Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  All I could hope for now was to go in and make a gallon of coffee, and leaf through and through the silly magazines that lay about, and stave off sleep until the dawn came. But there was something wrong with the cypress tree. The moon, slipping over the roof now in pursuit of me, caught the cypress and showed what I thought was a broken bough.

  That puzzled me. I was glad of the opportunity to go out between the bushes and take a prosaic look.

  It was not any distance, and the moon came bright. All the night, all its essence, had concentrated in that spot, yet when I first looked, and first saw, my reaction was only startled astonishment. I rejected the evidence as superficial, which it was not, and looked about and found the tumbled kitchen stool, and then looked up again to be sure, quite certain, that it was Marta who hung there pendant and motionless, her engorged and terrible face twisted away from me. She had used a strong cord. And those unidentifiable sounds I had heard, I realized now, had been the noises Marta made, as she swung and kicked there, strangling to death.

  The shock of what had happened was too much for Isabella, and made her unwell. She had been fond of the girl, and could not understand why Marta had not confided her troubles. Presumably her lover had thrown her over, and perhaps she was pregnant - Isabella could have helped, the girl could have had her baby under the shelter of a foreign umbrella of bank notes. But then it transpired Marta had not been pregnant, so there was no proper explanation. The woman who cooked said both she and the girl had been oppressed for days,

  in some way she could not or did not reveal. It was the season. And then, the girl was young and impressionable. She had gone mad. God would forgive her suicide.

  I sat on the veranda of the other villa, my bags around me and a car due to arrive and take me to the town, and Alec and Isabella, both pale with convalescence, facing me over the white iron table.

  'It wasn't your fault,' said Alec to Isabella. 'It's no use brooding over it. The way they are here, it's always been a mystery to me.' Then, he went in, saying he felt the heat, but he would return to wave me off.

  'And poor poor you,' said Isabella, close to tears. 'I tell you to come here and rest, and this has to happen.'

  I could not answer that I felt it was my fault. I could not confess that it seemed to me that I, invoking darkness, had conjured Marta's death. I did not understand the process, only the result. Nor had I told Isabella that the Janfia tree seemed to have contracted its own terminal disease. The leaves and flowers had begun to rot away, and the scent had grown acid. My vibrations had done that. Or it was because the tree had been my focus, my burning-glass. That would reveal me then as my own enemy. That powerful thing which slowly destroyed me, that stalker with a knife, it was myself. And knowing it, naming it, rather than free me of it, could only give it greater power.

  'Poor little Marta,' said Isabella. She surrendered and began to sob, which would be no use to Marta at all, or to herself, maybe.

  Then the car, cheerful in red and white, came up the dusty road, tooting merrily to us. And the driver, heaving my luggage into the boot, cried out to us in joy, 'What a beautiful day, ah, what a beautiful day!'

  The Devil's Rose

  I have always said I find this one of the most horrific of my own stories.

  How many times it must, in some form, have happened. And, in more

  modern guise, still does.

  One wishes to assume a strong moral stance. Yet self-denial is a wicked thing. The air is always full of first-thrown stones.

  O Rose, thou art sick!

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm

  Has sought out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  William Blake

  Because of a snow-drift on the line, the train pulled to an unscheduled stop at the little town of L____. Presently we passengers had debarked, and stood stamping and chafing our hands about the stove in the station-house. It was nearly midnight, but the station-master's charitable housekeeper came almost at once with steaming coffee and a bottle of spirits. A boy was also roused and sent running, apparently to wake all the town on our behalf for lodgings. We should not be able to go on for three or four days, even that depending on whether or not fresh snow were to come down. Since we had entered the great pine forests outside Archaroy, we had been seeing wolves. They were thick on the ground that winter, and in the little villages and towns, we were to hear, not a carriage or sledge could go out but it would have wolf-packs running after it for mile on mile, until the lights of human habitation came again in sight.

  'What a prospect!' exclaimed the estate manager who had shared my

  compartment from Archaroy. 'Besieged in the back of beyond by weather and wolves. Do you think, Mhikal Mhikalson, we shall ever get out?'

  I said that we might, in the spring, perhaps, if not this year's, then next. But in fact, being my own creature, such unprecedented quirks of venture as this one neither dismayed nor displeased me. I had no family either behind or at journey's end to be impatient or in fear for me. My friends were used to my eccentricities and would look for me to arrive only when I did so. Additionally, in this instance, my destination was not one I hankered for. The manager, however, who had business dealings up ahead, was turning fractious. On the pretence of the errand for lodgings, I walked out of that hot room and went into the town of L____, to see what, as the isolated clocks of midnight struck, it might offer me.

  It was a truly provincial backwater, such as you would expect, although the streets were mostly lit, and efforts had been made to clear the snow. There was an old market-place with a bell-tower, and close by some public gardens with tall locked gates. The houses of the prosperous ascended a hill, and those of the not so prosperous slunk down it. Some boulevards with shops all shut finished the prospect.

  On a rise behind the rest was an old stuccoed house which I noticed for something Italianate in its outline, but mostly through one unprovincial lemon-yellow window burning brightly there. What poet or scholar worked late in that room when all the town slept?

  Something in me, which would have done the same if so placed, sent a salutation up to him.

  After looking at the house, I made my way - perversely? -downhill, observing the degeneration of all the premises. The lower town fell into what might once have been the bed of some primeval river, which had carved out a bottom for itself before sinking away into the past. Over the area, the narrow streets sprawled and intertwined; it would be easy to be lost there, but for the constant marker of the hill hanging always above.

  Needless to say, the snow had here been churned and frozen in mud-heaps, and the going was heavy. I was growing jaded, when, between some boarded stables and a parade of the poorest houses, I discovered an ancient church. It was of the kind you sometimes see even in the

  cities, crammed between newer buildings that seem to want to press the life from it and close together in its default. A hooded well stood on the snow and the cobbles near the church door which, as may still happen in the provinces, was unlocked.

  The church intrigued me, perhaps only as the house had done with its window, for I sensed some life going on there. It was not an area for the wise to loiter; who knew what rough or other might not come from his hovel to demand money, or try by force to take it.

  Nevertheless something kept me there, and 1 was on the point of going nearer, when lo and behold the massive church door parted a crack. Out into the moonlight, which was now laving snow and town alike, slipped the slender, unmistakable form of a woman. It was the season when men go about garbed like bears, and she too was of course wrapped against the cold, her head mantled with a dark shawl.

  I recognized in her at once, even so, the thing I had sensed, the meaning of the church's 'life', or at least a portion of it. I wondered what she would do, confronted by a stranger. In
these small towns mostly anyone of any consequence knows all the others. If an alien, and a man, accosted her, what then? Yet had she not put herself, alone and after midnight, into the perfect position for such an overture?

  'Excuse me, young woman,' I said, as she came along the slope.

  She started, quite violently. It was so very lustrous, the moon inflaming the snow, that to tell a shadow from shadows was not easy.

  Perhaps I had seemed to step from thin air itself.

  She was so apparently startled I wondered if there were a chance I should now take her arm to steady her, tilting our faces to the moon as I did so, that she might see me, and I her. But she had already composed herself.

  'What is it?' she said, in a low and urgent voice.

  'The hour is very late. I wondered if you were in some difficulty.

  Might I assist you?'

  'No, no,' she muttered. Rather than reveal herself, she snatched her shawl about her face with her gloved hands.

  'I am a stranger to your town,' I said. 'Forgive my impetuosity in speaking to you.'

  'How are you here?' she said. She stood like a child who is being verbally chastised by the school-master, longing to break free into the yard where the other children are.

  'How else but the train? We are snowbound, it appears.'

  But who would be those other children, her companions, from whom I kept her?

  Just then, far away over the edge of the town as if over a high cliff out at sea, I heard the howling of a wolf. The hair rose on my neck as it always does at the sound. The cry was too apt, it came too nicely on my cue.

  But at that moment she turned up her face, as if straining to listen, and I saw her features, and her eyes.

  Although the shawl hid everything but a trace of her hair, I judged it to be very dark. And her face was very white, and her eyes were so pale in that pale face they were like glass on the snow. Her mouth, in the shadow-shining moonlight, seemed dark also, damson-coloured, but the lips beautifully shaped. It was not a beautiful face, but rather an almost classical one.

  'Is it safe for you to go about like this, in such weather?' I said. 'Have you never heard of starving wolves running into the streets?'

  'It has been known,' she said. Her eyes, now they had met mine, did not leave me.

  'Let me,' I said, 'escort you wherever you are going.'

  'Up there,' she said, 'to the Italian House. But you are a stranger -'

  'No, I have seen the very house. With a light burning.'

  'For me,' she said, 'my beacon.'

  'Will you take my arm?' I said. 'Where the snow has been left lying the way is slippery.'

  She came with a swift half-furtive step, and put her black silk paw into my arm. She leaned close to me as we began to walk.

  I would have liked to ask her at once what she had been doing, there in the old church, to give such an intensity to the night. Even the lamp in her room - the room of the beacon - had blazed with it. But I did not feel it was the time yet, to ask her that. In fact we said very little, but walked together familiarly up through the town. She

  assured me it was not a vast distance. I said I was sorry. She did not then flirt with me, or move away. She shivered, and when I drew her hand more securely into my arm, against me, she murmured obliquely, 'It is so easy to misinterpret kindness.'

  'Mine in going with you, or your own in permitting me to do so?'

  Then she did not answer, and we went on again in silence. All the way, we passed not a soul, but once heard a dog snarling behind a gate after wolves or the moon. Soon enough we came on to the part of the rise which ended in her house. The high walls along the street provided cover for our approach. The light still burned before us, now a huge tawdry topaz. It looked warm, but not inviting. A blind masked that upper room from curious eyes attracted to its glow.

  At the foot of some steps she detached herself from me. Feeling the cold after the warmth of me, she put her hands up to her face again.

  Her pale eyes were steady with their question.

  'As I told you, I am marooned here a day or so. May I call on you tomorrow?'

  'My parents are dead. I live with my aunt. My father's sister, she is old… Do please call, if you wish. But -' She left a long pause, to see if I could read her thoughts. I could.

  'You do not wish me to say I met you at midnight by the church.'

  'No, I do not.'

  She had given me by then her family name. I said, 'As it happens, Miss Lindensouth, I know some distant relations of yours, some Lindensouths, in Archaroy. Or, at any rate, I believe they may be related to you and your aunt. It will give me an excuse to look her up.'

  This was a lie. If she guessed, she did not seem alarmed. Her face was without an expression of any sort. She lowered her eyes and left me suddenly, running up the icy stair with a carelessness that saved her rather than put her in the way of an accident.

  I waited, briefly, across the street, to see what would happen with the light, or even if her silhouette might pass across it. But the lamp might have shone in another world mysteriously penetrating this one.

  Nothing disturbed it, and it did not go out.

  When I reached the station-house I found the party had gone off to

  the inn I had seen on my perambulations. Accordingly, I took myself there.

  At about six o'clock in the morning the town of L____ began to come to life. By ten o'clock, when I returned to the church, the lower streets were seething. On every corner were the expected braziers of smoking red charcoal; lamps burned now in countless windows against the leaden light of morning. Having negotiated the slop-collectors, the carts of cabbage, and the carriage-horses of some local charioteer, I gained the appropriate street, and found this scene was also changed. The well was a gossiping spot for women, who stood there in their scarves and fur hats arguing the price of butter. A wood-seller was delivering further down, and children played in the snow with little cold-bitten faces, grimly intent on their miserable game.

  The church itself was active. The door stood open, and two women in black veils came out. It was plainly an hour also for business, here.

  I went forward diffidently, prepared to depart again at once, but on entering the church, found it was after all now empty.

  It was like the inside of a hollowed boulder, carved bare, with the half-eggshell of the dome rising above. The shrine looked decently furnished, you could say no more for it. Everything that was anything was plate. A few icons were on the screen below. I paused to glance at them; they were Byzantine in influence, but rather crude, not a form I am much drawn to.

  As I was turning away, a man approached me. I had not seen him either present or entering, but probably he had slipped out from some inner place. He was about forty and had the scholars' look, a high broad forehead gaining ground, and a ledge of brows and gold-rimmed spectacles beneath.

  'You are one of our trapped travellers!' he cried.

  My heart sank. 'Just so.'

  He gave me a name and a gloved hand. I took, and relinquished, both.

  'You are interested in churches?' His manner was quietly eager.

  With caution I replied, 'There is something I am a little curious about -

  '

  'Ah,' he broke in immediately, 'that will be the famous window, I think.'

  What could I say?

  'Indeed,'

  'Come, I will show you.'

  He took me into a side arm of the church, where it was very dark.

  Some candles burned, but then I saw shards of red, green and mauve thrown on the plastered wall.

  My scholar brought me to his prize, and directed me where to look which, unless I had been blind, I could not have missed.

  The window, small and round-headed, was like an afterthought, or perhaps (as he presently informed me) it might belong to an earlier chapel, being then the oldest thing there.

  The glass itself was very old, a
nd gave a rich heavy light. Its subject was the Garden of Eden, its colour mostly of emerald, blue and purple. Distantly the white figures of the sinners stood beneath their green apple-tree, the fatal fruit in hand. They were about to eat, and God about to say to them, like every injured parent: I gave you everything! Why could you not remain as children for ever? Why is it necessary that you grow up? His coming storm was indicated by the darkling sapphires of the shadows, the thunder-wing of purple on the grass. But in the foreground was a rose-tree, and among the wine-coloured flowers, the serpent coiled itself, its commission seen to.

  'Most unusual, such a treatment,' said the scholar.

  How was it that I knew so well that she, my Miss Lindensouth, had been frozen before this window, had come out from its contemplation as if her pale skin were steeped in the transparent dyes?

  'Yes?'

  He quoted a supposed date of the twelfth century.

  'And of course it has a name, a window like this. Probably you know it? No? Well, it has been called "Satan's Rose-Bush", in church records even, for two hundred years. Or they say simply, secretively,

  "The Devil's Rose". And there are all sorts of stories, to do with curses and wonders and the rest of it. The best known is the story of the Girl Who Danced. You will know that one.'

  'I am afraid not.'

  'How splendid. Now I have all the pleasure of telling you. You see,

  supposedly, if you look long enough and hard enough at the glass, here, by the rose-tree, you find another figure in the window. It is one of those freak things, the way in which angles and colours go together randomly to form another shape - or perhaps the maker of the window intended it to happen. The figure is of a dark man, Satan himself, naturally, who took a serpent's appearance to seduce Eve to wrongdoing. I must say I have looked diligently at the window quite often, but I have never been able to make it out. I am assured it is there, however. The last priest himself could see it, and even attempted to describe it for me on the glass - but it was no good. My eyes, perhaps… You try yourself. See, it is here and here, alongside the roses.'