Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  closely folded square of newsprint. Prescott took it up and opened it carefully, in the line of his inquiry. A fragment of white paper fell out into his hand. It bore some Latin scrawl to which he paid no attention. Neither did he spare more than a glance for the piece of newsprint. That she should keep among her jewels the description of a murder was unsurprising to him. The memory of her sick, half-mad, merciless face had hinted at all manner of extremes. He replaced the cutting and the scrap of Latin, and shut the case.

  Shortly, the villa put to rights, Prescott turned off the electricity and closed the door. He carried the bags to his car and, getting in, drove north while the dawn swept unsparing light over the land.

  Standing smoking, he became aware that the two women, one all white, one all black, were poised like a couple of gulls high above him on the upper terrace.

  Prescott looked back. The maid, of course, had halted because Sovaz had done so. Sovaz herself was gazing out towards the far edge of the shore where the sand ran after the retreating tide. Prescott, turning again, followed the direction of her eyes.

  The short half-light had begun, dissolving contours, the darkening water ebbing before it. What was the woman searching for down there in the dusk?

  Suddenly Prescott made out the figure of a man standing quite still on the glistening abandoned ridges of the sand. Seen from this height in this uncertain afterglow, it was impossible to tell anything of much significance about the figure. Only its complete immobility was apparent, an immobility that somehow conveyed a sense of waiting.

  A man waiting for his girl perhaps - the beach was mostly very private. (Je veux aller a la plage.) The French woman had wanted to go to the beach. Prescott glimpsed again the diamond flash of her earlobes, her arm linked with that of a masculine companion. He had not paid much attention to them, just two shadows, that brilliance of a jewel, the words -

  A circuit in Prescott's brain engaged.

  The diamonds, the beach, the garnets, the French woman, the oblong of newsprint between his fingers unintentionally photographed by his

  retentive brain: Madame Collier, the twenty-nine year old wife…

  French consulate for three months… sadistic and apparently motiveless killing… diamond earrings and three garnet rings were found intact on the ears and fingers of the dead woman… police discovered Madame Collier's body on the beach at dawn…

  The woman Sovaz had described to him, the woman he had glimpsed in the garden, had been the Gallier woman, arm in arm with a man. Je veux aller a la plage. If it had been her murderer with whom she had been walking, then he had taken her to the beach as she wished, and there he had cut her throat.

  And what did Sovaz know about him? Why did she question Prescott?

  Prescott sifted facts automatically. If Madame Gallier had been invited to the reception, some police inquiry at the house would have been inevitable; those hours had been her last. There had been no police. Thus it was the man, the unknown murderer, who was the invited guest, bringing with him, as so many reception guests were apt to do, the one permitted companion. This time the precious cold adornments of Kristian's house had been bait to snare the killer's victim. He had shown her - pathetic little social climber, wife of a nobody at the consulate, sporting her tiny gems - the rich man's house. Then on the shore, the knife's edge.

  Did Sovaz understand this? Her description of the man, unlike her prosaic description of Madame Gallier, was self-consciously romantic. And in her jewel case she carried the details of his crime, like love letters or pressed flowers. Once more he saw the drained hunger of her face, the brimming hunger of her eyes, lit by the fire (the sun, the burning car) beneath. Yes. She would understand everything.

  The Englishman turned again sharply, but the white gull and the black had vanished into the house. Crushing his cigarette underfoot, he noticed that the occult figure had now also vanished from the darkening beach below.

  Tonight, there were white roses on the long table, selected, as were all other flowers ever impaled on the cruel metal quills within the

  porphyry bowls, for their lack of odour. It had been a habit of his mother's, which Kristian had observed throughout his life, not to mingle the scents of a garden with those of a dining table. Yet the eternal smell of the jasmine still drifted in the room.

  Kristian seated himself at the table's head. Directly opposite him but some twenty yards distant, a place had been laid, as always, for his wife. This was the place which, during Kristian's dinner parties, she would occupy in her elegant black or white frocks of guipure lace, handpainted silk, or gauffered Egyptian linen, with flashing lanterns of faceted carbon or corundum at her wrists or throat or ears. For six years, apart from the occasions of the dinners and although her place was invariably laid, Sovaz had eaten no meal in this room. She and Kristian had never discussed the matter, for, having long since exhausted the topic of the disease, its symptoms were of little interest to either of them.

  It was half past nine. The servants were already busy with the wines, and hovering like silent wasps about the silver. The doors opened suddenly.

  An instant of total pause overcame the room. Even the precise hovering of the wasps was momentarily checked. The cessation of the slight breeze created by their movements caused even the tulip-headed flames of the candles to straighten.

  Sovaz came through the room. She walked easily yet decisively. A wasp hurried to her chair, drew it out for her. Kristian came slowly, belatedly, to his feet. She sat. He sat.

  She wore a white dress, but not the rubies - somehow he had expected her to wear the rubies - only emerald ear pendants and a great cameo ring.

  He was unnerved, agitated by her presence. She appeared calm, yet very certain. It seemed to him he had never before encountered her in this mood. He was confronted by a stranger. After what had happened to her, after the outpourings of the little slum doctor, he had expected everything of her but this. His aesthetic dread was replaced merely by a new and more specific one. He did not trust her.

  Only the refuge which the presence of his servants afforded him steadied his hand on the glass.

  'Good evening, Sovaz,' he said presently. This is an unusual pleasure.'

  'Isn't it?' she said. 'But I thought tomorrow it might be more interesting to dine in the city. What do you think?'

  'Whatever you like, of course,' he found himself saying.

  'I mean with you,' she said, 'or do you have a previous engagement?'

  He set down his glass. She had grown rather thin, a curious El Greco elongation was apparent in the lines of her. It seemed wise to be careful of her mood, although he had never troubled before.

  'No,' he said, 'I think that should be possible.'

  Her eyes were brilliantly fixed on him.

  'I shall look forward to it, Kristian. Will you mind if I buy a new frock?'

  Aside from these few sentences, they ate in silence.

  The Englishman had telephoned about an hour after dawn. His explanation had been succinct, everything became clear at once, yet not quite everything, for it had seemed at first, as it had seemed to Prescott himself, that both the American and Sovaz were dead.

  Immediately the vision of the car had shot into Kristian's mind, the spinning tyres, the shattering burst of the railing, the vehicle poised above the brink, the descent, the vast explosion of sound and light and flame on the darkness. In those seconds he had seen Sovaz at the wheel of the car, her hands in her lap, smiling her arrogant greeting to death, shortly cremated like the warrior, her consort, willing or unwilling, consumed at her side. Next moment, Prescott's voice, travelling along the wires, was speaking of the unconscious drugged woman lying in his car. The American of course had been driving, Sovaz had somehow fallen to safety. Sovaz could not, in any case, drive. Her passage to oblivion had lain in the mouth of a little bottle.

  Kristian had avoided seeing her on her return. He had left instructions with Prescott, Leah, and finally
with Florentine. With everybody.

  And now, his first sight of her, this metamorphosis, suggesting to him what they should do together with their social hours, precisely as he had seen his mother do with his father over half his lifetime before.

  An unreal death. A resurrection.

  As she toyed with her sorbet, Kristian rose and went out and up to the library, where soon after the Englishman came to find him, and was told, through the medium of Kristian's valet, that whatever his

  business was it must wait until the following evening. Impartial, Prescott went away.

  The limousine passed, like a black leopard on wheels, with a soft predacious purring, through the terracotta afternoon of the city, pausing here and there to make its kill (the bloody corpse of a dress carried away to be devoured) or to lap gasoline into its vitals.

  From the body of the leopard, like a dark intention, at intervals, issued the black girl. She moved with a stately and imperious rhythm.

  Wardress and maid, she betrayed nowhere her unease - except in her eyes, held wide open. The first errand was the most diabolic, the argument with the jeweller, settled when he came out to the car.

  In a salon fanned by the electric zephyrs of the wind machines in the walls, Sovaz submitted her body to highly paid slaves. Each had a mask-face of white enamel with red lips and, as they bent over the gold or black or green-white flesh of the women in the cubicles, these masks cracked into charming smiles spiked with the teeth of lynxes.

  Sovaz said nothing to these maenads, but the symbol was not lost on her. She was at peace beneath the deft hands of the hairdresser, the manicurist, the cosmetician with her box of paints.

  Sovaz emerged into the dusk, her face, between the black grape clusters of her curled hair, now also enamel, kohl and flame, the tips of her white hands hennaed. She herself went this time into the jeweller's shop.

  'Is it ready?'

  'Yes, madame. I've followed your instructions, though I was grieved to do such a thing.'

  'Your grief is unimportant to me. Please let me see.'

  The jeweller produced for her a damask tray.

  She probed among the gems to be sure he had done, after all, as she had told him. The great rubies, each now severed from each, fell individually between her fingers.

  'Excellent,' she said.

  'I'm glad you think so, madame. To destroy such a necklace was -'

  Sovaz took up in her white and scarlet hand the central pendant of the dismembered mesh, and held it out to him.

  'Take this to console you.'

  'Madame, how can I… ? You're joking with me.'

  'Don't be foolish. If you like I will make out a statement to the effect that it is a gift.'

  'No, madame.' The jeweller's eyes flicked rapidly about the shop as if seeking help from his cases.

  'Very well. If you prefer.'

  She slipped the jewels carelessly into her purse, but, going out, let fall the pendant on the road, where it lay like a highly coloured sweet dropped by some child.

  In the black bedroom the dress was taken from its wrappings. Sovaz stepped into it. In the mirrors she watched as Leah drew the zipper like a thin silver snake up her spine then stood back, waiting with dilated eyes at the foot of the bed. Posed like this, the black girl reminded Sovaz for an instant of the painting by Gauguin entitled The Spirit of the Dead Watches, which, as a child, had exerted over her an influence of fascination and terror.

  The clock spoke in its delicate castrate.

  It was nine in the evening. Sovaz took up the new scent she had chosen at the salon, and applied it to her skin. She poured the contents of her purse into the little evening bag. The severed rubies collided like smashed glass. She stood before the mirrors and placed the long chain of pearls around her neck, touching their round white bodies with her fingers.

  There's no need for you to wait up for me,' she said to the black girl.

  'Go to bed, or go out. Whichever you wish.'

  She moved to the window, and here also, though dimly, was reflected a drowned and darkly glowing image of herself. Now she could hear the sea fall distantly against the shore below, and cheated, hissing, slide away. She could smell the faint drifts of the jasmine, rising like smoke. Tonight, all things had a curious, marvellous savour, all these ephemeral things, for this was the last night of the world. She pressed

  her hand against the inky glass. Yes - yes - tonight - A surge of almost intolerable excitement rose in her throat.

  In the pane she saw her own elliptoid face, the black holes of eyes, the scarlet mouth. Sovaz stood at the window, telling the chain of pearls like a rosary, listening to the sounds that her husband made, putting on his clothes in the dressing room. Such immaculate, precise sounds; now the rustle of the linen shirt, now the icy clink of the cuff-link lifted from its onyx box. Presently he came into the room.

  'You're dressed already.'

  'Yes. I've been listening to you next door. It was amusing.'

  She glanced at him. He looked, she saw (saw clearly in the bright dissection which infused her vision), tired and strained. His face was pale. He had not used the sun-lamp today probably. As if she had been half blind for years and suddenly put on spectacles, she observed, with a kind of delirious surprise, the lines of age which had gathered in his face, the cobwebs at the corners of the eyes which themselves seemed sunken. She stared at the elegant lean line of him beneath the beautiful dinner clothes - she had not seen his body for five years: what had happened to it? An old man had come into her room. Exultantly she smiled at him.

  'Do you know, Kristian, I find you, at this moment, perfectly ridiculous.'

  She measured delightedly how he controlled any reaction he might have felt at her words. To seem ridiculous was perhaps the worst fate for such a man. Rather burn in fire. She laughed.

  'You have changed your mind then,' he said.

  'Changed my mind?'

  'You prefer to remain here tonight.'

  'No,' she said. 'Much as you would like to, no.' She went towards the door. 'Let's go down.'

  He stood quite still a moment, his eyes fixed on her.

  'Is that the dress you bought this afternoon?'

  'Yes.'

  'It's the first time I have ever seen you wear red.'

  She wanted to dance along the gallery, every sedate step she took

  tried to contort her mouth into fresh excited laughter. Slow steps now, slow careful steps, or you will leave the rich old man behind with his wallet. She felt free as fire in her red frock, she felt like a whore who loved her work and flaunted herself at the night, neoned in diamonds: HERE I AM. This man, this old man with his finicky ways, had been her lord, her master for seven years. Well, now her master was exchanged for a god of night, a prince of darkness, a destiny. She could therefore no longer bow herself like grass before the man.

  These desires which had possessed her always, the ultimate need of submission, slavishness, which her nature carried, those aching, agonized and wondrous chains which had held her at Kristian's feet in misery, had now accepted the ultimate soil which occasionally finds out the ultimate seeds.

  The Devourer would have her. To him she gave homage. Kristian had become necessarily superfluous, his dominance, beside the other, absurd. She took vengeance on the dethroned monarch.

  Kristian also was witnessing the change. He could hardly avoid it.

  The blood-red colour of her dress, the ornate styling of her hair -

  these alone were unique. Even the perfume radiating from her flesh was different, as if her chemistry were altered. Her manner startled.

  She was liable to do some monstrous thing - he had been vaguely aware all day that he was dreading this dinner alone with her.

  Having some business to attend to in the city, he had found himself, at its conclusion, within walking distance of the great library. A compunction drew him towards it. The scabrous bronze daevas that dwelt in the foyer
glared from their protuberant eyes. The dusts, the shafts of dusty light were unaltered. He did not comprehend what had taken him there until, crossing between the brooding wooden stacks, he had come to a window seat dappled over by the jade and ruby glass of the pane behind. A girl was sitting here, about seventeen or eighteen years old, a slender girl bent to a book, her black hair down her back. The vision was so perfectly reproduced, so uncanny, that he froze before it. The girl, sensing his presence, glanced up and, liking the look of him, flushed slightly and smiled. A compulsion to run away gripped Kristian as he stood there. The smiling girl he barely noticed, for it was the other, earlier girl he was seeing, who had looked up into his face coldly, vacantly at first, a welling of concentration gradually gathering in her eyes. He had made a journey

  through time.

  Presently, outside in the caustic heat of the afternoon, he sat on a marble bench where sometimes the octogenarian intellectuals of the library came to sit. Perhaps the old man, the librarian and scholar, her father, had sat here too, hugging to him his case of translations and his deadly little cough.

  SEVEN

  The restaurant, though impeccable, was one Kristian had never before visited. Somehow it had seemed essential to take her to some place where, even should he be recognized, which was quite probable, he would not be known as a regular patron, so that no dossier of evidence would wait on him, no knowledge of his likes and dislikes, of previous solitary dinners or dinners with certain women not Sovaz. More important, that there should be no expectation that he would return thereafter. He had robed himself in an aura of incognito, actually mostly ineffectual, so that whatever might occur, he could absent himself from the scene of the crime.