by Tanith Lee
But he was sane, surely, that was the whole trouble, and his sanity insisted he investigate the maze. Smara would not need to begin to kill again for some days. Even if it took him a week to return … And then again, would he not anyway reemerge into Paradise at the hour, minute, or moment he had left it? Pieces of the complex wandering letter had seemed to tell him this.
Felion walked across the floor, toward the white wall. It came nearer and nearer. And then he was against it. He touched the surface with his finger, and it was cold.
Holding the torch high, the knife in his right hand – he had been left-handed but trained himself otherwise – he entered the arched opening.
At once, everything was altered. Became absolute. Although he could still see the entry point behind him, the wall of ice towered up and up and disappeared into an indescribable nothingness above that was not mist or space – or anything.
The labyrinth was freezing, like a winter, described to Felion in bits of rotten books. The ice breathed out a faint vapor that swirled around the nasturtium tatter of the torch.
There was a smell he recognized, if only from a laboratory. Not chemical. What had it been called?
The ground was like muddied glass. (He was reminded of the shattered bottle.)
Sounds came, rushes, like seas, like … blood moving in the ear. And he felt a slight vertigo. But then that would be proper, if the balance of matter had been disturbed.
He moved forward, following the left-hand turnings of the wall.
He believed in the labyrinth now, as he had not done when outside. He believed that it was real, and apt, and led to somewhere. His thoughts of Smara dwindled. The archway had vanished out of sight.
The first specter – hallucination, vision, element of elsewhere – spun suddenly at him, it seemed from the wall. He had not anticipated this, and despite his uncle’s warning (The labyrinth may open randomly to show you one other place or time) had not understood what the notation might mean.
It was like a surge of the fog that clung about Paradise, but in this fog were lights, shapes, voices. Felion heard a frightful shriek, but he had grown used to shrieking. Then the sight of women was before him, ugly women and one very beautiful in a dark fur cap, or else her hair was fur. Another of the women had been struck down. She lay full-length, and the beautiful one bent abruptly to her, touching gently – and then the mirage was gone.
Felion had stopped. He shouted, “Ah! Uncle!” And then, softly, “O my prophetic soul!” And then he grinned. And saw his grinning shadow reflected from the torch into the ice wall.
Stupid to hesitate. He had had the warning and not heeded it. But the thing had done him no harm. No, this was not the Minotaur of the labyrinth.
Felion strode on. He whistled a tune of the bars and dives of Paradise. The walls obligingly caught it up hollowly and it echoed back to him.
The second vision came quite mildly. It was like an aperture, filling the area between the walls, the ice-rink floor, and the illimitable ceiling. He saw a dry, tawny lawn, grass, without mist, rising up to a weird house of glass. And in the glass an enormous vine was growing with bursting black fruit.
He moved toward it, and wondered for an instant, if this was the exact exit point, but certainly he had not come far enough.
And the picture smeared, crumpled, and gave way. And there the labyrinth of ice went on.
“Smara,” Felion said.
He looked back. Could he turn back now?
Then he cursed his uncle, an awkward obscenity, for Paradise no longer had a God, a religion, or any regularized views of sexuality, to form the substance of oaths.
Felion walked on. He did not whistle.
He came around a turn, and a silver insectile web hung across the labyrinth. In the web a woman sat, her tongue protruding, and snakes for hair.
She was gone in three seconds.
And instead, he found he had reached the heart of the maze.
The heart was empty.
An oval region, with one way in from the convolutions of the ice, and a second way out.
In the floor was a stealthy mark, but it only looked as if something had scratched the surface, without intent. It was not a rune, a message, a cipher.
Felion raised the torch high again.
He recalled the woman who painted and would drink herself to death. He did not think she was one of those he had glimpsed in the hallucinatory visions. But now, standing in the womb of the ice, he credited that other world beyond, which his uncle had named, as if jestingly, Paradis.
Felion spent a few minutes at the core of the maze (the empty heart), and then he went on through the outleading arch, and continued, keeping to the left-hand wall.
Felion was primed now for further demons, but nothing occurred.
Nothing occurred until he came around one of the twines of ice and saw in front of him an arch of purest nothing.
It was not like the etheric tapering-off of the ceiling. It was a sort of omission from sight. He did not like to look at it. He looked away.
Here was the end. The egress.
Perhaps it was all a joke. A hoax.
Perhaps the labyrinth opened into hell, whatever hell was. Or heaven. Or into colossal snows. Or the sea.
The exit could not be relied on. His will might not be able to control it.
Felion’s will was strong. He and Smara had wills of iron and flame.
He glared again at the vacant arch and said aloud, “Her house. The painter who inherited from my uncle. There.”
And as he said it he thought, Maybe, in this other world, there are no houses. Maybe they drift in the air –
But the archway convulsed. It filled.
He saw a room, in shadow.
And with a howl, Felion ran between the walls, and out into that room. While as he did so, the torch puffed into darkness.
The house of the artist.
He had made it be, at the tunnel’s end.
Everything about the room (he deduced it was a room) was totally uncanny to him. It was not that the furnishings and accoutrements were so alien. But no mist hung over it, and above a skylight showed rich, black night.
An easel of metal stood in the room. And elsewhere were stacked canvases, and there, a long table littered with paints, and all an artist’s accessories.
He had accomplished his objective.
Felion kept still, and felt after the psyche of the house. The house of the woman who painted and drank. Who was the heir to his uncle’s fortune in this other world.
And the house was like a casket, chock-full of nothing. Empty, like the labyrinth’s heart.
Felion looked up.
And in the black pane of glass, he could see – stars.
Stars.
Felion kneeled on the floor of the studio in the parallel world of Paradis. He prayed to something that had no name.
Later, he investigated the room, but only superficially. He did not move anything from its appointed place.
When he eventually looked around for the way back into the labyrinth – this first time he was quickly satisfied, entirely overwhelmed – he could not see it.
But when he beat his head against the wall, crying, “Smara – Smara –” the wall gave way, and there it was.
As he stepped through, shuddering and hot with fear, the great cold came, and the dead torch – which all this time he had kept in one hand, the knife in the other – mysteriously revived.
He ran through the labyrinth, then. He ran through the heart of it, up against the right-hand wall.
And when he sprang out again into the cavern under the mansion of his uncle, he screamed.
Every stone reiterated his cry. He lay on the ground beside the track, hearing it, and the torch guttered out once more.
The initial killing had been a little like this. But then he had had no additional puzzlement. He had gone to Smara with a severed hand, and shown her, and they had marveled together over the whorls of its fingertips. Bu
t now, how, how to tell Smara of this?
FOUR
Paradis
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.
Nursery Rhyme
Leocadia remained calm.
Like any sentence of death, she did not believe it.
Even after she had taken up her new life, her food and music and drink supplied, books delivered, as she wished, paints and canvas, drawing materials, notebooks, clothes, powder, everything, even then in the hermetic environ of her prison she did not believe in it. Not wholly. Not with her mind.
Was that, after all, a form of madness, then?
Even after she had sorted the pieces, grasped the plot. Accepted that her very calm itself must come from minuscule tasteless particles in her food, and in the air itself, which did not restrain her creative flair or her energy, or ability to concentrate, but which must be controlling her. Not even then.
And as she went to and fro from her room in the daylight summer hours, having found she might, and met in the corridor and garden other inmates of the Residence, who were genteel and well-mannered, sometimes bemused, excitable, but never abusive, loud, or agonized, not then either.
Until in the end even her mind knew, and it was too late, she had accepted it.
For, though powerless, she should have resisted. In some fashion, however oblique or useless.
Her asides to the doctors – I’m anxious to leave, I’ll tell visitors how you torture me – were not protests or shields, let alone missiles. It was almost a repulsive flirtation, her acid quips, their smirking refutations.
And how did her life differ? She did much as she had always done. She spent a vast amount of time alone. She painted. True, the elegant dinners were gone, but had she ever really enjoyed them? True, she had no lovers, but surely it might be possible, if she were desperate, to seduce some person or other, their bizarre quality or nasty appearance offending her not at all in the onslaught of needy lust. And then again, if she could not be bothered with such unappetizing creatures, this must mean her sexuality burned low, she had had enough.
She missed walking in the City. But then, too, months had sometimes passed without her venturing more than two streets from her house.
Now she did not explore the asylum grounds. A low fence lay across the grass and trees the far side of the gravel walk, beyond the broken hothouse. It was easy to climb the fence, and now and then some inmate might scramblingly do so. But they returned from wandering among the old buildings of the madhouse disconsolate, once or twice crying.
It occurred to Leocadia that she kept the blocks of the madhouse in reserve, making of them something mystical and bad, against the ultimate rainy day of terrifying ennui.
“Oh dear, you’re too late, I must go down now,” Mademoiselle Varc had said to Leocadia when Leocadia first left her room and found the white woman in the corridor. “If only you had come sooner.” And then she scurried to the elevator.
Leocadia then did not see Mademoiselle Varc for several weeks.
Instead she confronted Thomas the Warrior, who might once have been a wealthy old soldier, that in his youth had conceivably seen action in some small foreign war, tanks and carrier planes, and the threat of worse. Now he puffed about a flowerbed he was in charge of, below the summerhouse. It was a wonder of blooms and stone slabs, on top of one of which stood a stone head of Medusa poking out her tongue.
Thomas was elderly, thin and stooped. He paid Leocadia no attention, only speaking to his flowers. Doctor Saume had informed her of his name.
Three or four more went about the garden regularly, and some of the other older ones would bask nervously in the summerhouse. Males and females, they were sad and frequently decrepit, moaning with stiffness that even contemporary medication had not been able to alleviate.
The most immature of those she saw was a young man, possibly twenty-five years old, who crouched along like a dismembered spider. He frowned at unseen things, but meeting humans he usually brightened for a moment, telling them how well and lovely they looked. But of Leocadia he seemed afraid, and ran away and hid behind objects as she approached, even behind Thomas the Warrior and his Medusa, if nothing else were available.
Only Mademoiselle Varc actually greeted Leocadia, now thinking her her maid, her niece, her nurse, and once or twice some kind of empress or queen that she had perhaps been introduced to long ago. On these latter occasions Mademoiselle Varc curtsied, and Leocadia had felt a sudden compulsion, in case Mademoiselle Varc fell over. This was the first compassion Leocadia had ever experienced for a being other than an animal. And so Mademoiselle Varc amused Leocadia, and Leocadia was careful, in her contrary way, always to attempt to be the one she was mistaken for.
Probably the strangest time had been when Mademoiselle Varc had taken Leocadia for an old schoolfriend, and both women had then seemingly become adolescent girls. They had sat under the summerhouse in the shade of the trees, and Mademoiselle Varc had confessed she had no idea what a man and a woman did together. Leocadia had told her a carefully constrained amount, and Mademoiselle Varc had giggled girlishly, even blushed, though Dr. Duval had revealed that Mademoiselle Varc had borne six children.
When she had returned from the sun-fallen garden, kindly driven in with Mademoiselle Varc by the warden in his dark uniform (before the trees could come alive and eat them), Leocadia stepped into the dusk of her room and heard the door shut with its final click, which meant her little freedom was gone until tomorrow.
There was autonomy in the way of lamps, and she switched them on in the sitting area of the room, and going to the refrigerator, she drew out a bottle of white wine and a narrow glass.
Then she moved into the painting area and turned on the working lights.
On its easel, the picture of the ship, the beach, the spillage of oranges.
Leocadia studied it coldly.
Was it some response to the other thing upon an easel? Asra, raped and choked with orange paint, her bare flesh adorned by islands.
The doctors who had oozed charm over this painting had seen it as such; they must have done.
But she, what had she been doing?
The ship was not Asra, and yet the ship was feminine. And the sea had split her, and she … bled.
Leocadia drank her wine. A swirl of panic rose deep within her like a beast in a bottomless lake. How long before it would reach her surface?
She tossed the glass against the wall, where it broke. Later the wall would suck up the bits.
But not quite yet.
So interesting, the knives for her food, the glasses that might be smashed.
Leocadia went close to the painting. Yes, it could well be seen as some expression of inner horror at Asra’s murder, which murder she had performed, and then forgotten.
Massed sky, the vessel with its snapped wing. And the little shells she had added. And there – what was that?
She leaned nearer. She could not make it out. Something white on the sand, a small distance from the shells. But not a shell.
She had not painted it. She did not know what it was.
Then again, it was done in her style, in tiny feathering brushstrokes, half its curve delineated as if cut.
Of course, they could copy her.
Leocadia crossed the room and turned about the two paintings she had previously executed here.
One a scene of a mountain, smoking over a peaceful valley. The other, a road leading into a wood. Both were dark, lowering, sinister. Neither contained a hint of orange, or any image she did not recall putting into them.
Leocadia dreamed not of distant bells but of screaming. It was full-throated and savage. It echoed and swerved through the building of the Residence. On Thomas’s stone the Medusa poked out her tongue farther.
Leocadia woke up, and got out of the bed, which squeaked its incontinence plastic at her.
&nb
sp; She went to the worktable and picked up a tube of orange paint, which she had employed without thought, as if to prove her innocence.
She uncapped it, and squeezed.
The tube screamed.
It screamed in her hand.
Leocadia kept hold of it. As her fingers relaxed, the scream stopped.
She put it on the table and pressed down on the tube with her whole hand.
Now the scream came vivid and awesome, rocking the room, dizzying her ears.
As it faded, she heard an afternote, like the boom of a massive organ in the Temple-Church twenty miles away.
Not me, Leocadia thought, concisely. It was the drugs in the food and drink, and in the light and sound and air. Or could it even be some other trick, like the orange that bled, the white ball entered in her painting?
“Or is it me?”
She seemed to stand above herself on a height, looking down into her soul, not with brief compassion, as she had gazed at the curtsying Mademoiselle Varc, but despisingly, as if at an expensive, once-reliable machine, which failed.
“Come along, Lucie,” cried Mademoiselle Varc. “I’ve found such an interesting place. It’s rather dirty, but you won’t mind, will you? You’re always braver than me.”
Leocadia had been sitting on the hot lawn near the empty birdbath, and now Mademoiselle Varc came up and filled the bath with cold tea from her breakfast pot.
Lucie was the adolescent friend, but she and Mademoiselle Varc seemed to have grown even younger.
Leocadia was not in the mood now for role playing.
“Not today,” she said, as if to a fractious infant.
But Mademoiselle Varc took no notice. She put down her alabaster hand and caught Leocadia’s arm.
“Come on. Before they catch us.”
Leocadia guessed correctly from this expression that although it was not in fact barred to them, Mademoiselle Varc wanted to go over the fence to the madhouse.
“No.”
“Oh, yes. Oh do. It’s really fascinating. There’s all sorts of things there. I found it last week, but I didn’t tell.”
