Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  Their table was discreet, another precaution. But Sovaz was faultlessly decorous in her scarlet dress, yet somehow always smiling, almost laughing.

  The meal progressed. She ordered dishes different from his own, as if on purpose. Also, pointedly, the most expensive dishes, which she then played with as a well fed domestic cat will play with a mouse it has caught.

  Once, about eighteen years before, he had begun a liaison with an impoverished actress, because she was beautiful and seemed to possess that quality of soullessness which, for some reason he had never troubled to question, attracted him. She, on a visit such as this to some expensive eating house, had done exactly as Sovaz did now, asking for gold bars to be put on her plate, to show her independence, that she was using the rich man. A pathetic charade; she was already in love with him and shortly lost his interest. In the case of Sovaz, however, Kristian was aware of a difference.

  Presently she asked for champagne.

  This seemed to him, more than all the rest, offensive, bourgeois,

  indiscriminate. He told her, dispassionately, what she should drink instead. She had always obeyed him. This time she laughed exuberantly, as if at some delicious joke, and, calling back the waiter, ordered for herself.

  As the man went away, Sovaz opened her evening bag and took something out which she laid on the table.

  'Look,' she said, smiling.

  Kristian sensed unerringly that the moment had come. It was an effort to control his alarm.

  'What is that?'

  'A ruby. Part of a necklace you gave me.' She opened the mouth of her bag farther and let him see the contents. 'I took it to a jeweller today to have it broken up into individual stones. At first he wouldn't.

  Then he couldn't. But I persuaded him. I expect you will get the bill tomorrow. Tomorrow,' she added, and her eyes clouded over sightlessly, but not for long. 'What do you say?'

  'Am I supposed to say something?'

  'You are supposed to say: "I am gravely disappointed in you for making so infantile and melodramatic a gesture." '

  He wondered if she could see the sudden tremor in his hands.

  The waiter returned. For a few moments they discussed the wine.

  When this was settled, Sovaz took up the jewel and placed it within the waiter's reach.

  'For you,' she said, 'a ruby. For bringing me my champagne.'

  The man was uncertain. He glanced at Kristian.

  'Yes. Take it,' Kristian said, feeling it imperative that he speak.

  'But, monsieur, if it is a -'

  'Thank you,' Kristian said. 'We require nothing further for now.'

  The waiter, nervous, suspicious, picked up the red drop from the cloth, turned and made off. Meeting another of his tribe, he stopped him. Soon heads swivelled like clockwork.

  Sovaz smiled again, and drank from her fizzing glass.

  'Do you want to leave, Kristian?' she murmured. 'I'm not ready to leave. I shall scream at you at the top of my voice if you suggest it.

  Or do you believe I wouldn't? Try me.'

  He found himself confronted suddenly by his mother, his terrible mother who so far he had always managed to escape by the original means of demanding that her attributes be expressed by those unable to do so. Her smooth steel, her frigid fire, her elegant destructiveness, her cruel, charming, remote dominance which had held his father impaled on a female phallus of self-sufficiency. The woman who had actually driven her husband down to his death with her, not from a sense of need or histrionics, but simply because she found him so unimportant that she could not be bothered to thrust him out of the car.

  'We will leave when you are ready,' Kristian therefore said to Sovaz.

  He felt dizzy, almost unwell. He knew the horror of a man in a gas-filled room who fears he will faint before he can break down the door.

  But, meeting no opposition, she was prepared to leave after all.

  She abandoned a further ruby on the table, dropped one with the skill of a perverse pick-pocket into the dinner jacket of a man going by in the foyer, let one fall on the pavement outside. Kristian was paralysed. He did not dare to remonstrate. This was what she had reduced him to - he did not dare.

  Paul handed them into the limousine.

  They drove slowly across the city. It was almost midnight, but traffic was still heavy. The icon face of Sovaz flashed on and off like a neon in the headlamps of passing cars.

  Sovaz opened the window and cast out at the sides of the road a trail of rubies. She did it in a neat calculated manner. The exercise finished, she turned to him.

  'Poor Kristian,' she said, with practically genuine sympathy. 'After tonight I shall be very docile. You will have no further worries about me.'

  He had no notion what to say. The rest of the journey was made in silence.

  As they went up through the gardens towards the house, she paused at each landing to touch, almost experimentally, the chess piece marbles. They reached the wide doors and went in. Her face had

  taken on, most unexpectedly, a gentle yielding look.

  'I am going up now,' she said quietly. 'I may take a walk in the garden later, then I shall go to bed. Good night.'

  She started to mount the stairs, then halted and looked back at him.

  Her eyes went over him, head to foot, next over the things surrounding him, the inanimates of the hall. A puzzled frown appeared between her eyes, then smoothed itself away. She turned and walked on up the stairway, the red dress pulsing on the shadow above long after the gleam of her hair and flesh had been extinguished.

  Kristian moved heavily towards his study. He felt the need to be among his own things, the mementos of the great estate. Yet, as he crossed the tessellated floor, he saw Prescott politely awaiting him before the double doors.

  At each step she thought, I shall never do this again or I shall only do it one time more.

  And in the gallery she thought, How insignificant all this is, the house, the ornaments of the house. And yet they were beautiful too, ephemeral, bathed in the fascinated glare of terminus.

  Reaching her room, having shut both doors which led into it, she unzipped the red dress and took the string of pearls from her neck, and put them both away. The girl, as she had instructed her, was gone, yet everything lay to hand. Sovaz bathed once again, scented herself, and sat before her mirrors, her combs and paints laid out before her.

  She was now completely calm, yet there was so much time to waste: three hours at least before the house was safe and Kristian either absent or shut in the library.

  A sort of nostalgia was coming over her, as if she were about to go travelling far away.

  She did not anticipate death. As on the shore road she visualized neither the stroke nor its consequences. Certainly she did not see as far as extinction, the end of life. She foresaw - and this only with her body - the ecstasy of utter submission. And since it was to a god that

  she was offering herself - will-less, welcoming - she herself seemed strangely deified. As the sacrifices of pagan festivals walked with dignity and joy towards their destiny, so she walked now in her instinct, and the people showered her with flowers and begged for her holy blessing as she passed.

  The rubies, scattered about the city, were a sort of symbol of this blessing. But also they were a message, a signal to the god. It did not really matter where she laid them; being ubiquitous, he could look down from the stars, out of the eyes of a cripple, or a banker, or a maitre d'hôtel, and see at once what she had done, what she was saying to him. Since the first, she had vaguely understood he had been holding back only for this, her free surrender. Nos cedamus Amori.

  As she stared pensively into the glass, picturing the mask of her own face which represented the Dionysos mask of the god, she recognized the great power the god had vested in her. Had she not destroyed the young boy, the American, in her fury at his intrusion, the coitus interruptus of her vision on the road? Yes. She had caused the ca
r to swerve, to plunge. Like Agave, she had torn her Pentheus to shreds when he threatened the rite of love. Never had she felt such power in herself, such assurance, coupled so strongly with the knowledge of yielding and abnegation.

  The little clock struck one, then two. The sea also struck its hours on the beach below. She retouched her lips and eyes meticulously, and examined her hands to which the effects of the manicure still adhered. At last she took from the closet the black lace frock, now faultlessly cleaned and repaired, and put it on. A communion, uncommon to her, had sprung up between her fingers and her flesh.

  She was like a very young girl discovering her body for the first time, adoring it, striving to please it, this temple of her emotion, which because it was lovely, desirable, was also magic.

  Presently she opened the windows wide.

  He would see the light, the one who waited for her, as she for him, on the shore.

  Warm night winds like the wings of birds filled the room, lifting her hair, disturbing the sheaf of drawings stacked neatly by the gramophone. She crossed to the bronze bowl in which she had

  burned joss sticks, an activity she recalled with wistful tolerance, the amusements of a child, and took up a box of matches. She struck a match and, selecting a drawing, she crumpled it and fed it to the flame, letting the paper fall into the bowl to burn and adding fresh ones instantly. Soon, gorged with its meal and made adventurous by the wind, the little fire shot up like the watchlight of an altar.

  Perhaps he could see that too.

  Fantastically aware of all her movements and her acts, Sovaz became for herself a sorceress who had created fire.

  Not once did she look at the drawings to see what they might represent. It no longer mattered, for the internal theatre, like Kristian, was now superfluous. She had become at last her own canvas.

  Prescott observed Kristian as he stood beside the case of guns, with the impartial evaluating composure so easily construed by others as good-mannered obedience. It was, after all, a part of Prescott's job to present himself in the guise of an intelligent dog, the kind that will carry things in its mouth and shake hands. Nevertheless, left to harden now for so long in this mould, he had actually lost interest in the ruthless vivisections of humanity which he still automatically carried out. The sort of scorn that Kristian and men of his class and type inspired in him in no way influenced Prescott's attitude or work.

  He waited patiently therefore for Kristian to digest what he had told him of Sovaz, as he had once waited seven years before.

  Finally Kristian spoke to him.

  'You say the man has been to this house?'

  'Yes. I have the guest list with me, the list from the last reception and dinner. I've been making inquiries, and I think I have located him.' He held out the list, and indicated the spot so Kristian could see it.

  'I don't recollect the name,' Kristian said.

  'An invitation at the request of someone more important, perhaps,'

  Prescott suggested.

  'Perhaps.' Kristian seemed preoccupied. 'You assume my wife is in danger.'

  'Inevitably, if this man is the murderer, and I have good reason to

  think he is. Madame Sovaz has extended her friendship to him, clearly without realizing what he will be bound to do to her. He is a compulsive killer. Given the opportunity, he will not be able to resist cutting your wife's throat. Precisely as he did the throat of Madame Gallier, and possibly the throats of other women in the city.'

  Kristian took from a jade box a cigarette, and lit it with the concentration of a man unaware of his surroundings. 'Why do you imagine he will come here tonight?'

  'I've been talking to Leah. Madame Sovaz has been making certain preparations. As far as I can see, she will go down sometime tonight and open the small gate that gives on to the beach. That is the way he will gain admission, then up through the gardens, into the house about three o'clock or half past. The servants are either in bed or out at that time. She will reckon on your being in the library.'

  Kristian sat slowly down. His eyes were blank. Surely, Prescott surmised, he also guessed the nature of Sovaz' interest. Prescott had spoken at some length with the black girl and with the chauffeur, Paul. He had built up a bizarre picture of Sovaz' behaviour over the period of time following the night of the murder. The press cutting, the drawings, the rubies, her apathy, her sudden decisiveness, her conversations with the doctor… all the paraphernalia of some unbalanced infatuation. This was what the American boy had become part of, her madness. Almost certainly what had killed him. Prescott felt no compunction to save the woman - it was merely part of his job to do so. As with Kristian, his personal feelings would not intrude.

  'You have not contacted the police,' Kristian said.

  'Naturally I informed you of the matter first.'

  'Good.' Kristian rose and crossed to the case of guns. 'These pistols are in perfect working order. I shot with them only a few days ago.'

  A glimmer of amusement lit deep down in Prescott's brain. The feudal aristocrat, absolute law on his own land. Kristian, bemused by his wife's madness, took refuge in his own past. Quite clearly, with these exquisite and perfectly kept weapons, they were about to gun the murderer down, the police business to be delicately settled afterwards, for those legendary strings-which-might-be-pulled were always available to the city rich. In some alley tomorrow night, a whore would perhaps stumble over the corpse of a man, or in a week

  some fishing boat would bring up a green and bloated fish from the bay.

  Kristian, as he took out the pistols, examined and presently loaded them, felt a soothing sense of purpose come over him. He had handled these guns, or their fellows, so often. The reassuring psychometry of well known possessions. There was no need after all to analyse, to enter the cloud of confusion that had swept through his brain. He had become aware, though only in the farthest pit of his consciousness, behind all the thousand veils with which human beings conceal their own impulses from themselves, of the true possibility of Sovaz' death. He feared her, he hated her, he despised and shuddered at her monstrous attachment to his life, yet he was magnetized, he had known as much from the first moment of seeing her. She was his devil. The eternal presence which he must dominate and have no interest in, in order to achieve his sense of self, which in turn burdened him with its indispensability. And, like all addicts, he scented destruction with hungry terror. She must not die. Yet if she should… Not the independence of suicide. The helpless victim of a murder which he himself could permit.

  It was half past two. He went with Prescott silently and in darkness down the stairs, across the ghostly ballroom, through the windows (open), and so on to the terrace of the house. Turning aside into the shadow of the jasmine, they saw her coming up the avenue of lemons towards them in her black lace frock.

  She was touching the flowers as she came, lightly. She looked very young, very knowing, wary as an animal picking its way towards the house. She had a rose in her hair, a red rose. There was something horrible, obscene about her, like the stench on the breath of the beautiful vampire, unlooked-for poison. Both men felt it yet would not feel it; for their different reasons rejection of the gothic and the primeval was instantaneous. She slid in through the double windows.

  'She's been to the gate,' Prescott said softly after a minute had gone by. 'This is the way he'll come.'

  So they waited, ready to ambush death with their silver pistols.

  The wind was not blowing from the city tonight with its freight of car horns, trains, music. There was only the flash and murmur of the tide.

  Prescott noticed that Kristian had put on gloves, as he had done on

  entering the slums seven years ago.

  Then a step fell, like the drip of a tap - huge in the silence between the phrases of the sea.

  Prescott glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. Five minutes to three. A shadow appeared through the lemon trees, following the path she had taken.
What signal had been given him? Perhaps her lighted windows - lights now out - or some signal to him as he stood on the beach. Or probably he had come before and tried the ornamental gate, finding it always locked, tonight ajar.

  The shadow moved, not with particular stealth or grace, rather clumsily in fact. The shade of the garden made identification impossible. Prescott had earlier suggested activating one of the master switches of the ballroom which lay beside the windows, flooding the area outside with light, and so apprehending the intruder by means of surprise. Kristian had ignored the suggestion, determined, Prescott supposed, to shoot the man.

  Now the visitor, skirting the oleanders, began to climb the steps. He was ungainly, the foliage rustled. Prescott was reminded of a rat scuttling over a wharf among old paper and rinds. He anticipated some cue from Kristian; nothing came. The man entered abruptly into the black of the house. Kristian also was invisible and unmoving.

  Prescott had neither premonition nor suspicion. He only saw the chance of the man's escape, the work botched - he moved from concealment, disengaging the safety catch of the pistol as he did so.

  A voice, out of the shadow ahead, the murderer's, high-pitched, anguished. A crack like the snapping of a bone followed, the safety catch of Kristian's gun. Prescott saw the perfect tailor-made stance of the professional shot, outlined only by starlight, as Kristian fired directly into the unseen area ahead that was a man.

  Sovaz lay across the bed in the black night-silence. Every line of her was quiescent, only the pulse in her throat, a drum under her skin.

  The Sleeping Beauty in the Dark Tower. Lying, as if spent, still the sum of her was gathered, she was immensely aware of the huge inky womb in which she floated, of the approach of waking, the savage kiss.

  Now he was in the ebony garden among the skulls of flowers, now perhaps in the shimmering ballroom. A pale electric current ran in her veins. Each step she had taken, he now took, noiseless, drifting like unheard music towards her through the dumb pyramid of the house.