by Tanith Lee
A day like this, I didn’t even need sunglasses. I could take in horizons, even the road, and a filmy high-speed dot of car. I stood on the porch, and looked at Jace working with the shovel. I felt a little twist of reassurance standing there in the safe morning. His face was all shut up and with its blinds down, unreadable, the way my face becomes when something is tearing at me. I wondered if he were torn. Of course he was. Why else his advent here and the cruel tricks of vengeance, undecided and malevolent as any of Hamlet’s.
Around the other side of the house, by the pump which had excavated Sand, and which provided my mother’s ghost with something fresh to stare at, Sand’s bones had lain all yesterday and all yesterday night. Now they were in a neat indecipherable pile by the hole Jace was digging. It didn’t have to be a large hole. It was already large enough.
Then Jace Vincent shocked me. Into the carefully dug, only ethically necessary grave he kicked, systematically and sparsely, the bones of his dead.
I went down the steps and crossed over to him and watched him cover them with dusts and soil.
“A ministering angel shall thy brother be,” I said to Jace, “when I lie howling.”
He tamped the soil flat, and let the spade go. He looked at me, and I beheld I had not reached him at any time, nor in any way. I had not even scratched the surface of what he was.
That second, the real fear caught up to me, the worse-than-fear. I had been trying to assess him by what I’d learned of men, and suddenly I saw none of these clues applied. He wasn’t any kind, but neither was he of any kind I knew, and an overcast, a bag under a bed, a glass of red juice, were not sufficient talismans.
And then we both heard the high-speed car’s rolling roar as it skimmed off the road onto the track.
“Who are you expecting?” Jace asked me.
I didn’t say anything.
In a dust ball, the vehicle whirled toward us, already slowing on big silent brakes. As the fumes soaked down on the air, the size of the car became obvious. It was a four-seater auto-drive, the color of old copper, which rejected the dust that tried to settle on it as it overshot the track, and came to rest ten feet away. The polarized one-way windows were blanks. Then the side door lifted. Out climbed Cassi’s executor, my uncle-in-law, Hog Koberman.
The Hog stared at once at Jace. Clearly, I’d guessed wrong before; they’d never met. The Hog didn’t recognize Jace, but the Hog’s features, his whole stance, implied disapproval, and uneasiness. This was to have been the Hog’s party.
Then his eyes slid away from Jace, who presumably was impenetrably and intractably undiminished. The Hog’s eyes lit instead on the spot of new-turned soil, and the fallen spade.
I can shriek: Uncle, save me from this madman who insists I killed his brother, the bones of said brother having just been buried where your eye is riveted. Jace can say: A woman who feeds dead men in her incinerator needs treatment. Neither of us is likely to say such things. I don’t want trouble and incrimination, I don’t want a planet-state institution any more than I want to die. And Jace, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to surrender me to anyone else.
“Another burial, Bella?” the Hog asked me, with obscene accuracy and surprising lack of social taste.
Jace is silent, letting me make the first move, waiting for the cat to jump.
In a second or so, the Hog will also note the demolished lock fitments on the porch door.
“A thief broke in the house,” I said, “while I was in town. He didn’t take much, my dog scared him off.” It’s mostly the same story I attempted before. “But he killed the dog.”
“Good God, Bel,” said Uncle, “this should be reported to the police.” He risked a man-to-man antagonistic glare at Jace. “And who are you?”
Jace said, “Ask the lady, she’ll tell you.”
Confused, frustrated, the Hog swung to me.
“A neighbor. He helped me, with the dog.”
“Jason,” Jace said. “Name’s Jason.” He smiled at the Hog suddenly, a snow-white smile of parochial gregariousness that threw the Hog off-balance instantly.
“Well then,” the Hog said. He came to me and took my arm, angling us away from Jace. “Shall we go into the house?”
“All right.”
We walked. Jace, naturally, came after us, sticking to us with a modest, eager-to-please doggedness. Uncle tried to ignore this dark and golden beast upon our trail.
At the door, Uncle examined the two loose tongues of the lock.
“The police, Bella. You contacted them?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What are they doing?”
“Looking. . . .”
The Hog was satisfied but omnipotent.
“If you have any trouble—”
“Thank you.”
“Strange I should drop by right now,” he said. (Stranger than you think.) “I had some business out Brade way, and took a notion to drive over into this Styx of yours. I have the bimonthly figures of your investment program. There’s also another matter—”
But really, it’s just curiosity, Uncle. You just wanted to see where I am, what I’m doing, the strange weeping girl in sunglasses, the social outcast of the tribe. Maybe you fancy me, too, your arm constantly around my shoulders, your hand on my arm, your breathing in my face. Whatever it is, you’re here.
In the hall we paused.
“That’s a fine window above the stairs, Bel.”
Last night, this hall was an arena of the most basic savagery, of my screaming desperation, of Jace’s blackness rising from the dark. My mother died out here. Now this stupid man stands and admires the damn window.
We went into the parlor. Uncle sat.
“I wonder if you have any iced tea?” wondered Uncle.
Glibly, against my earlier statement, I said, “The thief took everything from my cupboards and my freezer.”
“All she can offer you is water,” added Jace obligingly from the doorway. He leaned there, shutting us in.
Unless you care for a drop of blood?
I laughed noiselessly and snapped the laugh off my face. Jason Vincent watched me. Uncle didn’t see. Uncle was alone with two of the most dangerous creatures he was ever likely to mix with. Stop it, Sabella. Whatever you do, you mustn’t feel part of a conspiracy with Jace; condemned and executioner aren’t coupled in a primitive rite.
“Oh,” said Hog Koberman, “Mr. Jason—pardon me, but there are some private matters I should like to discuss with Bella here.”
Jace smiled accommodatingly. He would do Uncle a favor and not mind. But he wouldn’t move.
“Bel—” Uncle said to me. I didn’t offer a solution. The Hog made a wrong judgment he should wrongly have made some while before. His face engaged with his distaste, his disappointment. “Very well. If that’s the way you want it, Bella.”
“Sabella,” I said. I don’t really know why.
Uncle’s head jerked. “Excuse me?”
“Sabella,” I said. “That’s my name.” I looked at Jace. “Sabella.”
Uncle became very formal. Very proper.
“If you prefer. Sabella. Before we come to the investment figures, Sabella—”
“How about,” Jace said, “Miss Quey.”
Uncle jumped. He looked at Jace, and at me.
“Sabella—”
“Miss Quey,” said Jace. “Spelled Q-U-E-Y. Pronounced Kay. Try it.”
Hog Koberman was speechless. He looked at me, waiting for rescue, and then he stood up.
“I’d hoped to deal with this personally, Sabella.” Nervously, involuntarily, he hesitated for Jace’s interpolation, but none came. “Now I see a letter would be more in the order of things.”
Jace stood aside from the door graciously, making way for Hog Koberman to pass through. Jace wanted to drive the visitor off, and
he’d succeeded, the visitor was leaving.
Suddenly, a chasm split in front of us. The decision was so swift there was no space for doubt or conjecture.
I strolled quietly past Jace, and after the Hog, and I caught the Hog at the porch.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” I said.
“There’s no need.”
“I’d like to.”
“Very well, Sabella.”
We went out again. I took Uncle’s pudgy arm. Jace followed, slow, a guard hound pacing us, fifteen feet behind.
“Now,” I said, “tell me what you wanted to say.”
“What I wanted to say hardly comes into it, Bel—Sabella. I have a mystery on my hands, and I was in hopes you might throw some light on it.”
I was barely listening.
“Yes, whatever you think.”
“It’s this business of old John Trim’s death.”
We were marching toward the big car, Uncle dragging me by my hand on his arm which he wouldn’t acknowledge and I wouldn’t release. When he said, “Old John Trim,” it was like a record tape, snagged and repeating. I’d heard it before, yet it was meaningless.
“You understand, Bella—Sabella, I have responsibilities to the Koberman estate. After John’s death I was sent certain documents of his. I learned from these that Cassilda had made Trim a private antemortem payment, which had at no time been declared for tax. A foolish illegality for Cassilda to have committed. On top of it, John was being harassed for money by some person who seems to have made a lucky guess about the payment. A term of detention at Trim’s age would have finished him. In fact, the threat was enough. His stroke was doubtless due to worry at the harassment he was receiving. Among his effects was an unmailed letter, intended for the vulture who was threatening him, containing an enclosure of credit bonds. There was also evidence of the previous relationship of the two concerned. The reason I trouble you with the affair, Bella, is that apparently Trim had hired the man in the first instance at your aunt’s instigation, in the capacity of a private investigator, the subject of the investigation being yourself.”
We’re all mad. The Hog’s mad too.
Sand, a blackmailer, my gentle-voiced, sweet and sunlit lover?
Uncle was waiting for my reply, so I replied, but not verbally. I punched him in the stomach, a blow of such force he never could have reckoned my little white-knuckled fist would inflict it. And as he bent, choking, I threw myself past him into the car. Anyone can operate auto-drive.
The door sizzled down, and through the one-way window I had a final glimpse of Uncle kneeling on the ground, his head in the dust. Behind him, Jace, running, but a fat hog in the way.
Then the car spun itself about, as Sand’s car did just over two months ago. It raced for the road below. These big custom-built chariots, they do a maximum of two hundred, faster than most traffic there is. Jace’s car, small enough to be parked out of sight, wouldn’t have a speed like this.
The packed bag was only a symbol, and the hat for traveling.
I’ve left it all behind. And I’ve left another enemy, another witness for my prosecution.
“Say good-bye,” Jace said, when he smashed the glass container. Now I’ve said good-bye to everything.
* * *
* * *
When I got near the Brade Highway, Route 09, I took the bills I found in Hog Koberman’s wallet compartment. The credit cards I didn’t dare to touch, not from honesty, but because card-users could be traced in minutes by the central computer of the banking system. That the Hog carried bills at all surprised me, as Jace’s possession of bills had. I suppose they were a rich man’s small-change, and for Jace, a good-faith token to the blonde whore he had brought that night to the house. I didn’t feel compunction at robbery. In a world of enemies, compunction is a flaw no survivor could indulge. I’d stolen lives, after all. Cash was nothing.
After I’d pocketed the bills, I stopped the car. There was nothing on the road, either way. I got out, jammed on the accelerator, manually slammed down the door, and watched the vehicle plow on up the highway. A top-speeder has a built-in avoidance pattern to miss other traffic, halt at obstacles or roadblocks, or pedestrians. Meeting none of those, it will run until its solar cells dry out. With luck, the police Uncle would undoubtedly alert wouldn’t realize that the blank windows hid an empty space.
I walked into Brade Corner in ten minutes. The Corner is one of fifty outposts of Brade itself. People come and go constantly, and no one remembers faces. In a dim little underground parlor I let someone quick-set my hair with a haphazard bleaching that would fade in streaks—I could refine it later. Somewhere else again, I bought a red dress and a large red bag, and somewhere suntan makeup for girls who come in from the cold planets. Then I took a cab to Brade lift-off point.
It was thirteen o’clock, unlucky thirteen, when I boarded the air-bug to Ares.
Who’d reckon I’d head for Ares, Koberman country? But Ares is like all big cities, like the Plateau, a wide tract of land where names don’t matter, but the hunting is good by night.
I suppose I could have run to the hills, but years of human comforts had softened me. I couldn’t live in a cave, not now. Besides I’d dreamed of those hills, and Jace Vincent had found me in that dream. Maybe I was just insane as well as full of hate and fear and anger, and tired of making allowances, cheating myself. Saying no, Sabella, no.
I sat in my bright bloody dress, and I looked around the plane, and the dull sky shone in the windows. I didn’t care anymore, you see. I’d tried, and my reward was punishment. I wouldn’t try anymore.
The name on my ticket was Sarah Holland. Sarah was my mother’s name, and Holland was the promotion name on a long billboard advertising bottled water as the Hog’s car burned through Canyon.
Sarah Holland doesn’t care about cold fanatical Cassi, or shifty shifting Sand that Sabella had taken, scorched in her own horror and guilt, while he had been trying all along to take her too, and Trim, and how many others, perhaps, back in his insecure, faltering father-brother-haunted-past.
Even Jace has no part in Sarah’s world.
When Sarah was fourteen, she went with a boy in a car. And when she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, she went with all the boys. Her mother never said to her, “Sarah, what are doing to yourself?” Sarah’s mother hadn’t cared.
Sarah has no pursuers, and no guilt. Sarah won’t let herself tremble with reaction.
Sarah can live with all she is.
Sarah will have to.
Part Three
De Profundis
I
THE NIGHTS I don’t go out I sit and watch the skies above the city. I mentioned the clouds, and the lights of the city on the clouds, long ago. I explained about the hills of concrete and glass, and the valleys of neon and the trees of blue steel. The subways rumble wild as rivers. Great mountains of apartment blocks stand black on rays of white and indigo and violet. Sometimes jeweled birds fly over, planes coming into the landing strips of the port, or the golden tail of a phoenix, a space ship taking a fix on our glow, heading in to some point a thousand miles away.
In the end, maybe, I’ll go off-planet. Maybe I should go to Earth. But the hills are green and the skies are blue, how strange, how oppressive. I think I could only go to Earth to die.
I move about a lot, anyway, a month here, a month there. Five days in Cliffton, ten in Iles, three in Dale.
My hair’s pure blonde tinsel, but I have a wig which is black, woven of darkness. I wear white frocks and red, and stockings with silver seams. Guess what I do, nights?
I haven’t killed yet. The whole Christawful city is riddled with men who are searching for me, the whore who gave them the lay of their life, but they can’t recall why. I charge them cash, too, since I have to pay the rent somehow. Sometimes I even meet one of my customers again. I never say no. But then I mo
ve on again, and they’re safe, till next time.
Did I say I never say “no”? Once I did. In a bar behind the spin-drive stadium. He was a racer and he came up to me. Jet black hair and golden skin. He reminded me of Jace.
“Come on, honey,” he said. “Why not?”
Those fine black ink-and-brush-painted hairs were on his hands, lean and articulate with handling the blazing wheel of the spin-track. Had Jace done that, too? What had Jace done in any event, that I know of? Except hunt for me. Was he still hunting? Was the pig-man helping him now?
“I don’t do it with spin-racers.”
“Yes you do.”
“When I do it with a spin-racer, he crashes.”
They have superstition on the track. As he got up and left me, I caught the glimmer of a gold cross on his gold skin.
I left Cassi’s cross in the house, and the casket, and everything else.
I missed the house. The colored window, the deck of music, the wolves’ music in the loudly silent nights.
An overcast day—the cities are richer in these, pale-blue oxygen overcast on lavender—I went out. I saw a tinstone C.R. mission, the House of the Shepherd. New and shiny, with a great white banner. The banner said: WHAT ARE YOU LIVING FOR? LIVE FOR JESUS.
It’s been three months since I ran. Five months since Sand was burned to bones.
Sometimes it seems odd that they haven’t traced me after all. Other times, I know they never will.
So what am I living for? For what happens when I take? I’ll tell you something, when I take, now, nothing happens to me. It’s a hunger and I feed it. Like sex to some of them, an itch to scratch. Not like breathing anymore. Each time I hunt on the slopes of concrete, through the ravines of metal brick, my excitement says to me, this time it will be special, like it was. Why isn’t it? And if it isn’t, why do I go on? Perhaps it is a drug, a habit, and I could break it. Perhaps I’m deranged, need help. Put me in a doll’s house, lock me away. I’m preying on your city, sinking teeth in it, sucking its veins.