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

by Tanith Lee

  It seemed he went first of all to the registrar’s office, but why and for what nobody guessed. And then, very oddly, he turned down one of the town’s curling streets and fetched up by, of all unlikely spots, a haberdashery.

  “I was never so astonished,” said the lady who now ruled the shop. She had had to explain to Prince Lutz also that the former owner had sold up and gone away five years before. “I said, it was after her daughter died so young, poor little Ghisla who fell in the River and was drowned.” But Prince Lutz had brushed that aside, rather callously, the present shop owner decided: “which was peculiar, since until then he was the perfect gentleman. A lovely handsome man he was, though,” she added. “And he was nicer again presently, and asked me a question or two. I confess, I watched him as he strode off up the street.”

  It was a fact Ghisla’s mother had sold this woman the shop. Ghisla’s mother had been mourning the loss of her bondslave Ghisla, without whom she could not, she said repeatedly and bitterly, manage. No one knew where Ghisla’s mother had since taken herself, and perhaps nobody cared.

  Lutz spent little more time in the town. He went off into the country land beyond. The ones who had identified him wondered why he had come back, and hoped he might be going to stage another drama there. But he never did that. It was the last any of them saw of him.

  * * * *

  There had been a scene with Heine, however, all those long short five years before.

  It happened on the night following the night already described—that night when Prince Lutz and Ghisla met in the theatrical afterdark.

  The next evening’s performance was once more done, but it had ended earlier on this second night, around eleven, owing to a mechanical failure of the steam doll Bithida, which had needed improvising over.

  Everything settled, and the patrons having left, most of them not realizing they had missed anything much—the actors sat about the public bar to toast their genius on pulling the occasion through. And it was then that Ermelind gave up her news. Did they know, she asked, a town girl had gone missing, that very pretty one who had lingered on the gallery after yesterday night’s show? It seemed her name was Ghisla. At which another of the players cried did Ermelind not know the poor girl’s body had been found this evening, in the River farther upstream. She was drowned dead as a stone.

  Possibly Heine glanced round at that point, to see if the Prince reacted at all. If so, Heine was rewarded. For Lutz, even under his make-up now, had gone white as a cleaned bone. Then, getting up without a word, Lutz walked quickly from the bar.

  Until then he had been his usual self, better than ever maybe. But most of them were trained to his sudden moods, as mentioned. Heine as well, but this time he too rose, and went to see where the Prince was heading, and what the Prince might do there.

  Heine found him soon enough. Lutz had reached the ladder to the underdecks but not got on to it. Instead he lay, slumped against the inner ribs of the boat. He was, Heine said, out cold, in a faint like death.

  It seemed Heine waited, but next Ermelind bustled up, and perhaps at that Lutz stirred, and uttered some moaning noise, and then sat up, his eyes half-shuttered and swimming still, staring at them as if he had no idea in the world who they were, or who he himself was, come to that.

  Well, Heine could not resist, he later reportedly said. He bent down and murmured like a lover into Lutz’s ear. “Must have been a shock to you, Prince,” murmured Heine, “her being found so soon after you had her, and then killed her and threw her in the River.”

  But it was Heine who got the proper shock. For instantly, like one more doll set going by clockwork and steam, the recumbent Lutz sprang off the deck, and getting hold of Heine, shook him. “His eyes had gone red as rubies,” Heine reportedly said. But they were the last things Heine saw for a while, because Lutz then clouted Heine such a blow on the jaw it knocked him clear across the space and down the ladder to the deck beneath. Unlike the Prince, Heine did not recover his wits for forty minutes, and beside bruises he had three teeth loose for a week.

  * * * *

  She was not in the cemetery. Five years on the registrar had informed Lutz of that. There had been—how should he say?—some slight difficulty about her death. It appeared she must have gone mad, wandering alone about the woods by the night River, in clothes purloined from her own mother’s shop. One drew the reluctant conclusion she threw herself at length into the water to drown. Suicide. What a waste of a young working life, of a body fit to bear children. It seemed some doctor had protested, but nobody took any notice of his ramblings. He had attended the young woman’s father apparently, and was now entirely out of touch with modern life. The mother? Oh, the registrar could not recollect, but the haberdashery was still there, a silly little shop, catering to the vanities of women . . .

  The registrar afterwards, when gossiping about this, said that the man who had wanted to know these matters had seemed eccentric. Although the registrar had initially credited the fellow’s tale that he was a relative, subsequently the registrar thought he might have been lying. At no juncture did the registrar mention the generous tip Lutz had bribed him with. Also the registrar never detected who Lutz might really be. Famous actors of quality were beneath the interest of the registrar.

  But the woman in the shop helped Lutz. She had heard the girl was buried on a hillside above the River, about a mile from the town. This was a vernal and mostly unvisited place, rising up in the midst of the trees. It had not cost much to have a grave dug there. A stone had been set on the grave, but marked only with the young girl’s given name, though written in full: Ghisella. “I said I couldn’t swear to it, of course. But he thanked me again, in such a gentlemanly way. It was like talking to royalty. But then, didn’t they call him ‘the Prince’?”

  No one, aside from the creatures of the woods, the birds, the trees themselves, the wide River below and sky above, saw him climb up to her grave. By then it was far on in the afternoon, and the sun over to the west. Shadows divided the ground with their long, dark rulings. It was a glade artificially and incidentally fashioned by men, for many of the trees there had been lopped for timber. Those that remained stood forlornly, as if in unease. When would death come back for them?

  Without some attention it must have been easy to miss the spot. Lutz Alvarek took care not to. He parted the tall grasses with their spurs of hard dying flowers. The mound was overgrown by briars and tufts, and a young birch had rooted in it, speckled yet ivory white, with thin sprays of greenery that glittered against the sinking day.

  Lutz knelt down by the grave.

  He put his right hand on the stone, and then, leaning forward, laid his head against it. The angle and the gathering mass of shadows hid his face. He made no sound and did not again move.

  All light drained from the sky. The birch turned grey then wan, the sky wan then deepest grey. A star, pink as watered blood, soaked slowly through the darkness.

  Lutz had not, did not, move. He too might have been shaped from stone.

  What did the trees think of it? Perhaps only that the most horrible guilt can take the strangest forms.

  But it was too as if he were waiting. For what?

  * * * *

  Other than vilyas, sometimes they are known as rusalki, those ones who inhabit the trees or the water. They may be beautiful to see, or vile as the nightmare, but they bring retribution always; there is, the stories tell us, no alternative subject between them, these long-haired female shades, and human men, their partners in that dance of death. They are cruel as the moon, which on nights of its fullness is itself like a deathly marble stone, rounded yet incised with skull-like cavities, lit by a transient golden sheen which allows it, thing of night and underworld that it is, to pass for a shining lamp.

  On these nights that are given to them, the dead girls rise from their living tombs of bark
or water, they stretch out their long pale arms, and the skull-moon gilds them also, making their skin gleam silk-bright, and their eyes dark emerald as leaves and rivers, and the knotted wildwood of their hair into spiderwebs of spun silver.

  Fair or hideous, they are irresistible, the rusalki, the vilyas, and they glide weightless over the earth with their arms holding up the air, and the hungry tides of black fire already dancing in their eyes.

  * * * *

  Very probably it was the blinding moonlight that roused Lutz.

  It was not that he had been sleeping, but he had been in a sort of hypnotized state. He wanted nothing else but to lean his body and his head against the stone marker, his eyes shut, lost in the slow, dull, black dungeon-vault of some inner room that might have been his brain.

  But the moon now would not allow this.

  It speared in through his eyelids. The rays stuck and stayed like javelins, bisecting his interior prison.

  He had no choice but to look, and to come out.

  An actor, even in everyday life, it would often be quite difficult to tell what really he thought or felt. Even the old fool of a registrar was mostly reacting to Lutz’s wealth, manner, good clothes and powerful, graceful bearing, when deeming this stranger ‘eccentric’. Jealousy can nearly always brush up its syntax.

  Besides, Prince Lutz was accustomed to an audience.

  Standing up with the ease of a trained and still quite youthful physique, he glanced around. Did he smile or bow? Perhaps not. Conceivably he judged at once this audience would be hard to win. He raised his brows in a voiceless question, that was all.

  None answered.

  But the one he faced when he did this seemed to be their leader. Yes, without doubt, she was the feline ruler of the she-pack. All were women, were girls, some extremely young, fourteen or thirteen years he might have guessed, while certain others were much older—that one there a mature woman in her forties . . . But they were, everyone, most beautiful. And each of them—his blood ran colder. Again he turned around and looked about the circle of female beings that enclosed him. How long their hair in every case, some all frosted over silver, all tangled with reeds and weeds—hair like steam and cobwebs—They were white as the best paper otherwise, both their skins and their indecipherable garments. And their eyes were after all not dark, but like pale green pearls. Looking at them he began to see too that while dissimilar, they were each alike, and the most alike of all was the one who led them. There was a green moss in her hair, he saw now, and a flicker of black in her cream-green eyes. But next they all had this moss, this black sparkle, taking their cue from her. He had heard the legends of the riverbank, of course he had. He had named his showboat for them, Vilya.

  Therefore Lutz did give a short little bow to their queen. “Ill-met by moonlight,” drawled Lutz, “proud Myrra.”

  But Myrra, if so it was her, and like enough it was, gave no answer again.

  Then he shrugged. “Since you exist, do what you want. It seems to me, even if I never believed in you for a single minute, I may still have come back to find you. No doubt it’s the only method for me now. I’ve never been free of it, of her. I never will be free of her. All the brilliant moves I’ve made for myself, all the cunning escapes I’ve tried to effect—giving the boat and the business to Heine, running off to the theatre-temples of the cities, hiding in those roles of other men—Ulysses, Doctor Mirabilis, Hamlet—all useless to hide me from myself. My life ended five years ago. So then. Here I am, and you exist. Better do what they say you do. I won’t deny you. Exit. Curtain. No applause necessary, no encore.”

  They do not require his permission to begin. Does he feel he has to do it, to be sure they are properly riled, sufficiently aggravated to attack him at once? Or does he, educated, urban sophisticate, yet partly believe he imagines or is dreaming them?

  And does he wonder anyway why Ghisla—or Ghisella, as her tomb has it—is not with them, the horde of vilyas. Should she not be here?

  Above the glade, a smoky cloud shawls up the moon. There is a low quivering susurrous, a dry crepitation sounding like crickets where no crickets are; also there is a vague persistent rumble under the earth, thunder underground, continuous—drums, where drums too are not.

  The vilyas have begun their dance.

  Slow and rhythmic as the winding of a serpent, they moved about him, anti-clockwise it goes nearly without saying, as they tell us the dead must, opposite always when passing in again

  through the mirror of life. They were so beautiful as they danced they dazzled him, even in his hell of misery they seduced him, but now and then, like a sudden flash of lightning on a dark pool, he saw straight through the shimmer of their charms, and beheld plainly they were also foul, things like decaying carrion, with long yellowish hooked teeth and nails, and their eyes only holes, gleaming up opaque white or hollowing to black, with nothing behind or inside, but a malice so mindless it was an idiocy, yet a killing one nonetheless.

  He had started to feel how they touched him, on the face, on the body. Each tiny small little touch went straight through like pins. He felt his skeleton twist, and his muscles displace and cramp, and his blood, so cold, went thin as ice-water.

  He began after that to turn irresistibly with them, round and round, but not now of his own volition. He turned like a wine cork in a tidal pool. Slow even so, slow as slow can be. But his entire framework had commenced to resist, as he did not, to crank and to lock and to hurt. Yes, he hurt, like an old man with aching bones. But very much worse.

  And then inevitably the tempo of the dance, and the turning, increased. He was drifting, then walking, then trotting, and now he ran. He was sprinting, spinning, he had no say in any of it, could not have stopped himself, could not try.

  They were laughing, he thought distractedly. Either they laughed—or uncontrollably wept—faces in a rictus of anguish or overwhelming pleasure, either or both, resembling the throes of physical love—

  Overhead, over the tree tops, the moon spun too, bowling along like a smoky mechanical wheel.

  And now Lutz became the moon’s marionette. It had somehow attached to him invisible wires, and jerked irregularly and brutally at his arms and legs, feet and hands, his neck and head and spine.

  All of his body, outside and in, was spasming, jumping, leaping. His arms and fists made the violent gestures of a drunken prize-fighter, his legs thrashed as if to kick at objects or lurch him over fences. His head darted and shook, snapping on its cord.

  Lutz was in sheer agony now. As the seizures of the wild dance convulsed him he cried out at the excruciation, the tearing and pulling of sinews, his vertebrae crushed and crunching.

  He thought the moon above him changed to black-green, like a malachite.

  Lutz Alvarek soon lay on the ground. Still striking out and kicking as the convulsions dictated, he had stopped screaming, no longer able to make much sound.

  This, the true nature of the “dance” the vilyas award to men. The dance of death.

  But they themselves, with an odd feral innocence, went on, effortlessly twining and circling. Where they dance, the stories stress, the grass grows up rich and deep, corn or barley rise thick, trees put on ripe fruit. Or else, the other stories warn, the ground there goes black and the grass perishes and the trees fall down.

  Lutz stayed conscious. The dance did not permit full loss of awareness. He lay contorted and insanely writhing, and above him, against the malachite moon, he could just make out the crown of the birch tree that grew from Ghisla’s grave.

  In that way, senselessly, he noticed that something was rising up from the tree, like pale steam. It was meaningless in his pain, only pain had meaning. Yet the paleness gained shape, the paleness had become a girl—a galvanic wrench of his torso flung him over on his face. For that reason he could not witness how next the girl stood in th
e top of the tree, and then stepped off on to the air, and came walking quietly and simply down it, as if on a stairway.

  She had finally come out to view the evening’s drama, a neighbour woken by noise in the street. Ghisla, still sixteen years old, her black hair loose and pouring round her, her white dress torn, her drinkable sherry eyes stern and intent.

  And some ten feet from the earth, above all the measures of the dance, she paused immobile on the air, and gazed down at her lover, at Prince Lutz, as he grew ready to die.

  * * * *

  How much was left of Myrra, ruler of the vilyas? Maybe only an impulse still clad in partially human form. Why anyway was she queen of these revenants? Could it be only she had made herself so because, when alive, she had had status, the richman’s daughter?

  We must never doubt this, they never ‘speak’, these creatures. Even so, like other elements that appear not to converse, yet do, the earthly-lingering dead have a language, and use it.

  Myrra demanded of Ghisla why she stood by, balanced on darkness.

  Come down, said Myrra. Join us at our game. Watch him snuffed out like a match.

  Ghisla spoke.

  She said softly, “I’m here to say you must leave him alone.”

  Did she absolutely say that, that shy and ill-treated girl, and only a ghost now? In life she had been unable—taught in her first years by that harsh mother—to stand up for the rights of anything, let alone herself. And now she stands up on the air, you see, and tells the ghoul-queen of the damned and murderous dead that they must let go.