Red as Blood: or tales from the Sisters Grimmer

by Tanith Lee

  But he was not his father. And abruptly there came an awful suspicion. That he had been brought here for no other reason than to be protected from the city, from all cities, to be protected from the long, animated discussions and card games that ran into the early hours, from the theaters, the cafés, the pure excitement that a city symbolized. A prisoner. In that moment he thought of the girl again, and a strange revelation swept over him with a maddening sense of relief. Could it be she too was kept as a prisoner? That the loathsome man had brought her there and shut her up there, keeping all company away from her. Perhaps she had mentioned Viktor innocently, hoping for a repetition, and the devilish uncle had flown at her, battering her with the vulture’s wings of his cape—No, no, you must go nowhere, see no one. I shall make sure he never comes here again.

  But Viktor was powerless to alleviate her destiny. Powerless to alleviate his own.

  He wondered which wine would be served with luncheon.

  —

  By the time the sun set on the lake he was very drunk. Somehow, he had contrived to be drinking all day. He did not know why this had seemed necessary, had not even thought about it. His mother’s fear for him had begun it, and his fear for himself. As if by dipping into the vortex now and then, he could accustom himself to it, make it natural and mundane.

  When the gong sounded for dinner he did not go down. He was afraid of Ilena seeing him as he was. But of course she came up, touched his forehead to see if he had a fever, gazed at him with her deep remorseless eyes. If she smelled the wine on his breath he was not certain, he tried not to let her, muffling himself in the counterpane from the bed, protesting he had a slight cold, wanted only to sleep—finally she left him. He lay and giggled, curled on his side, laughed at her a long while, then found himself crying.

  He was surprised and shocked. He knew he was going to do something stupid, then, and such was his mental confusion that it was only two glasses of wine later that he realized what.

  —

  Rowing this drunk was much easier. He scarcely felt it at all, the grisly laboring drags and thrustings. Nor did he feel any anticipatory unease.

  It was quite late, overcast, and a wind rising and falling. This would account perhaps for his only suddenly hearing the music that came from the island, when he was about a hundred yards from the reeds and the summer house. The gramophone. So near, it was obviously no orchestra, tinny and hesitant, cognisant of the little box that held it, and the big horn that let it out. Did the fact that the gramophone was playing mean the man was away? The man in the hat and greatcoat, the man like a black vulture? Or home?

  What would Viktor do if he met the man?

  Call his hand, of course. Just what he should have done before.

  But really there was no need, if Viktor were careful, if he used the qualities of cunning and omnipotence he now felt stirring within himself, no need to meet the man.

  Gently now. The reeds moved about him m a wave and the boat jumped jarringly against the rotted post. With the drunkard’s lack of coordination and contrastingly acute assessment, he had seen landfall and planned for it and messed it up, all in a space of seconds. With an oath and some mirth, he tethered the boat and got ashore on the island.

  No swans. Just the music. And, as he passed the pavilion, the music ran down and went out. He had reached the edge of the lawn before it started up again, a cheerful frivolous syncopation that sounded macabre, suddenly, in the dark.

  But there were lights in the house, two windows a thick deep amber behind drawn blinds. They were on the other side of the veranda from the window she had called him from, the window of the room into which she had subsequently led him for a few minutes of reasonless dialogue, and a burning mouthful of tea.

  The out buildings loomed. He ducked under the rose vine, stepped over the china animal still lying there, and beneath the flagpole. He went toward the lighted windows, and paused, pressed against the veranda rail. Through the music he could hear the murmur of voices, or of a single voice. And now he could see that one of the blinds was not quite level with the sill. A trio of inches gaped, a deeper gold, showing slyly into the nakedness of the house.

  Viktor advanced onto the veranda, crossed to the window and kneeled down, putting his face close to the pane. It was as simple as that. He saw directly into the room.

  It was an amazing sight, a scene from a farce. He had no urge to laugh.

  To the jolting beat of a dance melody, a couple moved about between the furniture. A huge oil lamp threw light upon them, leaving the corners of the room in a magenta vignette. The girl was white, white hair, white dress; the man a black creature, clutching her close. The tall hat was gone from his head, which was covered with a snarled bush of reddish hair similar to that which sprang from the face. This face, that was for one instant in view on a turn, vanished on another, came in view again, was steeled in concentration, looking blindly away with its weasel eyes. Now and then the mouth spoke. Viktor found himself able to lip-read, with the slight aid of muffled sounds through the glass, and realized his adversary was counting out the beats. The girl’s face was blank. Neither danced with pleasure or interest and yet, oddly, they danced quite well, the man surprisingly fluid, the girl following like a doll.

  Like a doll, yes, that was exactly what she was like.

  Abruptly the dance ended. The man let go and stood back, and the gramophone ran down. In the silence, the voice spoke, quite audible now.

  “Better. You are better. But you must smile while you dance.”

  The girl was facing in Viktor’s direction. He saw her face at once break into a soulless grimace.

  “No, no.” The man was displeased. “A smile. Soft, flexible. Like this.”

  He turned away, and any smile that face could conjure, how could it be at all appealing? And yet the girl presumably copied his expression. And now, agitated, Viktor saw her smile limpidly and beautifully. He was charmed by her smile, mimicked incredibly from the monster.

  “Better,” the monster said again. There was a trace of accent, had been when he spoke to Viktor earlier in the day, unnoticed then in the alarm of the interview. What was it? Germanic, perhaps. “Now, sit down. Walk to that chair and sit on it. As I have shown you.”

  The girl, still with a trace of the magical smile on her lips, went to the chair, and seated herself, ladylike and graceful.

  “Good, that is good. Now we will talk.”

  The girl waited obediently, her eggshell face uplifted.

  “The gardens. A bench,” said the man. Viktor noted, all at once, that along with everything else incongruous, the foreigner still wore his greatcoat, securely fastened. “It is late in the morning. I have sat beside you. Good-day, m’mselle.”

  “Good day,” she replied aloofly, turning her head a little away.

  “I hope I do not disturb you?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Have I seen you here before, m’mselle?”

  “It’s possible. Sometimes I walk my dog here.”

  “Ah, yes. Your dog. A delightful little fellow.”

  “I am training him to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Perhaps you would be so kind—”

  “But of course. Ah! How clever he is.”

  “Thank you. I should be very lonely without him.”

  “But are you alone, m’mselle? A lady like yourself…”

  “Quite alone.” The girl sighed softly. Her eyes were lowered. The extraordinary playacting went on and on. “My uncle, you understand, has business affairs which take him often from home.”

  “Then, you spend all day in an empty flat?”

  “Just so. It is very tiresome, I’m afraid.”

  “But then, m’mselle, might I ask you to take luncheon with me?”

  “Why—” the girl hesitated. Her eyes fluttered upward, and stayed, their attention distracted. It took Viktor several moments, so objective had he become, to understand it was on him her gaze had faltered and then adhered.
She had seen him peering in under the blind.

  Stricken with dismay, he seemed changed to stone. But the man, with a flap of his black wings, paid no heed to the direction of her eyes.

  “Continue,” he barked sharply. “Go on, go on!” The white girl only gazed into Viktor’s horrified stare. Then suddenly she began to laugh, rocking herself, clasping her hands—delighted wild laughter.

  “On! On!” She cried. She bubbled, almost enchanting, somehow not. “On!”

  The man reached her in two strides, and shook her. “Be quiet. Quiet!” The girl stopped laughing. She became composed, and so remained as he coldly and intently ranted at her. “Was it for this I bought you in that slum, sores and verminous bites all over you, for this? You will be still. You will attend. You will learn. You hear me?”

  The effect of those repeated words upon Viktor was awful. They seemed to deprive him of all the strength of his inebriation. Stunned and totally unnerved, he came noiselessly to his feet. He crossed the veranda, praying she would say nothing of having seen him. But she would not, surely. She was not quite normal, not even quite sane—He reached the veranda step and misjudged it, saw his misjudgment in the moment he made it, could alter nothing, and fell heavily against the railing.

  The clamor seemed to throb through every wooden board and timber of the house. Before he could regain enough balance to break into a run, something crashed over in the lighted room, and then the main door flew open and a black beast came out of it.

  He had known this would happen. Somehow he had come here for this—this goal of self-destruction.

  “What are you doing?” the thing demanded. It caught hold of him, and he was brought about to face it again. All the rich light was behind the man now, full on Viktor. There were no excuses to be made. He flinched from the man’s odorless cold breath. “You are here? You dared to come back?”

  Viktor pulled some part of himself together.

  “Of course I dared. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “You trespass.”

  “No. I came to see you.”

  “Why? This island is private. You were told to keep away.”

  “You have no right to—”

  “Every right. It is mine. I warned you.”

  “Go to hell,” said Viktor. He was afraid. Could not control his limbs, barely his voice and the slurred movements of his mouth.

  “No,” said the man. “It is you who will go there. I will send you there.” And with no further preliminary, he punched Viktor in the arm and, as he stumbled away grunting with shocked pain, on the side of the jaw. Viktor fell backward in the grass, and saw through a sliding haze, the man coming on at him.

  As he rolled bonelessly against the legs of the veranda, the man kicked him in the side. The impact was vicious, filling him now with terror more than pain. Somehow, Viktor came to his feet.

  “No,” he said, and put up his arm. Like a big black bear the man lunged at him, bringing down both his fists together, sweeping away the protective arm as if it were a rag. The pain was awful this time, and the blow had been meant, clearly, for his head. Viktor had an impulse to curl up on the turf, allowing the man to beat him until he wearied himself and left his victim alone. Instead, Viktor’s own fist lashed out. He caught the man on the ‘nose, which began at once to bleed dark runnels of blood. But the madman scarcely hesitated. He flung his whole body after Viktor and caught him round the waist.

  For a moment then Viktor felt himself trapped, and envisaged dying. To be weary would not be enough for his enemy. Only death could turn him aside. The man was squeezing him, choking him; stars burst in Viktor’s brain.

  “I warned you,” said the man.

  Some remnant of self-preservation—actually a story told him once by a prostitute—caused Viktor spontaneously to knee the hugging bear in its groin.

  There was a dreadful sound, a sort of implosion, and the paws let him go. Staggering, Viktor ran.

  There followed a nightmare sequence during which the china animal in the bushes tried to trip him, the grass and tree roots likewise. Then he plunged into water, found a rope, tore it free, and collapsed into the boat, crying for mercy to the darkness.

  Somehow he made the oars work, and somehow the man did not come after him. Yet it was with the utmost fear that Viktor thrashed his way toward the midst of the lake. There, sobbing for breath, he lay still on the oars, and the great night grew still about him.

  It seemed to be a long while afterward that he began to row for the chateau. And by then he seemed, too, to be quite sober, but perhaps he was not, his feelings a slow chilled turmoil where nothing anymore made sense. My little dog does tricks—Ah what a clever fellow—better, m’mselle, better— And in the middle of it all, something came over the last stretch of water from the shore, from the lawns where the chateau stood, serene and dislocated from reality.

  It was a white something, and for a demented moment he thought the girl had jumped into the lake and swum out ahead of him. But no, it was a swan.

  Feeling ill, he leaned on the oars, drifting, watching the swan come toward him. He became aware he must have disturbed it. It did not move like a ship but ran at him standing up on the water, napping its wings which suddenly seemed enormous, like two white sheets. And abruptly the swan was beside him, hissing like a snake, smiting the boat, the air, his flesh. He tried frantically to beat it off, to make for shore. This second nightmare sequence had no logic and afterward he did not properly remember it. All at once the boat slewed and he was in the water. It was colder than before, and an agonizing something had happened to his arm. He no longer had any control at all.

  The first time he sank into the lake he shouted in terror, but the water was so very cold he could not shout again. And then he was falling down through it, knowing he was about to die, in absolute horror and despair, unable to save himself.

  —

  A month later he learned a servant, smoking a cigarette on the lawn near to the water, had seen the swan attack, and the accident with the boat. The man had leapt heroically into the lake and saved Viktor, while the swan faded away into the dark.

  The broken arm and the fever had debilitated Viktor, and as soon as he was well enough his mother returned them all to the city.

  “A terrible thing,” Ilena said. “You might well have been drowned. I remember a story of a boy drowned in that lake. Whatever possessed you?”

  “I don’t know,” Viktor said listlessly, propped up in bed, surrounded by the depressing medicines, the dreary novels.

  Ilena said nothing at all, but weeks after, apropos another matter, Janov mentioned a man who had kept his mistress on one of the islands, a young girl reckoned to be simple. It seemed they had packed up suddenly and gone away, and the house was in a nasty state, full of damp and mice.

  It was half a year before any of them thought Viktor fully recovered. He had begun to play cards with Uncle Janov, and next, billiards. Viktor had stopped drinking beyond the merest glass at dinner; he had taken a dislike for light and noise, painting and discussion. And so Ilena sent him to Paris, when he no longer wanted to go.

  —

  It was more than fifteen years later that he saw the girl again. In the winter of the northern city, the ice lay in blue rifts upon the sea, and a copper sun bled seven degrees above the horizon. He had been to visit his mother, cranky and bemused, in the house on Stork Street. Such visits, as the years went by, had become increasingly bizarre. Something was happening to Ilena. Arthritis, for one thing, had crippled her, twisting her elegant figure like the stem of a slender blasted tree. Betrayed by her bones, her sensibilities gave way. She made demands on Viktor and on everyone, calling the servants constantly: Bring me that pomander, that box of cigarettes. I want tea. I want my book of cuttings. She drove them mad, and she drove Viktor mad, also. Uncle Janov was dead. He had died ten months before, sitting bolt upright at the card table, without a sound. No one realized he had absented himself until he refused to play his hand.

&n
bsp; There had been a war, too, setting the whole world on its ear. Somehow, some had escaped the worst of that.

  To Viktor himself, time had offered a few patronizing gifts. He had published four novels with reasonable success. More than anything, writing, which he performed indifferently now, and no longer with any pleasure, gave him an excuse for doing nothing else. He had become, he was afraid, the perfect archetype of what the masses reckoned an author to be: one too lazy to attempt anything more valuable. The family meanwhile remained wealthy; he really had no need to do anything at all, except, possibly, to marry, which he had idly been considering. A much-removed cousin had been presented as a candidate, a lushly attractive young woman, with indeed some look of Viktor himself. She was a nice girl, quite intelligent and entertaining, and maternally adequate, being ten years his junior. An ideal match. It would soothe Dena, giving her the sense that the family continued, giving her, too,‘ something fresh to criticize. For himself, the proposed liaison was rather like his “work.” Something to give him an excuse to attempt nothing else. His libido, having reached a peak in his early twenties, was already diminishing. Sex had already lost all its alluring novelty. He had ceased to fall in love, and beyond a very occasional evening with one of the city’s hetaeras, he had put all that away, as it were, in some cabinet of his physical emotions.

  And then, he saw the girl again.

  It would not have been true to say he had often thought of her. He had scarcely thought of her at all as the years went by. And despite a fleeting reference to the peculiar events on the island inserted into his first book, he had never really reexamined the case. It had seemed to him very quickly that nothing much had happened at all. It had been merely a series of coincidental occurrences, made dramatic only by his state of mind and the ultimate plunge into the lake. The fact that he had never returned to the chateau did not strike him as particularly ominous. He had been bored there. Just as he had mostly been bored in Paris and was now bored almost all the time and almost everywhere. The only difference was that his fear of boredom had gone away. He was accustomed to it now and expected nothing else. It had come to fit him, suit him quite comfortably, like a well-worn dressing gown.