Blood 20

by Tanith Lee

  Now and then he heard the tinkling noise of hudja bells the people had hung on the banana trees. Then a fragment like piano music, but it was the bells again. Some nights the sea breathed as loudly up here as in the bay. Or a shout from one of the huts two miles off might seem just over a wall.

  He could hear the vrouw, certainly. But he was used to hearing that. Her squeaks and yowls, fetching off as Vonderjan shafted her. But she was a slut. The way she had come in tonight proved it, in her bedclothes. And she had never given the meester a son, not even tried to give him a child, like the missus (Uteka) had that time, only she had lost it, but she was never very healthy.

  A low thin wind blew along the cane fields, and Stronn could smell the coffee trees and the hairy odour of kayar.

  He went out of the yard, carrying his gun, thinking he was still looking for the white horse.

  A statue of black obsidian might look like this, polished like this.

  The faint luminescence of night, with its storm choked within it, is behind the figure. Starlight describes the out­line of it; but only as it turns, moving toward her, do details of its forward surface catch any illumination.

  Yet too, all the while, adapting to the camouflage of its environment, it grows subtly more human, that is, more recognisable.

  For not entirely – remotely – human is it.

  Does she comprehend?

  From the head, a black pelt of hair waterfalls away around it, folding down its back like a cloak –

  The wide flat pectorals are coined each side three times. It is six-nippled, like a panther.

  Its legs move, columnar, heavily muscled and immensely vital, capable of great leaps and astonishing bounds, but walk­ing, they give it the grace of a dancer.

  At first there seems to be nothing at its groin, just as it seems to have no features set into its face … except that the light had slid, once, twice, on the long rows of perfect teeth.

  But now it is at the bed’s foot, and out of the dark it has evolved, or made itself whole.

  A man’s face.

  The face of a handsome Justus, and of a Vonderjan in his stellar youth. A face of improbable mythic beauty, and opening in it, like two vents revealing the inner burning core of it, eyes of grey ice, which each blaze like the planet Venus.

  She can see now, it has four upper arms. They too are strong and muscular, also beautiful, like the dancer’s legs.

  The penis is large and upright, without a sheath, the black lotus bulb on a thick black stem. No change of shade. (No light, no inner blood.) Only the mercury-flame inside it, which only the eyes show.

  Several of the side teeth, up and down, are pointed sharply. The tongue is black. The inside of the mouth is black. And the four black shapely hands, with their twenty long, flexible fingers, have palms that are black as the death of light.

  It bends toward Antoinelle. It has the smell of night and of the Island, and of the sea. And also the scent of hothouse flowers, that came out of the piano. And a carnivorous smell, like fresh meat.

  It stands there, looking at her, as she lies on the bed.

  And on the floor, emerging from the pelt that falls from its head, the long black tail strokes softly now this way, now that way.

  Then the first pair of hands stretch over onto the bed, and after them the second pair, and fluidly it lifts itself and pours itself forward up the sheet, and up over the body of the girl, looking down at her as it does so, from its water-pale eyes. And its smooth body rasps on her legs, as it advan­ces, and the big hard firm organ knocks on her thighs, hot as the body is cool.

  He walked behind her, obedient and terrified. The Island frightened him, but it was more than that. Nanetta was now like his mother, (when she was young and slim, dominant and brutal.) Once she turned, glaring at him, with the eyes of a lynx. ‘Hush.’ ‘But I –’ he started to say, and she shook her head again, raging at him without words.

  She trod so noiselessly on her bare feet, which were the indigo colour of the sky in its darkness. And he blundered, try as he would.

  The forest held them in its tentacles. The top-heavy plantains loomed, their blades of black-bronze sometimes quiv­ering. Tree limbs like enormous plaited snakes rolled upwards. Occasionally, mystically, he thought, he heard the sea.

  She was taking him to her people, who grasped what menaced them, its value if not its actual being, and could keep them safe.

  Barefoot and stripped of her jewels, she was attempting to go back into the knowingness of her innocence and her beg­innings. But he had always been over-aware and a fool.

  They came into a glade of wild tamarinds. Could it be called that – a glade? It was an aperture among the trees, but only because trees had been cut down. There was an altar, very low, with frangipani flowers, scented like confection­ary, and something killed that had been picked clean. The hudja bells chimed from a nearby bough, the first he had seen. They sounded like the sistra of ancient Egypt, as the cane field had recalled to him the notion of a temple.

  Nanetta bowed to the altar and went on, and he found he had crossed himself, just as he had done when a boy in church.

  It made him feel better, doing that, as if he had quickly thrown up and got rid of some poison in his heart.

  Vau l’eau, Vonderjan thought. Which meant, going downstream, to wrack and ruin.

  He could not sleep, and turned on his side to stare out through the window. The stars were so unnaturally clear. Bleumaneer was in the eye of the storm, the aperture at its centre. When this passed, weather would resume, the ever-threatening presence of tempest.

  He thought of the white horse, galloping about the Island, down its long stairways of hills and rock and forest, to the shore.

  Half asleep, despite his insomnia, there was now a split second when he saw the keys of a piano, descending like the lev­els of many black and white terraces.

  Then he was fully awake again.

  Vonderjan got up. He reached for the bottle of schnapps, and found it was empty.

  Perhaps he should go to her bed. She might have changed her mind. No, he did not want her tonight. He did not want anything, except to be left in peace.

  It seemed to him that after all he would be glad to be rid of every bit of it. His wealth, his manipulative powers. To live here alone, as the house fell gradually apart, without servants, or any authority or commitments. And without Anna.

  Had he been glad when Uteka eventually died? Yes, she had suffered so. And he had never known her. She was like a book he had meant to read, had begun to read several times, only to put it aside, unable to remember those pages he had already laboriously gone through.

  With Anna it was easy, but then, she was not a book at all. She was a demon he had himself invented (Vonderjan did not realise this, that even for a moment, he thought in this way), an oasis, after Uteka’s sexual desert, and so, like any fantasy, she could be sloughed at once. He had masturbated over her long enough, this too-young girl, with her serpentine body (apple-tree and tempting snake together) and her idealised pleas always for more.

  Now he wanted to leave the banquet table. To get up and go away and sleep and grow old, without such distractions.

  He thought he could hear her, though. Hear her fast starved feeding breathing, and for once, this did not arouse him. And in any case it might not be Anna, but only the gasping of the sea, hurling herself far away, on the rocks and beaches of the Island.

  It – he – paints her lips with its long and slender tongue, which is black. Then it paints the inside of her mouth. The tongue is very narrow, sensitive, incites her gums, making her want to yawn, except that is not what she needs to do – but she stretches her body irresistibly.

  The first set of hands settles on her breasts.

  The second set of hands on her rib-cage.

  Something flicks, flicks, between her thighs … not the staff of the penis, but something more like a second tongue.

  Antoinelle’s legs open and her head falls back. She make
s a sound, but it is a bestial grunting that almost offends her, yet there is no room in her body or mind for that.

  ‘No –’ she tries to say.

  The no means yes, in the case of Antoinelle. It is addressed not to her partner but to normal life, anything that may intrude, and warns Don’t interrupt.

  The black tongue wends, waking nerves of taste and smell in the roof of her mouth. She scents lakoum, pepper, ambergris and myrrh.

  The lower tongue, which may be some extra weapon of the tail, licks at a point of flame it has discovered, fixing a triangle with the fire-points of her breasts.

  He – it – slips into her, forces into her, bulging and huge as thunder.

  And the tail grasps her, muscular as any of its limbs, and, thick as the phallus, also penetrates her.

  The thing holds Antoinelle as she detonates about it, faints and cascades into darkness.

  Not until she begins to revive does it do more.

  The terror is, she comes to already primed, more than eager, her body spangled with frantic need, as if the first cat­aclysm were only – foreplay.

  And now the creature moves, riding her and making her ride, and they gallop down the night, and Antoinelle grins and shrieks, clinging to its obsidian form, her hands slipping, gripping. And as the second detonation begins, its face leaves her face, her mouth, and grows itself faceless and only mouth. And the mouth half rings her throat, a crescent moon, and the many side teeth pierce her, both the veins of her neck.

  A necklace of emeralds was nothing to this.

  Antoinelle drops from one precipice to another. She screams, and her screams crash through the house called Blue View, like sheets of blue glass breaking.

  It holds her. As her consciousness again goes out, it holds her very tight.

  And somewhere in the limbo where she swirls, fire on oil, guttering but not quenched, Antoinelle is raucously laugh­ing with triumph at finding this other one, not her parasite, but her twin. Able to devour her as she devours, able to eat her alive as she has eaten or tried to eat others alive. But where Antoinelle has bled them out, this only drinks. It wastes nothing, not even Antoinelle.

  More – more – She can never have enough.

  Then it tickles her with flame so she thrashes and yelps. Its fangs fastened in her, it bears her on, fastened in turn to it.

  She is arched like a bridge, carrying the travelling shadow on her body. Pinned together, in eclipse, these dancers.

  More –

  It gives her more. And indescribably yet more.

  If she were any longer human, she would be split and eviscerated, and her spine snapped along its centre three times.

  Her hands have fast hold of it. Which – it or she – is the more tenacious? Where it travels, so will she.

  But for all the more, there is no more thought. If ever there was thought.

  When she was 14, she saw all this, in her proph­etic mirror, saw what she was made for and must have.

  Perhaps many thousands of us are only that, victim or predator, interchangeable.

  Seen from above: Antoinelle is scarcely visible. Just the edges of her flailing feet, her contorted forehead and glist­ening strands of hair. And her clutching claws. (Shockingly, she makes the sounds of a pig, grunting, snorting.)

  The rest of her is covered by darkness, by something most like a manta ray out of the sea, or some black amoeba.

  Then she is growling and grunting so loudly, on and on, that the looking-glass breaks on her toilette table as if unable to stand the sound, while out in the night forest birds shrill and fly away.

  More – always more. Don’t stop – Never stop.

  There is no need to stop. It has killed her, she is dead, she is re-alive and death is lost on her, she is all she has ever wished to be – nothing.

  ‘Dearest … are you awake?’

  He lifts his head from his arm. He has slept.

  ‘What is it?’ Who are you? Has she ever called him dear before?

  ‘Here I am,’ she says, whoever she is. But she is his Anna.

  He does not want her. Never wanted her.

  He thinks she is wearing the emerald necklace, something burning about her throat. She is white as bone. And her dark eyes – have paled to Venus eyes, watching him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Perhaps later.’

  ‘I know.’

  Vonderjan falls asleep again quickly, lying on his back. Then Antoinelle slides up on top of him. She is not heavy, but he is; it impedes his breathing, her little weight.

  Finally she puts her face to his, her mouth over his.

  She smothers him mostly with her face, closing off his nostrils with the pressure of her cheek, and one narrow hand, and her mouth sidelong to his, and her breasts on his heart.

  He does not wake again. At last his body spasms slugg­ishly, like the last death-throe of orgasm. Nothing else.

  After his breathing has ended, still she lies there, Venus-eyed, and the dawn begins to come. Antoinelle casts a black, black shadow. Like all shadows, it is attached to her. Attached very closely.

  Is this her shadow, or is she the white shadow of it?

  IX

  Having sat for ten minutes, no longer writing, holding her pen upright, Yse sighs, and drops it, like something unpleasant, dank or sticky.

  The story’s erotographic motif, at first stimulating, has become, as it must, repulsive. Disgusting her – also as it should.

  And the murder of Vonderjan, presented deliberately almost as an afterthought, (stifled under the slight white pillar of his succubus wife).

  Aloud, Yse says almost angrily, ‘Now surely I’ve used him up. All up. All over. Per Laszd, I can’t do another thing with you or to you. But then, you’ve used me up too, yes you did, you have, even though you’ve never been near me. Mutual annihilation. That Yse is over with.’

  Then Yse rises, leaving the manuscript, and goes to make tea. But her generator, since the party (when the music machine had been hooked into it by that madman, Carr) is skitt­ish. The stove won’t work. She leaves it, and pours instead a warm soda from the now improperly-working fridge.

  It is night-time, or morning, about 3.50 am.

  Yse switches on her small TV, which works on a solar battery and obliges.

  And there, on the first of the 15 mainland (upper city) channels, is he – is Per Laszd. Not in his persona of dead trampled Gregers Vonderjan, but that of his own dangerous self.

  She stands on the floor, dumbfounded, yet not, not really. Of course, who else would come before her at this hour?

  He looks well, healthy and tanned. He’s even shed some weight.

  It seems to be a talk show, something normally Yse would avoid – they bore her. And the revelation of those she sometimes admires as over-ordinary or distasteful, disillusions and frustrates her.

  But him she has always watched, on a screen, across a room when able, or in her own head. Him, she knows. He could not disillusion her, or put her off.

  And tonight, there is something new. The talk has veered round to the other three guests – to whom she pays no attention – and so to music. And now the TV show’s host is asking Per Laszd to use the piano, that grande piano over there.

  Per Laszd gets up and walks over to this studio piano, looking, Yse thinks, faintly irritated, because obviously this has been sprung on him and is not what he is about, or at least not publicly, but he will do it from a good showman’s common sense.

  He plays well, some melody Yse knows, a popular song she can’t place. He improvises, his large hands and strong fingers jumping sure and finely-trained about the keyboard. Just the one short piece, concluded with a sarcastic flourish, after which he stands up again. The audience, delighted by any novelty, applauds madly, while the host and other guests are all calling encore! (More! More! Again – don’t stop –) But Laszd is not manipulable, not truly. Gracious yet immovable, he returns to his seat. And after that a pretty girl with an unimportant voice comes on to sing, a
nd then the show is done.

  Yse finds herself enraged. She switches off the set, and slams down the tepid soda. She paces this end of her loft. While by the doors, forty feet away, the piano dredged from the Sound still stands, balanced on its forefeet and its phallic tail, hung in shade and shadow. It has been here more than a month. It’s nearly invisible.

  So why this now? This TV stunt put on by Fate? Why show her this, now? As if to congratulate her, giving her a horrible mean little failed-runner’s-up patronising non-prize. Per Laszd can play the piano.

  Damn Per Laszd.

  She is sick of him. Perhaps in every sense. But of course, she still wants him. Always will.

  And what now?

  She will never sleep. It’s too late or early to go out.

  She circles back to her writing, looks at it, sits, touches the page. But why bother to write any more?

  Vonderjan was like the enchanter Prospero, in Shakes­peare’s Tempest, shut up there on his sorcerous Island, infest­ed with sprites and elementals. Prospero too kept close a strange young woman, who in the magician’s case had been his own daughter. But then arrived a shipwrecked prince out of the sea, to take the responsibility off Prospero’s hands.

  (Per’s hands on the piano keys. Playing them. A wonderful amateur, all so facile, no trouble at all. He is married, and has been for 12 years. Yse has always known this.)

  Far out on the Sound, a boat moos eerily.

  Though she has frequently heard such a thing, Yse starts.

  Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  She can no longer smell the perfume, like night-blooming vines. When did that stop? (Don’t stop.)

  Melted into air, into thin air …

  X: Passover

  They had roped the hut-house round, outside and in, with their amulets and charms. There were coloured feathers and dried grasses, cogs of wood rough-carved, bones and sprinkles of salt and rum, and of blood, as in the Communion. When they reached the door, she on her bare, navy-blue feet, Jeanjacques felt all the forest press at their backs. And inside the hut, the silver-ringed eyes, staring in affright like the staring stars. But presently her people let her in, and let him in as well, without argument. And he thought of the houses of the Chosen in Egypt, their lintels marked by blood, to show the Angel of Death he must pass by.