by Tanith Lee
He, as she did, sat down on the earth floor. (He noted the earth floor, and the contrasting wooden bed, with its elaborate posts. And the two shrines, one to the Virgin, and one to another female deity.)
Nothing was said beyond a scurry of whispered words in the patois. There were thirty other people crammed in the house, with a crèche of chickens and two goats. Fear smelled thick and hot, but there was something else, some vital possibility of courage and cohesion. They clung together soul to soul, their bodies only barely brushing, and Jeanjacques was glad to be in their midst, and when the fat woman came and gave him a gourd of liquor, he shed tears, and she patted his head, calming him a little, like a dog hiding under its mistress’s chair.
In the end he must have slept. He saw someone looking at him, the pale icy eyes blue as murder.
Waking with a start, he found everyone and thing in the hut tense and compressed, listening, as something circled round outside. Then it snorted and blew against the wall of the hut-house, and all the interior stars of eyes flashed with their terror. And Jeanjacques felt his heart clamp onto the side of his body, as if afraid to fall.
Even so, he knew what it was, and when all at once it retreated and galloped away on its shod hoofs, he said quietly, ‘His horse.’
But no-one answered him, or took any notice of what he had said, and Jeanjacques discovered himself thinking, After all, it might take that form, a white horse. Or she might be riding on the white horse.
He began to ponder the way he must go in the morning, descending toward the bay. He should reach the sea well in advance of nightfall. The ship would come back, today or tomorrow. Soon. And there were the old buildings, on the beach, where he could make a shelter. He could even jump into the sea and swim out. There was a little reef, and rocks.
It had come from the sea, and would avoid going back to the sea, surely, at least for some while.
He knew it was not interested in him, knew that almost certainly it would not approach him with any purpose. But he could not bear to see it. That was the thing. And it seemed to him the people of the Island, and in the hut, even the chickens, the goats, and elsewhere the birds and fauna, felt as he did. They did not want to see it, even glimpse it. If the fabric of this world were torn open in one place on a black gaping hole of infinite darkness, you hid your eyes, you went far away.
After that, he started to notice bundles of possessions stacked up in corners. He realised not he alone would be going down the Island to the sea.
Dreaming again, he beheld animals swimming in waves away from shore, and birds flying away, as if from a zone of earthquake, or the presage of some volcanic eruption.
Nanetta nudged him. ‘Will you take me to St Paul’s Island?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have a sister there.’
He had been here on a clerk’s errand. He thought, ridiculously, Now I won’t be paid. And he was glad at this wince of anxious annoyance. Its normalcy and reason.
XI
Per Laszd played Bach very well, with just the right detached, solemn cheerfulness.
It was what she would have expected him to play. Something like this. Less so the snatch of a popular tune he had offered the talk show audience so flippantly. (But a piano does what you want, makes the sounds you make it give – even true, she thinks, should you make a mistake – for then that is what it gives you. Your mistake.)
As Yse raised her eyes, she saw across the dim sphere of her loft, still wrapped in the last flimsy paper of night, a lamp stood glowing by the piano, both of whose lids were raised. Her stomach jolted and the pain of shock rushed through her body.
‘Lucius –?’
He was the only other who held a key to her loft. She trusted Lucius, who anyway had never used the key, except once, when she was gone for a week, to enter and water her (dying) plants, and fill her (then operable) refrigerator with croissants, mangoes and white wine.
And Lucius didn’t play the piano. He had told her, once. His amouretta, as he called it, was the drum.
Besides, the piano player had not reacted when she called, not ceased his performance. Not until he brought the twinkling phrases to their finish.
Then the large hands stepped back off the keys, he pushed away the chair he must have carried there, and stood up.
The raised carapace of the piano’s hind lid still obscured him, all but that flame of light that veered across the shining pallor of his hair.
Yse had got to her feet. She felt incredibly young, light as thin air. The thick silk of her hair brushed round her face, her shoulders, and she pulled in her flat stomach and raised her head on its long throat. She was frightened by the excitement in herself, and excited by the fear. She wasn’t dreaming. She had always known, when she dreamed of him.
And there was no warning voice, because long ago she had left all such redundant noises behind.
Per Laszd walked around the piano. ‘Hallo, Yse,’ he said.
She said nothing. Perhaps could not speak. There seemed no point. She had said so much.
But, ‘Here I am,’ he said.
There he was.
There was no doubt at all. The low lamp flung up against him. He wore the loose dark suit he had put on for the TV programme, as if he had come straight here from the studio. He dwarfed everything in the loft.
‘Why?’ she said, after all.
She too was entitled to be flippant, surely.
‘Why? Don’t you know? You brought me here.’ He smiled, ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’
He was wooing her.
She glanced around her, made herself see everything as she had left it, the washed plate and glass by the sink, the soda can on the table, her manuscript lying there, and the pen. Beyond an angle of a wall, a corridor to other rooms.
And below the floor, barracuda swimming through the girders of a flooded building.
But the thin air sparkled as if full of champagne.
‘Well, Yse,’ he said again, ‘here I am.’
‘But you are not you.’
‘You don’t say. Can you be certain? How am I different?’
‘You’re what I’ve made, and conjured up.’
‘I thought it was,’ he said, in his dry amused voice she had never forgotten, ‘more personal than that.’
‘He is somewhere miles off. In another country.’
‘This is another country,’ he said, ‘to me.’
She liked it, this breathless fencing with him. Liked his persuading her. Don’t stop.
The piano had not been able to open – or be opened – until he – or she – was ready. (Foreplay.) And out of the piano, came her demon. What was he? What?
She didn’t care. If it were not him, yet it was, him.
So she said, archly, ‘And your wife?’
‘As you see, she had another engagement.’
‘With you, there. Wherever you are.’
‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘why I’ve called here.’
There was no break in the transmission of this scene; she saw him walk away from the piano, start across the floor, and she did the same. Then they were near the window-doors.
He was stood over her. He was vast, overpowering, beautiful. More beautiful, now she could see the strands of his hair, the pores of his skin, a hundred tiniest imperfections – and the whole exquisite manufacture of a human thing, so close. And she was rational enough to analyse all this, and his beauty, and his power over her; or pedantic enough. He smelled wonderful to her as well, more than his clean fitness and his masculinity, or any expensive cosmetic he had used (for her?) It was the scent discernible only by a lover, caused by her chemistry, not his. Unless she had made him want her, too.
But of course he wanted her. She could see it in his eyes, their blue view bent only on her.
If he might have seemed old to an Antoinelle of barely 16, to Yse this man was simply her peer. And yet too he was like his younger self, clad again in that searing charisma that had
later lessened, or changed its course.
He took her hand, picked it up. Toyed with her hand as Vonderjan had done with the hand of the girl Yse had permitted to destroy him.
‘I’m here for you,’ he said.
‘But I don’t know you.’
‘Backwards,’ he said. ‘You’ve made it your business. You’ve bid for me,’ he said, ‘and you’ve got me.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no I haven’t.’
‘Let me show you.’
She had known of that almost occult quality. With what he wanted in the sexual way, he could communicate some telepathic echo of his desires. As his mouth covered and clasped hers, this delirium was what she felt, combining with her own.
She had always known his kisses would be like this, the ground flying off from her feet, swept up and held only by him in the midst of a spinning void, where she became part of him and wanted nothing else, where she became what she had always wanted … nothing.
To be nothing, borne by this flooding sea, no thought, no anchor, and no chains.
So Antoinelle, as her vampire penetrated, drank, emptied, reformed her.
So Yse, in her vampire’s arms.
It’s how they make us feel.
‘No,’ she murmurs, sinking deeper and deeper into his body, drowning as the island will, one day (five years, twenty).
None of us escape, do we?
Dawn is often very short and ineffectual here, as if to recompense the dark for those long sunsets we have.
Lucius, bringing his boat in to West Ridge from a night’s fishing and drinking out in the Sound, sees a light still burning up there, bright as the quick green dawn. All Yse’s blinds are up, showing the glass loft, translucent, like a jewel. Over the terrace the snake tree hangs its hair in the water, and ribbons of apple-green light tremble through its coils.
Yse is there, just inside the wall of glass above the terrace, stood with a tall heavy-set man, whose hair is almost white.
He’s kissing her, on and on, and then they draw apart, and still she holds on to him, her head tilted back like a serpent’s, bonelessly, staring up into his face.
From down in the channel between the lofts and towerettes, Lucius can’t make out the features of her lover. But then neither can he make out Yse’s facial features, only the tilt of her neck and the lush satin hair hanging down her back.
Lucius sits in the boat, not paddling now, watching. His eyes are still and opaque.
‘What you doing, girl?’
He knows perfectly well.
And then they turn back, the two of them, further into the loft where the light still burns, although the light of dawn has gone, leaving only a salty stormy dusk.
They will hardly make themselves separate from each other. They are together again and again, as if growing into one another.
Lucius sees the piano, or that which had been a piano, has vanished from the loft. And after that he sees how the light of the guttering lamp hits suddenly up, like a striking cobra. And in the ray of the lamp, striking, the bulky figure of the man, with his black clothes and blond hair, becomes transparent as the glass sheets of the doors. It is possible to see directly, too, through him, clothes, hair, body, directly through to Yse, as she stands there, still holding on to what is now actually invisible, drawing it on, in, away, just before the lamp goes out and a shadow fills the room like night.
As he is paddling away along the channel, Lucius thinks he hears a remote crash, out of time, like glass smashing in many pieces, but yesterday, or tomorrow.
Things break.
Just about sunset, the police come to find Lucius. They understand he has a key to the loft of a woman called Yse (which they pronounce Jizz).
When they get to the loft, Lucius is aware they did not need the key, since the glass doors have both been blown outwards and down into the water-alley below. Huge shards and fragments decorate the terrace, and some are caught in the snake-willow like stars.
A bored detective stands about, drinking coffee someone has made him on Yse’s reluctant stove. (The refrigerator has shut off, and is leaking a lake on the floor.)
Lucius appears dismayed but innocuous. He goes about looking for something, which the other searchers, having dismissed him, are too involved to mark.
There is no sign of Yse. The whole loft is vacant. There is no sign either of any disturbance, beyond the damaged doors which, they say to Lucius and each other, were smashed outwards but not by an explosive.
‘What are you looking for?’ the detective asks Lucius, suddenly grasping what Lucius is at.
‘Huh?’
‘She have something of yours?’
Lucius sees the detective is waking up. ‘No. Her book. She was writing.’
‘Oh, yeah? What kind of thing was that?’
Lucius explains, and the detective loses interest again. He says they have seen nothing like that.
And Lucius doesn’t find her manuscript, which he would have anticipated, anyway, seeing instantly on her work-table. He does find a note – they say it is a note, a letter of some sort, although addressed to no-one. It’s in her bed area, on the rug, which has been floated under the bed by escaped refrigerator fluid.
‘Why go on writing?’ asks the note, or letter, of the no-one it has not addressed. ‘All your life waiting, and having to invent another life, or other lives, to make up for not having a life. Is that what God’s problem is?’
Hearing this read at him, Lucius’s dead eyes reveal for a second they are not dead, only covered by a protective film. They all miss this.
The detective flatly reads the note out, like a kid bad at reading, embarrassed and standing up in class. Where his feet are planted is the stain from the party, which, to Lucius’s for-a-moment-not-dead eyes, has the shape of a swimming, three-legged fish.
‘And she says, “I want more.”’
‘I want the terror and the passion, the power and the glory – not this low-key crap played only with one hand. Let me point out to someone, Yse is an anagram of Yes. I’ll drown my book.’
‘I guess,’ says the detective, ‘she didn’t sell.’
They let Lucius go with some kind of veiled threat he knows is offered only to make themselves feel safe.
He takes the water-bus over to the Café Blonde, and as the sunset ends and night becomes, tells one or two what he saw, as he has not told the cops from the tideless upper city.
Lucius has met them all. Angels, demons.
‘As the light went through him, he wasn’t there. He’s like glass.’
Carr says, slyly (inappropriately – or with deadly perception?), ‘No vampire gonna reflect in a glass.’
XII: Carried Away
When the ship came, they took the people out, rowing them in groups, in the two boats. The man Stronn had also appeared, looking dazed, and the old housekeeper, and others. No questions were asked of them. The ship took the livestock, too.
Jeanjacques was glad they were so amenable, the black haughty master wanting conscientiously to assist his own, and so helping the rest.
All the time they had sheltered in the rickety customs buildings of the old port, a storm banged round the coast. This kept other things away, it must have done. They saw nothing but the feathers of palm boughs blown through the air and crashing trunks that toppled in the high surf, which was grey as smashed glass.
In the metallic after-storm morning, Jeanjacques walked down the beach, the last to leave, waiting for the last boat, confident.
Activity went on at the sea’s edge, sailors rolling a barrel, Nanetta standing straight under a yellow sunshade, a fine lady, barefoot but proud. (She had shown him the jewels she had after all brought with her, squeezed in her sash; not the ruby earrings, but a golden hairpin, and the emerald necklace that had belonged to Vonderjan’s vrouw.)
He never thought, now, to see anything, Jeanjacques, so clever, so accomplished at survival.
But he saw it.
Where t
he forest came down onto the beach, and caves opened under the limestone, and then rocks reared up, white rocks and black, with the curiously quiescent waves glimmering in and out around them.
There had been nothing. He would have sworn to that. As if the reality of the coarse storm had scoured all such stuff away.
And then, there she was, sitting on the rock.
She shone in a way that, perhaps one and a quarter centuries after, could have been described as radioactively.
Jeanjacques did not know that word. He decided that she gleamed. Her hard pale skin and mass of pale hair, gleaming.
She looked old. Yet she looked too young. She was not human-looking, nor animal.
Her legs were spread wide in the skirt of her white dress. So loose was the gown at her bosom, that he could see much of her breasts. She was doing nothing at all, only sitting there, alone, and she grinned at him, all her white teeth, so even, and her black eyes like slits in the world.
But she cast a black shadow, and gradually the shadow was embracing her. And he saw her turning over into it like the moon into an eclipse. If she had any blood left in her, if she had ever been Antoinelle – these things he ignored. But her grinning and her eyes and the shadow and her turning inside out within the shadow – from these things he ran away.
He ran to the line of breakers, where the barrels were being rolled into a boat. To Nanetta’s sunflower sunshade.
And he seemed to burst through a sort of curtain, and his muscles gave way. He fell nearby, and she glanced at him, the black woman, and shrank away.