by Tanith Lee
They led him into a house above a coil of the river.
It had not been planned, at least, not in their conscious brains. They let him lie down on a bed, and then they ripped off his precious coat, and then they tied him to the iron bed frame.
When they took from him other clothes, they found his body was pale and hard, in better condition than their own, from his exertions on the stage.
Although drunk, he cried out when, one by one, they invaded him.
In prisons, orphanages, aboard ships, in gloomy watches of the soul, they had found out this means of sodomy, which now they brought and worked out upon Johanos Martin. They raped him many times. Without a single kiss.
And finally it was the runner who thrust into Martin’s body the empty gin bottle. Who worked with that upon him.
Inside the anus of the helpless man the four-sided glass neck shattered. (Normally, only orgasm would be sufficiently strong to break such glass.)
Much later, after the deceivers had left him, he was found. And thus, later still, five days later, in a paupers’ hospital, Johanos Martin died of a bottle of Penguin Gin. The death was disgraceful, and hushed up.
No last words, or quotations, remained, for in a delirium of agony, such things did not arise.
No one mourned him in particular, yet the spectators of the City did so, for he had held many in thrall that he had not met. The love of strangers.
All that escaped was the rumor he had died of drink.
They did not mind that. It was romantic, tragic: usual.
Hilde woke, weeping in the darkness. Hearing her, some of the others began to cry, and the woman who made sounds made them, over and over, like a bell.
Judit came to Hilde across the moonless black.
“You must be brave. One day, we’ll be free. We will go to my country. Or into the heaven of snow, Penguinia. For that is the land’s name. Yes, I asked Maque. Don’t you recall?”
It was winter, and the room was icy. Hearing Judit’s voice, the women whispered and were mute.
“Think of the warm snow,” said Judit, “warm as feathers. And the sweet wine.”
“I’ll never see it,” said Hilde.
Judit touched her gently, her head, her neck, her shoulders and hands, Hilde’s stomach. There, Judit hesitated.
Like all the beings of the madhouse, Hilde was ferociously undernourished, and she had become very thin. Her hair they had let grow, but it was not as strong as it had been, not springing or bright. The woman Moule had said she doubted it would be worth trying to sell Hilde’s second crop of hair. Hilde’s belly, where Judit’s hands had paused, was hard and round, like the gut of a terrible hunger.
The warders had not noticed, for they did not investigate their charges once novelty wore off, and Hilde, so slight, looked only swollen in the way of malnutrition. But to Judit’s fingers, the fact of this pathetic taut belly now became apparent.
Judit, who had been a whore, sat back in queenly stillness. Within the black, Judit closed her beautiful eyes.
“We must prepare.”
She bowed her head in a gesture of acceptance and mourning.
Hilde said again, “I’ll never see the Penguin Land. The Penguinia. Never. It isn’t real.”
“Yes. And you will see it, child. Before I do. Penguinia is the country of joy that lies behind this place of pain.”
Far off, from the men’s dormitory, came the lonely hyena calling of despair.
It was not true that Maque had named the Penguin Land. Judit had done that. After the day the actors came to look at them, Maque had been punished in various ways, and he had grown silent. He did not climb on top of the hill of furniture, and one morning the warders dismantled it. They threw the old chairs out into a yard of the asylum.
Citalbo had become quiescent too, and no longer wrote his snatches of verse. The noise from the male dormitory reminded Judit of these silences.
While inside Hilde, a bud had formed, even as the hair grew from her shaven skull. After a few weeks, Marie Tante and Bettile had ceased fastening Hilde into the mad-shirt. As well, for otherwise, they might, even they, have seen.
But the child in Hilde’s womb was without quickness. Judit had felt such things before, in her previous existence.
So she prepared, not for the arrival of life, but the advent of death.
Hilde Koster, in the madhouse, carried the dead child of dead Johanos Martin for a little more than five months. Any symptoms of her pregnancy she mistook easily for the constant malaise due to ill treatment, and the minor poisonings to which the inmates of hell were subjected, the lack of any care. And Hilde, who had once been “Little Hilde,” was ignorant of biological fact.
So she walked about in the straw of the white chambers, and sometimes in the stone court of exercise, and she slept in the room of the moon, stunned by the horrible cold, a dummy of flesh closed tight around this small lump of mortality.
At the beginning of the sixth month, about fifty days after Martin’s death in the paupers’ hospital, an incredible quiet sank on the asylum.
The warders prowled the rooms, sometimes slashing at the mad people with their sticks.
“What are they up to?”
Even the ones who crawled in circles or beat at flies did so in utter noiselessness.
Into the yard had been shunted a few of the men and most of the women, among them Judit and Hilde.
The day was frigid, like gray quartz, and up into it the biscuity walls rose, gray also in the stasis of the light. Hilde’s ruined hair was like a beacon, the only brilliant thing visible, a drop of autumn sun, the splash of a summer fruit. But under the trails of this hair Hilde was a white shivering Madonna of death, who suddenly dropped down, her mouth shaping into the grimace of a mask, a shock too vast for sound.
Figures of ice, the other women stood about, a chorus in a play without words, and without motion.
“Damn the pigs, why don’t they make a noise?” demanded Bettile. “Go over, Marie, and hit one of the bitches. Pull that fat one’s hair.”
The air was stony and silence hurt their ears.
Bettile took a step toward the group of women. And at this instant Hilde screamed in agony.
“Ah, there goes one. Again, again, you slut. Let’s hear you!” cried Moule.
And as all the women began to shriek, and inside the block the men yowled like dogs, the warders shook themselves and passed back and forth the brown bottle that only a shameful convulsion could shatter.
Like a hedge, the mad women solidified around Hilde on the ground, and unseen, Judit kneeled by her.
There was no time for Hilde to question or protest. Death broke from her in a shattering spasm of water, and of blood.
Hilde screamed, and the women, her chorus, screamed.
The wardresses congratulated them. They smote one or two across the legs. These women skipped and grunted, and then resumed their outcry.
“Old Volpe will hear,” said Moule, with satisfaction.
They were tickled.
If Volpe heard, up in his apartment on his country estate, he pretended to himself that these were the cries of winter geese blown inland from the river miles away.
Something tiny and dreadful was squeezed from Hilde’s broken body, and lay on the stone ground, linked to her by a silvered cord.
It was if her soul had been squashed out in the shape of a monster.
The warders had gone in, it was too cold for them in the yard. The women stared down on the death that had been born of Hilde.
It was a child, a child in parenthesis, not wholly formed. In color – in color it was like the skin of a pumpkin. An orange child, the product of wronged blood or a damaged liver, the product of a flame that had burned out.
Judit took Hilde’s hands.
“It’s over,” said Judit, as in the back streets of her past she had said it to this one or that, silken girls murdered by reproduction, the task devised of a male god, or demon.
Hilde co
uld not speak. Behind her eyes the sea was drawing away. She lay aground upon the beach. Hollow, adrift yet fixed, immutable and flowing.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Judit. “You ask me where you are going to? Now you’ll see Penguinia.”
For a second a light lit in the tidal windows of the eyes. Was it so? After this interval of the impossible, the redemption most human things hope for? Then the light flickered and faded. So swiftly, so clumsily and unbelievably, we must leave.
They were all dead now, the father, the mother, and the child of a cursory act one had wrought on the other.
Only the force and sorcery of the appalling event remained, and hovered there like the smolder of the blood, and was breathed in, through lips, through stones.
The women drew away. There was no more they could do. The ghastly orange gnome of the stillborn must be left for the warders to discover and remove, as the corpse of Hilde, the last door of all slammed on her, must be come on and tidied, roughly and with oaths. A piece of earth somewhere on the premises was kept for such debris. Dead lunatics were cast into sacks and so into quicklime, that there should always be space for the next one.
Outside the walls, about one hundred and thirty meters along the road, and among some desolate somber trees, Tiraud and Desel stood in the dusk before dawn.
Tiraud was grumbling that he had hurt his back, lugging “that bitch.” Desel was sullen, in the grip of a sort of agoraphobia that often came on him when he had to go beyond the asylum precincts.
The burial of the dead female lunatic and her stillborn infant had been gone through on the previous evening. Dr. Volpe had not attended, and it was Desel who spoke the prayer over the dead – which consisted of a drunken burp. The warder had botched up some evidence of the correct event, and then laid the two corpses together in a stout sack. It had been more difficult in earlier years, when Volpe had nerved himself to oversee all obsequies. Frequently then there had been nothing to salvage for the sinister carts that came up the road, with the morning star.
“Here it is now,” said Tiraud, as he gave over the gin bottle to Desel, the Penguin of Joy. “Are they going to haggle again? He’s lucky to get it. Such a fresh one, and only a girl. And the abortion’s grand for study. Some doctor will delight in it.”
Such was the security of the house of madness that they had easily been able to carry out the pitiable sack between them. Those that saw knew and approved their errand.
The cart came rolling up the road, a bundle of shadow, the lean horse pulling it, like some medieval image of Death.
But it was a cheery, leering individual who craned down.
“What have you got for me, eh? Something nice?”
“A young girl of fifteen, only a day old. And a premature child of unnatural coloring,” said Desel. “Do you want to see?”
“No, I trust you, gentlemen. You know there’d be trouble if you lied.”
One bag was hoisted up into the cart. Another, lighter, plopped down.
“It’s not enough,” said Tiraud. “You promised more.”
“Ah, but there, you see,” said the carter, “you think this is a rare treat for me, this young lady and her calf. But they’re harder to dispose of, these oddities. More questions are asked. And some of my clients turn shy. They’ll take a strapping great man without a qualm. But a maiden and a monster baby – who can tell? Why, I may have to tip the lot in the river.”
“You bloody liar,” said Tiraud.
“Don’t waste your breath,” said Desel. He took the money bag and began to walk up the road toward the loom of the asylum, which, from this juncture, looked like a weird mansion or fortress, probably romantic, in the half-light and mist.
Tiraud made after him, as if afraid to be left alone and standing in the world.
The carter eyed their retreat.
“Mad things,” he said to his horse. “Madder than their charges.”
As he turned the cart, the sack rattled under the cover. It lay amid sacks of potatoes and swart cabbage, and once he would have taken more care to ensure it was jumbled, the unvegetable death, among his other goods. But this did not matter much now, for the way he went by, into Paradys, was watched by those with whom he was on friendly terms.
It was a winter morning, and the dawn star was very radiant, sending fine shadows away from the standing things of the landscape. A bleak scene, the road and the black trees that periodically flanked it. Here and there a shorn field. Presently there would come gaps where the earth swept down, and the City might be glimpsed, curled around its river and smoking as if deadly on fire. The morning fog preempted the sense of smoke. A silence pushed in against the cart.
“Mad people,” said the carter of cabbage and death. “The world’s mad. Take me. I could be snoring in bed. Take you, horse, letting me fasten you to this cart.”
Something moved in the cart’s interior. It might be potatoes tumbling through a sack.
The carter cocked an ear. He knew the noise of potatoes.
“What’s that, eh?” He did not look back. In his particular trade, he had heard the stories, the corpse that sat up, perhaps wearing the face of a loved one. But the carter had no loved ones. “Better keep still,” he wheedled. “I’m taking you somewhere lovely. I am. To help in the pursuance of knowledge.”
There was a sound now like a knife slitting a sack.
The carter mused.
“Just stay quiet,” he said.
Then something rose up in the cart, and dislodged the cover. Because the dawn star was behind it, its shadow fell across the carter and his lean horse.
“Christ, now,” said the carter.
He turned slowly, and looked back.
As he did so, a darkness fell through the air, and then a pallor, and something stung his cheek. It was a snowflake. And in the cart, on top of the sacks, was a huge rock of a bird, black-caped like a nun, with a breast of ice, and an amber blaze against the blade of its beak, which resembled – or might have been – obsidian.
The carter did not know what this creature was, although he had seen it represented somewhere.
In the silence it towered over him. A smell came from it, the odor of spirits, killingly sweet. During those moments, before the carter could in any way respond, the reins jerked in his hands – the horse began to run.
As the carter clung to the reins and shouted, the darkness seemed to swirl about his head, and the only picture that was with him was of that stone beak like a dagger plunged between his shoulders. Yet he had no choice but to strive with the running horse.
Snow dashed in his face like pieces of a broken moon, a moon made of dead white flesh.
The horse grew tired suddenly and stopped still, the cart juddering and slewing to a halt behind it. With a loud cry, the carter turned again then, and saw the fearful bird thing had vanished from the cart. There instead strewn on the sacks, were the corpses of the dead girl and a little swathed thing that might have been anything small and once alive.
“Now,” said the carter, “now, now, now.”
He glanced over from the cart, through the flurry of the snow, and saw a hollow place into which they had almost fallen; the horse had stopped on the very brink. Below was a black pool not much larger than a well.
Touching the dead did not bother him, but now he would rather have not. Even so, it must be seen to. The money was lost, but he had cheated them anyway.
He hauled the girl and her fruit off the cart and flung them over into the hole of water. They went without a note, the water closed, and they might never have been.
When he was a mile farther off, the snow ceased. He gazed back and saw it falling still among the uplands and the raped fields. The trees had the shapes of birds waiting motionless, but for what?
Marie Tante moved with her lamp along a night corridor. She was searching for Moule, who always had gin upon her person. Sometimes Moule would slouch up to the room beside the chamber of the Waterfall, and sit behind the glass partition. Marie
Tante had often come this way to find her. There beside the lever they would stare into the dim inverted bathtub, with its hanging serpent and the horror chair beneath.
At the unlighted corridor’s end, Marie Tante found that she had lost her way. She was not where she had believed she would be. For years she had come in this direction and by this route. She checked in surprise. Here she was on the other corridor, which led to the little cells where newcomers were confined. How could this have happened?
Marie Tante had no imagination. Cruel things stirred her obscurely, but most of the nooks of her brain were closed up, or vacant. It might have been said she was a being who should never have been allowed to live but rather sent back at once to be refashioned, for her life had never gained anything for her, and to others, often, it had been the cause of atrocious evil, misery, and pain.
Lacking intuition, Marie Tante did not consider that something bizarre had occurred, although she knew she should not be where she was. She did not think anything had misled her, let alone that sections of her plane of existence had shifted. No, she merely retraced her steps, and got again onto the path toward the Waterfall.
Then however, as she was turning the corner, her lamp cast up a gigantic shadow on the wall high above her head.
Even Marie Tante was arrested.
She stopped, holding the lamp, and looking.
Then she looked back, over her shoulder.
Far off, at the passage’s other end, something moved. How its shadow had come forward, and so through her lamp, was a mystery. No other lights burned in these corridors when they were not in use.
Marie Tante could not be sure what she had seen. She took it for another warder, a tall man, and called. But the shape was gone now and the shadow also.
She went on and opened the door into the room that overlooked the Waterfall.
Something black rose up in a lump from the floor.
Moule balanced in Marie Tante’s lamplight, hugging herself, pulling faces. On the ground was a smashed bottle. So much for the gin.
