by Tanith Lee
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 château. 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 château 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, flapping 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.
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 Ilena, 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 château 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.
He was walking through one of the sets of gardens that bordered the museum and art gallery, on his way to a luncheon engagement at the literary club. And suddenly he saw a small black shape, rather like an animated sausage, trotting across the whiteness of the snow. It was a little dog, seemingly impervious to
the cold, a very black, very purposeful little dog, that he followed with his eyes intuitively. And then a woman came out between the white trees, against an oval of brown sky. She was fashionably dressed, at the height of fashion indeed, and maybe not warmly enough for the season. Yet like the dog, which was obviously hers, she seemed untroubled by the cold. Like the dog too, she wore black—jet black—save for the tall scarlet feather in her hat and a pair of blinding scarlet gloves, and the scarlet of her lips.
Perhaps it was the maquillage on her face that prevented his immediately knowing her, or maybe only the fifteen years that had separated those three brief glimpses he had formerly had of her from this. Then something, the turn of her head, her gesture to the dog as it bounced up to her, jogged his memory.
For a full minute he stared at her, unable to say a word. She did not seem to see him at all, and yet something in her manner told him she knew quite well a man stood watching her, as she picked up and petted the dog. And then, irresistibly, he found he had gone over.
And he heard himself saying, as if by rote, for all at once he remembered the words: “Good day, m’mselle.”
And aloofly she replied, “Good day,” just as on the island, through the window.
“Forgive me for disturbing you. But I was intrigued by your little dog.”
“Oh yes. I am training him to do tricks, to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Look at him! He’s trying to attract your attention.”
And Viktor found himself pulling off one glove and extending his hand to take the icy little paw, shaking it.
“How clever he is,” said Viktor.
“Thank you.” The smiling face, pretty in its makeup, lowered mascaraed lids. No wonder she looked different. The dark lashes, the black eyebrows. “I should be very lonely without him.”
Viktor almost choked, but he managed the words: “I find it hard to believe you’re alone.”
“Quite alone,” she said. She sighed, petting the black little dog with scarlet fingers.
“Your uncle is often away from home,” said Viktor, between sneering and joking and embarrassment,
“Why yes,” she said. She looked at him wonderingly. “Do you know my uncle?”
“I met him, once,” said Viktor. “Perhaps that gives me the right to presume. Will you have lunch with me?”
“Why—” she said. She lifted her pale eyes and looked at him. “Why, of course.”
She put her red hand through his arm as they walked, holding the dog with the other. He felt hilarious, and had already dismissed the other lunch engagement from his mind.
In the restaurant he talked to her randomly, hypnotized by the perfection of her answers. She replied to all, elaborated sometimes, giving the impression of an utterly charming negative neutrality, restful and obliging. And the little dog was a model of decorum, even when she awarded it a spoonful of the hot chocolate sauce. He marveled at its training, and hers.
Framed in the black bell of her hat, her face fascinated him with its changes, but he longed for her to remove the hat, to show him if her hair, now obviously very short, was still blond. As blond as when she had swum in the lake among the swans.
After lunch, he escorted her, naturally, to her flat. It was on a quiet street, between the ordinary and the modish. Flowerpots stood on the windowsills, winter bald. There was a plush carpet when, just as naturally, she invited him to enter and he did so.
They went upstairs to the second floor. She opened a door. It was much unlike the wild house with its peeling walls and oil lamps. The paper on the wall was a subtle cream and beige brocade, quite dry. At the touch of a switch the warmth of electricity flooded the rosy chairs, the deep blue rugs.
At this point, supposedly, the true meaning of their adventure would drift to the surface. It did so. Putting down the dog, she returned to Viktor across the pleasant room. Her gloves were gone, and she laid the smooth skin of her hand on his lapel.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said. Her eyes were brimming with invitation. From now on her clients would, probably, become more businesslike. And he remembered how she had dismissed him the first time, on the island, trained also to that.
With a strange sensation, Viktor lowered his head toward her. Her mouth was cool and perfumed with lip paint, curiously uninvolved as it yielded first to the caress and then to the invasion. What did she feel? Nothing? And he, what did he feel? He was unsure. He had persuaded himself to love her, once, the love of the unknown thing. He remembered her white body in the water and a sudden pang of sexuality shot through him, startling him.
The girl drew gently away. “Come with me,” she said secretively. And led him into her bedroom.
It was an ordinary chamber, in good taste, nothing lewd or even merely garish, no pictures of frolics intended to arouse or amuse, none of the bric-a-brac of the whore, except a heap of silken cushions.
“Take off your hat,” he said to her. “Take off all your clothes. I want to watch you.”
The girl laughed, and flirted with her eyes. The correct response. No doubt, his request was not unusual.
She stood then at the center of a red and black autumn of falling garments, and mesmerized, he did watch her, his heart ludicrously in his mouth as once before so long ago, and still the bell-shaped hat was left in place, even now she stood in her slip—he gestured to the hat, unable to vocalize, and she smiled and drew it upward from her head.
Her hair was black. Black as ink. He had not expected such a thing, it stunned him, and he felt again the water of the lake filling his nostrils, his throat, and the old break in his arm, which for years had promised the ultimate penance of Ilena’s arthritis, burned and ached.
“Your hair,” he said, forcing out the words, his excitement quite dead.
It was smooth and short and black, so black, as if a cupful of paint had been poured over her skull. Fashionable, and horrible.
She did not seem disturbed by his reaction, but went on archly smiling at him, trained as she was—this outcry of his was too far removed from her training to facilitate one of her closet-full of suitable responses.
It was only then, glaring at her, the cameo of black silk and blonde flesh, that he saw she had not changed at all, was just as he recalled, the ink blackness only an overlay. There was not a line that he could see in her smooth face, on her neck, her breast—these fifteen years, which had touched everything, had not touched her at all.
He went forward, and she, thinking equilibrium restored, invited with eyes and lips. But he did not take her to him, only stared at her. It was true. She was unmarked. He put one finger to her cheek, running it across her flesh that was as smooth as wax—And the bedroom door opened behind him.
Her hand flew to her scarlet mouth. It was another learned response, not real. Viktor could see that quite clearly. And he himself turned without any surprise and saw a man in a black greatcoat filling the doorway, his small eyes widened with outrage.
“What is this? I must ask you, sir—”
The voice was less foreign, the accent polished and succinct. The coat was of more recent cut, the face shaven, only a little red moustache and red hairs glinting in the flared nostrils. Nothing had faded, there was no grey. But the lines had deepened, quite normally.
Viktor felt a surge of relief. Yes, relief, that he would not have to go on with this absurd play, that he did not have to have her, the unobtainable, now ruined, thing.
He walked toward the man, who barked at her: “Get dressed!” And retreated out into the sitting room of the flat.
The bedroom door clipped shut. The black figure loomed before the mantelpiece.
“What am I to think?” the man said. “I come home unexpectedly, and I find my niece, and I find you, sir—and she is in her underwear—”
“What indeed,” said Viktor. He k
new the game, who would not? Once in Paris, he had almost been caught in such a way, if a chance acquaintance had not warned him: the flighty young woman, her husband bursting in—
“And she is a little—how shall I say this?—a little naïve in her wits, sir.”
“An idiot,” said Viktor.
“And you, taking advantage of such a thing, her plight—I see you are a man of substance, sir. What would your associates think, should they learn what you did this afternoon, how you tried to abuse a young girl of less than average mental capacity. Making her drunk, bringing her to her own home, with the purpose of satisfying your desires.”
The voice went on. Now and then, almost smothered, Viktor noted the hint of the foreignness, still extant. He had known, probably, at some level of consciousness, from the moment he saw her in the garden. On an armchair, the little black dog slept, unperturbed by this rehearsal of fierce anger it had no doubt heard a hundred times.
Viktor sighed. He felt nothing anymore, not even satisfaction. Where was the island, the darkness? Where was twenty, now?
“Shut up,” he broke in, loudly, but without emphasis.
The monstrous beaked thing did indeed fall silent.
“I do know your intention,” said Viktor, calmly. “And I have a piece of news for you. I intend to pay you nothing. Nothing. Do you hear?” But not even this parody of the man’s speech pleased him. Viktor went on, replacing his gloves as he did so. “If you wish, you may tell the world at large that you found me in the bedroom with your undressed niece, who is not your niece, but who you—let me get it right—bought in a slum, covered with sores and bites. And whom you taught to behave as she does, in gardens, ballrooms, and God knows where else, on an island, fifteen years ago.”
The man’s face had set, drawing in about itself, becoming unreadable, and most attentive.
“All of which,” Viktor said, “I too am willing to reveal in my turn. Rather a blight on a profitable trade, I would think. And now,” he found himself at the door, “good afternoon.”
