Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  When I finish.'

  She thought about ringing David. She couldn't guess what he'd say.

  What could she say, come to that? Her back ached now, and she felt sick, but she kept on with her work. Presently she heard energetic intimations of the Laceys visiting the bathroom, and the duck-child quacking happily.

  She caught herself wondering why blood hadn't run when the nails were hammered in the walls for Mr Tinker's pictures. But that was before the room really came to life, maybe. Or maybe the room had taken it in the spirit of beautification, like having one's ears pierced for gold earrings. Certainly the knife scratches had bled.

  Caroline put down the cloth and went over to the basin and was sick.

  Perhaps I'm pregnant, she thought, and all this is a hallucination of my fecundity.

  David, I am pregnant, and I stabbed a room to death.

  David.

  David?

  It was a boiling hot day, one of the last fling days of the summer.

  Everything was blanched by the heat, apart from the apex of the blue sky and the core of the green-blue sea. Caroline wore a white dress.

  A quarter before each hour, she told herself she would ring David on the hour: ten o'clock, eleven, twelve. Then she would 'forget'. At one o'clock she rang him, and he was at lunch as she had known he would be, really.

  Caroline went on the pier. She put money into little machines which whizzed and clattered. She ate a sandwich in a café. She walked along the sands, holding her shoes by the straps.

  At half past four she felt compelled to return.

  She had to speak to Mrs Rice, about the holes in the walls.

  And then again, perhaps she should go up to number eight first. It seemed possible that the dead room would somehow have righted itself. And then, too, there were the washed rugs drying over the bath that the Unlaceys might come in and see. Caroline examined why she was so flippant and so cheerful. It was, of course, because she was afraid.

  She went into the block, and abruptly she was trembling. As she climbed the steps, her legs melted horridly, and she wished she could crawl, pulling herself by her fingers.

  As she came up to the landing, she beheld Mr Lacey in the corridor.

  At least, she assumed it was Mr Lacey. He was overweight and tanned a peachy gold by the sun. He stood, glowering at her, blocking the way to her door. He's going to complain about the noise, she thought. She tried to smile, but no smile would oblige.

  'I'm Mr Lacey,' he announced. 'You met my wife the other day.'

  He sounded nervous rather than belligerent. When Caroline didn't speak, he went on, 'My Brenda, you see. She noticed this funny smell from number eight. When you come along to the bathroom, you catch it. She was wondering if you'd left some meat out, forgotten it.'

  'No,' said Caroline.

  'Well, I reckoned you ought to be told,' said Mr Lacey.

  'Yes, thank you.'

  'I mean, don't take this the wrong way, but we've got a kid. You can't be too careful.'

  'No. You can't.'

  'Well, then.' He swung himself aside and moved a short way down the corridor towards the Lacey flat. Caroline went to her door. She knew he was watching her with his two shining Lacey piggy eyes.

  She turned and stared at him, her heart striking her side in huge bruising blows, until he grunted and went off.

  Caroline stood before the door. She couldn't smell anything. No, there was nothing, nothing at all.

  The stink came in a wave, out of nowhere. It smote her and she nearly reeled. It was foul, indescribably foul. And then it was gone.

  Delicately, treading soft, Caroline stepped away from the door. She

  tiptoed to the head of the stairs. Then she ran.

  But like someone drawn to the scene of an accident, she couldn't entirely vacate the area. She sat on the esplanade, watching.

  The day went out over the town, and the dusk seeped from the sea. In the dusk, a police car came and drew up outside the block. Later, another.

  It got dark. The lamps, the neons and the stars glittered, and Caroline shuddered in her thin frock.

  The stork-legs had gathered at the café. They pointed and jeered at the police cars. At the garden pavilion, a band was playing. Far out on the ocean, a great tanker passed, garlanded with lights.

  At nine o'clock, Caroline found she had risen and was walking across the esplanade to the holiday block. She walked right through the crowd of stork-legs. 'Got the time?' one of them yelled, but she paid no heed, didn't even flinch.

  She went up the steps, and on the first flight she met two very young policemen.

  'You can't come up here, miss.'

  'But I'm staying here,' she said. Her mild voice, so reasonable, interested her. She missed what he asked next.

  'I said, what number, miss.'

  'Number eight.'

  'Oh. Right. You'd better come up with me, then. You hang on here, Brian.'

  They climbed together, like old friends.

  'What's the matter?' she questioned him, perversely.

  'I'm not quite sure, miss.'

  They reached the landing.

  All the way up from the landing below, the stench had been intensifying, solidifying. It was unique. Without ever having smelled such an odour before, instinctively and at once you knew it was the perfume of rottenness. Of decay and death.

  Mrs Rice stood in the corridor, her black hair in curlers, and she was absentmindedly crying. Another woman with a handkerchief to her nose patted Mrs Rice's shoulder. Behind a shut door, a child also cried, vehemently. Another noise came from the bathroom: someone vomiting.

  Caroline's door was open wide. A further two policemen were on the threshold. They seemed to have no idea of how to proceed. One was wiping his hands with a cloth, over and over.

  Caroline gazed past them, into the room.

  Putrescent lumps were coming away from the walls. The ceiling dribbled and dripped. Yet one moment only was it like the flesh of a corpse. Next moment, it was plaster, paint and crumbling brick. And then again, like flesh. And then again -

  'Christ,' one of the policemen said. He faced about at his audience. He too was young. He stared at Caroline randomly. 'What are we supposed to do?'

  Caroline breathed in the noxious air. She managed to smile at last, kindly, inquiringly, trying to help. 'Bury it?'

  Paper Boat

  The strange death of the poet Shelley inspired this. Circumstances surrounding the event are themselves so bizarre, so fate-laden, that they seemed crying out for rehearsal, and for the opium prose that formed upon the story's bones.

  The summer heat had come. It burned the hills to blocks of standing smoke. It filled the bowl of the shore and the spoon of the bay with its opium, it painted the terracotta of the house in progressively darkening washes of red and umber. The sea, a throbbing indigo, pulled itself to the beach and tumbled there as if drugged. The island lay dumb, half conscious, scarcely breathing, vanquished.

  It seemed to the poet he was made of some form of clockwork and the clock had stopped. He stood by the narrow window, looking at the blue-black sea, the distant shadow of a dreamlike mainland

  chalked in haze. Perhaps this was how the island itself felt, the sea, the rock… this lifeless numb internal silence, devoid of anything, even questioning or fear.

  This was where they had planned to spend the summer. This island and this house. This house, like a doll's house. If you opened the side of it you would see all the pretty dolls in their doll-like attitudes of occupation. Laura scribbling bitter witty prose with the yellow blind shielding her window from the sun, turning her to amber, a fierce amber hand, the scorched ember-coloured pages. Farther down, Sibbi bending like an Egyptian over a bowl of osiers and sun-mummified flowers, Sibbi with her magical face and her bright shallow brain, and her husband Arthur, a bear, at the eternal business of his pipe, knocking out dottle, refilling it, that rank black toba
cco odour woven by now into the scalding incense of every room. And somewhere Albertine, like a tall white goddess from a frieze moving silently and gently about, being careful to tread on the paws of none of them, this moody tribe of cats who inhabited her domestic landscape.

  And he, the black cat at the top of the house, the black cat in the symbolical tower with a door up to the roof where, under the golden awning, the metallic telescope was pointing like a tongue at the sea.

  The black cat was a poet and scholar. So, if you had opened the doll's house you should see him seated in the brown shadow at the desk, lost in some elegy or epic, among the open paper mouths of Plato, Virgil and Homer. And instead you saw him at the narrow window, the doll poet with the clockwork stopped inside him.

  Below, the silver hammers of the piano began to strike each other, and a girl's lovely singing winged up, yet the sounds had an undersea quality, stifled by the leaden air. Sibbi, her flowers meticulously imprisoned in their bowl, singing her siren's song to the poet in the tower. She sang to disturb him as he worked, to get her image between the pen and the paper. If he should say to her as they ate dinner: 'I heard you sing,' she would answer: 'Oh, I am sorry. Did I disturb you? I never thought you could hear me.' Her eyes were the colour of blue irises; they gave an impression of great depth simply because a world of vacuity opened behind them. She was a claw delicately scratching at him. All three women, the priestesses presumably of his shrine, were claws in his body - Sibbi clawed at his loins, very softly and with her own curious art, promising and never

  quite giving, giving, and promising more, like all empty vessels offering an illusion of hidden things. Laura clawed at his conscience; sharp-tongued and clever Laura, reminding him of her rights to him by means of a past neither wished to recapture.

  Only Albertine clawed at his heart. Albertine who was sad and travailed not to show it, who was brave and good and adored him, Albertine the best of women, whom he no longer loved. They had metamorphosed into different people from the two impassioned children who met in a graveyard in order to be secret, embraced on graves, and finally, hero and heroine of their own romance, had fled security with a wild hymn of abandon. Now they had grown up, security had gathered on them after all, like barnacles. The dismal shadow of reality overlay them both. They had found out they were not gods and they were not suited.

  The light from the sea, so darkly bright, made him shut his eyes.

  Sibbi sang below. No one else responded to the heat as he had done with this anaesthetic languor. There was a timelessness around him now. No past, no present, nothing to come. He could sense the mechanism stilled, the unheard drone of the sun. A perpetual, well known knowledge of loneliness gnawed somewhere inside him, yet he scarcely felt it. Only the sullen noises of the sea ran up the beaches of his mind and swooned like an indigo woman against him, and slipped away through his fingers sighing when he tried to hold her, while down below Arthur Merton knocked the dottle from his pipe, refilled it, lit it, and leaned back in his chair, and considered it was very hot.

  'Damned hot,' he said.

  Through the smoke of the pipe, and through the embalmed-looking stalks and scarlet rose-heads in the Indian bowl, he could see Sibbi at the piano in the next room, playing and singing prettily, sometimes glancing towards the open veranda doors with the sly, half-excited, half-evaluating look she reserved for Ashburn. Inadvertently Merlon's eyes slid up towards the weary stucco of the ceiling. Above them all, Robert Ashburn would be writing in the tower room, working in this infernal heat. If he was. Too hot to do much now.

  Even the boat, Ashburn's love, lay neglected by the quay. The sailing days had been good. When it was cooler -

  Merton sensed, as if through the steam or fog of his thoughts, the

  glamour of the girl at the piano, the witchery of that curious straying glance, once turned to advantage on himself. He felt no resentment.

  He also, in an improbable, asexual way, stirred at the thought of the dark young man above, the anguished poet -anguished by everything or nothing. The moods of the poet lit up dim glares of unrealized fire in Merton himself. Sonnets he did not properly understand, written perfectly obviously to his wife Sibbi, nevertheless pierced Merlon's wooden soul like splinters of glass with a painful, inexplicable delight.

  Sibbi finished her song. Notes and voice ebbed from the room, and the heat seemed to flood into the empty spaces. Presenlly she came lo the doorway and stood looking at him, like a cat with a canary dead in its mouth, contempluous, cruel and affectionate, knowing it will be forgiven simply because il is as it is.

  'That was very nice,' Merton observed.

  Sibbi smiled. 'How would you know? You don't care for music.'

  'Well, I care for yours, you know.'

  'Actually, I was playing for Robert, but I'm glad you enjoyed it, Arthur dear.' She leaned her hand with its wedding ring on the upright of the door, admiring it, her eyes a little glazed with heat and excitement. 'How bad of him to be in the garden at this hour, when he should be working. Laura will scold him, I expect. He hasn't completed anything this summer.'

  Merton laughed.

  'We shall have to visit the eye specialist after all,' he remarked. A year ago she had been threatened with the nemesis of spectacles; now some little spark of intransigent animosity made him refer to the terror whenever possible, in the form of a joke. 'Robert was never in the garden.'

  'Don't be absurd. I saw him quite clearly. I see better than you do.'

  'But you don't hear better, Sibbi. I heard him upstairs, walking about while you were at the piano. You know how he walks, like an animal in a cage, up and down.'

  'I think you must have sunstroke. You had better lie down. I saw Robert absolutely distinctly, by the stone urn at the end of the walk, listening while I played.'

  Merton got up with a reluctant irritating air of investigation and went slowly across the room, past Sibbi, to the veranda doors. The garden, stripped of shadow by the two o'clock sun, offered a vista of lank and blistered green with clumps of statuary, like unhealthy fungus or sores, pushed up at intervals. The local gardener was trudging complainingly beside Albertine along the walk. The old sunburned islander and the tall fair girl advanced in a desultory slow motion; nothing else stirred except for an inflammatory scatter of crickets, crackling as if trying to set the grass on fire.

  'I spy with my short-sighted eye Albertine and that old devil from the village.'

  Sibbi came to his side. 'Well, no doubt Robert's come indoors. He was just there a moment ago.'

  'Then he'd come through these doors here, wouldn't he? The only other way is to jump off the wall and, since the tide's in, swim round to the front, which seems,' he knocked dottle from his pipe to stress the point, 'unnecessary.'

  Then he's still in the garden. What a fuss you're making.'

  'You, my dear, are the one making the fuss.'

  Merton went out on to the terrace and waved to Albertine. The girl lifted her head; the gardener picked his fangs, disdaining the mad people of the house, recounting whose debaucheries and insanities kept him in free liquor at the village.

  'Did you pass Robert on the walk?'

  'Why no, he's upstairs in the tower room.'

  'You see,' Merton exulted.

  Sibbi shook her head. Her teeth snapped on canary bones. 'I distinctly saw him, I tell you.'

  Albertine crossed the lawn, glancing up anxiously at the shuttered landward window of the little tower and at the yellow awning above.

  'Now you've made Albertine uneasy,' Sibbi said crossly. She glanced at the girl with the same mixture of contempt and liking she had displayed for her husband. She had enchanted the poet, and could afford to be generous to his dull, pleasant handmaiden. Laura, the serpent-tongued, was the one she feared.

  Albertine called in a high light voice: 'Robert,' and then again:

  'Robert!'

  They all stared up as if mesmerized at the closed shutters; even
the mahogany gardener, his thumbnail worrying at his canines, added an oil-black stare to theirs.

  'Robert,' Sibbi suddenly sang out, as if certain her magic would conjure him where Albertine's could not. The heat swirled sulkily and reformed.

  The gardener muttered ominously: 'He write. He deaf to you.'

  Abruptly, for no particular reason, each one of them shouted at the masked window.

  'Here I am,' Ashburn said.

  They looked down and saw him coming between the veranda doors.

  Albertine and Sibbi exclaimed; the gardener turned and spat disgustedly. Merton said: 'Well, well. Just down from the tower.'

  'That's right.'

  'But you were in the garden,' Sibbi asserted almost angrily. 'I saw you standing on the walk while I played.'

  The poet looked at her and seemed not quite to see her. His eyes, also glazed by the heat, and very dark, appeared to gaze inwards, backwards into the shadows of his brain. He gave one of his absent, charming, half-apologetic smiles.

  'Yes, I heard you singing upstairs.'

  Sibbi failed to take up her cue. She looked feverish, annoyed; she went to him and touched his hand and gave a little hard silver laugh like piano notes.

  They went in arm in arm to dinner. Merton trailed after.

  'Perhaps, you know, we have a ghost.'

  The food was served and partly eaten. It was too hot for food.

  Merton, watching Albertine's gentle cameo face, the barley-coloured hair, visualized all the paraphernalia of a saint, fashioned for crucifixion. She ate little. If Ashburn looked at her she might eat something, pathetically attempting to deceive him. Merton passed her rolls reverently and helped her to wine. She was a fine woman, a

  sweet girl. Her devotion to the poet moved Merton, for perhaps, in some obscure way, it justified his own devotion to his blue-eyed cat wife.

  Now, striving to cheer everyone up after the labour of eating, he revived his little piece, and filled his pipe.