Personal Darkness

by Tanith Lee

  "Rachaela," said Eric, "this isn't the time for questions. It has been a long journey, over the sea."

  "You told me," Rachaela said, "they told me. You're all the Scarabae there were. The last."

  "We are the last," said Eric, "here."

  "Rachaela is confused," said Malach. "I—we—are Scarabae of another branch. Still Scarabae."

  Out of the lamplight, Althene said smoothly, "There are many Scarabae."

  "And in necessity," said Sasha, "where else should we turn?"

  Rachaela moved back a step. She was afraid of Malach. Was it the same fear she had felt of Adamus, terror of male beauty and power, the dominance of a man and all it implied, the pitfall, the trap?

  But Malach was also frightening in another way. Adamus had been a priest, but Malach was a warrior.

  Rachaela stood aside, and let them all move on into the gold and white drawing room from which the broken television had been removed. The dogs followed decorously.

  Michael and Cheta and the new one, Kei, were serving drinks, cups of greeting. Kei set down a large water bowl into which he poured a measure from a tankard of beer. The dogs went to it and began to drink loudly and couthly. Kei took the tankard next to Malach.

  Malach wore black. Black trousers inside black boots, a black shirt and long black coat.

  But Althene took off her velvet wrap to reveal a dress folded about her like two leaves against a stem, the color of green Han jade. Her pale throat was bare and her long fingers, but on her left wrist was a huge sunflower of dull antique gold held on a golden band. Her oval nails were painted the same shade. Her face was exquisitely made up, her black eyes in a coffee mask, lips tawny, the hint of tawny blusher on her cheeks. Her lashes were long as those of a leopardess.

  Rachaela stood in the doorway like a bad child who had crept down to spy on the grown-ups.

  Cheta brought her a goblet of wine and she took it uneasily.

  They were Scarabae. The Scarabae were everywhere.

  They had no look of dust, cobwebs, but in fact Eric,

  Sasha, and Miranda had greatly lost that look. Even the man Kei was firm and soldierly, an adjutant to Malach's captain. Like the incredible Althene he too had the black Scarabae eyes.

  But Malach was a rogue. His blood, like hers, Rachaela's, must be mixed.

  They had lost their champion, Adamus. They had had to borrow a new knight from another board. But it was still chess.

  "Michael and Cheta will take you up to your rooms. We hope you'll be comfortable." Eric paused. He said, "Camillo…"

  "Isn't here," said Malach. He tilted back his white head and his hair brushed his thighs. "Upstairs hiding?"

  Miranda said, "Camillo is changing, like a butterfly."

  "At last," said Malach. His chiseled, cruel mouth curled a moment, then relaxed. "You were used to call him Uncle."

  Eric shook his head. "If you prefer—"

  "Let's be young," said Malach. "You are Eric. Let him be Camillo."

  Malach's was the face of a man of thirty-eight or thirty-nine. If he was a Scarabae that would probably mean that he was a hundred years old, or older. If one believed their stories.

  Althene crossed her legs. Her short black boots were embroidered with jade green and golden flowers. Above showed a sheer stocking with a seam of charcoal black.

  Was she Malach's? She did not seem to belong to him, and surely women would be his belongings, not his companions.

  Rachaela put down her unfinished wine.

  "You're here because of Ruth."

  Miranda said, "It's all right, Rachaela."

  "We couldn't contain her," said Rachaela. She made herself look at Malach. "White knight to take black queen."

  "A traditional move," said Eric.

  Malach did not answer. The two dogs, having drunk their tipple, had come to him and were leaning their large lion heads on his side.

  Althene said, "What does Rachaela fear?"

  "Nothing," Rachaela said harshly. "I warned them in the beginning. Ruth is a demon."

  "But you don't believe in demons," said Althene.

  Her black eyes had a different power. It was there nevertheless.

  Rachaela looked away. "I've never believed any of it, yet I'm caught up in it."

  Sasha said, "Don't be afraid, Rachaela."

  Rachaela shut her mouth tightly. It would be unwise to argue. She had never been able to talk to any of them. The conversations were carried on on a plane that had to do with psychology and the spirit, bypassing conscious feeling and need. It was happening again.

  What did Ruth matter?

  Demon child. Black queen.

  Let Malach hunt her, out in the checkered forests of London's day and night.

  In her room Rachaela put on a symphony by Shostakovich, but it had too much eerie strength. She was becoming nervous of classical music, which opened so many mental doors unbidden.

  Instead she switched on her television. The newscaster was speaking of a riot somewhere, and she watched with a calming sense of detachment.

  The house was now curiously full.

  It had been injected with new blood. The wiring sang.

  Why did Camillo conceal himself, or did he?

  Rachaela took off her clothes. She sat naked in a chair, brushing her hair before the blind mirror of the television.

  "… body, which was discovered in woods near the sight of the fire, is thought to be of the young woman police have been trying to trace. The girl, aged between sixteen and nineteen, was found in bracken by two cyclists. She is thought to have died during the night."

  A man appeared in a blank brown suit. Someone must have told him about the pixilation of his previous garment.

  "Yes, we're pretty certain this is The Vixen. No, there were no signs of violence. It seems likely she took her own life."

  Rachaela's vision and hearing apparently fused with darkness, or else time jumped. Suddenly the screen was full of another event. The Vixen and her death were gone.

  In a wood. Ruth… a suicide under the trees.

  No. It was not true. No.

  The telephone… the telephone and the helicopter. Malach had come. Somehow, somehow the media and the law had been deflected. The Scarabae—cared for their own.

  CHAPTER 15

  UNDER THE TREES LAY A HOT unbreathing shadow. The day was stormy, the sky a dense blue-gray against which the green of the leaves became an acid lime. The graveyard stretched a long way, broken now and then by upflung angels and the dark lines of conifers. Already a few cones had fallen from the chestnuts, perfect as artifacts. Flowers stood in vases dying on the graves, a death for a death.

  She had come across a fallen angel, brought down by a gale and never tidied. Tall grass had grown up about her and through her wings, which were broken.

  Ruth studied the angel, the picture of the graves meandering away like dragon's teeth sown in a lawn.

  Then the man and woman came and sat down on the bench just beyond the chestnuts. They had not seen her. They did not speak for ten minutes.

  "I know why you do it," he said eventually. It was a tense, low, furious voice.

  "You don't. You think you do."

  "I do know. Don't you tell me what I know."

  "You imagine things."

  The man grabbed and pulled on the woman's arm and she gave a soft cry of pain.

  "I said, don't tell me what I think."

  He was thickset and not tall, with thinning hair and a good-looking, tanned face. She was tanned not at all. She wore lipstick and dark glasses, two pieces of a disguise. She twisted her hands, then rubbed her arm where he had hurt her.

  "Can't you leave me alone, Richard, I'm not doing anything. I just like to make a bit of money for myself."

  "You don't need it. I can give you money. God, you get enough out of me."

  "You want to eat, don't you?" she said.

  "How many women can say they don't have to work? You don't need to. I make enough. You're sittin
g pretty."

  "Pretty," she said, with a peculiar emphasis. -

  "Yes, pretty. But you want to be pretty for him, don't you?"

  "Him. What him! You're crazy."

  He hit her, lightly, a tap to the side of the face that swung her head around and dislodged the dark glasses.

  Ruth could plainly see the woman had a black eye.

  The woman put back the glasses. She said, desperately, "I just want a bit of money for myself."

  "Yes," he said, "so you can run out on me."

  "I wouldn't—"

  "No, you won't. Because if you ever try it, I'll find you. I'll find the pair of you. It won't be just your eye then, Linda. I'll take him out. And I'll put you in a wheelchair."

  Then the silence fell again. It was like the shadow of the coming storm, the pause before the thunder.

  She said, quietly, "All right. I'm sorry. I'll—I'll give in my notice. I'll do it tonight."

  "Yes," he said.

  "I'll have to work out the week."

  "No."

  "Of course I will. Be reasonable, Richard…" She hesitated but now he did not strike. "Just the week. Then I'll be home. We can—we'll try and make a go of it."

  "We have to," he said. Then he had seized her again, this time into his arms. A scent boiled from the bench, Lentheric for men, and an undernote, like burning insulation. "You're all I've got, Linda. My Linda. I don't mean to hurt you. You know you're everything to me."

  Presently they got up. They began to walk slowly together, like sick people released from a hospital, along the path beneath the chestnuts.

  Ruth followed.

  The house was in a walled park, one of several, all alike. Fudge walls and a bright red roof. Through the leaded windows showed lacy curtains, a vase of flowers like the graveyard. The garden was tiny, just room enough for a barbecue and chairs.

  After they had gone in, instinct made Ruth wait.

  Above, the curtains in the bedroom were drawn.

  Half an hour after this, a light came on in one of the downstairs rooms. It was very dark, the storm was near.

  Ruth went to the door. There was an ornate knocker, no bell. Ruth knocked.

  The woman, Linda, came to the door in a housecoat. She had put on her glasses again.

  "Mrs. Watt?"

  "Our name's Reeves. There used to be a Watt— number six, I think."

  "No. This is the house."

  "It can't be, I'm afraid. They all look the same, these houses."

  "I've come into London. I've come a long way."

  "You poor thing." Linda Reeves was flustered and contrite. "I'd ask you in, but I'm in a rush. I have an evening job, you see. And Richard. He's very busy."

  Silence.

  The storm gathered like a silent churning cloud.

  "Can I use your phone, please?" asked Ruth.

  "Oh, God, the phone. No—I'm sorry. It's broken. Richard—that is, we had an accident."

  A wind passed over the garden, the wings of angels, Semitic, hot and stifling, and the little trees in the little gardens bent before it.

  "Can I come in?" said Ruth.

  Linda Reeves put her hand to her mouth.

  "I can't—I daren't. My husband's—he's not very well."

  Ruth stood below the door, the passing of the wind lifting a halo of her hair, like fragile wings.

  "I've come a long way."

  "I'm sorry. I'm really—I'm sorry."

  Linda Reeves shut the door of the fudge house abruptly.

  Ruth stood outside.

  Upstairs she heard him shout.

  "What are you doing?"

  And the woman shouted back, "Oh hell, for Christ's sake—"

  "Don't use that language!" he shouted. "I've told you—"

  And through the walls of the house, one breeze-block thick, Ruth heard Richard Reeves descend. She heard him come into the living room and through the lace, in the lamplight, she saw him smash Linda Reeves across the face so she fell to the wall-to-wall carpet.

  "Don't ever do that."

  "I'm—sorry, Richard."

  Far off, the thunder murmured.

  Ruth knocked again.

  But no one came and the door stayed shut.

  CHAPTER 16

  UP THROUGH THE EARTH WALKED THE white-haired man. It was early in the afternoon, and the intestines of the tube had their usual smell of the inside of a Hoover.

  A sparse crowd came and went. And through the warm plastic air, unsuitably heavenly, ribboned the cadences of a violin.

  At the elbow of a tunnel, the violinist appeared. A young girl playing, as if alone with the instrument and her soul.

  The crowd trotted robotically by and vanished.

  Malach stopped to listen.

  If the girl was aware of him, she did not show it. The crowd had been aware and had stared at him, sometimes turning a head over a shoulder.

  The violin played Paganini, cunningly adapted.

  After perhaps a minute, Malach tossed a coin into the biscuit tin.

  Apparently lost in her dream, the violinist inwardly cursed him.

  What had rung against the ten- and twenty-pence pieces was plainly a foreign coin, little, thin and yellow. Worthless. Later she would take it out and puzzle briefly over the vague equestrian figure, before throwing the coin away. Her forte was music.

  It was true the coin was foreign. A French gold franc of the early fifteenth century.

  Malach went up out of the tube station into the intensity of the late-summer afternoon. The sky was heavy, and thunder was muttering like distant cannon. A light that resembled rain, drily wet, hung on the street. Cars pushed through, and tall red buses. To every era, its panoply.

  On the pavement a child eating an ice cream gazed up at Malach a mile above. Malach observed the child. It was old, imprisoned in the immature body and clearly uncomfortable. He touched its head as he passed, weight-lessly, with one finger.

  At the bus stop two young women saw Malach and giggled secretively. When a bus came, he got on to it.

  It carried him slowly and bumpily across London, through a sea of stares.

  The lines of streets curved and twisted, ebbed and flowed.

  Sometimes girls walked along them, some with black hair.

  He watched from the windows of red buses, with eyes like river-washed stones.

  At a quarter past six, The Cockerel had already filled with young men in sharp gray suits and creamy shoes. The three fruit machines flashed, reflecting on the lagers and the gin and tonics, diver's watches, gold signet rings.

  The door opened and otherness walked through, slow and still.

  "Here, Kev. Look at this."

  They looked, laughing, nudging each other.

  At home, the obedient lacquered mothers waited with low-burning oven dinners and speedy microwaves. The girlfriends were in their showers, preparing themselves for brown smooth hands loaded by watches and rings. Outside were the paper-cutout cars, glittering in the sun, the perfect hot English summer a ruined ozone layer had allowed.

  And here was this, this misfit. Something from the night. Dusty black, pale unred tan, blizzard hair.

  Kev's hair was very short, half an inch. In his right ear was the hole the earring had once made before he left off wearing it. He would tell people now he got the aperture in a fight.

  Kevin watched the outcast come up to the bar.

  "I don't think much of your one," said Den. "She's too tall." Den was pleased by his wit and his glasses shone.

  "Shhh," said Kev, "I want to hear what it drinks. Malibu and orange? Bristol Cream?"

  The outcast spoke softly to the barman.

  "What did he say?"

  "Beer, he drinks beer."

  "Nah, he's going to wash his hair in it."

  They waited, as the white-haired man waited. His back was turned to them, which intuitively they took for a sign of weakness.

  "I wonder where he gets it styled," said Ray.

  "He don't sty
le it, just puts fertilizer on it, make it grow."

  They laughed, and the white-haired man turned. He faced them, smiling. He had the beer now, which he raised.

  "Proost."

  "Oh, he ain't English."

  "He don't know what we've been saying."

  "Here, matey, where you from?"

  "Bloody German."

  "Nah, they look like pigs, Den."

  "Yes, he looks more like a rat."

  The slow riverine eyes went over them. The smile did not lessen.

  Malach dipped one finger in his beer. They watched, fascinated.

  Malach drew a circle around the rim of his glass. A faint silver note came from it, irritating to the ear as tinnitus.

  "Do you think it's some sexual gesture?" Kev asked Ray.

  "Maybe he fancies Den."

  "Take off your glasses, Den, and give him a kish."

  The note on the beer glass became suddenly shrill and unbearable. Across the bar a few heads turned.

  Malach removed his finger from the glass. It went on singing. He lifted the beer to his lips.

  And Kev's gin tumbler broke into fragments, showering on the floor. The gin and tonic splashed across his pink shirt. Kev yelled. He had gone white. Blood dripped on his diver's watch, which he had not noticed yet had stopped.

  "Christ," said Den. "Oh Christ, my glasses—" He pulled them off and one of the lenses cracked in half and fell out onto the ground. He went down on his hands and knees on the lary carpet, stupidly trying to find the two bits.

  Ray backed off. He put his drink on the table. "All right, mate," he called out at Malach. Then he turned and walked quickly into the street.

  Malach shrugged.

  The glass had stopped singing and he drained it.

  A few people watched curiously, not understanding what had happened.

  Kev said, "Very clever, smart-arse."

  Malach leaned forward. He caught Kev's face in his long hand with the tarnished rings. Kev's whiteness went to green.

  "Tot ziens," Malach said, and Kev wet himself.

  Outside on the pavement Ray was not in sight. An old woman came past, stepping carefully over Malach's shadow.

  The sun was a methyl orange star in the western sector of the sky. The storm had not broken.

  CHAPTER 17