by Tanith Lee
“What’s up, you fool?” said Marie Tante.
“Something’s out there.”
“Yes, old Big Feet wandering about, or that other one, Bettile’s fancy.”
“Oh yes,” said Moule, “oh yes.”
“What did you think it was?” demanded Marie Tante, irritated by the lack of drink. She toed the shards. In a pool of liquid, the label floated, sodden.
“Do you remember,” said Moule, “when we cut off that girl’s hair?”
“What girl?”
“The one who died.”
“The ginger slut? What of it? You got your share of the money.”
“That baby. It was a strange color. Like her hair, the color.”
“Tiraud and Desel will have seen to that.”
Moule mumbled. She glanced into the chamber of the Waterfall, and squeaked. “Look, Marie.”
Marie Tante looked through the glass, where her lamp vaguely shone, and saw that fluid was running from the hose above the chair.
“You dolt. Why work the lever now?”
“I didn’t. See, it’s in place.”
“Some fault in the apparatus,” said Marie Tante. “I’ll report it.”
The smell of the spilled gin was very intense.
“Let’s go away,” said Moule, spinning about like an unwieldy top.
She clutched at the lamp, but Marie Tante kept a firm hold on it.
“It’s the drink,” said Marie Tante, “it’s addled you.”
“Oh, it could be. Let’s go back, where the others are.”
“Yes, they may have some gin.”
Moule followed Marie Tante closely as a scared child, along the dubious, quiet, and unlit passageways.
Down in the courtyard, they passed a pile of furniture, wrecked chairs and parts of tables. Marie Tante seemed to remember it had been stacked up elsewhere, but she did not dwell on this, for obviously the pile had been moved.
The night was bitter cold.
“It’ll snow,” said Moule, staring up at the bright black hardness of the sky.
“So what? We’ll keep warm.”
The lunatics had been propelled, for the period of the dark, to their segregated dormitories. In one of the annexes off the vacated rooms of straw, the warders had a fire going. Into this area Moule darted and went shivering up to the hearth.
Desel and Tiraud sat among the men, smoking their pipes and gambling with the cards. Some of the wardresses too had a game, but Bettile was making a shawl, working the smoky wool cleverly, with harsh sharp twists. The hands of Bettile, which had inflicted so many blows, so much hurt, which had struck down Hilde when she would not parade before the actors, and later held her while another shaved the girl’s scalp, now forced into the shawl some awful psychometry. Only she, on a holiday, could have borne to wear it.
Tiraud got up abruptly. He had been uneasy since this morning’s transaction over the sack.
“Ah, he’s off to his harlot,” said one of the men. “Give Judit my kiss. Tell her I’ll be by.”
Tiraud spat. “Judit? That vermin. I’m only going to stretch my limbs.”
“Don’t take cold. The women’s pen has ice hung from the windows.”
Tiraud was away, removing in turn the lamp Marie Tante had brought in with her.
The room was sunny with firelight, a merry picture, dear friends gathered at a hearth.
There was the drink also. They portioned it out, starving predators with a kill, who must protect each other for the strength of the pack.
The fire described them, their faces and their hands, the angles of their bodies.
And one by one, it described how they flinched and touched at their cheeks or necks, and then gazed up.
A faint whiteness … fell softly through the room.
“Snow,” said Bettile, shaking it from her shawl. “The roof’s leaking. A fine thing.”
“How can it leak? There are the rooms above.”
The snow fell. It fell thickly now and swiftly. They got up. It sizzled in their fire and in the lamps, which flickered.
Then the snow stopped, and only the wet spots were on them, like the marks of God.
“Volpe must be told. Some crack in the wall –”
Marie Tante took a swig from her mug. The gin was hot and laced with sugar from the can on the table.
Moule crouched over the fire. She was thinking of a sister she hated, who lived north of the City, and how she might go calling on her very soon.
“Judit, you filthy cow. Open your legs.”
The queen of lands beyond Sheba and Babylon lay under Tiraud. Her face of a damask sphinx was exposed to the ceiling of the women’s dormitory, and so she saw the snow begin to fall at once. Judit smiled.
“Like it, do you?” said Tiraud. “Dirty whore.”
Judit raised her slim hands into the snow, and Tiraud finished in her with a series of unmusical grunts. As he left her, he stood up into the snowstorm.
On all sides the women were sitting up or getting on their feet. They made little noises like birds greeting the morning sun.
“What is it?” said Tiraud. His eyes were wide. He knew perfectly that the snow was falling in the room, out of the ceiling itself.
“Penguinia,” said Judit calmly, also getting up, her unclean skirt dropping to hide the vulnerable wound of her body. “The country of ice is coming.”
The women were romping now, in the snow, holding out their hands to catch it, rubbing it on their cheeks and eyes. The snow gleamed with its own light, defining the room with a beautiful silver deception, so that the meanness and foulness disappeared, the perspective of pallets and buckets and walls went on forever, becoming hills and distant tumuli. And the women looked young and fresh, lovely, tender.
Tiraud tried to flail the snow away from him like a swarm of wasps. He heard Judit say, “It’s warm as roses.” He rushed toward the door, grabbing up the lamp, flinging himself outside.
“What is it? It’s some trick. Some insane trick of theirs –”
And he heard, from the men’s dormitory, a sudden ululation, not the howls of distress or terror that generally went up there, but a full-throated, gladsome baying.
“Desel –” said Tiraud. He ran down the building, down a flight of stairs. A few lamps burned below, and he raced toward the light, for the darkness was not safe.
The snow had not been warm, not to him. He shuddered and sucked his frozen fingers as he ran. Of course, it had only blown in through the broken windows. What was the matter with him? Crazy as the stinking mad people.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairway, amazed at himself. And from the shadow just beyond the lamps, came a statue, walking.
Tiraud identified the creature at once. Laughable and absurd. And yet. It carried with it the soul of the darkness, and all the fearful majesty of some god of the Egyptian underworld. It was the spirit of the gin bottle, and only through that could Tiraud, ignorant of all things but self, have identified it: The Penguin.
It moved as a penguin moves, in a lurching waddle, but very slowly, ponderously, like a juggernaut of the East, a mechanism that had the power of ambulation. It was seven feet in height, perhaps taller. On its white breast the smudge of foxy color. Its head black as stone, black-eyed, and its beak was made to be a weapon of death.
From the dark it came, bringing the dark with it, and went across the space, not heeding the man who watched it, paralyzed, and away again into shadow.
Tiraud’s legs gave way and deposited him on the lowest step. Here he flopped, not able for some while to recollect motion.
Then at last he rose, cuddling the stair rail, and next shot himself staggeringly off into the passage It had left alone.
And as he wove and sped, Tiraud screamed. The scream burst from him uncontrollably, like steam from a kettle.
He reached the dayrooms of Madness, screaming like this, and screaming he thrust back among his brothers and sisters, the warders. So, being used to it, and to a particu
lar reply, they took him, beat him, knocked him to the earth.
“What now? Are you cracked like the rubbish upstairs?”
“I saw –” said Tiraud, lying at their feet.
“Saw what?”
They did not seem skeptical, but as if they had anticipated this messenger out of the web of the building.
Yet even now he did not dare to tell the truth. He sat and nursed his knees. “Give me a bloody drink.” And then he thought of the image on the bottle and pushed the liquor aside. “Someone’s out,” said Tiraud. “One of them’s escaped. Wandering in the corridors.” That was all he could say, to them, and to himself, to justify what he had seen. For what he had seen was not real. Then for a moment, he thought of the dead body in the sack. So he reached for the drink after all.
The warders became ferocious, accusing one another. How had one of the lunatics evaded the nightly shutting-up? (And Tiraud, drinking, realized he had not relocked the women’s dormitory. He had left them scampering about there and the door had only to be tried –)
And all at once, miles high it seemed, the bacchante cries of women flew through the upper air of the building and unravelled away.
“The beasts are out – all of them,” exclaimed Marie Tante, Her eyes lit, and Bettile put down her shawl.
There, in their cave of firelight, they listened. The vision seemed conjured in the room, the mad people in their white rags, flying along the upper corridors, down the steps, across the yards, and up into the other blocks, figures painted by a strange white light, like the moon, with streaming hair and outstretched arms.
Desel strutted forward.
“Idiots! Some of you – you and you, you three there – go to the men’s place and see to them. Use your sticks. And you women, you go after those bitches. You’ll be sorry, Tiraud, screwing your brains out on that trollop and forgetting the door. I know. Go and alert Volpe now. Why should he sleep, the bastard?”
In his downy bed, within his luxurious flat, Dr. Volpe, full of dinner and brandy, was dreaming.
He performed on the piano to a vast audience, up on a great white stage. He felt his genius flood from him.
But it was very cold. His fingers were losing feeling. They stuck to the keys, burning. It came to him, the piano was made of ice, and the stage also was ice. In horror he stared about him, and found he was adrift on the ice floe in the midst of a coal-black sea by night. And from the sky rang hammering blows.
These blows woke him. He lay huddled, the warmth slipping back into his body, gradually understanding that someone smote on the door. His housekeeper had gone to the City on some errand. He would have to attend to the door himself. And what could it mean, this nocturnal racket, but only trouble?
Still shivering, he lit his lamp, and fumbling himself into his dressing gown, he sought the door.
The warder Desel and some other man stood there.
“The lunatics have escaped, doctor, and are running all over the buildings, perhaps the grounds.”
“What?” said Dr. Volpe.
Desel repeated his cryptic news. Volpe sensed, correctly, that even in agitation, Desel drew enjoyment from Volpe’s fright.
“They must be caught,” said Volpe superfluously. “They may damage things – they may harm themselves.”
“The others are going about, doctor, trying to capture the wretches. They will, of course, be as gentle as they can, but restraint or blows are probable.”
“No, no,” feebly said Volpe.
Desel glowered with authority.
“They’re violent. Suppose they get out on the road?”
“Ah … yes.”
Volpe drew back into the room. He strained his ears but heard nothing at all, not the faintest cry.
Desel said, “We’ll inform you, doctor, of events.”
“Yes,” said Volpe. “Good, trustworthy men. I can leave this – in your hands.”
When he had shut them out, Volpe bolted and locked the door. He hurried to the window.
Something pallid flitted among the chestnut trees – or did he imagine it? He was sensitive and now his nerves were bad. He could no longer see anything moving there.
A loud crack caused him to jump. He gazed transfixed at the hothouse. Some panes of glass had given way, he could not see them, yet he felt the hiss of coldness coming in upon the winter fruit.
Because he had been woken, the brandy he had drunk was affecting him uncomfortably. His heart beat in a rattling way in the midst of his frame.
There was an impure and acid smell in the room.
Dr. Volpe turned, tracing the smell at once to the ewer of water standing beside his plants. He went to the ewer, sniffed at it. He recoiled. One of those men must have played a joke on him. It was in bad taste, and besides he could not think how it had been done, since neither of them had entered the room. The ewer, however, was full of their disgusting gin.
Volpe wanted to open the window and pour the muck out but was afraid to. Perhaps the mad people were on the roof and might, somehow, reach down –
And perhaps one of the mad people had got into his apartment as he slept, and contaminated the water.
Volpe was immobilized by terror for some minutes.
Finally, trembling, he lit the other lamps in the room, and then in the bedroom, and armed with the poker from the dead fire, he stole around, parting curtains and peeking into closets.
No one was there, and nothing but the ewer had been disturbed.
A dreadful compulsion made him go at last to the ewer, dip in one finger, and lick it. The flavor was like venom; it made him gag, as he had known it would. He raised the jug and bore it into the bath chamber, pouring it away through the drain of the bath. Then he employed the tap, and from its nozzle ran a stream of stuff that stank just like the gin, that surely was gin, although how could it be?
Volpe shut off the tap and panted back into his sitting room.
In the lamplight, the birds’ eggs and the growing plants glistened oddly, as if they had been coated with moisture or frost. And on their pins the butterflies flamed, and the remains of the butterfly that had crumbled were like metallic dust.
Reaching the male dormitory, the three men found the door was shut and locked. The calling of the women had faded, and they had seen none of them. Marie Tante and her crew would take care of this.
There was no longer any noise, either, from the male dormitory.
Armed with their sticks, and certain other implements, iron hooks, and so on, the warders decided to go in and effect a lesson on the madmen who had howled of their own volition.
The door was undone.
The long room, substantially exactly the same as that which housed the women of the asylum, was undisturbed. But by their pallets the men stood, every one of them, voiceless and intent, as if ready. Even the worst cases, who seldom kept still even asleep, were poised and altered. The man worried by insects did not hit out at them, the swaying man scarcely moved. On the grinning face of the man who grinned, the pain had been mitigated by a curious attention.
“What’s this row, then?” asked one of the warders, irrationally, of the silence, and a couple of others hefted their sticks and hooks.
Thin as the thinnest rope, the mad sailor, Maque, walked forward from his bed place.
“I’ve sailed the seas,” said Maque, “but I never saw the cold country of the snow.”
“Shut up, you,” said the foremost warder. “Or do you want a bit of this?”
Maque leapt up in the air, straight at the warder. Maque’s bony hands and nails like claws tore furrows in the flesh of throat and face. And as the warder raised his stick, shrieking, his fellows roiled forward. But in that moment a colossal sound passed through the building, through atmosphere, through stone, and through every atom in between. It was the resonance of an enormous organ, or perhaps the music of the arctic wind that threaded some hollow pipe of ice floating in eternity.
After the sound, the wind itself rushed across the r
oom. It blasted against the warders and threw them back, and they careered about with their eyes starting, yelling at the cold savagery of it, the sticks and iron ripped from their frozen hands.
Where they fell, the lunatics sprinted by and over them. As if at this signal, the prisoners darted out to freedom.
Of the felled warders, the two that could got up and pursued the madmen, shouting and cursing. One man, whose leg had been snapped, pulled himself along the corridor, begging his comrades not to leave him, but when he reached the turn of the passage a huge shadow went by and the warder buried his head in his arms, gibbering.
Marie Tante, Bettile, and their sisters could not find the madwomen. In small groups, they spread out through the buildings, searching. They too carried lamps and sticks, and a few had brought mad-shirts, in preparation.
From outside the blocks of the asylum, it was possible to see these lamplights passing up and down the windows of the buildings, and now and then over the yards, which gave the bizarre impression that parts of the masonry were shifting about, going from spot to spot, crossing over one another.
Sometimes a shout would echo down the night, but it carried no meaning except alarm or rage.
No snow had fallen on the outer ground, or if it had, it was invisible. Only the great cold was there, and the moonless shine of stars.
In the last block, Dr. Volpe’s apartment burned with frantic light. Once or twice he appeared at the window. He had heard a peculiar sound but now believed it was only his overwrought nerves that had caused it, inside his own head.
Small pieces of glass from the hothouse lay on the grass like fragments shed from the duller stars.
The captives of the asylum strayed down, maybe from force of habit, to the rooms of straw to which they were herded by day. They had never been there in the dark.
Citalbo met Judit, and Maque appeared with blood under his nails. The rest followed them.
Uncoerced, they went into the annex where the warders had been sitting at their fire. This room was warm and magical, and the people called lunatic wandered about in it, examining the things their jailors had left lying, the cards and pipes, and the hideous shawl, which Judit cast suddenly into the flames of the hearth.
