by Tanith Lee
"Blood," said Malach.
Ruth said: "Scarabae."
Then Malach stood up. He had been with her only fifteen minutes. He left her without any formal expression, but half an hour later she knocked and called out, "Can I have some more to eat?"
He phoned the restaurant, and two apple and raspberry Danish came, and an ice cream. She ate all of it.
The second day he went to her in the afternoon.
"Hunger," he said.
"Empty," said Ruth.
"Empty," he said.
She blinked. "Heart."
"Ruby."
"Heart," said Ruth.
"Heart," he said.
"Window."
"Describe the window," he said.
"Red. Ruby red. Ladies in red dresses and a red horse and a red sun."
"Darkness."
"Eyes," said Ruth.
"Whose eyes?"
"Yours."
"My eyes aren't dark, Ruth."
"Yes."
"My eyes are a very light blue. The eyes often turn paler, as the body grows older."
"Ink," said Ruth, starting the game again.
He let her. He said, "Ink is black."
"Blue ink. Mixed with white wine."
"What color is the window in this room?"
"Blood color."
"Blood, Ruth."
"Yesterday."
"Tomorrow."
She looked up at him and shook her head.
They played the word game every day for more than two months. Sometimes they would play for over an hour.
He did not seem pleased or dismayed by her reactions. It did not occur to her that rather than trying to learn about her, he was trying to teach her to be herself. She performed for him, only now and then lowering the shutter of her silence, and then only to decide. Even her evasions were relevant.
"Egypt," he said.
"Kings."
"Scarabae."
"Beetle."
"Describe the beetle."
"Black, with a face carved on its back."
Autumn came too quickly now, attached to the end of summer in a sudden sickening and death.
In the misty early mornings, more often after sunset, he would walk the streets of the capital, now with the dogs, and now alone.
But Ruth strayed only in her mind. She had nowhere else to go.
The dogs were sparring under the laurels, rolling and kicking at each other, barking joyfully.
Malach went back into the whitewashed room and drew the stone knife off the wall.
Going to Ruth's apartment, he unlocked the door, paused, and went in.
Ruth was sitting drawing. It was a palace, a compendium of many differing architectural styles, Renaissance Italian, Homeric Greek, timeless Egyptian.
She said at once, "I'd like some books. I'd like some books about buildings."
"I'll arrange it."
"Thank you."
"You are always very polite," he said.
"Emma taught me."
"But you dislike Emma."
"No…" said Ruth. And then, "Emma doesn't count."
"What word do you put with Emma?"
"Warm."
"Warm," he said.
"Fire," said Ruth. Then she screwed up her face. It became ugly, an imp's.
"The hanged man," said Malach.
"Tarot," said Ruth.
"Which card do you think is yours?"
"Priestess."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you see a tarot pack?"
"In the market. And Mommy let me have it."
"Look," said Malach.
He held up the knife. It was bluntly shaped, yet with the edge honed like a razor. The stone was pinkish gray. 0"What is it?" said Ruth.
"A knife of sacrifice."
"Is it real?"
"Yes."
He gave it to her. She examined it, meekly.
"Imagine," he said, "you are on a high place, before an altar, with this knife. On the altar is strapped a man. He asks you to kill him, to send him to the god."
"It's not sharp enough."
"Don't prevaricate. It's sharp."
"I'd wait for the sign," said Ruth.
"What sign?"
"That the god wanted him."
"But," he said, "you've never waited."
Ruth looked up at him. She put down the knife. She frowned.
"Sometimes—" she said.
"Sometimes. But it was an accident. The priest kills for God. The warrior kills for his legion. But you."
"Please," said Ruth. "Don't."
"Ruth kills for Ruth."
She bowed her head.
"I don't want to play anymore."
"Good. That means your eyes are opened."
"I don't want to see. The sun's too bright."
"There's no sun in this room."
"There's a light."
"Fire," he said.
"The house," she said.
"Anna," he said.
"Heart," she said.
"Heart," he said.
"Needle," she said. "Hammer and needle."
"Death," he said.
"Empty," she said.
He leaned forward and seized her. He pulled her up, up his body. She had grown perhaps an inch. Her head rested on his chest. He put the knife, cool, against her throat.
Ruth was quite still.
"Can I die if you kill me?"
"Believe it. Didn't Adamus die?"
"I don't know."
"Didn't Anna? Didn't Alice?"
"Did they?"
"If they didn't, why do I have you, Ruth, by the neck?"
He heard and felt her swallow. She did not struggle to resist. She said, "Thank you for doing it in private. When you've done it, will you hold my hand? It doesn't take long, does it? Just so I know you're there."
Malach let her go.
She fell straight onto the carpet. She had believed him.
He left her.
He locked the door.
He put the knife onto a little round polished table.
Then he walked into the second beautiful modern bathroom and vomited the bitterness of centuries and two thousand lies.
CHAPTER 28
IT WAS NOT HER LATE NIGHT AT THE library. At a quarter past six, Stella walked out and up the road, towards the supermarket, which today was open until eight.
After she had met Nobbi, after Nobbi began to stay with her for the evening, Stella had bought a big freezer. She stocked it carefully. She liked to cook for Nobbi.
The supermarket was comparatively empty. Stella manhandled a trolly and wheeled it up the aisles under the hard fluorescent lights.
She took some fruit first and a can of pilchards for her own supper, two cartons of orange juice and some crusty rolls. Then she moved among the tins, selecting tomatoes, lentils, kidney beans. When she knew he would be coming, she went to the delicatessen, gathered white gourds of garlic and fresh vegetables.
At the frozen-meat section, she leaned deeply into the vats, drawing out a leg of lamb, fillet steaks, a wedge of bacon.
Anyone seeing her would think she was shopping for a family.
Well, one day. Perhaps.
She did not often think of it. She rationed her daydreams. But there might come a time, after he had got his daughter settled. He would leave Marilyn all his worldly goods, and he would come to Star. She would support him until he could build his business up again.
It did not matter to her if he came to her with nothing. She only wanted him.
Stella for Star. That was the first thing he had said to her when he stepped into her flat for the first time. He was carrying a box of chocolates. Stella hated chocolate, but she loved the ones he brought. She kept them until the sweets turned white, and then she kept the box, which had kittens on it. Marilyn, apparently, liked kittens. She had been known to say, wasn't it a pity they had to get bigger.
Stella for Star. When he said
it, she had exclaimed with delight. "Just some old film I seen," said Nobbi. Stella said, "It's Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire." "Oh," said Nobbi. He had lowered his bashful eyes. He was slightly embarrassed and already hard. Five minutes later they were on Star's bed.
She had met him in the library. He had not come in for a book. Books, to Nobbi, were the commodity of others.
No, Nobbi had come in about a crack in the Senior Librarian's office wall. A favor to someone, Nobbi afterwards said.
It was two weeks after Stella's cat had died. There were only three elderly men browsing among the book stacks, and Stella alone at the computer, which she disliked. It had just messed her up, and she had started to cry.
To her rage and wretchedness the door opened, and this burly bloody man was there, through her tears only a graceless shape.
"Where's—" said Nobbi. And then, in a voice so utterly gentle, so utterly kind that it made her see him, he said to Stella, "What's up, love? What is it?"
So she saw him. A short, fat, common London wide-boy in middle age. Bristly thin hair and nut-brown skin from all weathers, in a vest with a jacket over it and a flash gold chain.
And in his eyes, Stella saw—
She saw that which is eternal and indescribable, what the lucky ones have all seen, once, and the very lucky twice or three times. What she had never seen before among the gropings of her youth and the frigid evenings of her maturity.
Stella blushed. It was her body's flag, raised to signal to him from a hill.
Then she said, "My cat died. She was very old. It's silly, isn't it?"
"No," said Nobbi, "no it ain't. It breaks your bloody heart. My granddad had an old dog. Only one eye. It died, and I bawled my bloody eyes out for a month. Lovely old dog, it was. What was her name?"
He knew the cat had been feminine, or else all cats were female to him. "Gertie," said Stella. "My mother called her that. For Gertrude Lawrence."
"Oh," said Nobbi. He plainly had never heard of Gertrude Lawrence, but he liked the name. It had been the Old Girl's. "The thing you got to tell yourself," he said, "is that you gave her a good life. We all got to go. It's what you get here that counts."
"She did have a happy life. She died in her sleep."
"There you are," said Nobbi, "bless her."
"Bless you, too," said Stella.
And then Nobbi also blushed, faintly but unmistakably.
He went on to the Librarian's office and the crack.
A week later he came back. The gang of three workmen had created the usual chaos. Nobbi stood surveying it proudly.
"Look here, Mr.—er—isn't there any way you can hurry it up?" bleated Mr. Rollinson. "It's been going on for a week. You really—"
"Yeah, squire, I know," said Nobbi. "Not a thing I can do."
There was an open courtyard in the library, with potted trees and a seat. Here Nobbi came, to look at the offending wall from outside. Stella was eating from a carton of salad.
"Hallo."
"Hallo," said Nobbi.
He made a couple of passes at the wall.
"Funny old job, this." He glanced at Stella. "How do you get on with him?"
"Mr. Rollinson? I wish I could kill him."
Nobbi grinned.
"It's nice," he said, "all them books. I don't get time to read. No, it ain't that. Just don't have the knack for it. I bet you enjoy it, though."
"It fills in the gaps," said Stella.
Her heart bounced in her throat. She said, "Will you have lunch with me tomorrow?"
Nobbi's mouth fell open. He looked about eight. Maybe nine.
"Well I—I get my dinner as I go. Always moving around—"
"Don't make an excuse. Say yes."
There was no one anywhere. The red walls of the library turned the courtyard into a medieval garden.
Stella got up and went to Nobbi.
She went right up to him, and softly touched his balls.
"I want to go to bed with you," said Stella.
Nobbi looked frightened.
"Hang on—"
"No, I do. I really do."
"I'm married. I'm old enough to be your dad. Got a girl of my own—"
"I'm thirty-five. I haven't made love for ten years."
Nobbi back away and the wall stopped him, Stella's friend. "But—"
"I'm telling you about the ten years," said Stella, "so you know I don't make a habit of this."
"I'm not—" said Nobbi. "You're brainy," he said, "all that."
"I'm Stella," said Stella. "I want to feel you inside me."
"Christ," said Nobbi.
He looked up into her burning eyes, and seemed to recognize her from a long way off.
"Please don't—" said Stella, "don't, don't say no."
"You're bloody scaring me," said Nobbi.
"I'm bloody scaring me."
Next day they met in the park. Stella had brought sandwiches of cold roast pork, mustard and cream cheese, and a half bottle of Muscadet.
They ate under the trees. It was spring, not very warm, and when she shivered, he put his arm round her.
"I shouldn't," he said. "And you shouldn't. A girl like you."
"I'm not a girl."
They kissed experimentally. It reminded Nobbi of former times, kissing on the grass, nowhere to go. But there was somewhere to go.
In the evening he rang Marilyn, told her he was working late over at Roehampton, and went to Stella's flat with a box of chocolates which he knew, intuitively, were wrong, but not what else to get.
Stella's love-making was frenetic but not violent. She did not grab. In his embrace she seemed to have no bones, a slender snake.
Even in the eager beginning, Marilyn had never been like this. No one had, that he could think of.
When they had exhausted themselves, Stella for Star had made bacon and egg, which she served with a hollan-daise sauce. She did not cry or carry on when he left. She did look wistful. She did not reckon he would come back.
He called her in the middle of the night, from his office in the annex.
"Nobbi," she said, "I wish you were here."
"Don't wish that, Star."
"No, I don't mean… I just mean, if you could have stayed the night."
Outside the grapeleaves, young and tender, rustled on the pergola. With the year the grapes would bud and turn to green and purple. The cleaning woman would pluck them and take them home. By then, Star and he would be an established thing, but he did not know this, then.
"I just wanted to tell you," he said, "you were lovely."
"Was I, Nobbi?"
"You was wonderful, Star."
"Was I?"
At the caress of her voice, his erection strove upward, longing for her hands and lips, the velvet tunnel of her loins.
"Sleep tight, Star. I wish—I wish I bloody well was in there with you too."
At the checkout was a dowdy woman with her handsome husband. He spoke to her in knife cuts.
He's ruined her, thought Stella for Star. So many shits of men.
Her own father had not been much. They had been happier after he was gone, her mother and she.
Star had loved her mother. But she loved Nobbi more. She loved sex with Nobbi. She loved sleeping with Nobbi, back to back. His hard bare buttocks against her own.
She loved his goodness. His shyness. His loyalty to Marilyn and Tracy. Yes, she even loved that.
She paid for the food.
One day.
One day she would go home, and Nobbi .would be there, working on his accounts at her table. They would have a big dog, and a cat, bought together in infancy so each believed the other was a version of itself, a meowing dog, a barking cat.
And, it might be, if it did not take too long, that she could give him a child.
Why not? It happened all the time, mothers of forty-five and more. She was fit and strong.
A girl. He would want a girl.
Another Tracy, but better. A Tray brou
ght up to appreciate him.
She thought of Nobbi pushing a little girl on a swing. And stopped herself.
She had to wait.
God knew, she had waited long enough for love.
The bus came, and she lugged the heavy bags of food, merrily in her strong arms, aboard.
"Foggy old night," said the woman beside her.
"Terrible," agreed Star. She had not noticed.
CHAPTER 29
CROSSING THE RIVER, THE FOG lessened. Lights hung in the night water like reflections in a mirror that had been breathed on.
For a moment it might have been anywhere. Torch poles above the Tiber. Brands on the living bank of Thebes. Or some stretch of medieval water lit for an occasion.
But past the river, the fog closed in again.
Rachaela remembered the days of the fog, years ago, when the Scarabae first reached out for her.
"Of course," said Althene, "this is nothing. Hardly a London Particular."
She sat away along the seat of the taxi, the traveling lights catching her colors. She wore a blue velvet coat, and under that a tunic suit of ash-blue silk. Around her neck was a spray of green cut-glass vivid as crystallized angelica, and on the middle finger of her left hand a large polished emerald.
Rachaela had put on the olive-green dress Althene had bought her. It was her concession to the evening. She felt vaguely angry, uncomfortable. Why had she come? Perhaps to see the film, or merely to escape the house.
But there was never any escape now, and she had accepted that, surely.
Areas of her emotions had opened out. She seemed to have another sense. This constant awareness of other places, times, feelings… different lives, previous centuries. It was insidious, and pleasing in a bittersweet way. Perhaps it had even been there from the beginning, and her mother had successfully driven it under. When she listened to music, maybe it had come then, in another form.
Althene did not say very much.
She too seemed to be deriving some sensation or thought from the foggy city. Once, she sighed. Her perfume was light yet brunette, cinnamon with something darker.
Her perfection was slightly, as always, intimidating.
/ don't really like her, Rachaela thought. She only fascinates me.
No, she makes me angry.
Althene had said that Rachaela should come with her to see the film. An old film, made in 1916, Griffith's Intolerance.
The restaurant was in a tiny side street with old-fashioned lamps that gave a greenish cat's-eye glow through the fog.
