by Tanith Lee
After we had dined, the ladies permitted the men to smoke, by withdrawing.
The banker lit up and coughed prodigiously.
'These winters,' said he, 'will be my death.'
To me he added, 'How I yearn for the city. I have not been in Archaroy, let alone anywhere else, since my thirty-fifth year. Is that not a fearsome admission? Finance has been my life. I still dabble. If you were to be seeking any advice, Mr Mhikalson -'
The Inspector broke in with a merry, 'Never trust this rogue. He is still in half the deals and plots of the town. But I must say, if you were thinking of remaining a week or so, there are some horses I think you should look at, with an eye to the summer. My cousin Osseb is quite an authority. Did you know it is possible to hunt wolf here all the year round? Well, there you are. Of course, Madam Lindensouth's brother, the father of Miss, had a lodge in the forest.
But that was sold.'
'But you are not to think,' put in the banker, giving him an admonishing glance, 'that the family fortune here is on the decline.
Not a bit of it. I will say, my dear friend Madam is something on the careful side, but there is quite an amount stashed away…'
'Tut tut,' said the Inspector. 'Can the ladies have no secrets?'
Finally we had smoked sufficiently, and went into the next room, where Madam regaled us all with some music from the piano, which, startled to find its lid had been raised, uttered a great many wrong notes.
Mardya would not play. She said that she had a chilblain on her finger. This evoked three remedies given at once by the mouse, the banker, and the Inspector. In each case, suffering the chilblain would have been preferable.
A card game then ensued, out of which Mardya pardoned herself, and I was left also to my own devices, being besides pushed to them by
smiles and nods. I joined the girl by the piano, where she was searching among the sheet music for an old tune her father had been used to play.
'Come now,' I said, speaking low, 'how is it to be managed?'
'Impossible,' she said.
'Think of our stop on the hill.'
She blushed deeply, but continued to leaf through the music.
'I am afraid.'
'No. You are not afraid.'
'The Ace!' cried the banker. He added to us, over his shoulder, not having heard a word, 'Now, now.'
'Think of the apple-tree,' I said to her, 'think of the rose.'
Her hands fluttered, some of the music spilled. Her pulse raced in her throat so swiftly it looked dangerous. We bent to retrieve the music.
'Leave before the others.' She spoke crisply now though scarcely above a whisper. 'I will go down and open the door. Return almost at once and go into the side parlour below. The blinds are down, there is a large table with a lamp on it that is never lit. You must be patient then. Wait until the house is quiet. Wait until the clock in the hallway strikes eleven.'
'Where is your room?'
She told me. She was shivering, from desire or fear, both.
We had regained the music and arranged it together by the piano.
'There is the song my father used to play,' she said. But she did not play it.
It was almost thirty minutes past nine, and I suspected the festivity would be curtailed sharp at ten o'clock. After the banker had told us again to Now, Now, and the maid-servant had brought in the trusty samovar and some opaque sherry, the card game lapsed. It was a quarter to ten.
'Madam Lindensouth,' I said, 'I must return at once to the inn. I had not realized how late it has grown. There are some arrangements I shall need to make.' I left a studied pause. She would deduce I meant to give up my seat on the train. 'Thank you for your kindness and
hospitality.'
'If it chances you are still here tomorrow,' she said. (The banker and the Inspector laughed, and the mouse primly sniffled.) 'We take luncheon at three o'clock. I hope you will feel able to join us.'
At the concept of another meal of sawdust and pasted aspics I almost laughed myself. Something in her eyes checked me. In holding out to me the branch of unity with her niece, a girl therefore about to taste the chance Madam had missed, there was a sudden ragged edge to her, a malevolence, which showed in a darkening of her pallid eyes, the iron smile with which she strove to underpin propriety. It was clear from this that a callous and unkind method would have sustained her treatment of Mardya from the beginning. She had never been a friend to her and never would be. Small wonder the savage innocent turned to shadows for her Fata Morgana of release and love. It even seemed probable in those moments that the aunt had known all along of midnight excursions to a church on the lower streets, of a flirtation with grisly legends and unsafely. Did the woman know even that this was where Mardya had met me? Did she know what plan we had (now, now) to meet in the night on the shores of lust, under her very roof? Yes, for a moment I beheld before me a co-conspirator.
When I took her hand, she said, 'Why, your hands are cold tonight, Mr Mhikalson. You must have a care of yourself.'
I uttered my farewells, got down through the house, and was shown out into the darkness and the snow.
I went down the steps, and waited where I had done so the first night, across the way, taking no particular pains over concealment.
That light was not burning in the upper - her - room. The window was sightless, eyeless, and waiting, too. Before midnight, I should have seen the inside of that room, should have touched its objects and ornaments, invaded the air with my breath and will, my personality, perhaps a stifled cry, the heat of my sweat. I should have possessed that room, before the morning came. I did not need to see its light, now.
After about six or seven minutes, I went back. If I met anyone on the steps or in the doorway, I should say I had lost something and returned hoping it was in the house. But I met no one.
The front door was ajar, and I passed through silently, shutting it again. A muffled bickering came from above, from the dinner party.
The side parlour was as she had described, to the right of the hall, remote from the stair. It was in blackness, the table dimly shining like a pool of black water, and the unlit lamp upon it reflected vaguely, and here and there some glistening surface. I went through and seated myself on an upright chair against the wall, facing the doorway.
Naturally I was quite concealed, by night, by the shapes of the furniture, best of all by being where of course I could not reasonably be.
Like the audience in the darkened theatre then, I stayed. And down the dully lighted stair they passed in due course to the hall, the banker, and the Inspector and his mouse-wife. The maid arrived with hats and sticks, and Madam waved them off from the vantage of the staircase, not descending.
All sound died away then, gradually, above. And lastly the maid came drifting along across the open door, like a ghost, to take away the final guttering lamp. Partly I was amazed she did not catch the flash of my eyes from the black interior, the eyes of the wolf in the thicket. But she did not. No one came to bother me, to make me say how I had left behind a glove, or a cigarette case, or had felt faint suddenly in the cold, and come back to find the door was open - and sat here to wait for the maid and fallen asleep. No, none of that was necessary.
At last, the clock chimed in the hall, eleven times.
Rising from my seat, I stretched myself. I walked softly from concealment to the foot of the staircase. Hardly a noise anywhere.
Only the ticking of the clock, the sighing of the house itself. Beyond its carapace, snow-silence on the town of L___, and far away, so quiet were all things now, the tinny tink-tink of another clock finding the hour of eleven on a slightly different plane of time than that of the Italian House.
I started to go up the stairs. The treads were dumb. I climbed them all, passing the avenues of passages, and came to a landing and a heavy curtain with a moth-ball fringe. And then, in an utter darkness, without even the starlit snow-light of the windows, her door, al
so standing ready for me, ajar.
I closed it with care behind me. The room was illumined only by the aqueous snow-sheen on the blind. This made a translucent mark, like ice, in turn upon the opposite wall, and between was a floating unreality, with a core of paleness.
'Ssh,' she whispered, though I had not made a sound.
I went towards her and found her by the whiteness of her nightgown on the bed. The room was all bed. It could have no other objects or adornment.
Her hands were on my face, her arms were about my neck.
'Where is the candle?' I said. 'Let me see you, Mardya.'
'No,' she pleaded. 'Not yet…'
My vision was, anyway, full-fed on the dark. I was beginning to see her very well.
The little buttons of her nightgown irritated my fingers, to fiddle with them almost made me sick. I lifted my face from her burning face, kissing her eyes, her lips. I pulled the nightgown up in a single movement and laid her bare in the winter water of the light, the slender girlish legs folded to a shadow at the groin, the pearl of the belly, the small waist with its trinket of starlight, and the ribcage with the two cupped breasts above it, and the nipples just hiding still in the frills of the nightgown - she was laughing noiselessly and half afraid, shuddering, pushing the heavy folds from her chin, letting them lie across her shoulders and throat as I bent to her. My hands were full of her body and my mouth full of her taste. The mass of black hair stained across the pillows, shawled over her face, got into my mouth.
I threw off my coat, what I could be rid of quickly. Her skin where it came against my skin was cool, though her lips, ears and forehead blazed, and the pits of her arms were also full of heat, and her hands, their hotness stopping mysteriously at the wrists. She was already dewy when my fingers sought between the fleshy folds of the rose.
'No,' she said. She rubbed herself against me, arching her back, shaken through every inch of her. 'No - no -'
'This will hurt you.'
'Hurt me,' she said, 'I am yours. I belong to you.'
So I broke into her, and she whined and lay for a moment like a rabbit wounded in a trap under my convulsive thrusts no longer to be
considered, but at the last moment she too thrust herself up against me, crucified, with a long silent scream, a whistling of outdrawn breath, and I felt the cataclysm shake her to pieces as I was dying on her breast.
'I knew you would come to me,' she murmured. 'I knew it must happen. I called out to you and you heard me. Across miles of night and snow and stone.'
'Sometimes,' she said, 'I have seen you in a dream. Never clearly. But your eyes and your hair.'
'Are you the one?' she said. 'Are you my love? For always?'
'Always,' I said, 'how else?'
'And my death,' she said. 'Love is death. Kill me again,' she said, but not in any mannered way, though it might have been some line from some modern stage drama.
So presently, leaning over her, I 'killed' her again. This time I even pinned her arms to the bed in an enactment of violence and force. Her face in ecstasy was a mask of fire, a rose mask.
Afterwards her eyes were hollow, like those of a street whore starving in the cold.
When I began to put on my clothes, she said, 'Where are you going?'
'It will be best, I think. We might fall asleep. How would it look if the girl came in and found me here, in the frank morning light?'
'But you will come back tomorrow?'
'Your aunt has invited me to luncheon.'
'You will be here? Will you be late?'
'Of course I shall be here, of course not late.'
I kissed her, for the last time, with tenderness, seemliness. It was all spent now. I could afford to be respectful.
As I reached to open the door, she was lying like a creature of the sea stranded upon a beach. Her delicate legs might have been the slim bi-part tail of a mer-girl, and the tangle of nightgown and hair only the seaweed she had brought with her to remind her of the deep.
I went down again through the house with the same lack of difficulty, and as well, for I could have no decent story to explain my presence
now.
As I let myself out of the front door, and descended the steps, the air cut coldly in the icy deserts before dawn. It was almost four o'clock, but I had seen to my luggage beforehand. I need only go along to the station and there wait for the train which, because the allotted hour was now both extempore and ungodly, would doubtless leave on time.
Two doctors attended me at the point of my destination, one the man I had arranged, a month previously, to see, the other a colleague of his, a specialist in the field. Both frowned upon me, the non-specialist with the more compassion.
'From what you have said, I think you are not unaware of your condition.'
'I had hoped to be proved wrong.'
'I am afraid you are not wrong. The disease is in its primary phase.
We will begin treatment at once. It is not very pleasant, as you understand, but the alternative less so. It will also take some time.'
'And I believe,' said the less sympathetic frowner, 'you comprehend you can never be perfectly sanguine. There is, as such, no cure. I can promise to save your life, you have come to us in time. But marriage will be out of the question.'
'Did I give you to suppose I intended marriage?'
'All relations,' said this man, 'are out of the question. This is what I am saying to you. The organisms of syphilis are readily transferable.
You must abstain. Entirely. This is not what you, a young man, would wish to hear. But neither, I am sure, would you wish to inflict a terrible disease of this nature, involving deformity, insanity and certain death where undiagnosed, on any woman for whom you cared. Indeed, I trust, upon any woman.' He glared on me so long I felt obliged to congratulate his judgement.
The treatment began soon after in a narrow white room. It was, as they advised, unpleasant. The mercury, pumped through me like vitriol, induced me to scream, and after several repetitions I raved.
One does not dwell on such matters. I bore it, and waited to escape
the cage.
The ulcerous chancre, the nodulous sore, long healed, which had first alerted me in Archaroy, has a name in the parlance of the streets.
They call it there the Devil's Rose.
And in that way, Satan comes out of his window, unseen, and passes through the streets. All the lights go out as he dances with the girl who vowed herself to him. And in the morning they find her skin upon the hillside.
She died insane, I heard as much some years later in another city, from the lips of those who did not know I might have an interest.
The condition was never diagnosed. Probably she had never even been told of such things. They thought she had pined and grown sick and gone mad through a failed love affair, some stranger who entered her life, and also left it, by train.
She had always been of a morbid turn, Mardya Lindensouth, obsessed by dark fancies, bad things. Unrequited love had sent her to perdition. She was unrecognizable by the hour of her death. She died howling, her limbs twisted out of shape, her features decayed, a wretched travesty of human life.
Yes, that was what dreams of love had done for her, my little Mardya. Though in the streets they call it the Devil's Rose.
Huzdra
With what glee I wrote this tale, in my late twenties, and new into the glory and pleasure of being a professional writer — at last.
As with many of my ideas, it simply came, and drove itself with simple complexity through my fingers and pen, lovely black scribble only I or my mother could read. And I have always liked justice.
It was the sunset of Midwinter's Eve. Black-haired Mirromi, the wife of Count Fedesha, sat before the eastern window of the great house, as she had sat by the same window, at the same hour, on the same day, for the past six years. The window was made up of alternating squares of blue and cochineal glass, all but the s
ingle clear pane
through which Mirromi looked. This pane being, in fact, a lens of highly magnified crystal, it gave a fine and detailed view of the snowy countryside beyond the walls, and the highway which cut through it, and of any traffic that journeyed there.
And there was considerable traffic on Midwinter's Eve, everything going one way: north toward the city, for the festival. The sun was almost down, the snow darkening from white to lead, and still several carts and wagons were visible, trundling along the road, and a couple of rich men's carriages with outriders.
Countess Mirromi watched intently, just as she always watched at this moment, when the pale-crimson winter sun plunged nearer and nearer the brink of the land. The carriages galloped away, the carts vanished on their iron wheels. The road was for an instant empty.
And then (Mirromi smiled) two new figures appeared. The larger was a man, walking slowly and doggedly, and he held the other, a young girl, bundled in his arms.
Mirromi rose. No need to watch any longer. As in the past six years, her cunning and her magic had not failed her. And though she was not surprised at her cleverness, it did her good to see the proof of it.
Countess Mirromi's hair, under its net of jewels, was black as oil; her velvet gown, under its goldwork, was blacker. And her heart and soul and mind blacker than either of them.
A track ran from the highway to the walls of the great house. This track the man and the girl he carried took without a second's hesitation, as if they had been invited, or as if they had been summoned there.
There were large gates in the wall, but they swung grindingly open as the travelers advanced, though who or what opened them remained unseen. Beyond the wall lay a grim garden, rather like a graveyard, with peculiar statuary poking from the snow, and an avenue of snow-fringed cypresses leading up toward the house. The house itself was a bizarre amalgam of tapering roofs and overhanging stories, with three gaunt towers, one of which faced directly to the east, and had a high window set in it of blue and blue-red glass.
