Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  'Hi, Cathy,' I said.

  I heard her drag in a deep breath, and then she said, 'I'm glad you called. It doesn't make any difference, but I want to apologize for what I said to you.'

  'It does make a difference,' I said.

  'Thank you for mailing me back the bracelet,' she said. 'I'm going to hang up now.'

  'Carthage are doing my book,' I said.

  'I'm so glad. You'd never read me any. I'll be sure and buy it. I'm going to hang up right now.'

  'OK. I'll be with you in twenty minutes.'

  'No-'

  'Yes. Give the cats a dust.'

  It was a quarter to five when I reached the house, and a premature white snow was coming down like blossom on the lawns along the street.

  Here goes, Genevieve, I thought, as I pressed the doorbell. Now let's see what does happen to me when Cathy opens the door.

  What happened was a strange, strange thing, because I looked at Cathy, and I just didn't know her. For one thing, I'd never properly seen how beautiful she was, because she'd looked somehow familiar from the first time I saw her. But now, she was brand new, unidentifiable. And looking in her clandestine face, I wondered (always wondering) if I was ready to break the cellophane wrapper.

  'There's snow in your hair,' she said quietly, and with awe. And I comprehended she, too, was seeing something new and uncannily special in me. 'Are you sure you want to come in?'

  'You're damn right I do. I'm getting cold out here.'

  'If you come in,' she said, 'please don't try and make me agree to anything I don't want. Please, Stil.'

  'Cross my heart.'

  She let me in then, solemnly. We went into the living room. The once-conversation-piece electric fire, which didn't look like a fire at all but some sort of space-rocket about to take off and blast its way through the ceiling to Venus, exuded a rich red glow. It enveloped five squatting forms, and their fur was limned as if in blood.

  'Hi, cats,' I said. I knew by now I was probably going to have to concede, perhaps even share my life with them. Maybe I could get to love them. I reached down slowly, and a fistful of scythes sloughed off some topskin. So. I could tie their paws up in dinky little velvet bags, I could cover the floors with washable polythene, I could always carry a gun. Cats don't live so long as humans. Unless they got you first.

  We sat by the fire, the seven of us. Cathy and I drank China tea. The cats drank single cream from five dishes.

  There were some enormous fresh claw-marks along the fire's wood surround, bigger and higher than any of their previous original etchings. Cathy must have gone out at some point and missed one of their ten or eleven mealtimes, and they'd got fed up waiting. I surreptitiously licked my bleeding hand.

  'Genevieve told me,' I said, 'about a ground-floor apartment just off Aster. There's a back yard with lilac trees. They'd enjoy scratching those.'

  'You still want me to sell this house,' said Cathy. 'My parents' house, they wanted me to have.'

  'Not sell. You could rent it.'

  She .looked at the fire, which also limned her now, her bone-china profile, the strands of her hair, with blood.

  'I thought I'd never see you again,' she said.

  'The Invisible Man. It's OK. I took the antidote.'

  'I thought I'd just go back to where I was, the years before I met you.

  That I'd always be alone. Me, and the cats. I thought that was how it would be.'

  I took her hand. It was cold and stiff, and her nails were long and ragged. Down below, the cats were poised over their empty plates,

  staring up at her, their eyes like blank glass buttons.

  'So I said to myself,' she said, 'I don't need anyone. I've got the cats. I don't need anyone human at all.'

  She pulled her hand out of mine, and got up.

  'I'm not,' she said, 'leaving this house.'

  'All right. Good. Sit down.'

  'In a minute,' she said. 'I have to feed the cats.'

  'Oh, sure. The cream was an aperitif. Which is the starter? Salmon or caviar?'

  She considered me, her eyes just like theirs. She wasn't laughing either. She went out to the kitchen, and the cats trotted after her. They didn't screech this time, but I could imagine all that cream slopping loudly about in their multiplicity of guts.

  Alone, I sat and contemplated the Venus rocket, and the huge new claw-marks up the wood. It looked, on reflection, really too high for the cats to have reached, even balanced on tip-claw. Maybe one had teetered on another one's head.

  After a while, none of the cats, or Cathy, had come back.

  The tea was stone cold, and I could hear the snow tapping on the windows, the house was so quiet, as if no one else but me was in it.

  Finally I got up, and walked softly, the way you tread in a museum, along to the kitchen door. There was no light anywhere, not in the passage, not in the dining area, or the kitchen itself. And scarcely a sound. Then I heard a sound, a regular crunching, mumbling sound. It was the cats eating, there in the dark. I must have heard it a thousand times, but suddenly it had a unique syncopation all its own. It was the noise of the jungle, and I was right in the midst of it. And the hair crawled over my scalp.

  I hit the light switch on a reflex, and then I saw.

  There on the floor, in a row, were the five cats. And Cathy.

  The cats were leaning forward over their paws, chomping steadily.

  Cathy lay on her stomach, the soles of her feet pressed hard against the freezer, supporting her upper torso on her elbows. Her hair had been draped back over one shoulder so it wouldn't get in the way as she licked up the single cream from the saucer.

  She continued this about a couple of seconds after the light came on, long enough for me to be sure I wasn't hallucinating. Then she raised her head like a snake, and licked her lips, and watched me with her glass-button eyes.

  I backed out the kitchen. I went on backing until I was half along the passage. Then I turned like a zombie and walked into the living room.

  Nothing was altered. Not even the big new runnels in the wood surround of the fire.

  I was sweating a dank cold sweat and breathing as fast as if I'd just got out from a lion's cage, which I hadn't, yet. It was some kind of primitive reaction, because what I'd seen was really very funny, a joke. But I don't think I could have been more shaken if she'd come at me with a steak knife.

  I pondered my alternatives. I could make it out the door, and run. I needn't come back. She'd know why not. Or I could stay and try to figure her out, try to persuade her to tell me what the game was and why she was playing it, and how I could help stop her going insane.

  I was deliberating, when she came into the room. She looked straight at me, and she said, 'I'm sorry you saw that.'

  'Are you? Somehow I had the feeling I was meant to see. What's the idea?'

  'No idea. I like it. I like scratching the wood, too. Over the fire. See?

  You look nervous.'

  'Must be because I am.'

  She glided across the room, and slid her arms round my ribs. 'You're nervous of me.'

  'I'm terrified of you.'

  She kissed my jaw, and each time she kissed, I felt the edges of her teeth. I could imagine what she'd be like if I made love to her now.

  Not that I wanted to make love to her.

  I wanted to leave her and run. That was all I wanted, but concern gets to be a habit, and I guess we all know about habits. Besides, you find a girl sitting with a bottle of pills and a razor blade, and you go out and shut the door? And then, in any case, I realized she was

  trembling. I'd thought it was just me.

  'Get your coat and your boots,' I said.

  'It's snowing.'

  'Excuses, excuses. Get your coat.'

  'All right.'

  Ten minutes later, we were on the street. The cold silvery air seemed to blow through my head, and I started to ask myself where I was taking her. Bu
t Cathy didn't speak, just walked beside me, like a good little girl doing what the adults tell her though she doesn't understand.

  We rode the subway, and came back up out of the ground and walked to my place, to which I never take anyone unless I must, not even a rabbit. The King of Cups is where I live; 23 Mason is where I occasionally eat, and less occasionally sleep, thrash a typewriter, and worry. And that's the way it looks. It's a couple of flights up, or chiropractical jerks if you use the elevator. In the snow-light, it was gray and chill and scattered with reams of paper, magazines and dust.

  My world and no one else's, and I didn't want her here, and this was where I'd brought her. Why? Because part of me had subconsciously worked out that this place had been built from my own individual ectoplasm, and I was going to use it to bawl her out and back to sanity, louder than any shout I could make with my throat.

  We got inside the door, and she glanced drearily around. We hadn't offered a word to each other since leaving the house.

  'Every luxury fitment,' I now said. 'Most of them not working.'

  Cathy crossed to the window, and stood there in her coat with the snow dissolving on its shoulders. She looked at the yard two floors down, and the trash-cans and broken bottles in their own cake-frosting of snow. When she turned round, her face was gleaming, waves of tears running over it. She sprang to me suddenly and held on to me. I knew the grip. I knew I'd gotten her back. If I wanted her.

  Her hair seemed the only thing in the room which had color, and which shone.

  'I'm sorry,' she muttered, 'sorry, sorry.'

  I felt tired and it all seemed faintly absurd. I stroked her hair, and knew in the morning I was going to call Genevieve, and ask her what the hell to do next.

  In the morning, about seven, I slunk out of bed, put some clothes on, and went out, leaving Cathy asleep. The pay-phone in the entry, as usual, was bust, so I walked down to the booth on the corner of Mason and Quale. The snow lay thin and moistly crisp as water-ice, and the sky was painting itself in blue as high summer. It was an optimistic morning, full of promises of something. I got through to Genevieve, who hardly ever sleeps, and told her all of it, feeling a fool.

  'Oh boy,' said Genevieve. And then: 'Bring her over here to breakfast, why don't you. Maybe the dog'll chase her up a tree.'

  'You think I'm on something and I imagined it.'

  'No.'

  'You think I should laugh it off, it doesn't matter.'

  'It matters.'

  'Well?'

  'Well. I think you're going as bats as she is. I don't know what I can do except feed you pancakes - little children like those, don't they?

  But I know a guy might help.'

  Genevieve genuinely knows a remarkable number of guys who can help. Help you get to sing with the opera, help you find out who you were six hundred years ago in medieval Europe, or help you find a cop who cares somebody mugged you and stole the fillings from your teeth.

  'A shrink.'

  'Sort of. Wait and see.'

  'It has to be gentle, Genevieve. Very, very gentle.'

  'It will be. Bring her. I'll expect you by eight.'

  Once you've passed the buck, you feel better. I felt better. I walked back through the snow, identifying the footprints in it like a kid: human, bird, dog. I knew I could leave all the delicate maneuvering to Genevieve, who is one of the best social surgeons there are.

  Sometime later, I'd have to decide where I wanted to be in all of this, but I didn't have to do it right now.

  I got up to the second floor, and let myself in the apartment, and Cathy was gone.

  The bed was empty, the bathroom, even the closet. I was working myself into a panicky rage when I saw her purse lying under the window. The window was just open, and the dust-drape of snow on the fire-escape had neat dark cuts in it the shape of shoe-soles. I climbed through on to it, and looked down and saw Cathy standing in the yard, with her back to me.

  I didn't react properly. I was just so relieved to find her. I leaned on the rail and shouted.

  'Hey Cathy. We're going to Genevieve's for breakfast.'

  She turned round, then, and her eyes came up to mine, but without a trace of recognition. And then I saw what it was she had in her mouth. It was a bleeding, fluttering, almost-but-not-quite-dead pigeon,

  Cathy had found her breakfast already.

  II Bacio (II Chiave) -The Kiss (The Key)

  This too was firstly begun — though not finished — in my teens. It developed from my craving after Renaissance Italy, the realms of the Borgias.

  In the first version, the key related to a bedchamber. But then, of course, it still does…

  Roma, late in her fifteenth century After the Lord, packed on the banks of her yellow river, had entered that phase of summer known by some as the Interiore. This being a kind of pun - an interior place, or - frankly - entrails. It was a fact: Roma, brown and pink and grey and white and beautiful, ripely stank. Before the month was over, there might very possibly be plague.

  Once the red cannon-blast of the sunset, however, left the cool garden on the high hill, the dusk began to come with all its tessellated stars, and the only scent was from the grape-vines and the dusty flowers,

  and the last aromas of the cooked chickens now merely bones on a table. Four men had dined. From their garments and their demeanour it was easy to locate their portion, the noble rich, indolent and at play.

  They had no thought of plague, even though they had disparagingly discussed it an hour before. They were young, the youth of their era -

  the oldest not more than twenty years - and in the way of the young knew they would live forever, and in the way of their time, as in the way of all times, understood they might die horribly in a month, or a day. And naturally also, since such profound and simple insight is essentially destructive where too often recognized, they knew nothing of the sort.

  There had, very properly, been talk of horses, too, and clothing and politics. Now, with the fruit and the fourth or fifth cups of wine, there came talk of women, and so, consecutively, of gambling.

  'But have no fear, Valore, you shall be excluded.'

  'Shall I? A pity.'

  'Yes, no doubt. And worse pity to have you more in debt to us than already you are.'

  'You owe me two hundred ducats, Valore, since the horserace. Did you forget?'

  'No, dearest Stephano. I very much regret it.' Valore della Scorpioni leaned back in his chair and smiled upon them with the utmost confidence. Each at the table was fine-looking in his way, but Valore, a torch among candles, far out-shone them and blinded, for good measure, with his light.

  His was that unusual and much-admired combination of dark red hair and pale amber skin sometimes retained in the frescoes and on the canvases of masters, a combination later disbelieved as only capable of artificial reproduction. Added to this, a pair of large hazel eyes brought gorgeousness to the patrician face, white teeth blessed it; while all below and beyond the neck showed the excellent results of healthful exercise, good food not consumed in excess, and the arrogant grace evolving upon the rest. In short, a beauty, interesting to either sex, and not less so to himself.

  Added to his appearance and aura, however, Valore della Scorpioni had the virtue of an ill-name. His family drew its current rank by bastardy out of an infamous house not unacquainted with the Vatican.

  As will happen, bad things were said of it, as of its initiator. Untrue as the friends and adorers of Valore knew all such things to be, yet they were not immune to the insidious attraction of all such things.

  No trace of witchcraft or treachery might be seen to mar the young man, scarcely eighteen, who sat godlike in their midst. That he, rich as they, owed money everywhere, was nothing new. It pleased them, perhaps excited them, Stephano, Cesco, Andrea, that this creature was in their debt.

  'Well,' said Andrea now. 'I, for one, have nothing left to put forward on the dice, save my jewels.'

/>   'And I,' said Valore della Scorpioni, with a flame-quick lightness that alerted them all, 'have only this.'

  On the table, then, among the bones, fruit, and wine cups, was set an item of black iron at odds with all. A key. Complex and encrusted, its size alone marked it as the means to some portentous entry.

  'Jesu, what's this,' Stephano cried, 'the way into your lord father's treasury?'

  Valore beamed still, lowering his eyes somewhat, giving them ground.

  'It's old,' said Andrea. 'It could unlock a secret route into the catacombs -'

  And Cesco, not to be outdone: 'No, it is the door to the Pope's wine-cellar, no less. Is it not, Valore?'

  The hazel eyes arose. Valore looked at them.

  'It is,' he said, 'the key to a lady's bedchamber.'

  They exclaimed, between jeering mirth and credulity. They themselves were unsure of which they favoured. The dark was now complete, and the candles on the table gave the only illumination.

  Caught by these, Valore's beautiful face had acquired a sinister cast, impenetrable and daunting. So they had seen it before, and at such moments the glamour of evil repute, though unbelieved, seemed not far off.

  'Come, now,' Andrea said at length, when the jibes had gone unanswered. 'Whose chamber is it? Some harlot -'

  'Not at all,' said Valore. He paused again, and allowed them to hang

  upon his words. 'Would I offer you such dross in lieu of honest recompense for my debts?'

  'Oh, yes,' said Cesco. 'Just so you would.'

  'Then,' said Valore, all velvet, 'for shame to sit here with such a wretch. Go home, Cesco, I entreat you. I'd not dishonour you further.'

  And when Cesco had finished uneasily protesting, Valore picked up the great black key and turned it in his flexible fingers. 'This, sweet friends, fits the lock of one, a lady of high birth. A lady most delectable, who is kindred to me.'

  They exhibited mirth again, sobered, and stared at him.

  Andrea said, 'Then truly you make sport here. If she is your kin, you would hardly disgrace her so.'

  'She's not disgraced. She will not be angry.' In utter silence now they gazed on their god. Valore nodded. 'I see you doubt her charms. But I will show you. This attends the key.' And now there was put on the table a little portrait, ringed by pearls, the whole no bigger than a prum.