by Tanith Lee
I turned my back and walked on.
When they put me into the hospital they may cure me. Or if they don’t I’ll die.
But if my courage fails me, I’ll just move out of four on twenty-sixth, Iles, and the circus will continue. I can keep away from churches now.
He found me. What was the point if it goes nowhere?
I hadn’t wanted him to kill me. I’d wanted him to say to me it would be all right. Not a dove on an altar, but Jace. Not prayer, but Jace. Not Jesus.
Jace.
* * *
* * *
A mail chute slanted up into my room at four on twenty-sixth. A couple of random circulars came along the chute in the morning when I was drearily, restlessly sleeping. The package came later, and woke me from a nightmare like a grave. Awake, the grave persisted, since I knew what the package was. It was my haunting, Cassi’s casket.
I opened the package, and I lifted out the casket. It was rather funny, had an element of burlesque, the way three times I’d been given this thing. There was the sinister quality, too. This version of the casting of runes. I knew who’d sent it now, delivered it by hand through the chute marked four, twenty-six Holland, ten stories down. But there was a miniature self-play tape in with the casket.
For half an hour, I couldn’t make myself press the button to activate the tape. Maybe I never would have, but part of me, a very shamed foolish part, wanted to hear his voice, whatever it said to me. And this small part finally pressed in the button.
“Your friend, the Hammerhead mailman, hung onto the parcel with Cassi Koberman’s box in it. Your recent life seems full of those of us trying to test which side of the law you walk. The mailman thought he could play games and you wouldn’t report him. Then he sobered up some, and got scared you might. I know, because I had a couple of drinks with the bastard, the day before I took the box off him. I’ve talked with a few people about you, Sabella. Don’t backtrack on that. None of them can get near you, or has the guts to try. As for Cassi’s box, I guess you couldn’t have opened it the second time. When the fat man left, I went through your house on the Plateau, and I found the box, and opened it. Trim John sent it to you, just before he died. He put his own letter in the box. You haven’t read the letter. Read it.”
The voice ended there, and I paced about waiting for more, but the blank tail of the tape coiled on, with nothing, and then stopped.
I thought of Jace’s eyes, on the bridge. The voice was unchanged, the lazy slurred drawl, even an edge of bevelled humor on the “Trim John.” I thought of other things after that, but finally I set the key in the casket and lifted the lid, and took out the sheet of fine quality paper—finer than the paper Cassi’s curse had been written on.
I expected to be cursed again. I spent a while looking at the thin, spidery, stilted writing, so I wouldn’t have to read the words. “Miss Sabella Quey,” it began. “Miss Sabella Quey, When Mrs. Koberman went to Easterly and came home with the warmth of God Almighty in her heart, I was glad for her. But then she had this notion that God’s angels had warned her against you. And all her last days, she was planning how she would get to you through the law, because she said that they don’t burn witches, and the law was the only recourse she had. To begin with, she provided you a sum in her will. She believed the chance of the money would ensure your presence at her funeral, while, if you had vacated the house at Hammerhead, a newscast announcement was to be made of your mention in the will, similarly intended to draw you from seclusion. Next, she selected a young man, a private investigator in Dawson, and instructed me to hire him. She had seen from the advertisement that the young man’s name was Sand Vincent, and insisted that, because of his name, she understood God had selected him to carry on His work against you. Well then, Miss Quey, Mrs. Koberman died, and I did what she’d told me because you get accustomed to obeying a woman you’ve obeyed for ten-odd years. But Mr. Vincent isn’t God’s agent, Mr. Vincent is an evil man. The day after we put Mrs. Koberman to rest Mr. Vincent came back to the house for his rented car, which he had parked beside the cemetery. He told me he was driving out west to Hammerhead Plateau, to see you, Miss Quey. He said he had things arranged between you and everything was going as he wished. But then he threatened me over a certain payment that Mrs. Koberman had made to me. This evil boy is from the devil, and has not done with me, or with any of us. You see, Miss Quey, not being well, I can write these things, but I should be quick. I think that your aunt was led falsely in her supposings. I think that, rather than to chastise you, she was meant to bring you to salvation. It’s a wonderful thing to approach God, and His Only True Son, Jesus Christ, whose love compasses all worlds and states and times. If you could know the comfort it brings me, even in my agitation, I believe you, too, would turn to Him. And for this reason, I advise you to go to Easterly, Miss Quey. It was there that Cassilda Koberman found her faith and there she learned what she upheld to be this bad thing which you had done, though she never confided in me as to what this thing might be. In Easterly there’s a church, and here is where she said she was directed to discover this terrible thing. Or maybe we have all been mistaken. But I felt obliged to reveal all these matters to you, in hopes you also will seek redemption. And I ask you to forgive me if I have wronged you. I remain, most faithfully yours, John Michael Trim.”
The extraordinary form of this letter. Its religious fever coupled to its curious formality; its blindness, its doubts, its pedantry, its childishness, linked to the stoicism with which John Trim recognized oncoming sudden death.
I visualized again his frail hands on the stair rail, his impartial, self-effacing solemnity. (Can I recall his face?)
But none of that took me nearer to any point of reference. So I reread the letter. John Trim advised me to go back to Easterly for the salvation of my soul. An old man’s naïve fanatical deed of expiation. But why had Jace augmented it?
I pulled the blind of polarized glass over the window, for the day was burning bright. Easterly. Already I could smell the aniseed grass, see the cotton wool over the refinery chimneys. Already I could feel momma as she slapped my fourteen-year-old face in my locked bedroom, and hear the sound of men marshaling for a wildcat hunt, and the noise the wind makes, blowing over the river, the meadows, and the dry canals. And by the hole in the rock where I found my pendant.
Easterly’s where it started. Maybe it had to end there.
I read Trim’s letter yet again. (Why did the name Sand Vincent make Cassi judge him suitable to her scheme?) Then I played the tape again, but all I heard was Jace’s voice, not what he said.
He stood in the dark, and watched me with the boy from the bar. Jace watched me, and then he examined the boy, and then he walked with me, and he never spoke. “I drink blood,” I said to him. Only the second time I ever vocalized it. The first time, momma hit me and yelled at me. He didn’t answer. He didn’t hit me, or yell, or laugh, or try to reason with or kill me. As if—
As if he’d been expecting it all. As if he knew.
I know what you are, Sabella. I didn’t know until I came to God, but when I found God, He told me. I hope the cross cripples you, as it should. You’re just one of the wolves.
His angels told me. I know what you’ve done.
Cassi had found God at Easterly, and her heart should have exploded with love, but instead she went crusading, and I was the Infidel and she knew it—
And Jace knew it.
How?
It was more than Cassi digesting my mother’s old letters, those hints and evasions. It was more than Jace talking to a few people who mistrust me, and guessing. The kind of thing he’d never guess would be a thing like a girl who lives by drinking blood. I doubt if he actually believes it, even now. But he knew it.
It was at Easterly, whatever the truth was.
And then I realized that Jace has had the time, between when he opened the casket and when he waited fo
r me on the off-chance in the church at Dale. He’d had three months since I ran from Hammerhead Plateau. Whatever was at Easterly, he’d been there, and that was how he knew.
But the dead are always in league against me. Momma, Cassi, Sand, John Michael Trim. And those others, Frank and Angelo and Benny and Lek and. . . .
Maybe all the dead were sending me to Easterly to die and Jace was the human spokesman for all those ghosts, so real and human and alive that I’d never figure it out until too late.
I sat in the room in Iles, and waited, but no one came to take me into any kind of custody.
So I packed my bag and I went out on the briefly sunset street, and dipped in the minute of fire, an auto-cab came to the walkway. And before the fire had died, I was riding east.
Besides, there was nowhere else to go but Hell.
II
AT A CAR fixit place two miles outside Easterly, having had a moment’s forethought, I went into the washroom and slipped on a black dress, took off my silver stockings, combed and pinned my bleached hair into a big knot on my head, and wiped most of the cosmetics off my face. When I was a child there, Easterly had a Puritanical flavor, and being sixty-two miles from Sodom (Ares) had only made it worse. I assume Cassi had gone to visit Easterly again out of nostalgia, and perhaps out of fear. It seems to me she understood death was creeping up on her, and she needed every anchor she could find. So she aimed for her roots, the town she was born in, and with true Koberman luck she caught God and holy war into the bargain. But what do I feel, with only the synthetic tan dye left on my skin, and my sober black dress, do I register anything beyond scents and alarms and old dusts?
It’s true, I felt a kind of hankering for Easterly, the way you can look back at childhood, even when it’s bitter, longing for all those firsts of life, and those endless wide horizons of unknowledge.
And remembered Easterly, of course, was bigger than I’ll ever see it now, and younger, and more important. The brindle oaks, the honeysuckle trees, the children in the streets, the unmechanized bakery that baked real bread; the beer shops and dancing palaces and wicked 3-V cinemats outlawed out of town.
The first thing I saw as the auto-cab decelerated to eighty an hour and cruised in was the great chain of supermarkets built along the highway. And then I saw the surrealistic candy-parlor ballooning over the town, a large striped tent of magenta and white sugar fluorescents.
Everywhere new apartment blocks had been built up like toy bricks, and then spilled over and left lying in the meadows. Automated plants and factories overhung the dam. Where were the refineries? Their chimneys were hidden, like the mines, and only long plumes of smoke, pure bronze on the neonized darkness, flowed up into the night.
There were bars in Easterly, blazing on main street. The novel copper bricks of the ore boomtown looked oxidized and pale. The houses crouched between the piles and pylons, a colony invaded by monsters. The old town was being squeezed out like paste from a tube.
Some of the streets were entirely gone to make way for improvements. My street was one of them.
I stopped the cab at the edge, where the half-remembered, half-familiar avenue ended, and where my street, momma’s and mine, had begun, and now had ceased to be. It’s very odd, the way it just isn’t there. As if a chunk of my past had been rubbed out, as if it’s only hearsay. Did we really live here? Did any of the events I associate with this spot actually occur? It suddenly seems memory itself could be a fake, come to that. What happened an hour ago, only the fabrication of a mind anxious to possess its background.
Even the trees had vanished.
The times I’d smelled aniseed grass, and thought of this place. And now the one place in my world that I wouldn’t smell that grass was here.
I paid off the cab, and it sailed away into the lights and shadows. Then I moved slowly along the concrete sidewalk, through the arches and over the tiled plaza with its fountain of liquid glass. The house would have stood about here. Maybe I would find it. Maybe somewhere it was still here, meshed in the new brickworks and tiles, like those crazy drawings where you win a prize if you can discover the shape of a flower in a girl’s eye, or a girl’s eye in a flower.
But I didn’t win the prize.
Only one thing was sure. The C.R. church had remained. Cassi came to it, and Jace had come to it. John’s letter told me that this was where the secret of my sin was blazoned forth for all to see who could read it.
Abruptly my legs were water. I wondered what I was doing here at the whims of my enemies.
Over there, where the apartment blocks stride away beyond the river, a tunnel ran into a quarry. Was that the way I ought to go?
I walked through town, and over the river by a new steel bridge. Then I walked on a new white fluorescent road by the rims of which wild flowers still clustered. My heart roused in my side as I got closer and closer, closer and closer to that afternoon.
About a quarter of a mile from the border of the two dry canals, a wall climbed up into the air. Through an eyelet in the wall, I beheld scaffolding and other walls and a pallid dome which ambiguously might be intended as the future roof of a processing plant or of a theater. These buildings extended for two or three miles into the night, beyond the point where the quarry had gaped and the hole had gaped in the quarry.
Like vast dunes, they had swarmed over, and smothered it.
I went back to town, and then couldn’t remember where the C.R. church was anyway. Subconsciously, no doubt, I had reasons. Consciously, I was simply confused and exhausted. There was a shabby hotel on the corner of one of the older streets. The desk was mechanized, and the lift played tinny music. I went into a room that was like the lift except it had furniture squashed into it. I lay down on the bed and I listened to the noise that Easterly made now, a noise like Ares, but thinner and less sure.
I took ten showers in the closet of that room that night. The room was hot and the windows wouldn’t open and the air-conditioning was faulty. I came to imagine there was nobody in the hotel but me, not one human. And I felt alone as I’d never felt alone, alone without even myself for company.
* * *
* * *
When the sun came and set Easterly on fire, I lay on the bed in the hotel, because it was too bright to go out, too bright and hot to go searching for any answers. But possibly the church would be shut after sundown. I considered waiting for an overcast, but to wait alone in this room and to walk the streets and the dry meadows by night filled me with an obscure fear. I didn’t want to take, not in Easterly, where it started. The spacer had been generous, loading me with gifts, and then the boy from the bar had added the last dance of the night. I could hold out two or three nights on that, if I avoided the sun, but one day and night of the allowance were gone, and here was another day.
When the big sun began to wester, I put on my shade hat and my sunglasses, and walked down through the seemingly deserted hotel and out into the town. Long shadows I didn’t recall were plastered on the ground from the new buildings. I asked someone on the street the way to the church. It was like seeing a movie I hadn’t seen for years, recollecting the actions only as they happened—here the turn of concourse, there the angle of a store, now crushed between giants. The blackish shade trees were the same and the fence, discolored now like teeth. The church had been fitted with a door that opened as you approached.
I didn’t really remember the church after all. Or else it was entirely changed. It had an austere whitewashed frame, through which had been stabbed great wounds of windows, like sliced pomegranates, green angelica and blue ink. The altar cloth was the blue and white I’d seen in Ares, and roses bled over their bowls in the hands of white marble angels with huge open-fan wings of tarnished gilt. A pool of incense hung in the air above the altar, like a mirage. The watch flame flickered in its little crystal canister, showing that God was present. But nobody else was home.
I
stood on the tiled floor, staring around, my pulse a drum, searching for the vast scrawled words written in fire on the white wall; SABELLA QUEY IS DAMNED. But there weren’t any words, and only the angels with their roses had any connection with Cassi’s letter. Surely, there hadn’t been marble angels here when momma and I sat among the congregation, tensed for the visitation of light out of or into our souls. Maybe marble angels would come alive, were granted the power of speech.
Their carved faces were frigid over the red flowers like blood. The blank eggs of the eyes stared back at me. Their lips must have parted slowly, and before Cassi’s gaze they had stated the truth to her, as she kneeled astonished between the pews. Behold, the mouthpiece of the Lord.
And then one of the angels slowly opened its mouth.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I froze, with that feeling of the heart actually turning over which accompanies unpredicted horror. Wider and wider the lips of the angel stretched, as if snarling, as if preparing to bite at me. From out the lips came a huge high-pitched gale of sound, which seemed to split my head apart. Not till the shriek cut off did I scream, irresistibly, but helplessly delayed. The scream sounded far away, and so did the crack of my purse landing on the tiles.
There was a thud, and footsteps. I looked to see the angel running toward me, its mouth pulled wide to bite, but instead there was a man with a distraught face and two gray dog’s ears of hair flopping at either side of it.
“Please,” said the man, taking my arm, treading on my purse and jumping off it. “Please, don’t be alarmed.”
“The angel—” I think I said.
“It’s just the calliope,” said the man.
I looked past him. The angel’s mouth remained wide.
“The calliope,” said the man. “The organ pipes run up through our angels, there, and when I play they part their lips so they seem to be singing with the congregation. It’s rather cute, I suppose. I always run over the hymns at this time. Usually the church is empty. But, oh my, I’ve really given you a shock, haven’t I?”