by Tanith Lee
“You’re full of secrets, Timonie,” I said aloud, but softly. “I won’t like them, I think. I don’t care for any of it, this game of yours.”
And I turned her face to the wall before I made ready for bed. I would have to call Thissot, and it would have to wait now until tomorrow.
I did not sleep that night.
“It’s curious, I mean that you were asking about him, and then this. I take it you haven’t seen any of the journals yet?”
“No,” I said to Thissot, cautiously, as my landlady buzzed about her morning parlour, tweaking at furnishings, ears pricked and elongating visibly to a rabbit’s.
“He seems to have fallen down the staircase, and broken his neck. Not found for some days, I gather. This man, his agent, Rudolf Vlok – he discovered the body and ran out in hysterics on the street. Apparently it’s not the first death in that house. Some mayfly of a girl was murdered there seven years ago.”
“But the papers quote a profession?” I asked Thissot.
“Our own Weathervane does so. An entertainer, your de Jenier, sometime actor, acrobat, mime, mimic. Latterly much in demand at select nightclubs of the south. His speciality had come to be the impersonation of female beauties –” Thissot’s voice assumed a self-protective archness and aversion. “He dressed as women. Starry actresses, singers, and so on. Later quaint ladies of his own quaint invention. Very successful. To my way of thinking, that’s just –”
I heard what Thissot thought he thought, thanked him, and almost ended the conversation, when I decided to say, “One other thing – a quotation I came across that’s been bothering me. I’m sure I know the source, but can’t pin it down.”
“What’s that?”
“Kingdoms of the sky-blue universe.”
“Ah –” he began. Then, “No, I’m not sure at all. I thought I knew it too, but differently, somehow. Now why am I thinking of alchemy? No, I’m quite eluded, I’m afraid.”
Having placed my telephone coins in the landlady’s box, I hurriedly got my coat and hat and rushed out to purchase an armful of journals for myself.
Returned, I spread them everywhere and raked them through. Most carried a mention, and some made much of the sinister aspect, that this was the second violent death in a building barely a decade in age.
Depending on the type of paper, so its bias went. But very swiftly, nevertheless, the facts sprang out.
Here was a smudgy photo-image of Rudolf Vlok, and so I could identify him as the second man in the café, my subsequent guide and deserter at the house. He had been implicit, then, in the fakery of accidental death, along with another, still nameless, and unpictured. And now I could read for myself brief details of a career, and the retreat to this City, of one Louis de Jenier, the colour of whose eyes they did not even mention. There he was, in that almost new house under the Observatory, among the litter of duellists’ cemeteries. And next, I was reading of a wealthy young woman who, years earlier, had conducted orgies of grape and poppy and hemp in that house, until one sunrise found there in a bizarre upper room made blue-windowed for her pleasure. The body was “mutilated.” It took another journal (although I rightly guessed which one it would be) to inform me in what manner. The murderer had cut away ears, eyes, breasts, her hands and her feet, even her teeth and tongue, and capriciously distributed them about house and garden. That time, apart from the blood, the house showed no other signs of savagery, and not a bank-note or a curio had been stolen. While of all her quantity of jewels just one small piece was missed, an antique spider of sapphire, possible to sell anonymously only if broken up into its one large and thirty tiny corundas. There were no other leads, the murderer was never apprehended, and for some months fears of a European “ripper” ran wild. Such a crime was not repeated, however. The fears died. The journal which itemised so much, gave the dead girl her name, but also a second name by which she had come to be known. That was, of course, Timonie. She was what they call a platinum blonde, with very blue eyes. There was no photograph. By then, I had begun to feel I did not need to see one. (But maybe what I know has bled back across my knowledge of that day, time at its eternal trickery.)
In the City, the bells began to ring for noon, the other side of midnight.
There was nothing left now but to put the journals away and take up the diary.
I did so.
I read straight through, referring, where the text so indicated, to the documents that had been in the cover. He had commenced only when events thickened about him. But he was, obviously, used to and adept at writing things down. His script was for the most part legible, and where sometimes it failed to be, the empathic wave of horror which now gripped me, bore me on to perfect understanding.
Outside, brilliant sunlight set Paradis in crystal. But in my rooms, darkness came and blossomed.
To copy out the whole diary would not be wise for me, I believe. Third person then, at a remove, I must present its happenings, propped by all other evidence and occurrence as I knew it, or have come to know it, since. I invent nothing, for even the dialogue is as Louis noted it. No. I invent nothing. He had escaped Vlok – “the jailor” as he tended to call him – on a train. It had been travelling north to the border, and stopped at a crossing, as a caravan of goats was driven over, to take on mail. De Jenier had happened to be in the corridor, smoking, while Vlok and his assistant sprawled asleep in their compartment. They were en route to another city, another round of private parties and public performances, and on impulse, Louis had suddenly opened the nearest door and jumped down into the plucked fields and vineyards, leaving his luggage and his jailors together for the steam-bannered train to bear away into the evening.
He was about nine and a half miles outside the suburbs of Paradis, through which the train had already passed. He started to walk back to them, got a lift in somebody’s young, snorting car, and arrived before the dinner-hour.
It was not the first time Louis had behaved in this way. Life was not serious. The antics of a Vlok, always concerned with profit and decorum, amused and irritated him. Louis rarely obeyed any rules, and routines exasperated him.
Having plenty of money, he checked into a good hotel, then got to work on finding a house to live in. He had not lived in a house for years, not since, that was, his earliest childhood. Both his parents had been beauties, but paid for it. When Louis was five, the handsome actor father had been shot in the back by a jealous rival; the lovely actress mother promptly swallowed ratpoison. The only child of only children, now an orphan of orphans, he was kinless, and placed in an institution. Here he existed in bleak misery and mercurial grace for a further seven years, before a male patron ran off with him, used him, gave up on his uninterest, and left him on the bosom of a world that would be prepared always to rhapsodise and fall abjectly in love with him, but would never attempt to clarify his needs.
If Louis ever properly believed in the reality of others is doubtful. It was not that he was callous, rather he did try to be kind. But so seldom did anyone act in a reasonable fashion when he confronted them. He brought out the simpering fool, the liar, the viper, the cheat. It was the curse of his attractions.
The house had been standing empty a number of years. Though its history had been damped down, it kept an amorphous but nasty reputation. It was boarded up, the attic filled by dead birds.
Open, scoured, and slapped in the face with paint, it was soon ready for its tenant – gaped for him. About its rumours he did not give a damn. He had, in repose, a cheerful disposition, thoughtless and clear.
He furnished the house frugally and carelessly. He had not wanted a home. Meanwhile, Vlok would be naturally in pursuit, and those who noticed Louis’ appearance accosted him wherever he went. The hollows of the house were privacy. They gave him what others seek in deserts and on mountain-tops.
He must, too, have made in it journeys and explorations. In the second week of occupancy, he found the silver and sapphire earring.
Of all the rooms he had
furnished the room which pretended to be a study the most thoroughly. It may have evoked some memory, even that of a favourite stage-set, the desk with its romantic symbols – books, pens, skull. He had hunted for a realistic astrolabe, not found one that passed the test, for bones and shells, hour-glass, compasses, scales, a pestle and mortar. He did not utilise the desk in the beginning, but he looked at it from the sofas, walked round and round it, rearranging objects. (Contrastingly the bedroom across the way had a bed, with a decanter of mineral water standing on the floor beside it, and a clothes closet.) For the blue-windowed room he had some plans involving musical instruments, a slender violin he had seen, a cittern.
The blue windows were fixed and could not be opened. Through them, the City became an abstract.
He wondered if he might have time, before Vlok caught up with him, to experiment with other shades of blue glass, or with patterns of white glass.
Across from one of the windows, gleaming on the wooden floor in its reflection, lay a disc of ornamented silver.
Louis knelt down. He examined the disc. He thought it had not been there before. It looked as if it had come from the attic, for the dead birds who had nested there had also been something of collectors. The workmen must have missed the silver thing, somehow it had fallen through into the room below. It was an earring, or had been made into one, with a ring and silver hook to pierce the lobe.
Not until he took it through into the study, into ordinary light, did he see the spider, which was sunk into the disc, was composed of one large, and thirty tiny, sapphires.
The piece was fine, not necessarily beautiful. The metal of ring and hook did not match the metal of the disc, which had also been beaten in an odd way, much older. There were two small holes on either side the upper curve of the disc. A wire or ribbon would have passed through them. The earring had been hung on the ear, not from it, once, long ago.
Louis was quite pleased with the find. He left it on the desk beside the scales and skull. He felt no urge to have the jewellery valued or dated. He forgot about it.
During the night. Louis de Jenier woke. Something had woken him: a heavy sound of movement, and repeated soft high little cries, close by in the house.
His first thought was that someone, perhaps even Vlok, had broken in. But the noises were not like those of burglars or even agents.
Louis left the bed, and went out of the bedroom into the passage. The sounds came from the room with the coloured windows. Its doors were shut, although he had left them open. Everything was dark. Louis crossed the angle of the passage, the stairs yawning black to his left, below. It felt very cold there, as if winter waited in the stair-well. He put his hands on both doorknobs and turned them, but the doors to the room would not oblige him.
Inside, the noises went on. Something heavy was being dragged about, something throbbed, like a gramophone which had run down. Then the girl’s voice, which had paused, began again to moan and whine, to hiss and cry out.
Then – silence. In the silence, a cold glow seeped out between and under the doors. It was blue, like daylight through the glass.
Louis had a premonition the doors were after all about to open, and stepped back. He had been correct, they did so and forcefully, banging against the wall to either side. A gale went by him. This was not cold, but burning hot.
The scene in the room was done in blues and whites and greys, lit, not by the windows, not by anything visible. There was a sofa, a sort of chaise-longue, not a possession of Louis’ own, and on it lay a young woman. She wore only a silk robe, and that barely. From her position and her expression, you saw at once what she had been doing to elicit her outcry – not of pain, presumably, but pleasure. Her face, which was very beautiful, was also slack, and still wanton, the white-blonde hair falling all over it.
She stared directly at Louis, and though she was a psychic recording, what is termed a ghost, she seemed to see him.
And, “I know you’re there,” she said. “I know you are.”
Louis, cynical enough to accept most things, was not alarmed, merely unnerved. But besides that, the physical aspect of the manifestation, those extremes of heat and cold that were now coming in waves out of the room, were making him ill. Nevertheless he did not retreat, thought he though it useless to go forward, let alone answer.
“I made you come here,” she said. “I can do that, can’t I? Did you like it, seeing me doing that? Better than with any of them, those toads. They can’t give me that, not one of them.” Then she moved her body, slim, firm and young, stroking it, its skin and hair. She said, “Why don’t you come close to me? I know you can. I’ve got you.” She shook her head, and through the pale strands, one silver earring flashed.
Then the other noises started up again all round her, the heavy dragging, the dull throb. The girl seemed to hear them for the first. She looked about, and as she did so, a last wave, of utter black, came boiling through the room. It poured over the girl and the light and they went out. The wave poured on, over Louis. It was almost palpable. It was an emotion, incredibly strong. Yet indecipherable. It seemed to go through him as well as over him, and then there was only night in the empty house. He was dizzy and leaned on the wall a moment before going back to bed. There he lay down and heard a distant car-horn in the streets, the bell from the Sacrifice, and later birds singing.
Drained, he slept. When he woke it was midday, the sun standing on the roof.
When he went back to the blue room, it was undisturbed, except that the sapphire spider-earring was lying, not where he had left it, but out again on the floor.
That afternoon Vlok, and his dark, pretty assistant, Curt, arrived at the house.
There was a furious drama, during which Louis remained quiet.
On this occasion, the tracking process had not been easy for the jailor. The jailor was in a rage, which increased on meeting no opposition.
Finally rage resolved into resolve. They would take him, the captive, to their grand hotel. Then, tomorrow, on. Some of the cancelled northern dates might yet be salvaged.
“No,” the captive then said. “You don’t understand. I intend to stay. I meet a girl here.”
Volk volleyed out a string of profanities.
Physically-sexually, de Jenier was dormant, or non-existent. His sexual engagements had been with men, overtures received and complied with indifferently. Emotionally-sexually he responded to women, but as he had no wish to form a union, let alone consummate it, he had learned early on to limit his company, words, glances and caresses. At last, prompted by a promoter more seedy though no less ambitious than Vlok, Louis had discovered how to create all he wanted from himself. His minutes and hours as a woman, women, lightly padded to their shape, wigged and dressed and painted and gemmed for them, afforded him a transcendent excitement, not merely sensual, or if it was, then also a sensuality of the mind. He swam strongly in the sweetness of it. But it did not disturb him. That vital element, a sort of guilt or shame, had passed him by. The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid. By-standers, particularly those able to cash in on aberration, tend to encourage and expect the latter state.
“Girl? When did you want girls? My dear Louis. I’ll forgive you your antics on the train, my money wasted and my time. Tomorrow, we shall go north together. My God, if you want to, bring the fancy bit with you. A boy, yes? Dressed up as you do it? I thought your taste was otherwise.”
All these entirely inappropriate comments on Louis’ sexual life, which he heard without a flicker, were prompted by ignorance, awareness that the guilt-shame should be present, and an undercurrent of resentment that it was not.
“How you bother me, Rudolf,” said Louis. “I can’t invite her with me. She’s indigenous, I imagine. A ghost.”
Vlok shrugged. Louis often cried wolf, or inventively lied from boredom.
“I’ll send for the luggage from the hotel. If you won’t move, we’ll stay here with
you.”
“Oh please, don’t.”
“Introduce me to the ghost.”
“Where shall I sign, Rudolf, and what?”
“What are you talking about?”
“To terminate our agreement.”
An hour later, at the foot of the staircase, Vlok shouted: “You need me, and you know it quite well. Squander another week, then. But you’ll be watched. If you take flight again, my bird, I’ll be after you. Depend on it.” The front door slammed.
In another hour, Curt, having received a secret signal, returned to the house. Louis entertained him with white wine in a downstairs room bare of anything but for bottles, a bowl of peeled almonds, and a pot of forced white camelias.
Curt was the slave of both, Vlok’s in the matter of finances, and Louis’ in the sense of feelings. He betrayed one to the other as need demanded. Now he accepted Louis’ errand. It seemed no threat to business enterprise. Curt had also brought, in a small case, the framed photographs of Louis’ two most admired animas: Anette, Lucine. Louis permitted Curt to put them up in the “study,” either side of the mirror. Across the blue room Curt passed with scarcely a look. He had torn off a camelia for his buttonhole.
“Perhaps you’ll let me sleep on a sofa one night. I’ve never seen a ghost. I’d die of terror.”
“I couldn’t allow you to die. No. I won’t let you stay here.”
When Louis returned alone from dining, about eleven-thirty, he felt at once, on opening the door, that the house was waiting for him. During the day it seemed to sleep, the way a night-animal must, for it had grown busy after dark.
The moment he closed the door, was shut in with it, its life began, as if, now, mechanical.
He heard from above a violin, that was the first sound.
Not a melody, but three or four quivering wails, then a spasm of tuneless plucked pizzicato. He had not yet bought the violin. He anticipated the unbought cittern next, but instead there came again that deep throbbing, the turntable of the imaginary gramophone let run down. Light started to billow slowly down the stairs, in a plume, like phosphorescent smoke. Nothing was adrift in the light-plume. There was time, if he wanted, to open the front door and get out.
