by Tanith Lee
I felt rather sick and very foolish. I sat down on the edge of a pew and the dog’s ears man picked up my purse and put it by me.
He offered me a brandy from the medicine cabinet, but when I refused, he brought me a small tumbler of water instead, from the back room behind the angels.
“And you’re a stranger, too,” he said. “A newcomer, and now I’ve frightened you away.”
“I’m just passing through,” I said. “Some relatives of mine used to come here, years ago.”
“That’d be before my time, then. Only been here a year and a half, part-time organist, and museum attendant on the side. If it’s that you’ve come to see, I’m afraid it’s not on show today.” He seemed to expect a comment.
“Excuse me, what isn’t?”
“The museum.”
“I didn’t know about a museum.”
“The museum is generally what visitors to Easterly come in here to see. Or did. One time there was quite some traffic, but once the initial interest died down—Mother Earth gets the original and we get the bits, and everyone forgets. I say museum. I think I overstate.”
The water, laying a cold gravitational center through my body, had steadied me.
“I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.”
“You mean to say, Miss—”
“Holland.”
“Miss Holland, you mean to say you didn’t know about the archaeological find at Easterly, two years back?”
There it was. It was like a gong booming through the pit of the world, unheard, detected only by its massive vibration. I still didn’t comprehend, yet I recognized the moment.
“What find?”
“Ah, Miss Holland. Are you interested in previous cultures? Are you concerned about the prior civilization of Novo Mars? Don’t answer. Let’s pretend you are. When they started to process the ground over the river for the New Easterly Complex, they blasted out an old quarry, and straight through it was this blessed confounded hole with a slab in it that dates back a thousand years before the first ships landed here. Just think of it. One thousand years before men started squeaking and picking about over the surface. That’s older than the foundations at Dawson, older than the stuff up in the Callicoes. Not only older, but different. That’s the real point. Different. The news had it, TV newsouts carried it for months. You never heard?”
“I suppose . . . I must have.”
Recollect, I never listened to the news of my world, not since my mother died, except those days after I burned Sand Vincent.
“Well, it’s a tomb. We’ve had them before, right? But they’re urn burials. And this. This is a sarcophagus. Like the Egyptians on Earth, or the Plutonids—you get me, Miss Holland?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, damn it,” said the dog’s ears man, then he glanced at the altar and said, “Pardon me, Sir. Miss Holland, we’ve put away the museum for today, but I’ve nearly scared you half to death. So if you’d like to see what we have down there—”
I wanted to say no.
“Yes,” I said, “I really would.”
He beamed at me.
“Better take off those glasses. The generator runs the lights below, and it’s switched to half power now.”
I took the sunglasses off, and the wounded window light shattered over me.
“Why, that’s strange,” said my guide, as he walked me towards the angels and the room behind, “the very last visitor that came to see the museum—you wouldn’t have a brother, would you, Miss Holland?”
“No.”
“That’s strange,” he repeated. We went by the angel with the open mouth, and I could see the hairline hinges in its jaw. “A tall man, what I’d call the piratical type. Of course much bigger built than you and black-haired, but you know—a distinct resemblance.”
Is he talking about Jace? Do Jace and I look alike? I don’t want to think about Jace, not now, nor Cassi, nor anything. They were leveling the ground out there, to create their complex with its ambiguous domes, when they found the hole I had crawled into, and disemboweled it. Whatever they’d found in there, one thing they hadn’t found. That thing which seemed to be beating now, like a second crimson heart against my breast.
We were in the organ room, with a door to the robe room, and a static moving stair that led down through a trap in the floor. A notice in the wall said: REPLICATE REMAINS.
“Isn’t that too nasty for words?” he asked me, indicating the notice. Then he invited me onto the stair, and pressed the down button. “This used to be the old robe room,” he told me. “When they dug up the sarcophagi (or do you prefer ’guses?) it was reckoned the safest storage place in Easterly. Or rather, the safest place that would accept responsibility. Then, after they’d shipped the real relics off to the Federation archives on Earth, the replicas came in here, and here they stayed. Ares wants them, naturally, but we’ve held out. You know, I do think it would have been kind of nice to have held out all the way. We keep the real articles and have the Federation make the confounded replicas.”
Cassi must have come this way, a year ago. Did she see the reality or the replicate? The replicates will be so perfect, I doubt it would have made much difference. Then again, suppose this stone around my neck were in a vault on Earth and a replicate were throbbing on my skin. What difference would that make?
As he warned me, the old robe room, now the museum, was dim, and after the rain of sun from the windows I was glad. Along the far wall were a series of blocks, the kind all genuine museums have, to contain and protect the objects inside yet leave them accessible to all around view.
“It’s very dark,” said my guide. “Of course, the blocks light up. Here we are.” He led me, and we stood by the first block in the line, and it came alight like dawn.
The slab across my way in the tunnel, satin-smooth and almost featureless, save that there, there, Sabella, was the crevice you never saw before, only felt, in which your destiny lay like a pebble.
“See that little dinge, just there?” Helpfully he pointed. “No one guesses as to what made that pock. You need laser power to cut into such a slab. And look, this next one shows the cut sections.”
The second block lit. Inside, the tomb, split wide like a walnut.
My heart rattled. It couldn’t beat so fast and let me live.
“And here we are, the insides—”
The third block lights. There it was. Whatever it was. It looked like handfuls of yellow string, and gray wire, and then I perceived a skull that looked to me human, ordinary and simply dead.
“That,” he said, “is a Martian. A New Martian. Not dust, but bones. Now, just look at these wrappings from the body—” And he dashed to the fourth block and it lit.
Where the bones had staled, the covering hadn’t. It was a sheet of a weave that looked like the best kind of synthetic silk, only a touch faded. The drawing, or maybe embroidery, on the cloth was photographically accurate. A man bent to drink from a cup a woman was handing him. Both were naked, hairless, beautiful. Beside them stood another man and woman (or rather the first pair, repeated in the fashion of a cartoon), and the woman was kissing the neck of the man. The pictures were very calm, and quite innocent, except for the drop that hung from the woman’s throat. These drops are two pieces of crystal, fixed into the design, and the first one colorless as white diamond, the second red.
“The theory is a little grisly, I’m afraid,” said my guide. “Do you want to hear it? Originally, there was some outcry over such items being stored under the church if the theory was true, but of course, the safest place for every form of evil is directly under the eye of God. If it is evil.”
“I’d like to know the theory.”
“Well, first of all, the pictures were taken to mean nothing in particular—domestic duty, affection, between man and woman. Then the visual semantics people got on to it. The i
dea is that, since only two activities are shown, and quite specifically, they must interrelate. In the first picture, the woman gives the man a cup and he drinks. In the second, the man is giving the woman drink.” There was a silence. He glanced at me rather apprehensively. After my outburst at the roaring angel, he wondered if I could take this. “I mean, she is drinking from his neck vein. Which leaves us, if the theorists are correct, with vampirism. Of course, there’s nothing supernatural in it. It’s probably a rite. We know so little about this people—” He starts to theorize himself, postulating many other acts which the cloth may really be depicting.
I stood, and I called to mind Cassi visiting in momma’s house. Cassi not seeming to notice me. Not noticing me till she reread momma’s letters, which must have mentioned several things, half hiding, half revealing. Momma, you must have seen the stone, and told her. You must have seen the stone, I know you did, when it was white and when it was red—and yet, even so, for Cassi to make the connection between this replicate under the church, the replicate she thought God led her to see, and myself—
“But superstition is a dreadfully clinging vine,” my guide was saying. “The worst moment came for our collection here when the robot digger on the complex unearthed the bones.”
I realized something about my guide. Despite his worry over me, which was quite genuine, he’d brought me down here because he felt assured, after my response to the angel, of a sensitive, perhaps hysterical further reaction from me. For months he’d had no custom for this pride of his, this find, and when I screamed in the church, he visualized, somewhere on the dark side of his brain, I might scream a little over these blocks. And so far, I hadn’t. So now he was waiting. It was time to speak again.
“You mean there’s another burial besides this one?”
“Well, in a way. What I actually meant was that human bones were found in the tunnel, outside the tomb itself.”
It didn’t register properly. It didn’t fit.
“Human bones?”
“Well, yes. Something of a mystery, and hence a lot of foolish nonsense, and opposition to us keeping the artifacts of the burial just here. I recall a lady who came all the way from Ares to shout at us. A big name. What was it now—Cooperman—”
“Koberman,” I say, before I can hold myself.
“Ah, yes, I believe it was. How did you know?”
“The Kobermans are a big name in Ares.”
“I can credit that. This lady now, she spoke a lot about God, and what she owed to Him. She scared me, I don’t mind telling you. And as it turned out, her objections were virtually groundless, she didn’t even know about the human bones. Then Pennington—he was guide down here then—he blurted it. She went as white as ash, this lady did. That was the first time we had a lady faint in our church (you were nearly the second). And when she came to, you’d think she’d had some sort of vision. I love my God, Miss Holland, but that sudden turning on, like an electric current, it bothers me. . . .”
I didn’t feel anything. No, not quite correct. I felt a sword poised across my neck, delicate as the wing of a butterfly. I couldn’t prompt him, but I didn’t have to.
“The thing was,” he said, “this set of bones the digger unearthed belonged to a perfectly healthy little girl, about eleven years of age, just on the edge of puberty. There was no apparent cause of death, though I’d say she’d crawled in there and maybe the air was bad and she fell asleep and asphyxiated. But that’s not good enough for the superstitions of our community. Something had to have lured her in the hole, and killed her. Now who in their senses would agree to that about a tomb full of dead remains?”
I was cold. Christ, I was so cold. Even the roots of my hair, my fingernails, even the moisture in my eyes, cold, cold. . . .
“But who was she?”
“The little girl bones? Well, it’s a funny business, I’ll admit that. The date of the decay was around eleven or so years before we got them out—they’d sunk back in the earth some, but we can date fairly accurately, even after Martian soil has done its work. But the trouble was, nobody had reported a child missing at that or any subsequent time, here in Easterly. The teeth are the usual way of identifying, and they were a dear little set, all flawless, but for a spot of work on one back molar. So they chased up the dental records in the town, and the only child whose record matched the teeth in the skeleton was a child called—”
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
“—Sabella Quey.”
He pronounced it Kee. Perhaps that made it all right. Perhaps that means it isn’t—can’t be—
“But this Sabella Kee (Sabella—that’s pretty, don’t you think?)—Well, she certainly didn’t go missing at any point. In fact she and her mother moved out of the area about three years later than the bone-decay date, and went to live over near Brade somewhere, I think the gossip had it, though we never traced them.”
No. No.
This man is mad. And he told Cassi all this. And Cassi thought—no wonder Cassi thought—
I went in the tunnel. I went in, and I came out. I, me, Sabella. Sabella. Oh momma, why aren’t you here with me to tell this man he’s crazy, and that I’m your daughter, that you slapped and loved and died for.
He was saying something else about the bones, and missing children, and he was moving on and there was one more block, but I didn’t want to stay there. I knew now what Cassi heard, what made her hate and fear me, and it was a lie.
But I must, as always, cover my tracks where I can. The tracks of the wolf.
“It’s been very good of you—”
“But you must see the last one.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize how late—”
And the last block lit up, but I was on the moving stair.
* * *
* * *
“Come out!” my mother called. “Bel, come out of that, it’s nothing but a dirty hole. Bel, do you hear me?”
But that was my dream on the plane to Ares, the dream when Sand woke me, and told me everything was all right. My mother wasn’t with me.
But I remember. I do.
I was eleven, and nine years before, my father was killed. And I lived in Easterly, and I started to menstruate. And I was unhappy and I walked out of town and I found the tunnel in the quarry, which may have been a metaphor for the vagina, and—
And when I came back to Easterly last night, the house was gone that I’d lived in, and I thought it was as if a chunk of my past had been rubbed out, as if my past were only hearsay, and it suddenly seemed memory itself could be a fake, a fabrication of the mind.
And yet I can remember—
Everything since I came out of the tunnel, clear and absolute and washed with color and pain and shadings. And everything before I went into the tunnel—yes, I can remember, but—
It’s like a diluted painting, or a kind of tableau, where events and people are made of paper and pasted on. . . .
Yes, I know my father died. I know where I lived and where I went to school, and the shape of that room and this tree, and the color of a doll’s dress and mother’s hair and that it went gray after my father was killed and then she tinted it another color; and I know what my grades were, and when my second teeth came, or maybe a dentist fixing one, and perhaps I climbed trees and perhaps I loved lemon-acid ice cream, but then—
It was just as if I learned those things, the way I learned history dates in school. I could remember, but maybe only—
Second hand.
Outside the church, there was half an hour left of sun. A pink-copper light slicks off the walls beyond the churchyard fence.
Everything seemed to be whirling, the air full of specks, the trees coming undone, everything in shreds, returning to chaos. There was nowhere firm for me to stand, and even my flesh was whirling off, Sabella’s flesh that wasn’t Sabella’s.
And
then there was one dark solid, a static beacon in the flood.
The avenger, the dark angel. There was a bar across the street, and he was standing there. He’d been right behind me all the while, right behind this thing he knew wasn’t human, not even the part-human thing it thought it was. In the whirling world, only he remained whole, but that was because he was death, just as I always thought.
He’d seen me, but he was waiting for me to cross the street and lie down for the stroke of the sword.
I turned and I ran. By the church and under the shade trees. The path was tiled, and there I could see a back gate and a street beyond.
He’d be running to catch me. He always caught me before. But now I knew what I was, now I was running not only from human vengeance but from my own self, that thing I dreamed in the mirror, its claws sticky with blood, its tongue a black whip, now surely I could run fast enough to get away.
I dropped my purse somewhere. The heel of my shoe twisted and I tore off my shoes and ran on.
I couldn’t hear his steps behind me.
My hat was caught in the tree, a black raven. That was funny.
On the street, people got out of my way. Their surprised eager faces flashed past. Perhaps I wasn’t running, but the world was dashing away from me, carrying Jace with it.
I ran over a road and a car dived by me, a hot breath of hell on my back. I never turned. I might see death behind me.
Here was a crowd. I ran, I pushed, I was trapped, I was free, I was through.
The sun was going. Try to catch the sun.
Sabella was running. No. Not Sabella. Something.
A pain in my side began to slow me, like a piece of lead shot in my vitals. And the red sky was being tipped out over the horizon and overhead the sky was already black.
What place was this? Did I need my fabricated memory, or the real one?
Real one. I was on the highway out of town. Beyond the hypermarkets and the giant stores, where the old beer shop used to be, and where the bars were now like yellow rips in the dark. This was where I was when I was fourteen and the boy with fair hair came by. That’s right, that’s fine. Full circle. And there was an open-top solar jeep slowing by the walkway.