take him and have him?
The voices of the wolves were fading, blowing away. Out there, the hills are promises, there are four thousand neons in heaven.
Maybe he’d sleep. Sometime he had to. He was confident, he thought he’d beaten me.
The house was softly dislocating its tensions in the chill of the young night. Momma’s ghost was sitting in her room, watching at the window. The broken swing and the broken door slowly swung to and fro in the wind.
The knife moved like a child in my belly, but then I began to drift, drift up out of the hurt. I began gently to hallucinate, or to dream. . . .
About how, over westward, Montiba way, the little deer may be feeding on the night-black plants, and how sometimes the heavy cattle, white as plaster in the dark, break their way from the corrals. . . .
Where do the wolves run to who hunt these hills, where do they run when they’re invisible—back into time, before the civilization of this planet ended? Back to when the pillars upheld roofs like fluted water-ice and the urns were empty?
Dreaming, I struck west and ran ten miles. It was nearly midnight by the rings and spirals of the stars which seem immovable yet move. (No. The planet moves, not the stars. We must ignore the evidence of our eyes.)
There was a ravine, a memory ravine I remembered at once, its contours, its tiers ripe with leaves. A fragmentary wind rustled the papers of the leaves, and below, a rivulet of black water waded. I eased down through the shadows, and I could feel the dream deer as I always felt them, like a warmth in the night.
Near the bottom of the ravine side, where the eucalyptus trees grew sideways toward the water, I beheld the deer by the river, like young girls in a story, like Pharaoh’s daughter at the river with her handmaids. No male in attendance, for the season is far off. Now a slender head, ears like curled leaves, lifts and listens. How lovely, the striped body, the fragile legs. Every one of them’s a porcelain figurine.
I walked forward, and other heads lifted. The stone was burning softly on my breast, and I loved the deer as I moved among them. When I was fourteen, fifteen, and learned my hunting, I was surprised that I could go right into the herd like this, selecting from them the one I would drink from, like a precious wine stored in a vase of flesh. When I took from the deer, there was no human sexual act to encounter, to use as bait and placation. There was simply their instinct to fly from me, which only the chosen animal would exhibit. If they died, it was from shock, blood loss. I killed accidentally, through greed and carelessness, at first. And then I lessoned myself in how I need not kill. On the night of Cassi’s death, I had chosen mistakenly a creature which had a weakness in it, and when it died between my hands, it was as though Cassi’s cold breath, hissing from her corpse, had condemned us all. The deer, Sand, myself.
Here is the one I will have.
She comes after me instantly, her delicate steps pattering on the stones among the moss by the water. She came trustingly at first, irresistibly. In reality, I would feel now the excitement of hunger, and tenderness, compassion. In the dream, my limbs are leaden. I creep to the edge of the clearing, and in the cradle of the eucalyptus I drop down, and the deer follows me.
A yard away her struggle begins. She suddenly knows. She’s come to the wolf. She tosses her head and stamps her miniature feet, as if she were tethered to a post, scenting death, unable to escape.
I go on gazing at her, at her soft antimony eyes, and finally she comes on again and kneels down. Her head lowers itself. Her eyes are glazed with terror, but her body is quiescent. Don’t be afraid. I stroke her neck, whose nap is prickly velvet (I can feel it, even dreaming). Her smell is strong but healthy (I can smell her, dreaming). My eyeteeth are slanted a fraction, outward, not enough to notice, enough to save my own mouth from their razors (dreaming, I can analyze). I make the single bite with enormous care. I must be very careful of her life. When I begin to draw out the wine, she quivers, tenses. Now she’s ready for flight the moment I negate the hypnosis I’ve set on her. She feels, I think, nothing. She suffers it because she must. While I feel gratitude, comfort and boundless love.
Measure, Sabella. Don’t drain her. Don’t harm her. Love her and thank her. Let her go. (I don’t remember anymore that it’s a d
ream.)
No more, Sabella.
Let her go.
I wrench my head away, and at once the deer leaps to her feet. Memory of a hundred other deer.
They flash like bolts from a gun, through the nets of the shadows and the leaves, over the stream. The strong deer, who, when they had put distance between us, would rest and browse again, their cells refashioning what I had robbed them of. All the deer vaulted over the water and poured through unseen holes in the black.
The moss made a pillow for my body, and the pains were going out in me as if cancelled by a powerful analgesic, that yet left my brain quite lucid. I have evaded the avenger. How had I done that?
Perhaps, I had not.
I lay there in the dream and I thought, he couldn’t keep up with me, a wolf-bitch’s running.
But he was an athlete, his body gave evidence of that. He could keep up. Silently. But a night is full of sounds, of winds and grass and sands and waters. What you take for silence in the hills is only another kind of clamor. Yes. Jace could have tracked me, could have witnessed me. If I sat up and I saw him in the night-scape anywhere around me, then I’d know I’d told him every detail, after all.
There were none of the breaks, the edited sequences that come in dreams. All went forward logically, in progression. So I sat. And just across the trickle of the stream, the way the deer had fled, a black silhouette was inked on the night. It was not a freak form constructed of boulder, tree or shadow. It was a man. It was Jace.
I sat and looked at him, and eventually I could even see his eyes, their brightness, and then I could see the sheen of something slung behind his shoulder, a burnished tube that also was no part of any tree or branch; the long muzzle of an electric gun with which a man goes hunting wolves.
Dream Jace spoke to me.
“And that,” he said, “the thing with the deer, is what you did to Sand.”
“That and more.” I wasn’t afraid, not here, not in the dream-canyon, pain-freed, among the stars and the leaves.
I got to my feet. I was warm, and still, and easy with him.
“When I take blood from a man,” I said softly, “it isn’t the same as when I take it from an animal. When I find a man I want, when we make love; I take it then.”
I was walking to him, I was stepping over the narrow stream. My tongue gently burning. My body burning. All the night was strung, like the strings of violins, resin-taut. As I walked to Jace, stepping over the water, I was like a bow, ten bows or twenty, drawn across those strings. And the note sounded deep in the womb of the darkness.
“Let me show you,” I said to him. I knelt down before the man with the gun as the deer knelt to me. I was arching my back and the hoarse music of the night was soaring through me. He could kill me then. I didn’t care. I wanted him to.
I turned my head, and offered him my neck.
“It’s all right,” Sand said. “You’re awake. It’s all right now.”
But it wasn’t Sand. There was nobody there. No one by me.
The wind was blowing the curtains around my bed, the wind which smelled of the hills and which had brought me my dream. But not all of my dream.
About me, the house was quiet as though empty.
His skin is sunburned, Sabella. He drinks alcohol and eats real food, Sabella, you saw him. No, that isn’t the horrible joke. He isn’t one of your own kind. You’re still unique, and alone.
Why then. . . .
I was the victim. Willing victim.
It’s sex, Sabella. What you missed. What you give but never receive. That’s why you’re afraid to touch him, Sabella.
I rested my head against my knees, doubled up to ease the clawing in my stomach. And I smiled coldly, remembering the Freudian dream symbol of the gun, and the Pascian symbols of the stream, the violins.
The house was so noiseless. Was he sleeping? Was he? The avenger, doubly my enemy, doubly to be dreaded.
I should like to see him asleep, just once. That face smoothed out, helpless and blind in sleep.
No, Sabella, let me explain this to you. All sadists are also masochists, one indulgence feeds the other. Sand kneeled to you. Now you kneel to the sword. But it’s the night you need. Yes, I can, I must.
I crept out, and down those stairs which I’ve descended a thousand, thousand times. In the starlight from the window, pausing, reaching out to sense and avoid him. The darkness was deaf and dumb with waiting for me, the whole night a pool that I must cleave.
The glass door would open silently at my finger on its button. The night would open silently, and close over my head, hiding me.
The splotch of the starlight window was colorless yet glowing on the wooden floor. I half turned, intuitively, feeling for the parlor, the sofa where I had slept, and where the man, secure in his assumptions, was sleeping now.
I ran forward soundlessly, and a huge blackness materialized from nothing, apparently from the bottom of the door, and reached out and seized me with iron hands.
I screamed in an ecstasy of terror, my whole body and my spirit dissolved in fear and loathing and despair. Pressed into the shadow, he had waited for me, like a great dog guarding a prison gate. Screaming, I couldn’t stop. The whole night was screaming. The wolves, who waited on the hills for me, cheated as I am cheated, reciprocal of my terror, howled.
They were closer than I’d ever heard them, a ring of voices spiking the air, the stars.
“Shut up,” he said to me.
I could only scream.
“All right,” he said. He was forcing me, upright and wrapped against him, into the kitchen. Lights fired up. He was forcing me to look at something. I couldn’t see. Then I opened my eyes.
My mother used to make homemade lemonade in that cut-glass jug. On the lawn at Easterly, lemons and sugar, and I was eleven years old, and I was almost happy and I don’t remember—
There was blood in it now, blood flavored with hashish and pomegranates and tomatoes.
“Is that it?” he said to me. “Is that what you want?”
I was breathing and that was enough. He dropped me in a chair and poured a glass of the red juice for me with the detached accuracy of a bartender. It was deduction, he couldn’t know. There was more of it than anything else and it had concentrator granules on the container rim. Maybe he understood, too, its scent is a cover for something else. He’d poured it in the jug, then smashed the container so I’d hear.
I drank carefully, almost primly.
My stomach griped, dulled, subsided.
It was over.
The avenger had saved me.
I could feel the imprint of his body against mine, even though he was no longer touching me.
The wolves had fallen quiet. I wondered if I’d imagined their cries rising with mine.
“Now, do I tell you about your brother again?” I said to him, not looking at him.
“Forget it,” he said. “You’re frecking crazy, Jezebel. Whatever you told me would be a pile of crap.”
I felt drowsy, but it was a thin skin over my unease, my dread. Was this another snare? What’s he playing for? Tell me the truth. No, any truth you tell will be a lie.
“If,” I said, “you’re not going to execute me, or hand me over to a madhouse somewhere, or even listen to what I say, or even credit what I say, why don’t you get out and go to hell?”
“Maybe I will,” he said. It’s the mumble, lazy, indifferent.
I sat daintily drinking blood that tasted of fruit, and he sat, but I didn’t look at him, didn’t know what he did, his presence like red-hot metal a few feet away over my shoulder. I thought I’d become his experiment. In the morning, perhaps, he’d dissect me.
For sure, he wouldn’t sleep. Watch and prey.
* * *
* * *
Like a picture of an invalid, I lay on my bed, prop
ped up high, the glass of nourishment to hand, covered by a paper cloth. He didn’t try to prevent me from coming back here, just watched me. I shut the window and pulled the blind and now the sixty-second dawn was beginning and the blind was a shining sapphire.
The juice wasn’t enough, not really enough, to restore me after my dose of golden radiation. And besides, it wouldn’t last long.
I’d tried to think of a way out of this. I’d tried to imagine some way I could appease him. But I didn’t think he really knew anymore what he wanted from me. Maybe in the end he’d come up the stairs and beat me and rape me, and then he’d go away. Or maybe he’d just go.
Or maybe he wouldn’t.
* * *
* * *
The day was overcast, the sky a gray-pink almond fondant. It was the kind of day I could go out on, the kind of day I used to wait for and use, for here, in the revitalized atmosphere of Novo Mars, that kind of overcast, once formed, remained till sundown.
Had the wind changed? I mean, the wind of ill-fortune.
I decided to display normalcy, what normalcy I could. I rose and showered. The shower was temperamental, being accustomed to my touch, because another had used it, and now it hesitated to respond to me, the hot too hot, and the cold too cold. I put on some of my black clothes, I brushed my hair, and fixed my face before the mirror. Then, on impulse, I brought my single traveling bag from under the bed, and packed it as if I were planning another trip, and when I’d stored the bag again, under the bed, I hung my black straw hat ready on the mirror. It was a premonition. Like the premonition I felt on the air-bug, going to Ares for Cassi’s funeral, like the premonition I had the night I visited my mother’s grave: foretastes of Death the hunter.
I walked downstairs, and I heard a sound thwack on the dry ground. The glass door stood open on the sugar almond day, and Jace was framed in the door and the day, twenty feet away along the slope. He was digging a grave for all the bits of his brother’s bones. I glanced at the door, automatic and forewarned, since he wouldn’t have gone outside without arranging the door. The lectro-chain was shorted, the self-lock quietly broken from inside, and bent.