The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  This was also an attic room, but dusty and dirty. Tumbled clothes and books lay about, used plates and glasses.

  On a bed too narrow for them lay a young couple. In sleep they had separated as much as they were able. She wore a grubby slip, and he nothing at all, and in the liquid lake-light of the stars, he was naked to the ankles, naked enough that nothing was hidden, but his feet.

  Owlsa came on to the windowsill, where by day the girl fed sparrows.

  Owlsa looked upon her prey.

  She lifted like a ghost and settled like one on the young man’s naked breast. Daintily she stepped across him on her diamond claws. She bent her beak to his arched throat, and rent him. He did not struggle, could not wake. He writhed a little, and Owlsa beheld and felt as she stood upon him the mighty thumping of his heart. The blood poured out black, and Owlsa put her beak into his blood. It was good. It was the freshest food and drink she had ever known. She sucked it up, and he trembled and groaned faintly, his smooth body surging under her claws, and she stroked him with her wings to soothe him, until she was done. (His partner did not wake at all.)

  Then Owlsa left the lamplit room and soared out again into the night.

  She felt filled by lights, by sparks or stars. But she was not satisfied.

  She flew away, inward again on the City, and heard the clocks and bells tolling for three o’clock in the morning.

  There was a window without a light. It was a window whose frame seemed stuck with platinum and cold, faceted stones. It was not. But it was the window of a rich woman who lived high over the City in a tall tower, in an apartment lined with white furs. And her window stood open, for she thought this healthful.

  The rich young woman lay face down in her pillows, having herself drunk a little too much champagne. Over her neck and shoulders streamed long black tresses, heavily curled and shiny from attention.

  Owlsa sat upon the young woman’s creamy back, above the guipure lace of her night robe. Owlsa parted the long hair with her beak, and fanned softly with her wings: A lullaby. Lulled too by her champagne and her capsules for sleep, the rich young woman did not know Owlsa sucked out her blood from the nape of her neck.

  Then Owlsa tore out strands of the young woman’s wonderful hair, plucked great clumps, to line her owl’s nest. It would be enough to leave the victim partly bald for the rest of her life. With the sheaf of black curls in her beak, Owlsa lifted from the window and flew away. She was satisfied. For now.

  Below her the City wheeled. A faint blush was on the edge of the sky. The stars set.

  For a moment Owlsa did not know where she should go. Did she not have some nest, high in some ruined belfry of the City? No. It was an attic room near the clockmaker’s.

  She hurried to outfly the dawn.

  As Elsa Garba trudged to and from her work, she saw peculiar tidings on the stands of newspaper sellers. A young woman of great wealth had been set on during the night, wounded, and a third of her hair torn out at the roots. Some gangland vendetta – the money her father had left her being unwholesome – was mooted. Elsewhere, a young man had been taken ill with an injury to his throat, but he was a nobody, and only the smallest paragraph about him worked its way into the journals several days later, following a spate of such attacks.

  A plague of bats was suspected. The citizens were warned to keep closed their windows by night.

  By night.

  How she flew about. She was just. From the poor she drank the life blood, as has always been done. From the rich she took other things. Their glossy hair, their manicured fingernails, small jewels of unbelievable value, silly items they loved and which were worthless. From one, a banker, she took an eye. It was only glass, but what terror it caused, and what headlines.

  In Elsa’s room Owlsa left her trophies. They were cleaned where necessary of blood, and laid out upon velvet pin cushions, the hair wound around silver pins. An eccentric display. Sometimes a name or place she had heard murmured was written down for Owlsa by Elsa. Armand, Cirie, The Steps, The Angel, Klein, Hiboulle.

  She did not attack her employers. She discarded them contemptously. Owlsa did not remember them.

  It was a dark wonder in the City, the bat plague. Windows were closed, but always there were some that were not.

  There was a tenement that craned toward the moon. Everything below was sordid and unprepossessing. The streets mean, the alleys sinks and quags of filth. Refuse and miserable lives made dustbins of the rooms. But above the skyline of the City, and especially of the tenement, up there, always, something was beautiful. The sky was a source, if not of hope, at least of cleansing. Even the smokes that trailed across it became gracious. The shapes of cloud were wonderful as statuary, the evenings and mornings, the stars and planets. And the moon, which on this night was full.

  Alain was a mender of things, and he had been mending some old iron pans, a flowerpot, a doll with a head that had come off, and other articles, for people who could not afford to buy new. By day he worked too, in a graveyard, where he cut the grass with a great scythe, like the Grim Reaper himself, but apart from the scythe Alain did not resemble the Grim Reaper. He was fair-skinned and handsome and his dark curling hair had turned the heads of ladies at funerals.

  Alain’s room was a cluttered place, of no special attractions. Cracks ran up all the walls, and the lopsided bed would have crippled one unused to it. Everywhere lay the items of his mending, so that it was also like an odd sort of curiosity shop. And in one corner, on a pile of old newspapers, sat a birdcage.

  The cage was wonderful. It had belonged to an old lady who had fallen into penury, and once had contained three parrots. It was very large, and its bars were silvered. In shape it was like a great dome with two lesser domes, one at either side. Alain had been mending the bird cage, in which the old lady had perhaps wanted to keep a pair of sparrows, when she had died. Sometimes he thought of selling the cage. But the difficulty of persuading anyone to buy it, or give him what it was worth, daunted Alain. Money of any worthwhile amount was forever out of his reach; to chase smaller coins seemed pointless.

  When he had finished his mending of things, Alain would sit long into the night at his narrow window, gazing at the sky. He had become insomniac gradually, although he was so young and worked so hard. He was unhappy with a sadness that can be borne, that does not starve out pleasure, but that never goes nor ever can go away.

  And this night, as Alain watched the sky above the tenement, he saw a great black owl fly by, out of a window half a mile off and up over the disk of the full moon.

  At once a spark of wild excitement pierced Alain in the side. For he knew (at once) that what he saw was neither natural nor perhaps real. It was as if he had yearned for hallucinations.

  Moreover, the owl, as though it knew of his inclination, did not fly away. It circled over and over, and then suddenly came down upon a neighboring ledge only an arm’s length from the window.

  Alain stared, and quickly saw what was so strange about the owl. Its head was far greater than its body, and was like a beautiful black mask of feathers set with glowing eyes. The owl too had little breasts buried in its feathers, and its claws, of which it had also a pair, batlike, at the ends of its wide wings, were like diamanté.

  Alain opened his window, quietly, not to startle the night owl. “Beautiful thing,” he called, “beautiful thing.” And he poured for it a saucer of some cheap but nourishing wine he had supped on, and put it out onto the sill.

  The owl hesitated awhile, but then it came. It landed daintily, and folded its wings. It looked into the saucer and he saw its glowing eyes mirrored there. Then it turned suddenly and flew into his breast. Even as he felt the soft firm feathered warmth of it and his hands went out to hold it to him, there came the needle thrust of its beak as it tore into the side of his neck.

  “A vampire,” said Alain. “You’re a vampire, my love.”

  And he held the owl gently, supporting it while it drank the wine of him.

&nb
sp; The most odd and sensual feelings flowed through Alain, perhaps because he expected them to. As the drinking creature went on, he drew dreamily nearer and nearer to a floating and dissociated orgasm, unfelt since the innocence of childhood. Wild images of a naked woman clad in black feathers, with fair silken hair, pressed to his body, her teeth in his throat, her soft claws milking him another way, tipped him suddenly into ecstasy, and he cried aloud.

  The owl, startled after all, went to spring back. Alain seized it strongly. He held it to him, and as the shuddering left his body, he held it still. The diamanté claws – they were hard as diamond – scratched at his breast. But now he was the cruel one. He bore the black-feathered thing to the birdcage on the newspapers and thrust it in. He shut the door on it. “Come live with me and be my love,” said Alain, who had shifted back the slabs of storm-tilted stinking graves, and mended toy soldiers. “I shall feed you as you like to be fed. But stay with me. Stay.”

  In the great cage the owl padded up and down. It found it could spread its wings, and spread them, but there was no room to fly.

  “When you’re used to me,” said Alain, “I will let you go. You’ll fly over the City and come back to me.”

  Then he placed wine and water and some crumbs of bread in the feeding dishes of the cage. The owl tried to peck him with its silver beak. He laughed. The wound in his neck had ceased bleeding. He would wear a scarf tomorrow.

  He hung the cage in the window, where his bird might watch the sky, and watched it in turn from his bed until, near dawn, sleep claimed him.

  Those who were used to Elsa Garba’s punctuality were surprised. “She must be ill,” they said. But none of them knew where she had her room, or cared enough about her to inquire. “If this goes on,” they said, after the second or third omission of her visit, “we’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  Elsa Garba knew, inside the feathered shell, the mask of Owlsa, that she had another life, but it grew dim and vague as she lived in the cage of Alain.

  At first she longed only for freedom. At night, when (the window closed) he let her from her confinement, she beat about the room. She scratched him over the eyes and he laughed at her and slapped her away, and caught her and brought her to his throat. And there Owlsa drank like a child at the breast. Her bad temper faded. When she had been fed, she would allow him to pet her and stroke her feathers. His groans and cries of delight had only the meaning for her of given responses to her own obsessive cue. He was not rich, and so blood was all she asked of him. Soon, when he let her out, she would fly more softly around the room, alighting only to look at things – an unrepaired toy caravan, a pot of dead camellias – then she would spring to his neck and he would receive her. They would lie on the lopsided bed. He would tell her she was a maiden from a dark forest. If he pulled one feather from her wing, she would assume her true shape and he could bind her forever. But he never did this. Perhaps he was afraid her true shape might disappoint him.

  Weeks passed, and this was their ritual. But Alain did not yet allow Owlsa free to fly about the City, for fear she would not return to him.

  He grew very pale but was not listless. If anything he was stronger than ever, and worked at heaving up the great stones that a winter’s storms had toppled. As he scythed the graveyard grass, the young women turned their heads, sometimes even through tears, and saw him.

  Alain brought gifts for Owlsa.

  He wound the cage bars with bright beads and put mirrors of silver-gilded frames into it. He placed a pot of living camellias in the corner of the cage for Owlsa’s convenience, and also to give her a screen, a garden wherein todisport herself. Her cage grew beautiful, as the room was not.

  Then came again a night of the full moon, and Alain opened the window, and opened the door of the cage.

  “There’s the night. Here am I. You must come back to me or I shall pine to death.”

  Owlsa left her cage slowly. She flew slowly to the windowsill and looked out into the night.

  The sky was clear, a lily pond of stars, and the great white face of the moon like a drowned girl floating in hair.

  Below lay the City, its slanted roofs, its towers and pinnacles. Here and there a chimney gave a cloud of lighted smoke.

  “Remember,” said Alain, smoothing her back, her folded wings, “if you leave me I shall die.”

  But Owlsa lifted up into the sky, up and up, higher and higher until the light of the moon seemed to burn her out.

  “Faithless. Lost,” said Alain. And he slammed the door of the cage angrily shut upon its riches.

  Owlsa flew.

  She flew across the tops of churches like palaces and churches like temples. She saw the colored windows and heard the singing to God, which to her was like the sound of cattle lowing in the market, or the rush of the river beneath a boat. The river she saw also, its shining loops and flimsy bridges. It was as if she had forgotten everything. She flew above graveyards and parks. She saw revelry on the streets, where tables crowded the pavements and cold electric lamps were lit, for she was out very early.

  She even flew about the Clocktower, and over the gaunt old house where Elsa Garba had had her room. But Owlsa had forgotten Elsa, and Elsa’s room was long since raped, the door smashed in, pin cushions thrown out in marveling disgust. A prostitute lived there now, as if in mockery, and her faint complaints could be heard to the music of the gramophone, which now played not Cassarnet but a tune with syncopation and a saxophone.

  Owlsa flew and flew. She joyed in her freedom. The night was her tapestry, which she stitched with her wings. The hours were cast off her needles.

  The moon turned thinner and gray, as if it might melt and reveal some shadow shape behind it, but it did not. Then toward morning there were only stars.

  Owlsa flew toward the tenement that now contained her chamber of bars and beads, mirrors and flowers.

  She came to the window of Alain.

  She stood upon the sill.

  The window was shut.

  On the lopsided bed lay Alain in the arms of a young girl like a wilted chrysanthemum. They twined and groaned, and the girl sobbed, and Alain cried out in the way he had cried when Owlsa fed from him. Just the same.

  In the cage, the camellias were dying.

  Owlsa flew off from the sill like a cinder from a fire. She flew up into the sky, searching for the moon. She felt a frantic need to find the moon again, to follow it down to where it went under the world, and so she rushed with a rapid heartbeating of wings into the deathly west.

  And the air tore by her, and the belfries and towers of the pitiless City that cared not even for itself. And as the wind rushed at her, she felt a peculiar loosening, at her face. It was as if a skin came painlessly away, and suddenly winged off from her. She saw it. It was black and feathered, tipped and rimmed with silver. It was the mask. The mask had flown from Elsa, in the sky.

  And already and at once she felt herself changing. Her feathers were scoured away and she was only skin and bone. Her slender arms flapped meaninglessly, and her pale small hands. Her legs and feet weighed her to the earth. She fell.

  And as she fell, she saw the mask fly on over the hill of heaven into the west, following the sunken moon.

  Then she struck the ground. It was stone, and killed her outright.

  She lay on a grave, on her back, all smashed. But her face was not damaged, and her face was the face of a beautiful owl-woman, with shining eyes yet open wide, and the long streams of her shining hair running off from her with her blood into the scythe-cut grass.

  Those that came on her in the sunrise were amazed. They hid her quickly underground, knowing such things must not be thought of very much, for it was obvious she had fallen from the air.

  But in our secret hearts we know: The moon is a mask; it conceals something that hides behind it, passing over the sky and watching us. What can it be?

  THE BOOK OF THE MAD

  Tired moons ask higher tides.

  – Zelda Fitzgerald
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br />   LE LIVRE ORANGE

  PROLOGUE

  Paradise

  The sun shall not smite thee by day,

  nor the moon by night.

  Psalms

  It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in gray mist. The sun had been invisible for years. The architecture of the City itself – decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns – was visible in shifting patches, or regularly to a distance of seven meters. So that, as Felion climbed the long stair of a hundred steps, his world sank away into a sea of fog from which a few ghostly towers poked. And above, the Terrace of Birds began to form around a single dot of light – which would be Smara’s lamp. That is, he doubted anyone else would have climbed up here. The unhinged citizens of Paradise were also sluggish and indifferent, obsessed with rituals and trivia.

  Felion stepped off onto the terrace. Through the mist, the strange dim stone figures of bird-headed things perched on the balustrade, their long beaks moistly shining. In their midst, the amber lamp floated obediently in the air. Smara stood beneath it. Slim and blond as Felion, and wrapped in a sleek, pale dress, she stared at him with essential recognition. They were twins.

  “I haven’t seen you for a week,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Sane,” said Smara. “And you?”

  Felion laughed. “We two,” he said.

  He went over to her, took her hand, and laid it against his face. He loved her, but in the wrong way. Brother and sister, they were expected by their society to be incestuous, it was the custom. But then the customs of Paradise were wild and sometimes uncouth. The polluted chemical saturation of the atmosphere, which produced the eternal mists of Paradise and eroded the buildings, had influenced the minds that lived there. For some reason, Felion and Smara were not mad, at least not in the accepted manner. They had therefore no friends, no lovers. They had had an uncle, but he was gone. Nevertheless, he was their reason for meeting at this place, for climbing up the hundred steps to his tilted mansion on the City tops.