by Tanith Lee
Several of the mad acknowledged Judit, and some even bowed or curtseyed to her. But others were too busy. One was an insect and waited in her web for flies and another was talking to spirits or invisible people. One crawled in a circle around and around.
In perhaps the third room a man had been tied to the wall by a thong about his throat. He wept ceaselessly and his neck was raw from trying to pull free. Judit went to him and wiped up his tears with her long hair, which no more existed. A second man was in a mad-shirt, and he rolled along the floor, biting at the straw and making strange hoarse barks. The warders had beaten his legs on their patrol.
In a fifth room there was an arrangement of old broken furniture that rose in a hill higher than the gallery that ran along the wall. The hill was some distance from this, and from all the windows. At its top sat a skinny man, looking out like a gull from a roof.
“There’s Maque,” said Judit.
She began to climb the structure, her firm legs, bare of stockings, revealed up to the white knees. Hilde did not follow, for though she was no longer able to be afraid, some physical nervousness remained. But then Judit turned and beckoned her, and Hilde did go up the stair of furniture, which was actually quite solid, its uneven places simple to avoid.
Aloft, on a table, sat Maque, and here they joined him.
The glory of the height was its view through a window. Although about six meters away, unreachable, it showed sections of burning sky and the crowns of burning trees. The sun was setting there, as if it had never before done so, and meant to make the world pay attention.
They stared at it, their faces lit like potter’s clay.
Maque was extraordinarily thin, and in his ears were tears from which the rings had been torn years ago, on his arrival at the asylum. Elsewhere now, in the City, his ill-omened earrings were worn; they had got free.
“I’ve sailed the sea,” said Maque presently. “I had a pet monkey that died of old age when he was twenty-three. I’ve seen Eastern ports where women dance naked but their faces are veiled in black. I’ve smoked hemp under the shelter of an elephant and eaten powdered pearl for the pox, which cured me.” His conversation, or rather monologue, was somewhat like Judit’s. He said, “Ten men gone overboard in a tempest. We came to an island. There were unicorns there, but our mate said they were only a kind of goat. A virgin may capture a unicorn.”
The sun went under the window, and the bars stood on thick burnished sky. Shadows spread among them. Below the hill of furniture some of the mad people made small sounds.
“This child can never,” said Judit, “capture a unicorn. She’s been violated.”
Hilde was not shamed. She nodded, distantly.
“Yes,” she said, as of another, “that happened to me.”
“She went to him in love,” said Judit.
“Look,” said Maque. And he got up on one knee and pulled from under his right thigh a brown glass bottle. “Empty, of course,” he said, “Thrown away near the latrine.”
“A gin bottle,” said Judit. She took it and gave it to Hilde. Hilde had never seen such a thing. On the label was a great black and white bird with a flush of amber next to its head. Behind was whiteness.
“I never saw a land such as that,” said Maque the sailor. “A cold country with mountains of snow. But I heard of them. The freeze forms vast cliffs of ice that float into the sea, and when they meet they clash like glass. These birds live there. Penguins, they’re called. They can’t fly, but stalk about like kings.”
“Are they little birds?” asked Hilde childishly, for this was her protection now, between Judit and Maque.
“Some, maybe,” said Maque. He pointed at the bottle. “But not this fellow. Look at him. He could be seven feet high. And his beak’s a knife.”
Below the furniture, many of the inmates had gathered close, and looked up at Maque. Maque rose, and taking back the bottle, he raised it. One last spark of sunlight came in at its top and shot a ray from sky to ground.
“And they said,” said Maque, “the snow is warm, there. So warm you can lie down and sleep in it like a feather bed. And flowers grow when the sun shines on the ice. The sun never sets but hangs low, so it’s always dawn or sunset. That is Penguin Land.”
“I’d do without my country, to see that,” said Judit.
“But,” said Hilde, some dim rationality struggling deep within her. Yet she had no use for it any more, and abruptly let it go. “You could play at snowballs in Penguin Land,” she said, “and never burn your hands on the snow.”
“You would never be hungry or thirsty,” said Judit. “Fruit and sweets grow on the trees and wine runs down the ice.”
The light ray melted from the bottle and went out.
The room was very dark.
And through the doorway stamped three wardresses, jingling their keys.
“Get down, you bitches,” shouted one at Judit and Hilde.
“What is it now?” asked Hilde.
“Now they lock us into our dormitories,” said Judit. She smiled, “After dark, we’re sinful, so they must separate the women from the men.”
When they were near the bottom of the furniture, Marie Tante seized Hilde and pulled her off, bruising her. “Not quiet yet? Perhaps you’ll need more subduing.”
The women were marched away by women, and men came in a crowd, toting their sticks, to get charge of the male inmates.
Darkness was full now in the asylum. One of the female warders carried a lamp, and the outer corridors had been sparsely lighted.
They passed up a stair, and a door was unlocked. Into the women’s dormitory they went.
The beds lay along the floor. They were straw pallets covered by thin blankets and having each a soiled and impoverished pillow. Every place was foul, and a worse smell came from buckets of necessity set at intervals and doubtless not frequently emptied. On a wall facing the beds and buckets was a wooden cross. This was ignored by one and all.
The women went where they wished, or where they felt they must, and sat or lay down.
Marie Tante drove Hilde the length of the room to a pallet apparently unclaimed.
“Here, my lady. Your couch.”
Hilde got onto the bed and crouched there. After all, fear remained of this woman who seemed grown to a preposterous size. (Why not then a giant penguin?)
“You’ll have lice by tomorrow,” said Marie Tante. “What a stink in here. We must hose these beasts down.”
“That one’s been wetted already,” said Moule.
The third wardress giggled and swung up her lamp, to make the room career and spin. The madwomen gazed at this phenomenon silently.
The wardresses left them, locking the door.
The room was black, and in the black the women rustled and whispered. One moaned over and over.
Hilde sat in dull dismay, for Judit was far off. The awful smell oppressed her, but then she sensed a current of cleaner air. Some tiny panes of glass were missing from the window above, and now a night breeze blew. It would be cold in winter, not warm as the snows of the Penguin Land.
An hour later, the moon entered the window. And so the room.
On the space of black floor below the powerless crucifix, the milk-white squares of the barred window appeared.
One by one, two by two, the madwomen left their verminous beds and came down to the pool of light.
Here they moonbathed. Some washed in the moonlight, rubbing their arms and faces, or lifting up the whiteness between their legs. Others lay down and swam among the squares. The woman who moaned tried to prize the shadow bars away and could not, and crept back, made dumb, to her bed.
Judit stood up in the center of the reflection, her face raised into the light, which tinted her like snow.
But the moon passed over, and total darkness returned. And in this dark, the door was unlocked, not brashly now, but with stealth.
The male warder who had come after the moon sought Judit the whore among the women, and mounted
her. They heard her say, in a voice of velvet, “What, are you here again, oh my king? What an honor.” And then they heard the man strike her. It was Tiraud, who would drink to capacity and then seek out the queen of harlots. Soon finished, he called her filthy names and exclaimed now over the fetor of the dormitory.
At the door another chuckled. And away along the corridors there started a wild whooping and screaming.
Hilde sprang up, and Judit was by her, for even so soon she knew Judit’s touch.
“They do things to the men they don’t dare try with us.”
The awful crying went on, and the women huddled off their beds. They congregated around Judit, as they had gone to the moon pool. Her skirt was sticky, but she was yet a queen.
When the cries stopped, there came instead a crazy clatter in the air, and at the door the jailers laughed raucously.
Something flew against Hilde, leather and fur, and she shrieked in turn. No, fear was not all gone.
All about, the women gurned in panic. Into the dark it was not possible truly to see, only to hear, as they burrowed and howled and ran at the walls. The other thing also did that, swooping from side to side.
Judit had stood up again, and she raised her arm, and mysteriously she was half visible as if faintly luminous from within.
So, by Judit’s shine, Hilde saw the bat the warders had let go in the room. It whirled overhead and dipped suddenly down, settling on Judit’s fingers as the hawks did in her dream country.
A demon with a fairy face, the bat folded its wings.
Judit carried it to the wall, and put it there, and the bat detached itself and crawled upward, into the high embrasure of the window. Here it found a broken pane and slipped through.
“Very good, very good,” said the men at the door. “She’s clever, is Judit.”
As they locked the door behind them, the cries began again across the building. Dr. Volpe, two blocks away in brandy sleep, would not hear them. And if he did? Lunatics were noisy.
Hilde lay back. She pushed the crying from her and thought of the bat in the cool sky, and of the warm snow.
The mandarin leaves fell slowly and sparingly from the trees on the lawn and in the wood. Gray geese passed over.
An extravagant hothouse built for Dr. Volpe on the lawn outside the asylum blocks began to burgeon with harvest, black grapes on a vine, apricots, toasted roses.
The mad people were never allowed as far as the lawn, and never beheld it from the windows.
There had been plans for a summerhouse too, maybe a small lake. But these things had never come to be.
One evening an agent brought Dr. Volpe a wonderful new prisoner, a dead butterfly with huge bright wings.
Hilde did not cause any trouble, and Marie Tante had lost interest in her. One of the men had taken to shrieking, and was conducted to the Swing, where, in a sort of box, they rotated and reeled him until he vomited and swooned. Thereafter he sat quietly in his mad-shirt on the straw.
Hilde came to recognize her fellows, though usually not by any name.
Judit showed her the poet Citalbo, who had gone insane from reading drama and writing verses. Citalbo walked solemnly from room to room, sometimes scribbling on small pieces of paper that the warders allowed him, as Dr. Volpe had decreed. The warders often stole the papers, however. This did not appear to matter. What Citalbo wrote now was nonsense, frequently illegible. He never seemed to miss his former works, or anything that was stolen, as if, once he had put down an idea, God had it in safekeeping.
During the days of straw, Judit occasionally told stories, histories perhaps, of her queendom. At night also, now and then, for they would not always sleep at night in the dormitory, as by day sometimes they would. Maque sat upon his hill. They did not speak or approach him again. The brown bottle had vanished – confiscated? No one mentioned the Penguin Land.
One morning the warders beat a man in front of all the others. He had been running to and fro and the warders caught him suddenly and threw him down, kicking him with their boots and striking him with their sticks. The noise rose in the madhouse then like a storm in a cage of parakeets. The screams and cries of the mad did not quite overcome the oaths and grunts of the male warders or the shrill giggles of the three wardresses who were present.
The beaten man was left lying, and somehow recovered, or at least did
not die.
When Dr. Volpe went along the galleries at noon, the lunatics were generally very still. Some tried to hold their breath. Most did not know who Dr. Volpe was, only that he appeared rather like a clockwork toy, at a certain time, also that he presided over the worst tortures.
There were other incidents: The shaving of a woman’s head, the force-feeding of another, a drunken song the warders indulged in without warning. The afternoon that something was added to the slops which gave the inmates pains in their bellies, and how Judit raved about the healing tinctures of her land, and between calmly told Hilde this had occurred before, and would soon pass. By night, intermittently, Tiraud, or others, came into the women’s dormitory, to use Judit’s body. She did not resist these rapes. Once or twice some other woman was violated as well or instead. In particular darknesses, outcry resounded from the men’s cloister.
The moon came often to the women’s barred window, at different hours, and laid its light along the floor. The women did not always go down to it. And one night Hilde stood alone in the midst of the pool, staring up at the window, its source, above. She had lost all comprehension of the place she was in, she did not look for rescue, if she ever had. The image of Johanos Martin had long since withered from her, as had her night game, the sweet masturbation of her innocence. In a manner, the asylum had done what it had promised, driving out the devils that had brought her here, but only to replace them with others.
Judit, who had been preyed on three times that night, lay sleeping. Hilde went to her and curled up by Judit’s feet. It was cold. Hilde thought of the Penguin Land.
Dr. Volpe dusted the leaves of a palm, and standing back, surveyed its effect against the autumnal window. He could see down toward the hothouse, and the chestnuts and oaks of the wood. This was a pleasing view and might be that of any country retreat.
A knock on the outer door alerted him and he pulled a child’s sulky face.
His housekeeper entered.
“The gentleman from the theater, Dr. Volpe.”
Dr. Volpe had forgotten.
His face of distaste became harder and more adult.
“Very well, you may send him in.”
Dr. Volpe paused beside the case with the new butterfly in it. He would linger just long enough to show the visitor what was important, and proper.
But the visitor, the blustering gentleman from the Goddess of Tragedy, launched at once into a speech, not waiting to be asked.
“We are delighted that you’ll do as we desired, Dr. Volpe. This will render my actors a great service. And in the course of art –”
“It is a disgrace,” said Volpe, his face swollen now. “To bring sightseers here. As if into a zoological garden. These people are my patients.”
“Quite, quite.” The visitor brushed Volpe’s words and stance aside. “But as you’re aware, the minister has overridden your objection. I’m sure you don’t set yourself above him, doctor.”
Volpe was ruffled. He was at the mercy of upperlings and underlings.
“If he thinks so. I’m not certain the minister was correctly informed.”
“Oh, quite correctly.”
“To have your troupe here, staring at these poor deranged souls.”
“What harm can it do?” said the agent from the theater. “And so much good. The lunatics won’t notice, I expect. And for my actors, an invaluable help in the preparation of the mad scene for our next production.”
“I dissociate myself from the proceeding,” said Dr. Volpe.
“Of course. I suppose your warders are capable of overseeing the affair.”
Dr. Volpe imagined his warders poking the mad people with sticks, forcing them to caper and wail to interest the actors. But they would do it, too, if he was present, and then there would be the shame of it. The warders would expect to receive large tips.
He did not offer the agent refreshment, and when he was gone, Dr. Volpe walked among his birds’ eggs, caressing their smoothness (each a tiny coffin, but he did not consider that).
Soon after dawn, the dormitory was unlocked and the women were hustled out again, down to the common rooms. Today it was not the same.
Marie Tante, and the wardress Bettile, stood at the doorway. They took hold of Judit at once. “This one,” they said, “she’s much admired.”
The other women, thinking Judit had been singled out for some therapy (punishment), shied away, all but Hilde.
Marie Tante reached and gripped Hilde’s arm.
“This is a pretty one. Look how quickly her hair’s grown back. You’ll have to be shorn again, my lady.”
Hilde hung speechless in her grasp. But now Bettile grabbed two other girls from among the women.
“These will do. For the pretty ones.”
“Hah! They’ll pass.”
The four chosen women and the one other Bettile hauled out, who whimpered and then sobbed, they led away along the corridor to a big tiled area.
Hilde felt again the invasion of terror. This was like the white room in which she had been tortured. She could recall very little of it, but she had thought that she died there, and came back very changed.
“Don’t be afraid,” Judit said sternly.
The warders told them to take off their garments. Judit removed hers almost blithely. Despite her captivity, she was still very beautiful, and though her breasts were not those of a girl, they were full as two blown roses.
Marie Tante jeered at Judit: “Not bad for an old whore.”
But Judit laughed, and Marie Tante turned her attention to the other women.
These were malformed and undernourished, or oddly fatty, their bodies blemished by moles and pimples, inner subsidences of the flesh.
Hilde was ashamed to bare herself, and Bettile charged at her and ripped the clothes off her body.
