Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  “Here I am,” he said, “I won’t keep you a minute. If you’d just be kind enough to sign these.”

  Felixity did not get up at once only because she was lethargic. But she said softly, “What if I refuse?”

  Roland continued to smile. “I should be forced to take away your radio and books, and to starve you.”

  Felixity believed him. After all, if he starved her to death, he would inherit everything. It was really quite good of him to allow her to live.

  She went to the table and signed the papers.

  “Thank you so much,” said Roland.

  “Won’t you let me out?” said Felixity.

  “Obviously I can’t.” He added logically, “It’s much better if you stay here. Or you might be tempted to run away and divorce me. Or if you didn’t do that, you’d be horribly in my way.”

  Roland had, prior to their drive to the villa, sacked the original servants and installed a second set, all of whom were bribed to his will, served him unquestioningly, and held their tongues. Roland now lived the life that ideally suited him, answerable to no one. He lay in bed until noon, breakfasted extravagantly, spent the day lazily, and in the evening drove to the nearest city to gamble and to drink. Frequently he would return to the villa in the small hours with beautiful women, to whom, in a great scrolled bed, he made ferocious love, casting them out again at dawn, in their spangled dresses, like the rinds of eaten fruits.

  “But,” said Felixity,” “you see I’m afraid — if I have to stay here — I may lose my mind.”

  “Oh don’t worry about that,” said Roland. “The servants already think I locked you up because you were insane.”

  Then he left her, and Felixity went to gaze from her window. The mountains looked like the demarcation line at the end of the world. Felixity turned on her radio.

  That night, as she ate a piece of hard sausage, she broke a tooth.

  She felt curiously humiliated by this, yet she had no choice but to set the fact down on a page of her notepad, and append a request for a dentist. This she slipped out through the flap in the door with a pallid misgiving. She did not suppose for an instant Roland would permit her to leave the house, and what kind of mechanic would he send in to her?

  For nine days, during which the broken tooth tore at her mouth and finally made it bleed, Felixity awaited Roland’s response. On the tenth day she came to see he would not trouble to respond at all. He had spared her what suffering he could, under the circumstances, but to put himself out over her teeth was too much to ask of him.

  This, then, was where she had sunk to.

  Four hours passed, and Felixity sat in her chair listening to a serial about a sensational girl who could not choose between her lovers. Behind her the window became feverish then cool, and darkness slid into the room.

  Suddenly something strange happened. Felixity sprang to her feet as if she had been electrically shocked. She rushed towards the cheap mirror on the wall and stared at herself in the fading crepuscule. She did not need light, for she knew it all. She reached up and rent at her thin hair and a scream burst out of her, lacerating her mouth freshly on the sharp edge of broken enamel.

  “Nonononono!” screamed Felixity.

  She was denying only herself.

  She jumped up and down before the mirror, shrieking, galvanized by a scalding white thread inside her.

  Only when this huge energy had left her, which took several minutes, did she crawl back to the chair and collapse in it, weeping. She cried for hours out of the well of pain. Her sobs were strong and violent and the room seemed to shake at them.

  At midnight, the radio station closed down and the shattering silence bounded into the room. Felixity looked up. Everything was in blackness, the lamp unlit, and yet it seemed there had been a flash of brilliance. Perhaps there was a storm above the mountains. Or, incredibly, perhaps some human life went over the plain, a car driving on the dirt tracks of it with headlights blazing.

  Felixity moved to the window. Night covered the plain and the mountains were like dead coals. Above, the stars winked artificially, as they had done in the planetarium where once she had been taken as a child.

  The whip of light cracked again. It was not out on the plain but inside the room.

  Felixity was still too stunned for ordinary fear.

  She walked back slowly to her chair, and as she did so, she saw her reflection in the round mirror on the wall.

  Felixity stopped, and her reflection stopped, inevitably. Felixity raised her right arm, let it fall. Her left arm, let it fall. The reflection did the same. Felixity began to walk forward again, towards the mirror. She walked directly up to it, and halted close enough to touch.

  Earlier, in the twilight, the mirror had reflected Felixity only too faithfully. It had shown the apex of her ungainly figure, her drab, oily complexion, her ugly features and wispy hair. Now the mirror contained something else. It was illuminated as if a lamp shone on it out of the dark room. In the mirror, Felixity’s reflection was no longer Felixity.

  Instead a woman stood in the mirror, copying exactly every gesture that Felixity made.

  This woman, to judge from her upper torso, was slender, with deeply indented breasts. Her skin, which was visible in the low-cut bodice and at the throat and the lower part of the face, was the mildest gold, like dilute honey. Her tightly fitting gown was a flame. On her upper face, across her forehead and eyes, she wore a mask like yellow jade, from which long sprays of sparkling feathers curved away. And above the mask and beneath ran thickly coiling gilded hair, like golden snakes poured from a jar.

  Felixity put both her hands up over her mouth. And the woman in the mirror did as Felixity did. She wore long gloves the color of topaz, streaked with scintillants.

  The flash of brilliance snapped again. It was up in the black air above the woman. A lyre of sparks came all unstrung: a firework. As it faded, an entire scene was there at the woman’s back.

  It was a city of steps and arches, plazas and tall buildings, through which a brimstone river curled its way. But over the river slim bridges ran that were fruited with lamps of orange amber, and on the facades all about roared torches of lava red. All these lights burned in the river too, wreathing it with fires.

  Figures went across the levels of the city, in scarlet, brass, and embers. Some led oxblood dogs or carried incandescent parrots on their wrists. A bronze alligator surfaced from the river, glittered like jewelry, and was gone.

  Felixity saw a large red star hung in the sky.

  Within the woman’s mask, two eyes glimmered. She lowered her hands from her mouth and Felixity found that she had lowered her hands. But then the woman turned from the mirror and walked away.

  Felixity watched the woman walk to the end of a torchlit pier, and there she waited in her gown of flame until a flaming boat came by and she stepped into it and was borne off under the bridges of lamps.

  After this the scene melted, all its fires and colors spilling together downward and out by some non-existent gutter at the mirror’s base.

  Felixity took two or three paces back. In sheer darkness now she went and lay on her bed. But the afterimages of the lights stayed on her retinas for some while, in flickering floating patches. The mirror remained black, and in it she could dimly see the room reflecting. Felixity closed her eyes and beheld the alligator surfacing in a gold garland of ripples, and as it slipped under again, she slept.

  In the morning, when she woke, Felixity did not think she had been dreaming. It did occur to her that perhaps Roland had played some kind of trick on her, but she quickly dismissed this idea, for Roland had no interest in her, why should he waste effort on such a thing? Had she then suffered an hallucination? Was this the onset of madness? Felixity discovered that she did not thrill with horror. She felt curiously calm, almost complacent. She took a bath and shampooed her hair, ate the meals that were shunted through the door, ignoring as best she could the difficulty with the broken tooth, and listened to
the radio. She was waiting for the darkness to come back. And when it did so, she switched off the radio and sat in her chair, watching the mirror.

  Hours passed and the mirror kept up its blackness, faintly reflecting the room. Once Felixity thought there was a spark of light, but it was only some spasm in her eyes.

  Eventually Felixity put on the radio again. It was midnight and the station was closing down. Felixity became alert, for it was at this moment on the previous night that the mirror had come alive. However, the station went off the air, and that was all. Felixity watched the mirror from her bed until sleep overcame her.

  Somewhere in the markerless black of early morning, she awakened, and over the mirror was flowing a ribbon of fire.

  Felixity leapt from the bed and dashed to the mirror, but already the fire had vanished, leaving no trace.

  Felixity set herself to sleep by day and watch by night. This was quite easy for her, for rather like a caged animal she had become able to slumber almost at will. In the darkness she would sit, without the lamp, sometimes not looking directly at the mirror. She let the radio play softly in the background, and when the close-down came she would tense. But nothing happened.

  Seven nights went by.

  Felixity continued her bat-like existence.

  Only one magical thing had ever taken place in her life before, her betrothal to Roland, and that had been proved to be a sham. The magic of the mirror she recognized, as sometimes a piece of music, never heard before, may seem familiar. This music was for her.

  On the eighth night, just after the radio had announced it was eleven o’clock, the mirror turned to a coin of gold.

  Without a sound, Felixity got up, went to the mirror, and stared in.

  It was a golden ballroom lit by bizarre chandeliers like the rosy clustered hearts of pomegranates. There on the floor of obsidian a man and woman danced in an austere yet sensual fashion. His were sophisticated carnival clothes of black and blood, and he was masked in jet. She was Felixity’s reflection, and now she wore a dress of sulfur beaded by magma rain. There was a tango playing on the radio, and it seemed they moved in time to it.

  Felixity felt herself dancing, although she did not stir, and the man’s arm around her.

  In a tall window was a sort of day, a sky that was coral pink and a huge red sun or planet lying low.

  The tango quivered to its end.

  The man and woman separated, and all the colors pooled together and sluiced down the mirror. Felixity made a wild motion, as if to catch them as they flushed through the bottom of the glass. But of course nothing ran out.

  In the blackness of her room then, Felixity solemnly danced a tango alone. She was stiff and unwieldy and sometimes bumped into the flimsy furniture. She knew now a raw craving and yearning, a nostalgia as if for an idyllic childhood. She had come to understand who the woman was. She was Felixity, in another world. Felixity’s brain had made the intellectual and spiritual jump swiftly and completely. Here she was a lump, unloved, unliked even, so insignificant she could be made a prisoner forever. But there, she was a being of fire.

  Oh to go through the mirror. Oh to be one with her true self.

  And at last she touched the mirror, which was very warm against her hand, as if the sun had just shone on it. But otherwise it gave no clue to its remarkable properties. And certainly no hint of a way in.

  After the vision at eleven o’clock on the eighth night, a month elapsed, and the mirror never altered by night or day.

  Felixity grew very sad. Although she had been thrown into an abyss, idly tossed there, her reaction had been mostly passivity rather than despair, for she was used to ill-treatment in one form or another. But the images in the mirror had raised her up to a savage height, to a plateau of lights she had never before achieved. That she grasped almost at once their implication demonstrated how profoundly she had been affected. And now she was left with the nothing which had always encompassed her and which Roland had driven in beside her, into her cage.

  She ceased to eat the scanty meals and only sipped the coffee or water. In order to hide what she did — she was incoherently afraid of force-feeding — she dropped the portions of food into the lavatory. Felixity became extremely feeble, dizzy, and sick. Her head ached constantly, and she could not keep down the pain-killers. She lay on the bed all day, sinking in and out of sleep. She could hardly hear the radio for the singing in her ears. At night she tried to stay conscious, but the mirror was like a black void that sucked her in. Her head whirled, and spots of light burst over her eyes, deceiving her, for there was nothing there. She cried softly without passion. She hoped she would die soon. Then she could sleep indefinitely.

  On the first morning of the new month, before sunrise, Felixity raised her gluey lids and saw the woman who was herself standing up against the inside of the mirror in her mask of yellow jade, a dress like naphtha, and the glinting vipers of her golden hair.

  Felixity’s heart palpitated. She tried to get up, but she was too weak.

  Behind the woman who was the real Felixity, there was, as at the start, only blackness. But now the mirror-Felixity lifted her ruby glove, and she held in her fingers a single long, coppery feather, the plume of some extraordinary bird.

  If she would only take off her mask, Felixity thought, I’d see that she is me. It would be my face, and it would be beautiful.

  But the woman did not remove the mask of yellow jade. Instead she turned her head toward the feather, and she blew gently on it.

  The breath that came out of her mouth was bloomed with a soft lightning. It enveloped the tip of the feather, which at once caught fire.

  Felixity watched, dazzled, until the flame went out and the woman dissolved abruptly into glowing snow, and the mirror was only a mirror again. Then Felixity turned on her side and fell asleep.

  When it was light, she woke refreshed and, going into the bathroom, bathed and washed her hair. Presently when the tray of food came, she ate. Her stomach hurt for some while after but she did not pay any attention. She put on the radio and hummed along with the melodies, most of which she now knew by heart.

  In the afternoon, after the lunch tray, from which she ate everything, the door was unlocked and Roland entered the room.

  Felixity stood up. She had not realized he would arrive so quickly.

  “Here I am,” he said, “I won’t detain you a moment. Just some more of these dull papers to sign.”

  Felixity smiled, and Roland was surprised. He expected acquiescence, but not happiness.

  “Naturally I’ll sign them,” said Felixity. “But first, you must kiss me.”

  Roland now looked concerned.

  “It seems inappropriate.”

  “Not at all,” said Felixity. “I’m your wife.”

  And at this, the gigolo must have triumphed over the thief, for Roland approached Felixity and gravely bowed his head. Indeed, at the press of her flesh on his, after the libidinous life he had been leading, his lips parted from force of habit, and Felixity blew into his mouth.

  Roland sprang away. His face appeared congested and astonished. He went on, stumbling backwards, until he reached the door, and then he turned as if to rush out of it.

  So Felixity saw from the back of him, the tailored suit and blue-black hair, and two jets of white flame that spouted suddenly from his ears.

  Roland spun on the spot, and now she saw his face, with yellow flames gouting from his nose and purple gases from his mouth. And then he went up in a noiseless scream of fire, like petrol, or a torch.

  The doorway was burning, and she could not get out of it. Flames were darting round the room, consuming the sticks of furniture as they went. The bed erupted like an opening rose. The mirror was gold again, and red.

  How cold the flames were. Felixity felt them eating her and gave herself eagerly, glad to be rid of it, the vileness of her treacherous body. The last thing she saw was half the burning floor give way and crash down into the lower regions of the house,
and the mirror flying after it like a bubble of the sun.

  The servants escaped the blazing villa and stood in the gardens of the house above the sea, wailing and exclaiming. It was generally concluded that their employer, Roland, and his mad invalid wife, had perished in the inferno. With amazing rapidity the house collapsed, sending up a pillar of red smoke that could be seen for miles.

  Unseen by anyone, however, Felixity emerged out of the rubble.

  She had not a mark or a smut upon her. She had instead the body of a goddess and the face of an angel. Her skin was like honey and her hair like a cascade of golden serpents, and in her mouth were the white and flawless teeth of a healthy predator.

  Somehow she had had burned on to her, also, a lemon dress and amber shoes.

  She went among the philodendrons, Felixity, out of sight. And so down toward the road, without a backward glance.

  The Thaw

  Ladies first, they said.

  That was OK. Then they put a histotrace on the lady in question and called me.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Listen,” they said, “you’re a generative bloodline descendant of Carla Brice. Aren’t you interested, for God’s sake? This is a unique moment, a unique experience. She’s going to need support, understanding. A contact. Come on. Don’t be frigid about it.”

  “I guess Carla is more frigid than I’m ever likely to be.”

  They laughed, to keep up the informalities. Then they mentioned the Institute grant I’d receive, just for hanging around and being supportive. To a quasi-unemployed artist, that was temptation and a half. They also reminded me that on this initial bout there wouldn’t be much publicity, so later, if I wanted to capitalize as an eyewitness, and providing good old Carla was willing — I had a sudden vision of getting very rich, very quick, and with the minimum of effort, and I succumbed ungracefully.

  Which accurately demonstrates my three strongest qualities: laziness, optimism, and blind stupidity. Which in turn sums up the whole story, more or less. And that’s probably why I was told to write it down for the archives of the human race. I can’t think of a better way to depress and wreck the hopes of frenzied, shackled, bleating humanity.