Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition

by Tanith Lee

  “You are pale and sullen. Do you mean to be?”

  “No, my lady.”

  “Give me your hand. Do you see this faint scar on your wrist? Do you remember how it came there?”

  “I remember a binding. When the binding was taken away, I saw the mark.”

  “Tonight you may not wander in the garden. In an hour, when the twilight is finished, you will enter the insularium.”

  * * * *

  The woman sat brooding in her stone house on fifteen years of power that had not yet come to her, on a statue with jeweled eyes, fingers, feet, until her servant advanced into the room, that tall man, the dark-skinned Eastern mute.

  In his language of signs, which she had taught him and which only they knew, he spoke to her. He had watched the portico. It was ever the same. A young man would appear, slender, his movements catlike and elegant, his face in shadow, the moon at his back. And Jaspre would go to him. They would lie together, but not in carnality. She was a virgin yet, the pure child who was the price, the bargain, the golden rope into Hell the Underworld.

  Demons had tempted maidens with apples. Peerless maidens, exquisite youths, these were the apples with which demons were tempted. Reared from birth to particular ways, definite forms, pliant, sweet, unblemished. Once bitten into, bruised, the spoiled fruit was useless and must be flung away.

  Plucked then, but untasted. Perhaps only readied the more certainly…

  But the woman saw suddenly with her inner eye, the scavenging father, the lustrous whore, mother to the child. And these devils of the mind, cringing before her also jeered. “Why,” the man said, filthy and golden, “he is one step from enjoying her, one minute away from getting her, maybe, full of a pair of twins—a son, a daughter. A powder then, a herb, to make the trouble go away—”

  The woman dismissed him, this vision. Next, her flesh and blood servant was sent out. Only then was one darkened window opened upon the night-bloomed garden.

  Black before moon-rise, it stretched its vistas out for her, a carpet, a maze. Nothing stirred, no white figure, the too-early moon of Jaspre. Not even the foliage of a forbidden tree rippled in the low wind.

  Presently the woman passed from black night to a black lacquer door, and down into her sorcerous cellar.

  FOUR

  Jaspre descended to the insularium, the first short prelude to that greater, abysmal descent. She knew, her very spirit guessed, that this night was the ending. And she was dull with terror, lax with it, she walked like one almost asleep.

  Within, her mind turned drearily about and about.

  Her blonde slippers on the stair, she thought of her lover, the moon’s rising and his arrival in the garden to find, at last, she had not come to meet him. Her flaxen dress brushing over the occult threshold, she wondered how long he would linger before he went away. On each occasion of their parting she had said farewell to him as if forever, dimly acknowledging this last night would claim her finally, fold her away into its obscurity. From which, her instinct told her, she would not return. Her impulse was not to resist. Such seeds as resistance had never been planted in her character. She was just that creature her mentor had trained her to be—pliant, sweet—only he had left any imprint on her psyche, molding her gradually and mysteriously to other patterns. Yet he had been, it seemed, too gradual, too patient, too much an optimist. Seeing the shadow of the chamber spread like a deep well before her, Jaspre felt a moment’s wilder fright, picturing how he might come to the house to seek her, batter on its doors, invite the wrath of the woman’s cold and unstressed powers—but he, too, feared. The witch, he had called her from the first. He had never gone close to the inner walls of the house. No, he would not risk himself in such a way. He would merely suppose the immaculate idyll ended, and so it was. He would hasten to safety. Jaspre mourned and she was glad it should be so.

  She had never asked his name, even. In a year she, being herself, had not thought to ask it. Yet, he had known her name, and might remember her, a little while, grieve for her, perhaps. And she, adrift in endless moonless, starless night, might sense that memory and tremulously burn like the palest spark, until he should utterly forget.

  High in the vault of the chamber, the chandelier ignited into fire, not blue but purple.. The witch stood waiting, straight and stony, her hands folded, each finger exactly fitted between two others.

  “Come here, Jaspre. Disrobe.”

  Jaspre saw the marks upon the floor, the Circle, the Star of the Five Points, the figures of the zodiac—and other talismans, infinitely less clear and more inimical. The purple glare, while it showed all, seemed to give neither illumination nor dimension.

  “Hurry,” said the woman. “Why are you so reluctant? Have you mislaid who it is you serve? Yesterday, only then, you laid flowers at his feet and poured wine into the cup. You have been dutiful, but can you have omitted love?”

  “No, my lady. Oh, no.” If not to resist, she had learned somewhat to lie.

  “For where else,” mused the woman, “could you bestow your love? Not upon me, for sure. Not upon yourself, for yourself you do not know. Only Angemal is your motive and your lord. Remove your garments.”

  Jaspre shivered. Her hands hesitated over pearl buttons, satin lacings. Somehow she had also learned the vulnerability of nakedness.

  But at length, naked, vulnerable, she lay down within the Circle, and it was closed upon her. Far away then she seemed to see her own luminous flesh, enmauvened by the ghastly candles, dashed with painted symbols, touched with oil and soot and water, and the unholy rosary of crystals pooled in chains between her breasts. The drugged resins uncurled their vapors. She floated in a syrupy sea of dread, her face beneath its surface, drowning.

  The woman spoke aloud for a long while, but not at any time to her. It seemed the woman must be speaking to Angemal. And Jaspre felt his untrue beauty hover like a smoking star.

  A knife slit the sea, the vapor, glittering.

  “Kiss the blade.”

  Jaspre kissed the blade.

  “Consent,” said the woman. “Tell me so.”

  Jaspre shut her eyes. “I consent.”

  The pain licked out, her left wrist, her right wrist. Drums pounded in her veins. With abject horror, Jaspre felt herself commence to fall—

  —And the dream began suddenly, and was appalling.

  Jaspre hung from the fifth window of the great tower of stone, by her wrists. Two scarlet cords bound them, and she, depending from the cords, drew them tight. Her arms seared and throbbed so she moaned for their agony, while below, the endless drop of stone sheered down and down, and down and down. One other thing fell from the tower, a ladder of gold. Even as she looked at it, the ladder quivered. Its silken rungs sang out. Jaspre realized, even through her blinding hurt and fear, that something had sought the ladder’s foot, something climbed toward her.

  Angemal came to her, as he had been so ceaselessly invited to do. She recollected the black horse, the black-clad rider, who turned away his face. His face was not beautiful, then, but hideous, so hideous it could blast with fire as his laughter had blasted the fountain of her hair. But, how had such a notion claimed her? Pain and terror suggested it. The golden rope, enchanted from her hair and her soul, tingled, rang.

  Jaspre writhed as she hung from the cords of her spilling blood, and the incredible tower swayed like a granite stalk. Jaspre screamed—

  And woke as if she had been flung upward through the floor, the witch’s face above her, malevolent and intent, its eyes alive, its lips parted.

  “Ah,” said the witch. “Go back—” and struck Jaspre across the cheek.

  Cast from fear into fear, Jaspre was flung down again.

  She felt herself, weightless as a feather, spinning, tumbling.

  She lay at the tower’s foot, and before her the sh
aft of it ran up and up, becoming a slender pole, an awl, a needle, nothing. A black cloud clung to the side of the tower where it had thinned to an awl. The cloud moved stealthily upward, and she believed it was the thing which now Angemal had become. No ladder of gold, no cascade of golden hair remained to aid its journey. Jaspre lay fluttering on the rock plain beneath the tower, and found herself a white butterfly.

  Her body hung far away, out of her sight, screaming no longer, already dead.

  Jaspre’s wings flickered. She flew up into the air. She flew across the vacant rock, leaving the tower, the miasmic climbing cloud, the remembrance of her own self hung out for it, an empty vessel of flesh.

  There was no more pain, and as she drew further and further from the immensity of the tower, very little sensation of any kind. She herself had already half forgotten herself. No longer did she have a name, or any care. Only love remained with her, though love was also nameless now, love and sorrow both, and both limitless and inexplicable. The void and its mists enveloped her. The tower was only a colossal specter at her back. The rocky plain ran on and on, barren of everything. And she, a shining flake of snow, sailed on her tiny tissue wings into the formless dark.

  * * * *

  The woman stood, and experienced the enormous energy that seemed now to drive toward her. Its center was the girl who bled slowly to death in the heart of the Pentagram. But its source lay deeper down. The atmosphere of the insularium was charged and murmurous. Vials and vases shifted softly in their cabinets, the telescope rattled, the chandelier vibrated, splashing the floor and the inert body with wax, as if an earth tremor went on under the house.

  The woman drew her breath thickly. Her dead eyes were quickened, her mask face almost galvanized to expression. Prepared and ready, her stance never altered as one by one the lights sank and bloodied to extinction.

  A vast blackness, impenetrable and complete, brimmed upward through the chamber.

  Seeing nothing, hearing no sound, still the woman knew some fabric of dimension gave way. A presence like a cool heat, invisible, untouchable, passed through, and was in that place with her.

  The woman kneeled.

  “Lord of lords,” she said. “You are welcome, at last.”

  The voice which answered spoke within her head. It answered with one word, a word in a language obsolete and lost, a word no longer capable of any meaning. And yet the woman was granted a total understanding of that word, of all its myriad and profound convolutions, its nuances, its embryo.

  She started instantly and involuntarily to her feet in a terror worse than any terror Jaspre had ever known.

  And at once a hundred articles fell from their shelves and smashed all about, and the room was garishly lit by burning powders, so not a trace of darkness remained.

  * * * *

  Darkness had failed, the desire of all one life had failed. Great fear stole in behind failure, shadow of a shadow.

  Yet the woman walked from the insularium, straight as a rule, and in her cold unimpassioned voice, she called the mute servant to her. She instructed him on the cleansing and clearing of the chamber. One further item must be removed from it. The wrists of the girl were to be tightly bound, she was to be found some rag of clothing to put on. Then the servant should carry her outside the walls of the house, among the bone trees, and throw her down there. From her apartment then all the furnishings must be stripped, broken and burned. The bed, the chairs, the rich garments, the harpsichord. Even the jewels must be thrust into a fire, consumed.

  The man gestured that he grasped what should be done, and went about it silently.

  The woman proceeded through the house. As she moved beneath the many candelabra and the lamps, a silken thing glowed brightly in her hand. With one last stroke of her knife she had severed Jaspre’s hair. She had stripped her of everything, her life, even her death—which now was purposeless.

  Stiffly, the woman stepped into the avenues of the long garden, into darkness that was not darkness.

  Among the pavilions of these trees, Jaspre had played as a child, here she had wandered into her young womanhood, shut from the world. And here he too had come, the intruder, the ruiner of all, who should in turn be ruined.

  The moon poised on the peak of an unseen mountain in the sky, as white as fear.

  The woman reached the lawn ringed by its savage shrubbery, the spiked and twining briers, and there she saw him immediately, now seated, idle and dismayed, now springing up alarmed. The moon chalked in his pale face, the leaves rained black lights across it. The woman saw him as if he were some cipher only, the humble garb, wild hair, wide eyes. Here it was, that which had cheated her after all, had marred the delicious fruit in some insidious manner the woman neither knew nor cared to know. He was the ultimate of all Jaspre’s treasures that would be destroyed.

  “Come seeking love?” the woman said. “Here it is then.”

  And she tossed to him the golden rope of hair like a spray of silver water over the night.

  Then she spoke swiftly to the garden.

  At once the shrubbery came alive, lifting on its stems to seize and tangle, and the long briers like spined serpents thrashed and fell down on him. She did not hear him shout or cry aloud. She did not even stay to witness what she had wrought on him, his body whipped, clawed, flayed, his eyes scratched out. She turned and retraced her way briskly toward the house and into it, not glancing back.

  Directly returning to the insularium, she found the mess of misadventure already tidied; and the half-dead useless thing had been dragged from her sight. While perhaps only psychologically perceived, there swirled the smell of burning silk, the sharp cracks of splintering wood.

  All that she must do, she had done. Yet, she had importuned him, angered him, and now he had withheld at last what she had asked and schemed to get life-long—but still she must propitiate him, Angemal who was Arimanio, Prince of Darkness.

  So, her rage in check, her anguish reined, she drew back the curtain of samite, the curtain of velvet, unlocked the door of horn and iron. Spat upon, degraded, his word of denial twisting in her brain, she would kneel and worship him, atoning all her days for ever once imploring him. And maybe he would be merciful. Then she pulled aside the curtain of mail and a brazen beast shrieked in her very soul, although the witch gazed in upon the alcove and therefore in upon herself as pitilessly as she gazed upon all other persons.

  She never changed, although she felt, soft as a kiss, the curse he set on her, some future of blight, disease or madness, felt it begin within her at that very instant she beheld the statue. There were marks of claws upon it, the precious tintings ripped away and the stone gouged to ugliness beneath. While from the blind bowls of its eyes, the sable jewels had been torn out.

  And so she was made aware of the full measure of his jest, and his fastidious disdain, the one she had tempted with a rope of gold.

  * * * *

  Jaspre had flown, a weightless butterfly in a waste of granite. Then, there came a waste of coldness, where frost formed on her wings. They presently snapped off from her like broken shutters, and she smote the stony floor of Hell and crawled about there. But then there came the waste of a great and blazing light, and Jaspre opened her eyes upon a blanched sun with the face of a skull, and against this sun huge fleshless hands stretched out in supplication or in hate.

  She had been cast out into the wood of dead trees, which seemed to her to be all the world there was for her now. Her hair had been sheared, coarse sacking covered her skin. Bracelets of agony held her wrists. Her hands were numb and flaccid, and there was no strength in her, not even the strength to lament. So she lay and watched the white sun creep across the fingertips of the trees. The earth was not as he had told her, her lover, yet she loved him only the more for his lies which had been beautiful and kind. And if she must die here in the wilderness of t
he bone trees, she did not care, if he should only continue to live happily in some dream, or magic place he had conjured.

  “But I will take you there, my child,” he said, his voice, for her, like music.

  And she smiled with joy, supposing she imagined it, until he lifted her in his arms.

  For a few moments she lay against him as the pain melted from her wrists and body and a warmth and strength flowed like wine through her limbs, her heart, her reverie, and then she raised her head and looked at him. She knew him immediately, no other but the wanderer who had found her in her garden, the young man she had loved. She knew him also as he truly was, since now he had set aside the screen of illusion. Tall and pale, his hair blacker than blackness, apparelled in the dark of the moon and gemmed with its light, his eyes the oceans and the shores of night, his face no longer hidden, more wonderful than the face of any statue. She was not afraid. Love cannot fear. She asked him nothing.

  But as he held her now, the bandaging upon her healed wrists turned to jewels, the sacking robe to velvet. And, as in her dream, her hair grew like a wind and poured over like a tide, a streaming silver that was gold, until it brushed the ground.

  The bleached trees parted and darkness ran through. A black horse, flamed with a sapphire mane and tail, and hung with stars, stood against the sinking moon.

  He mounted Jaspre before him.

  “The soil, the roots of the trees, will open,” he said. “My land lies there, beneath the earth. Whatever the woman told you of it you must unremember. The country is not as once it was, nor as you have seen it.”

  Then the horse danced on the ground and the ground gave way. Far off, Jaspre glimpsed—not darkness—but a glimmering multi-colored luminescence, the flowering trees of an endless spring, the towers of a rainbow city, more beautiful than in any book, and winged with a gilded morning, there in the black pit of the world.

  “And this is your kingdom,” the young girl sighed.