by Tad Williams
She was built like a ballet dancer, no fat anywhere, her breasts small as a very young woman’s, with amaranth-colored buds on the tips as firm and cold as ice cream still hard from the freezer. A delicate shimmer of fine pale hair descended in an almost invisible line from her navel and across her flat lower stomach to the delicate swelling of her pubis, where it joined the tiny puff of near-whiteness that hid the cleft. As I held her legs apart to look at her there, the muscles of her thighs quivered and she made a noise as if she fought back tears. She pulled herself upright in what seemed more than ever like desperation, put her hands flat against my chest to shove me backward, then took my cock in her mouth and did things to me with her startlingly cool tongue that I still cannot quite explain or even remember clearly, but the sensation was enough to make me fall back on the floor and lay there for long moments, unable to do anything except let it happen and hope it would never stop. Her hands kept moving the whole time, stroking, cradling, her chilly, tender fingers everywhere, distracting and delightful.
Soon enough, though, she lifted herself up on one elbow, holding me in her hand and squeezing gently, her eyes glinting with mischief. “More? Or do you need a rest?”
I answered the only way I was capable of at that moment: I rolled over and wrestled her to the floor again, then began to lick and kiss and nibble my way from her face to her toes and back up again, stopping somewhere in the middle of the second traverse to nose my head between her thighs. She yanked down one of the filmy curtains surrounding the bed and let it settle over us, then took an end of it and looped it slowly and lovingly around my neck, using it as a bridle to speed me up or slow me down as I indulged myself in her astonishing, wonderful wetness. I heard her cry out my name until even that last word disappeared into less articulate sounds. But as much as I loved the taste of her, the cold skin and the warm, salty damp, I couldn’t wait long-in fact, I couldn’t wait any longer. As she lay catching her breath, I sat up between her thighs and began to position myself over her, but she was not going to let me do it, not yet. She rolled me onto my back, putting a finger over my mouth to silence my questions, and then squatted on her heels above me, teasing my hardness with her own silky softness, rubbing back and forth without allowing me to penetrate, until I was almost as desperate as in the most frightening moments of our struggle, with her knife pressed against me. Then, as if we still struggled, I suddenly summoned my remaining strength and wrestled her onto her back. This time I was the one who stabbed at her, and she was the one who gasped out a cry that sounded like agony. Cold, cold, her skin was so cold…but inside she was hot as a furnace. I cried out then, too, shocked and amazed and overwhelmed that it could be like this-that anything could be like this.
“He’s never been here,” she said as we lay on her bed later, naked and sweaty. “He doesn’t know about this place.”
“I guessed, actually. Wouldn’t be a very good hiding place if he knew it, and he’s the one you’re hiding from, right?”
She nodded. I couldn’t help staring at her flawless features, her schoolgirl face and ancient eyes, and wondering again what she really looked like, but somehow it didn’t matter as much to me as it had before. “Not just hiding from. Running away from.”
“What do you mean? And if he’s never been here, why do you have clothes for him here?”
“Because I had the same contractors build it who did all the rest of our…hideaways. And to keep them from being suspicious I did everything the same, including stocking the closets with his clothes. I handled all the bills, and he doesn’t care how much things cost, anyway. He’s a duke of Hell-money is like water to him, he turns on his faucets and it pours out. So I had them build this one just for me. I decorated it myself. I know you think it’s ghastly.”
“No,” I said, “not at all. Just…surprising. Not what I would have expected.”
“It was something I dreamed of when I was a girl. Don’t worry, we also had the boring Aspen cabin with the fabulous view and the boring Manhattan penthouse on Central Park West, and even a boring little chalet in Gstaad. But this one is mine. So if you spoil the secret and make me give it up I swear I’ll kill you, Bobby Dollar.”
For a moment the tone of her voice made me raise up on my elbow to see if she was kidding. She didn’t look like she was. “Did you really…fall for him? Like you said?”
She shrugged and rolled onto her side to root in a bedside drawer. She took out a slim golden case and removed a cigarette, then offered the case to me.
“No, thanks. Had to give it up years ago.”
She lit up anyway, then settled back on her pillow and watched the smoke lift lazily toward the surprisingly high ceiling. “I don’t know, maybe you were right. Maybe I didn’t fall for him so much as I fell for what he had, what he could do-what someone like him could mean to someone like me.” She frowned. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Then you don’t have to, Casimira.”
“Caz. Nobody’s called me Casimira much for a couple of hundred years.”
I looked at her. My surprise must have shown.
“Yes, I’m old,” she said. “I’ve been around a while. How about you?”
“We never know, and they sure don’t tell us. I don’t remember any farther back than the 1990s, which is when I first got to Earth.”
She dragged on her cigarette, let a plume of smoke geyser upward. “Lucky.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.” She put the cigarette out in an ashtray on her bedside table, grinding it dead with surprising force. “I didn’t mean to get you into this, but I’m sorry anyway.”
Even now, after all that had happened between us, I still found myself reflexively mistrustful. Who ever heard of a demon apologizing? Was she laying it on too thick? Had I just fallen for the oldest con job since the apple? “From what you’ve said it wasn’t your fault,” I offered. “It was Grasswax’s.”
“Yes, but if I hadn’t tried to leave Eligor-if I hadn’t stolen from him so I’d have some protection against him-”
“Slow down, Caz. You stole from him because you left him? Not the other way around?”
For just a moment I saw the return of that sharp flare of anger, but then it passed and something infinitely sadder crept into her eyes. “He wouldn’t have let me go any other way, Bobby. Once something belongs to him, it’s his forever. He’s that way even with his living possessions-no, even more with the ones that are alive. Someone like me, who’s likely to live as long as he does and would be a permanent reproach to him…well, he’d much rather destroy me than let me go, whether he still wanted me or not.”
“So you stole this…feather. To blackmail him into leaving you alone?” I was mostly guessing since I still had no idea what the feather actually was but didn’t want to reveal the depths of my ignorance. I was relieved when she nodded.
“I guess you could say that. But I don’t want to think about him any more-about any of it. You’re here. I’m here. We may never have this moment again.” She shook her head. “What am I saying? We won’t have this moment ever again.” She smiled a hard little smile. “Obviously we were never meant to be.”
I was badly torn between wanting to tell her I’d never leave her, which was truly how I felt at that moment, and wondering still if this was just some elaborate scam-if I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a cynical ploy from a self-serving demoness. I certainly knew which side the oddsmakers would have chosen, but looking at those wide, almost tearful eyes it was hard to let my more critical self do its job. “Whatever we are or whatever we’re meant to be, you’re right-we have right now,” I said, and pulled her toward me so I could kiss her neck. She rolled closer, then fastened herself against me so that I could feel the wetness we had made together pressed warmly against my leg.
“Oooh,” she said, reaching down and giving me a squeeze. “It appears your chariot is no longer swinging low, Mr. Dollar.” Her voice dropped down to a husky ras
p. “What do you say, Wings? Would you like to…carry me home again?”
Caz was asleep, her hair spread in a white-gold fan across the crimson pillowcase, her back nearly as slender as a child’s. I could count every knob of her vertebrae and watch the muscles move beneath the skin every time she changed position.
I crawled out of bed to take a shower. As I dried off I tried to call Sam and the others but couldn’t get a signal. Perhaps the walls of Caz’s hideaway had been constructed to block transmissions. After seeing her secret agent garage, I could believe it. Whatever the case, I was going to have to get in touch with somebody on my side soon, just to make sure Sam and Monica were all right, if nothing else. And I knew it wouldn’t hurt me to get away from the Countess for a while. Any objectivity I might once have had about her was long gone, and even though there was still so much I didn’t know about her and so many reasons for me not to trust her, I couldn’t help looking at her as she slept and feeling a clutch in my chest I hadn’t felt for a long time. In fact, I didn’t think I had ever felt quite like this. That would have been scary enough with any woman, but with this one it seemed damned near suicidal.
As if she could read my troubled thoughts, Caz began to twitch a little in her sleep, then to whimper. She rolled over and pushed feebly at something that wasn’t there, then scrabbled at her pillow in a way that reminded me so much of what she’d done to my cheek a couple of hours earlier during our struggle that I reached up to touch the tender, healing scrapes.
“No,” she said faintly, “no, no!” She was struggling harder now but the nightmare still seemed grip her tightly. I sat down on the bed next to her and gently lifted her eyelids with my fingertips, still mistrustful enough to think it might be a trick, but her pupils did not contract, which they should have done even in a dim room. Instead she grabbed at my hands, slapped at them and fought against me, but so weakly I could tell that she was still deep in her oppressive dream. Her cries became more articulate, and now tears ran from her shuttered lids and down her cheek.
“Caz!” I said, shaking her. “Caz, wake up! It’s just a nightmare. You’re having a bad dream.” I couldn’t believe I was saying something like this to one of Hell’s minions, but I couldn’t just sit by and watch her suffer either. Nothing I did seemed to help, though, and at last I pulled her out of the bed and stood her on her feet, holding her tight to keep her from falling. This seemed to drag her back to some kind of consciousness, although I regretted the decision almost immediately because as soon as she got her balance she attacked me with nearly as much savagery as before, although this time it was clear she didn’t know who I was. I defended myself, doing my best not to hurt her, and after a short struggle she became less frenetic in her movements. She came slowly back to herself as though surfacing from deep waters.
“What…?” She looked around at what must have been the familiar sights of her windowless room, then down at her own slim, naked form. “Why…?”
“I really hope you remember why you don’t have any clothes on, Caz, because if you don’t I’m going to have a tough time convincing you.”
She looked up at me, her eyes troubled. “Don’t ever joke about that, Bobby. We’re here. Of course it all happened. I just didn’t know why I was…” She shook her head.
“You were having a nightmare. I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t.”
Her eyes suddenly filled but did not overspill. It was precisely those tears, which should have set all my alarm bells jangling, that finally made me stop doubting her. They had been so fast to rise-surely nobody, not even a trained actress, could come thrashing up from sleep and make a real physical body jump through hoops that way. “It wasn’t a nightmare,” she said. “It was a memory.”
She climbed back into the bed, pulling the covers up to her waist. With her youthful, wide-eyed face and long white-gold hair cascading over her naked shoulders she might have been a portrait of Alice that Reverend Dodgson would have kept locked away and shown to no one-not even God.
“It was him. I was dreaming about him,” she said, closing her eyes with a shudder.
“Eligor?”
She laughed. “No, the first ‘him’ in my life. The man who owned me. The man I killed.” I didn’t say a word-I didn’t dare-but she must have sensed something in my silence. Her eyes opened, and she gave me a crooked grin. “You didn’t think I got sent to Hell by mistake, do you? Believe me, Bobby, I earned every single moment of my damnation.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you do, I’ll listen.”
“There’s not a lot to say. It was a long time ago. He was an important man, the hrabia-the count, we’d say now. His name was Pawel, and his family owned most of the land around Lublin.”
“Poland.” Now I finally understood that whisper of middle-European under the British schoolgirl diction. “When was this?”
“Do you really want to know?” She smiled, but it was a bitter one. “I hope you like older women. Much older. Let’s put it this way-you know about the Renaissance? Well, it was before that.”
I didn’t say anything. Something was happening here, something as powerful and inevitable as a storm, but I had already decided to hunker down and let it wash over me.
“They gave me to him,” she said. “That’s how they did things in those days. I was scarcely fifteen years old. Practically an old maid!” She laughed. It hurt to hear it. “And Count Pawel looked every inch the part. He was tall, handsome, a brave soldier, and a firm ruler. He was also twisted inside, twisted and bent and broken.” She shuddered. “He still is. Even in Hell he’s considered dangerous.”
“You have to…see him?”
She shook her head. “Any business between us is long over. He’s happier persecuting the dead than he ever was on Earth. But for a while, when we were both alive, I was his favorite plaything.”
“You don’t have to-”
She lifted a hand. “I want to. You…you deserve to know the truth. But come and sit next to me. It would be nice to have someone near.”
I sat beside her and took her hand. I could sense she didn’t want to be looked at, so I leaned back and stared at the ceiling and the draperies as they swayed gently in the breeze of the air-conditioning.
“He was a monster. Some are discovered, but some are never known except by their victims. He was one of those sort; the subtle, clever kind of monster. Never killed anyone powerful, never tormented anyone who could fight back-although, since he was a high nobleman, he had a wide array of victims to choose from, of course.
“With me it was different. Yes, he raped me over and over, but that was nothing unusual for the time. I was his wife, and he owned me. A little thing like reluctance bordering on terror only added savor for him, and as my terror grew so did his enjoyment. He went out of his way to find things that would frighten me and hurt me. And he hurt others in front of me, especially women…and girls. The servants were no more than furniture-no, they were no more than animals. Either way, they were possessions, and unlike Elizabeth Bathory or Gilles de Rais, he was just careful enough with his crimes that no one ever felt the need to stop him.
“And if God had not punished me enough, I also had to live with his mother Justyna, the dowager countess, a harridan who never killed anyone but in her own way was every bit as cold and cruel as her son. Worse, in some ways, because she understood some of the subtler cruelties only other women know how to use. She employed them gleefully, too. My family were only minor nobility, and she never thought I was good enough for her Pawel.
“I gave that monster and his bitch mother two heirs, both boys, and I lived each day of my life in dread. If any of the servants showed me any sympathy or kindness beyond the strict performance of their duties Pawel or his mother went out of their way to punish them. Justyna all but snatched my own boys away from me and raised them herself to be certain they grew up to be Pawel’s sons and nothing of mine…” She trailed off, then took a deep breath and resum
ed.
“And one night it was finally all too much. I won’t trouble you with details, but my husband had recently killed a sweet little servant girl I favored, and only that day I had seen her buried in our churchyard. He came to me that evening and, as he took me, showed me a lock of her hair that he had cut from her head in the coffin, and which he had put into a locket to give me, ‘So that you may keep your little peasant girl with you always,’ he told me. So that I would remember always how he had snatched her from me and killed her, was what he meant. So I would know that he could take from me anything I cared about-and that he would always do so.
“I don’t know what happened to me, except that I simply couldn’t take any more. When he fell asleep I slit his throat with his own knife. As he thrashed in his own blood, I stabbed him over and over in his chest and back and face, and continued to stab him long after he was dead. Then, covered in dripping red like some horrible phantom, I went and dragged the two boys out of their bed-they could scarcely have been six and seven years old-and brought them in to see the wreckage of their father. I was laughing hysterically and could not stop. ‘Here’s a present from me so you’ll remember him always!’ I kept saying, or so I’m told. They ran away in terror, but not before I tried to kill them both as well, wanting now to dam the whole river of Pawel’s cursed blood once and for all.
“When I was alone again I tried to pray but my hands were numb and my heart was like ice in my chest, as though my crime had stolen all the heat out of my body.
“The boys brought back their grandmother and the guards. They found me sitting beside Pawel’s body, sunk up to the wrists in his deepest, widest wounds, blood soaking my arms to the elbows. I tried to explain what I was doing but they pulled me away from him, screaming that I had desecrated his body. I wasn’t trying to hurt him any more-I only wanted to warm my hands, because they were so cold.”
She turned to look at me. I could scarcely stand to see the agony there. “And now, dear Bobby, you finally know where my name comes from.”
