Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  When he roused, the dawn was breaking, the tree stood scentless and empty, and the poet, lying alone, was dead.

  'So naturally,' said Isabella, with relish, 'there was a cry of witchcraft, and the priests came and the tree was burnt to cinders. All but for one tiny piece the prince found, to his astonishment, he had broken off.

  Long after the poet had been buried, in unhallowed ground, the prince kept this little piece of the Janfia tree, and eventually thinking it dead, he threw it from his window out into the garden of his palace.'

  She looked at me.

  'Where it grew,' I said, 'watered only by the rain, and nurtured only

  by the glow of the moon by night.'

  'Until an evening came,' said Isabella, 'when the prince, overcome by a strange longing, sat brooding in his chair. And all at once an amazing perfume filled the air, so mysterious, so irresistible, he dared not even turn his head to see what it portended. And as he sat thus, a shadow fell across his shoulder on to the floor in front of him, and then a quiet, leaf-cool hand was laid upon his neck.'

  She and I burst out laughing.

  'Gorgeous,' I said. 'Erotic, gothic, perverse, Wildean, Freudian. Yes.'

  'Now tell me you won't write it.'

  I shook my head. 'No. Maybe later, sometime. If you don't. But your story still doesn't explain the name, does it?'

  'Alec said it might be something to do with Janus being the male form of the name Diana - the moon and the night. But it's tenuous.

  Oh,' she said, 'you do look so much better.'

  Thereby reminding me that I was ill, and that the sword still hung by its hair, and that all we had shared was a derivative little horror story from the back hills.

  'Are you sure you can't manage dinner?' she said.

  'Probably could. Then I'd regret it. No, thank you. Just for now, I'll stick to that yoghurt, or it to me, whatever it does.'

  'All right. Well, I must dash. I'll call you tomorrow.'

  I had come to the villa for solitude in a different climate, but learned, of course, that climate is climate, and that solitude too is always precisely and only that. In my case, the desire to be alone was simply the horror of not being so. Besides, I never was alone, dogged by the sick, discontented and unshakable companions of my body, my own restless mind.

  The sun was wonderful, and the place was beautiful, but I quickly realized I did not know what to do with the sun and the beauty. I needed to translate them, perhaps, into words, certainly into feelings, but neither would respond as I wished. I kept a desultory journal, then gave it up. I read and soon found I could not control my eyes

  enough to get them to focus on the pages. On the third evening, I went to dinner with Isabella and Alec, did my best, watched Alec do his best, came back a little drunk, more ill in soul than in body.

  Disgraced myself in private by weeping.

  Finally, the scent of the Janfia tree, coming in such tides into the room, drew me to the window.

  I stood there, looking down at the veranda, the far away hills beyond described only by starlight, the black tree much nearer, with here and there its moonburst of smoky white, an open flower.

  And I thought about the poet, and the incubus that was the spirit of the tree. It was the hour to think of that. A demon which vampirized and killed by irresistible pleasures of the flesh. What an entirely enchanting thought. After all, life itself vampirized, and ultimately killed, did it not, by a constant, equally irresistible, administration of the exact reverse of pleasure?

  But since I had no longer any belief in God, I had lost all hopes of anything supernatural abroad in the universe. There was evil, naturally, in its abstract or human incarnations, but nothing artistic, no demons stepping from trees by night.

  Just then, the leaves of the Janfia rustled. Some night breeze was passing through them, though not, it seemed, through any other thing which grew on the veranda.

  A couple of handsome shy wild cats came and went at the villa. The woman who cooked left out scraps for them, and I had seen Marta, one morning, leaving a large bowl of water in the shade of a cypress they were wont to climb. A cat then, prowling along the veranda rail, was disturbing the tree. I tried to make out the flash of eyes.

  Presently, endeavouring to do this, I began to see another thing.

  It was a shadow, cast from the tree, but not in the tree's shape. Nor was there light, beyond that of the stars above the hills, to fashion it.

  A man then, young and slender, stood below me, by the Janfia, and from a barely suggested paleness, like that of a thin half moon, it seemed he might be looking up towards my room.

  A kind of instinct made me move quickly back, away from the window. It was a profound and primitive reaction, which startled me, and refreshed me. It had no place on the modern earth, and scarcely any name. A kind of panic - the pagan fear of something elemental,

  godlike and terrible. Caught up in it, for a second, I was no longer myself, no longer the one I dreaded most in all the world. I was no one, only a reaction to an unknown matter, more vital than sickness or pessimism, something from the days when all ills and joys were in the charge of the gods, when men need not think, but simply were.

  And then, I did think. I thought of some intruder, something rational, and I moved into the open window again, and looked down, and there was nothing there. Just the tree against the starlight.

  'Isabella,' I said to her over the telephone, 'would you mind if I had that tree carried up to my bedroom?'

  Tree?'

  I laughed brightly. 'I don't mean one of the pines. The little Janfia. It's funny, but you know I hadn't been sleeping very well -the scent seems to help. I thought, actually in the room, it would be about foolproof. Non-stop inhalations of white double brandies.'

  'Well, I don't see why not. Only, mightn't it give you a headache, or something? All that carbon monoxide - or is it dioxide? - plants exude at night. Didn't someone famous suffocate themselves with flowers? One of Mirabeau's mistresses, wasn't it? No, that was with a charcoal brazier -'

  'The thing is,' I said, 'your two gardeners have arrived this morning after all. And between them, they shouldn't have any trouble getting the urn upstairs. I'll have it by the window. No problems with asphyxia that way.'

  'Oh well, if you want, why not?' Having consented, she babbled for a moment over how I was doing, and assured me she would 'pop in'

  tomorrow. Alec had succumbed to some virus, and she had almost forgotten me. I doubted that I would see her for the rest of the week.

  Marta scintillantly organized the gardeners. Each gave me a narrow look. But they raised the terracotta and the tree, bore them grunting up to the second floor, plonked them by the window as requested.

  Marta even followed this up with a can of water to sprinkle the earth.

  That done, she pulled two desiccated leaves off the tree with a coarse functional disregard. It was part of the indoor furnishings now, and must be cared for.

  I had been possessed by a curious idea, which I called, to myself, an experiment. It was impossible that I had seen anything, any 'being', on the veranda. That was an alcoholic fantasy. But then again, I had an urge to call the bluff of the Janfia tree. Because it seemed to me responsible, in its own way, for my mirage. Perhaps the blooms were mildly hallucinogenic. If so, I meant to test them. In lieu of any other social event or creative project, an investigation of the Janfia would have to serve.

  By day it gave, of course, very little scent; in the morning it had seemed to have none at all. I sat and watched it a while, then stretched out for a siesta. Falling asleep, almost immediately I dreamed that I lay bleeding in a blood-soaked bed, in the middle of a busy city pavement. People stepped around me, sometimes cursing the obstacle. No one would help me. Somebody - formless, genderless - when I caught at a sleeve, detached me with a good-natured, 'Oh, you'll be all right.'

  I woke up in a sweat of horror. Not a wise measure any more, the
n, to sleep by day. Too hot, conducive to the nightmare… The dream's psychological impetus was all too obvious, the paranoia and self-pity.

  One was expected to be calm and well mannered in adversity. People soon got tired of you otherwise.

  How not, who was exempt from distress?

  I stared across the room at the Janfia tree, glossy with its health and beauty. Quite unassailable it looked. Was it a vampire? Did it suck away the life of other things to feed its own? It was welcome to mine.

  What a way to die. Not messily and uncouthly. But ecstatically, romantically, poignantly. They would say, they simply could not understand it, I had been a little under the weather, but dying - So very odd of me. And Isabella, remembering the story, would glance at the Janfia fearfully, and shakily giggle the notion aside.

  I got up, and walked across.

  'Why don't you?' I said. 'I'm here. I'm willing. I'd be - I'd be only too glad to die like that, in the arms of something that needed me, held, in pleasure - not from some bloody slip of a careless uncaring knife, some surgeon with a hangover, whoops, lost another patient today, oh dear what a shame. Or else to go on with this bloody awful misery, one slap in the teeth after another, nothing going right, nothing,

  nothing -Get out, to oblivion hopefully, or get out and start over, or if there's some bearded old damnable God, he couldn't blame me, could he? Your honour, I'd say, I was all for keeping going, suffering for another forty years, whatever your gracious will for me was. But a demon set on me. You know I didn't stand a chance. So.' I said again to the Janfia tree, 'why not?'

  Did it hear? Did it attend? I reached out and touched its stems, its leaves, the fruited, tight-coiled blossoms. All of it seemed to sing, to vibrate with some colossal hidden force, like an instrument still faintly thrumming after the hand of the musician has left it, perhaps five centuries ago.

  'Christ, I'm going crazy,' I said, and turned from the tree with an insulting laugh. See, the laugh said, I know all that is a lie. So, I dare you.

  There was a writing desk in the room. Normally, when writing, I did not employ a desk, but now I sat at it and began to jot some notes on the legend of the tree. I was not particularly interested in doing this, it was only a sort of sympathetic magic. But the time went swiftly, and soon the world had reached the drinks hour, and I was able with a clear conscience to go down with thoughts of opening a bottle of white wine. The sun burned low in the cypress tree, and Marta stood beneath it, perplexed, a dish of scraps in her hand.

  'Cats not hungry today?' I asked her.

  She cast me a flashing look.

  'No cats. Cats runs off. I am say, Where you go give you better food?

  Mrs Isabella like the cats. Perhaps they there. Thing scares them.

  They see a monster, go big eyes and then they runs.'

  Surprising me with my surprise, I shivered. 'What was it? That they saw?' Marta shrugged. 'Who's know? I am see them runs. Fat tail and big eyes.'

  'Where was it?'

  'This minute.'

  'But where? Down here?'

  She shrugged a second time. 'Nothing there. They see. I am go along now. My aunt, she is waits for me.'

  'Oh yes. Your aunt. Do go.'

  I smiled. Marta ignored my smile, for she would only smile at me when I was serious or preoccupied, or ill. In the same way, her English deteriorated in my presence, improved in Isabella's. In some fashion, it seemed to me, she had begun to guard herself against me, sensing bad luck might rub off.

  I had explained earlier to everyone that I wanted nothing very much for dinner, some cheese and fruit would suffice, such items easily accessible. And they had all then accordingly escaped, the cook, the cats and Marta. Now I was alone. Was I?

  At the third glass I began to make my plans. It would be a full moon tonight. It would shine in at my bedroom window about two in the morning, casting a white clear light across the room, the desk, so that anything, coming between, would cast equally a deep shadow.

  Well, I would give it every chance. The Janfia could not say I had omitted anything. The lunar orb, I at the desk my back to night and moon and tree. Waiting.

  Why was I even contemplating such a foolish adolescent act?

  Naturally so that tomorrow, properly stood up on my date with delicious death, I could cry out loudly: The gods are dead! There is nothing left to me but this, the dunghill of the world.

  But I ought to be fairly drunk. Yes, I owed the situation that. Drink, the opening medicine of the mind and heart, sometimes of the psyche.

  The clean cheeses and green and pink fruits did not interrupt the spell of the wine. They stabilized my stomach and made it only accommodating.

  Tomorrow I would regret drinking so much, but tomorrow I was going to regret everything in any case.

  And so I opened a second bottle, and carried it to the bath with me, to the ritual cleansing before the assignation or the witchcraft.

  I fell asleep, sitting at the desk. There was a brief sea-like afterglow, and my notes and a book and a lamp and the bottle spread before me.

  The perfume of the Janfia at my back seemed faint, luminous as the

  dying of the light. Beginning to read, quite easily, for the wine, interfering itself with vision, made it somehow less difficult to see or guess correctly the printed words, I weighed the time once or twice on my watch. Four hours, three hours, to moonrise.

  When I woke, it was to an electric stillness. The oil lamp which I had been using in preference was burning low, and I reached instantly and turned down the wick. As the flame went out, all the lit darkness came in about me. The moon was in the window, climbing up behind the jet-black outline of the Janfia tree.

  The scent was extraordinary. Was it my imagination - it seemed never to have smelled this way before, with this sort of aching, chiming note. Perhaps the full moon brought it out. I would not turn to look. Instead, I drew the paper to me and the pen. I wrote nothing, simply doodled on the pad, long spirals and convolutions; doubtless a psychiatrist would have found them most revealing.

  My mind was a blank. A drunken, receptive, amiable blank. I was amused, but exhilarated. All things were supposed to be possible. If a black spectre could stalk me through eight years, surely then phantoms of all kinds, curses, blessings, did exist.

  The shadow of the Janfia was being thrown down now all around me, on the floor, on the desk and the paper: the lacy foliage and the wide-stretched blooms.

  And then, something else, a long finger of shadow, began to spill forwards, across everything. What was it? No, I must not turn to see.

  Probably some freak arrangement of the leaves, or even some simple element of the room's furniture, suddenly caught against the lifting moon.

  My skin tingled. I sat as if turned to stone, watching the slow forward movement of the shadow which, after all, might also be that of a tall and slender man. Not a sound. The cicadas were silent. On the hills not a dog barked. And the villa was utterly dumb, empty of everything but me, and perhaps of this other thing, which itself was noiseless.

  And all at once the Janfia tree gave a little whispering rustle. As if it laughed to itself. Only a breeze, of course only that, or some night insect, or a late flower unfolding -

  A compound of fear and excitement held me rigid. My eyes were

  wide and I breathed in shallow gasps. I had ceased altogether to reason. I did not even feel. I waited. I waited in a type of delirium, for the touch of a cruel serene hand upon my neck - For truth to step at last from the shadow, with a naked blade.

  And I shut my eyes, the better to experience whatever might come to me.

  There was then what is known as a lacuna, a gap, something missing, and amiss. In this gap, gradually, as I sank from the heights back inside myself, I began after all to hear a sound.

  It was a peculiar one. I could not make it out.

  Since ordinary sense was, unwelcome, returning, I started vaguely to think, Oh, some animal,
hunting. It had a kind of coughing, retching, whining quality, inimical and awesome, something which would have nothing to do with what basically it entailed - like the agonized female scream of the mating fox.

  The noises went on for some time, driving me ever further and further back to proper awareness, until I opened my eyes, and stood up abruptly. I was cold, and felt rather sick. The scent of the Janfia tree was overpowering, nauseating, and nothing at all had happened.

  The shadows were all quite usual, and, rounding on the window, I saw the last of the moon's edge was in it, and the tree like a cut-out of black and white papers. Nothing more.

  I swore, childishly, in rage, at all things, and myself. It served me right; fool, fool, ever to expect anything. And that long shadow, what had that been? Well. It might have been anything. Why else had I shut my eyes but to aid the delusion, afraid if I continued to look I must be undeceived.

  Something horrible had occurred. The night was full of the knowledge of that. Of my idiotic invitation to demons, and my failure, their refusal.

  But I really had to get out of the room, the scent of the tree was making me ill at last. How could I ever have thought it pleasant?

  I took the wine-bottle, meaning to replace it in the refrigerator downstairs, and, going out into the corridor, brought on the lights.

  Below, I hit the other switches rapidly, one after the other, flooding the villa with hard modern glare. So much for the moon. But the

  smell of the Janfia was more persistent, it seemed to cling to everything -1 went out on to the western veranda, to get away from it, but even here on the other side of the house the fragrance hovered.

  I was trying, very firmly, to be practical. I was trying to close the door, banish the element I had summoned, for though it had not come to me, yet somehow the night clamoured with it, reeked of it. What was it? Only me, of course. My nerves were shot, and what did I do but essay stupid flirtations with the powers of the dark? Though they did not exist in their own right, they do exist inside every one of us. I had called my own demons. Let loose, they peopled the night.