Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  Now on the marble stairway, between the icicles of the candelabra.

  He came to her so slowly. An unbearable excitement murmured in her which only the touch of him on her in the black unseen could satisfy. She did not need to see him, knew him, could superimpose his image on the blindness of the room, white, gold, black, scarlet.

  The god.

  Suddenly there was a crack of enormous sound. It pierced her stillness, raped her silence. She started up on the bed, staring sightlessly about. Having dismissed civilization and its concepts she could no more remember how to draw the drapes from the windows, turn on the light, than she could recall such things existed in the elemental world to which she had given herself up. So she crouched on the bed in the attitude of a cat or an ape confronted by the inexplicable sorcery of mankind. Shaken from her dream she was not, even so, awakened.

  Some time passed. She did not register time as such. All at once she heard a footfall in the gallery outside.

  Now she felt fear, extreme fear, ecstatic. She flung herself down in an attitude of abandonment, trembling and writhing, her mouth parted, her teeth set, her eyes shut.

  A hand fumbled at the door. She uttered a little whimpering plea and spread her arms wide. The door opened.

  She felt his presence in the room with her. A great wave, a sea wave gushed through her. She stretched herself, arching her body.

  Suspense, stasis.

  'Sovaz,' a voice said.

  She could not answer. Only the anguished entreaty of her straining flesh responded.

  'Sovaz,' the voice said, more insistently, 'the man was very dangerous. I don't think you can have realized. We discovered who he was and waited for him downstairs.'

  She twisted, struggled against some invisible restraint. Her eyes

  opened. She knew the voice, the man. She gave a sort of hoarse inarticulate grunting sound.

  The gallery outside was pitch dark, no light had come into the room.

  She could not see. As he came nearer she could only smell the odour of smoke from the pistol.

  'I am afraid I had no choice but to shoot him,' Kristian said.

  Neither could Kristian see her very well. He stood in the room tiredly. The hidden urge in him had never reached fruition, he did not know it. He had not switched on the lights.

  Sovaz sprang from the bed across the floor to her husband. She gave a series of screams that were heard throughout the house, as not even the pistol shot had been. She hurled herself against him, gripping him with legs, feet, teeth and one arm, in an embrace like love, and, snatching with her right hand at the pistol he had retained in his gloved fingers, she thrust the muzzle against his chest and pulled the trigger.

  The second bullet was ejected in a shattering spasm and muffled roar of noise. He made no sound, but jerked like a marionette between her limbs. A convulsion went over her that seemed to uproot her heart, her lungs and her brain from her flesh.

  She slid down him, and as she let him go, he also fell.

  She was kneeling on the floor above Kristian's dead body, her hands and the front of her dress sticky with blood, the pistol in her lap, when the Englishman ran up the stairs, along the gallery and into the room.

  Hearing the cries, the unexpected second shot, Prescott ran upstairs and, reaching the bedroom, immediately depressed the master switch of the electric light. He saw at once that Kristian was dead. Sovaz seemed to be dying, rocking limply in her bleeding gown. Then she raised her head and looked at him.

  Her face was white, but her wide eyes were completely intelligent, rational. Despite the unnerving scene, she was in full possession of herself. It seemed to him he had never seen her so before.

  'I thought,' she said quietly, 'that Kristian was the killer, coming for

  me. It was dark, I couldn't see. I was terrified. I somehow got hold of the gun and fired it into him.'

  'The man used a knife, always,' Prescott said.

  The murderer, impregnated by Kristian's bullet, huddled on the floor of the ballroom. A small body, its spine curved like a clerk's, and with receding hair, totally nondescript save for the stiletto in the pocket, so unlikely, yet highly polished for his victim, as a man might polish his shoes before visiting his mistress. He was not as Sovaz had described him. Even in the dark, it would be hard to mistake Kristian for such a creature.

  'Prescott,' Sovaz said casually, 'I suggest that I confided in you a fear that the murderer might have armed himself with a gun in addition to the knife, and that this is why my husband fired on him so arbitrarily in the garden. I suggest that, hearing Kristian's shot, I was in terror that my husband and not the killer had been harmed. I suggest that, hysterical with panic and seeing a shadowy figure enter my room, I attacked it wildly, with such tragic consequence. Your supporting statement will be useful but is merely a formality. As you know, the police can be perfectly accommodating, particularly since my husband's money will devolve on me. I can pay to retain my good name. I shall also, in future, be paying your wages, your deservedly high wages. Unless, of course, there is some mistake about this dreadful business in which case no one will be able to pay you.'

  She stood up now, imposing, in her dress of lace and blood. Prescott, seeing only the transformation, the result, could have no inkling of the vast cataclysm which had brought it about. She had been Agave, she had torn Pentheus and, in a metaphysical completion of the Dionysiac rite, she had devoured him. Prescott felt all the ancient erosion of his cowardice. It disguised itself as flights of fancy that women, particularly Sovaz, had always sparked off in him. And cowardice nodded his head to her, puppet-fashion. In fact he bowed it.

  'Yes, madame. That makes sense.'

  'Very good,' she said.

  Downstairs he could hear the muted hubbub of the emergent servants, the flat voice of Paul taking charge, while somewhere out to sea, the requiem of a lost ship added its note to the night.

  Sovaz glanced aside at the curtained window, as if the noise of the ship held some significance for her. Her face was arrogant, remote to a point almost of unworldliness, yet entirely sane. Her eyes seemed extraordinarily intent by contrast with the eyes of Kristian, glazed and unfocused bits of lapis lazuli in his death-mask on the floor.

  As he looked at her in that split second, it seemed to Prescott that she, like the rakshas of Indian mythology, had acquired the ability to take on another form.

  Kristian's.

  THE STORIES

  The Mermaid

  After the Guillotine

  Meow

  II Bacio (II Chiave)

  A Room with a Vie

  Paper Boat

  Blue Vase of Ghosts

  Pinewood

  The Janfia Tree

  The Devil's Rose

  Huzdra

  Three Days

  The Mermaid

  A young woman named Anne Page generously gave me the idea for this story, in two or three succinct sentences.

  Although I had always been drawn to the notion of the mermaid, such a possibility had never occurred to me. It is logical - therefore appalling.

  Michael was a quiet man with never much to say for himself. He worked at his father's ironmongery business, which the old dad was now too frail to see to, and had taken on some new lines in hammer and nails and paint, which pleased the weekenders, who want their cottages all colours, and to hang up their trophy knick-knacks, their shells and dried weeds, and other dead hard things from out of the sea. It was the sea was the thing with Michael too, for though he would never tell you of it, she had bewitched him. As a child he was always on the shores climbing among the steep caves, fishing off the Rock, or just sitting staring away out to where there is nothing, you mind, but what the inner eye and the heart imagine. And it was the sea that gave to Michael the one long speech I ever heard him make.

  I had known him since we were children in the village. And when I came back from the city, soul-sore and drinking down a bo
ttle a day, he was the first thing I saw that I knew, as 1 walked from the train along the street. 'Hallo, Michael,' I said, 'how are you doing?' And Michael nodded and said to me, 'I'm going along,' as if he had only met me that morning, when it had been three years and more.

  I began my writing then, up in the room over the Widow's bakery, and for all I was told Watch out for the Widow, she did me no harm except in the pastry way, fattening me up. But it got me off the drink, so maybe it was not so bad a bargain.

  And as I sought my path back into the village, and they stopped their jibes about the city and the stranger, I saw Michael here and there, in his father's shop, and in the pub sometimes of an evening, where I drank my two halves slow as cream, or walking along the shore at dusk, by the snow-blue water and under the ashy rose-petal sky, not grey, not pink, clearer than a washed glass, that only the sea knows how to bring.

  But Michael, as I say, was no talker. He would stand his round, he would play his game of cards, he would put on the odd bet, he would help you if you needed an item or two and had not the cash, and once, when one of the holiday couples lost a dog, it was Michael went down and found it under the Rock, and brought it in his arms. And when the woman held out a bright leaf of money, Michael turned it

  gently aside.

  But he would neither converse nor confide, not Michael. Nor he never married. And he was a nice-looking man, dark and blue-eyed and not yet much above forty. He could have had three or four but they had given up on him and taken elsewhere. There was never any idea, mind, that Michael had other tastes. He had even courted a girl, when he was a boy, but nothing came of it.

  And then, when I had been back a year, there came the storm.

  It waked me at three in the morning. I had forgotten how it would sound, the sea, when she was angry.

  I stood in the window and looked down the village to the shore, and there were the great waves like spiked combs and the sky tearing at them, and this sound of guns the water makes, and the tall thunder, and the lightning flash like a knife. It filled me with terror and joy, and I put on my clothes and my boots and went out, and in the street I came on others, drawn forth as I had been as if by a powerful cry. We spoke of what boats might be out and if they had got to safety, but there was a primeval thing upon us, that had nothing to do with human sympathy or care. And in the end I went on down the street, past the pub, which had opened itself up again, and through the lane to the Rock.

  And when I reached the place, the wind was rending and it was like the edge of chaos, so I stood there drunk as I had not been now in eleven months, with my mouth open, half-blinded, until I saw Michael was there before me, down along the Rock where the spray was coming up and the water ran black as oil. He stood with his feet planted, looking out.

  'Come back a way, Michael,' I called, 'She'll have you off, man, and into all that.'

  He turned and looked at me, and I saw he had my face, my drunkard's face, and suddenly he grinned and he said, 'Had me she already has.'

  But then a great bomb of water burst against the Rock. I saw him go to his knees and I dashed forward, afraid he would be lugged over and lost. But he was not and he and I pulled away from the edge together.

  'You've the right of it,' he said, when we stood back drenched on the

  track. 'For she's greedy tonight.'

  There are moments when you foretell suddenly a man will speak to you, that there is something lodged in his spirit, and now it will be shown. It may be a diamond or a severed head and there is no means to guess, but you must not gainsay him. Not for your own hope, you must not. And so it was with Michael now. For he waited by me, and he said, 'I could do with a drink if Alec has the bar open.' And then, making no move, he said, 'You're a writer, you could write it down maybe.'

  'Write down what, Michael?'

  'The mermaid.'

  So too when he puts the diamond or the hacked head before you, you do not say to him, Bloody rot, man.

  'A mermaid is it?' I said. 'I always dreamed there were such things.'

  'I dreamed it,' he said, 'since I was a boy, and the dad told me stories.'

  His lashes were strung with water so I could not see his eyes to be sure of them. We huddled into a lee of the Rock. It was the pub our flesh wanted, the warmth and the lamplight and the company, if not the liquor. But our souls kept us there in the loud corner of the storm.

  We could not go away, not yet, till he was done.

  'When I was sixteen it was,' he said at last, under the scream of the wind. The glass waves smashed upon his voice but could not drown him out. That is how it is when a man must speak to you. Though he whisper in the whirlwind, you will hear, like Job, or Moses on the mountain.

  His brain, Michael said, was once full of fantasies, day-dreams, and there were night-dreams too, very rich and beautiful, often remembered, all to do with the sea. It had been that way with him since he,was a child, and his father told him sea-yarns of his fishing days, and some wonderful lies besides which to the child were no more than a proper truth, as perhaps in a sort they are. There were cities under the ocean, of coral and crystal and nacre, and great beasts like dragons that could swallow up a ship whole, and there were peoples, whose young girls swung upon the waves, as if upon a garden swing, combing their green-yellow hair the colour of canaries, singing, and if you stared you caught a glimpse of their pearl-white breasts and of their silken tails, for they had no legs but were fish

  from the belly down.

  'You know how it is,' said Michael, 'you're coming to think of girls by then, and you get the strange feelings - between sweetness and sin.

  And it was those glimmer breasts on the waves, maybe. I'd dream of them after.'

  'Nor would you be the first,' I said. 'That dream began long ago.'

  Michael smiled. 'With the first fisherman,' he said.

  We paused in the storm's corner, and the sea cursed us and all mankind. She was the very devil tonight, we said. And then he went on.

  It was near the end of the summer of his seventeenth year, and he had been fishing but caught nothing, though it did not greatly trouble him.

  He was walking back along the shores, with the tide behind him, but he had nothing to fear for he knew its times better than his own body, which was still a surprise to him. It happens now and then at that season, seals stray in and lie along the rocks like tabby cats to sun themselves, and in the afternoon water they play. He had seen them before and liked them, and when first he came around the headland with the old tower, and saw the shape out among the offshore rocks, he reckoned it was a seal, and went carefully.

  The sun was westering, and the water gleamed and the objects upon it and in it were dark. But then a big mallow cloud passed over the sun and the light softened, and he saw that on the rocks there sat no seal but a woman, naked as a baby, and with a hank of long hair down her back.

  He took her for a holiday-making girl, who else would be so brazen as to swim without covering, and this was strange, for he had eyed the holiday girls all summer, and they him indeed, and he thought he knew them all, but this one was different. Her hair was very pale for one, and then, although he was too far off to see anything of her well, her skin seemed pale in the same odd fashion, but perhaps this was a trick of the glare upon the ocean. Just at that moment, the sun came out again, and she turned to a silhouette.

  Michael stayed, wondering to himself if he had the nerve to go near and take a fair look. He had never seen a woman bare, except in his fancy with the aid of a few pictures picked up round and about. His pulses were beating, and he tingled at the notion. But what if she saw

  him? Could it be she would not mind? He had heard stories too of the loose girls from the towns. Michael began to tremble at this, as a young man will, and many an older man if it comes to it. He did not know whether to go nearer or to take himself right away. And it was as he was arguing it out that the girl herself decided to be off. Her exit was a simple one. She me
rely dived from her rock into the sea.

  He beheld her pale body and hair spring and turn over, and then the upending of something that curved up like a bow against the shining sky, flickering a fan of silvered paper upon its utmost end. Then everything was gone down into the blaze of the water.

  Michael stood amazed. And told himself he was seeing things, then that he had seen nothing at all, then that it was a seal, and next a girl, and lastly that he had looked upon that creature of the myth, the innocent, sweet sin of his adolescent lust, the mermaid.

  'I never slept that night,' said Michael.

  'I never thought that you would,' said I, softly. 'But did you tell a soul?'

  'Not one. What could I tell? The dad would have thought me cracked, for all he claimed to have seen them himself in his sea days. No, I was ashamed. I was afraid.'

  'And then, how long did you hesitate, till back you went?'

  'Only the one day,' he said.

  He returned in the afternoon, to the same spot and better, finding himself a vantage where the cliff comes down to the water and there are the caves. He lay about along a ledge and watched for her and knew she never would come, but as the sun moved over into the west and the sea began to sheen, come she did, up out of the slick mirror of the water, pulling herself he said like a live rope. And she sat upon a green rock and he saw her clearly now and near enough, if he had gently thrown a stone, he might have hit her. That was not near enough that he saw her face beyond the form of it that was a woman's, or the details of her body, beyond that she had a narrow back, slim arms, two breasts upon her like little white cups and spangled with wet, and her long hair, and that she combed her hair with a spiny shell, and that below her flat belly she had no legs but a fish's tail, which coiled over into the sea-froth, glittering and tensing with muscle, and alive and part of her.

  'She didn't sing,' said Michael. 'That was all I missed. She made no sound, though once a gull went by, crying, and she raised her head in the way a cat does after a bird. But she was real as my own skin.'