Heroes and Villains

by Angela Carter

  ‘It’s raining. You can’t go now.’

  ‘I can and will.’

  ‘You might be incubating my child already. It’s some time since I’ve been doing you.’

  ‘The Professors know cures for that particular malady.’

  ‘Take a knife. To protect yourself.’

  ‘I’m not particularly afraid.’

  ‘Not so much for the wild beasts. I only ever saw a lion once, in a wood. It lay across the carcass of a cow, beside the place where a train crashed, ooh, years ago, when they still had them. All the doors of this train were hanging down like the wings of a dead insect with ever so many wings and the lion had a bloody mouth. Also, gum seeped from its eyes. It was the colour of bracken and it got on with its dinner without minding me.’

  ‘You are trying to appeal to my romanticism,’ she said angrily. ‘I’m not a child, to be taken in with pretty stories.’

  ‘The wild beasts won’t jump you but, on the other hand, the ruins are full of such horrors as lepers, madmen, hermits, men with heads of apes or single eyes in the middle of their foreheads, to say nothing of roving bands of Out People –’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said crisply for, after all, he was her husband and deserved the formality of a farewell. But he did not say goodbye to her, even though she was his wife. Descending from the rickety tower, she sightlessly followed the inward spiral of the staircase and the only clue she had to guide her were her five fingers against the clammy surfaces of the walls. She inched her way gingerly, slithering on steps that had never before seemed so steep, so uncertain or so curded with slime, and the wind blew in fitful gusts, shaking the stones. The sickly air of the long corridor above the chapel struck surprisingly warm when at last she gained it. She made her way along this corridor and reached the landing where the chapel was; and Donally was waiting for her in the dark.

  She was so angry with herself for not having guessed he would be waiting for her that she could not speak. She could see nothing of him at all but he closed his hand around her wrists and she was trapped.

  ‘We’ll have to hobble you, like the horses,’ he said.

  He drew her into his room. His books were put away in innumerable packing-cases and his jars and instruments were packed in grass in several large baskets but the eternal saucepan still bubbled on the brazier and four candles were alight on the altar. Chained to the staple in the wall, the child slept with only a torn blanket between his bare, narrow sides and the stone-flagged floor. Fresh weals of a beating marked his back.

  ‘He’s promising to be a good boy,’ said Donally in a brooding voice. ‘So he can sleep indoors, tonight, for we’ll all be on the road tomorrow.’

  How cool, sweet and pastel-tinted were the voices of the Professors; while the voices that grated daily on her nerves were edged with steel and ungrammatical. His voice was so gentle and familiar she was almost inclined to trust him until she saw the bloody chain with which he had beaten his son lying on the floor. He had been repairing his lurid cloak and the feathered garment was spread across the altar and shimmered in the candlelight. He offered her a drink from a leather flask. She refused.

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I continue my work. There won’t be time for it, during the travelling.’

  He put the flask down beside him and seated himself cross-legged on the altar; he began to ply his needle in the many coloured feathers. She wondered if he would swoop down on wings to catch her if she made a dash for the door. He inquired in intimate tones:

  ‘Does he misuse you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked carefully.

  He batted his eyelids. His plucked brows were like sideways parentheses.

  ‘Vile practices and unspeakable things, for instance,’ he hedged.

  ‘Such as what?’ she asked, this time rudely.

  ‘Fellatio and so on.’

  ‘Would you consider that misuse?’

  He opened his eyes wide as if surprised at her naïvety.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed; a vile practice and only to be discreetly mentioned in a language safely dead. The Romans were here and gone, of course, and, after them, Uther, when there were also wolves in the forests and even a lion or two if one can sort out fact from fiction, always a difficult task. And the milk-white unicorn, a heavily symbolic and extravagantly horned beast who could only be captured by a young virgin, which always proved the worst for it. Poor Jewel, in the same plight; though not, of course, milk white. It is going backwards, time is going backwards and coiling up; who let the spring go, I wonder, so that history wound back on itself ?’

  The melancholy whimsy of Professors gathered together over their after-dinner, home-brewed blackberry brandy when they would discuss apocalypses, utopias and so on. Marianne suppressed a yawn but, all the same, she felt at home. She went closer to the altar and watched the giant tailor repair his skin.

  ‘God died, of course. Quite early. Do you think we should resurrect him, do you think we need him in this hypothetical landscape of ruin and forest in which we might or might not exist?’

  ‘Do you desire the role yourself ?’

  ‘I prefer to remain anonymous, I’d rather choose to be the holy spirit. But I’ve often thought of grooming Jewel for some kind of mythopoeic role. If he never made the final rung of full-scale divinity, I’m sure he could easily acquire the kind of semi-legendary status that King Arthur had.’ He began to laugh. ‘He could be the Messiah of the Yahoos.’

  He laughed so much he almost knocked over his bottle; he caught it just in time, drank again and again offered it to her.

  ‘Come on, young lady. You might as well learn oblivion from their odious aqua vita now as later.’

  ‘I don’t plan to stay long enough.’

  ‘What, you’d leave your husband to the melancholy pleasures of auto-fellatio? If you stay, I’ll teach you necromancy.’

  He was exceedingly drunk, no doubt passing most of the hours of darkness consuming their crude spirit to ease the pain. When she realized this, Marianne felt a certain exhilaration. Fallacious clouds of unreason rose from the saucepan in a green steam which also seemed to contain hallucinogenic properties since the skeleton in the recess occasionally twitched as if rattling his bones and the waxen Mary behind the altar swelled and diminished by fits and starts. But she could deduce methodologically that the Doctor’s real though parti-coloured beard was dark at the roots on the red side and thus needed a fresh application of dye.

  ‘Necromancy doesn’t work,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody need ever know,’ he whispered cunningly.

  ‘Why did you run away from the Professors? Did they turn you out for doing something disgusting?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I came of my own free will.’

  ‘Give me another aphorism, I feel the need for comfort.’

  He thought for a while; then he said: ‘The world becomes a dream and the dream, a world.’

  ‘I hardly ever dream at all,’ she said sadly. ‘Jewel was angry with me when I told him, as if I was cheating.’

  ‘I am trying to invent him as I go along but I am experiencing certain difficulties,’ complained Donally. ‘He won’t keep still long enough. Creation from the void is more difficult than it would seem.’

  Marianne saw the door open soundlessly. Jewel put his fingers to his lips to show her to keep quiet; he was carrying a knife between his teeth in order to have both his hands free. She was so angry he had followed her that she said at once: ‘You’ve another visitor, give him some brandy.’

  Jewel took away the knife and spat.

  ‘And I’d meant to stab him, too,’ he said with faint regret. He was hastily dressed and bare-footed but had taken the time to sling a mass of amulets around his neck. He shut the door behind him and lurked in the doorway with a beautiful, treacherous smile on his face.

  ‘Venturing on to the stair for the purposes of nature, Jewel Lee Bradley, who should I find but your child bride intent on fleeing your embraces.’

&n
bsp; ‘Not so much my embraces as fear of their consequences.’

  ‘There’s nowhere to go, dear,’ said the Doctor. ‘If there was, I would have found it.’

  He held out the flask to Jewel who approached crabwise and accepted it. He sniffed it suspiciously, wiped the top and drank. A cold wind disturbed the rushes on the floor. Jewel’s brown throat rippled and, watching him, Marianne wondered if the urge she felt to touch him was a need or a desire or if, contrary to what Donally said, both were functionally the same. The Doctor was perhaps experiencing a similar emotion. His hand came to rest on Jewel’s shoulder. Marianne saw his fingernails were carefully, even beautifully, polished and manicured.

  ‘Hands off,’ said Jewel, shaking himself. ‘I’ve told you often enough.’

  ‘Show me my picture,’ said Donally. ‘Take off your shirt.’

  He felt under the collar and began to pull off the garment; Jewel shrugged and allowed himself to be stripped.

  ‘Kneel down.’

  ‘You silly old man,’ said Jewel almost tenderly and knelt. He parted his river of hair, exposing his neck as for the executioner’s blade, and revealed again the monstrous tattoo, the Garden of Eden, the tree, the snake, the man, the woman and the apple.

  ‘Observe the last work of art in the history of the world,’ said Donally to Marianne. ‘Observe the grace of line and the purity of execution.’

  ‘You always did fancy me, you old bugger,’ said Jewel, flinching a little as his tutor’s hands slid lovingly over the incised marks.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Donally. ‘Though how attractive you were at fifteen years old, wild as Cambyses and gentle as Ahasuerus.’

  ‘I saw him for myself when he was fifteen,’ said Marianne coldly. ‘And I thought he looked a perfect savage.’

  At that, Jewel raised his shaggy head and cast her a look of such naked distress that all at once she felt wounded herself; she gasped.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ said Donally, satisfied with looking. He dropped the shirt back on Jewel’s shoulders and tipped his bottle. ‘It’s as small a world as the Romans found and much smaller than Uther’s, getting smaller all the time. Contracting, tightening, diminishing, shrinking.’

  ‘Shall I offer her a real choice?’ suggested Jewel. ‘The more choices one has, the larger the world grows.’

  ‘She’s got no surprises for me, I assure you. I know which way her wind blows.’

  But Jewel took up the candle, extended his hand to the young girl and said: ‘Come.’

  Donally sank back on the altar, banked by many sparkling feathers, his bottle in his hand, and watched them go with an air of applause. Outside the door, Jewel thrust the candle and the knife into her hand.

  ‘Light your way out and defend yourself; feel free to go, get going.’

  The flame cast a ring of pure light which illuminated only their faces so they were forced to look at each other closely. The terrible stench from the hall caught at Marianne’s throat and somewhere a baby began to cry; she was filled with foreboding that her own children might one day weep in some hut or ruin among such wretchedness but she could no longer set her foot outside the compulsive circle, not, at least, tonight, desire it as much as she might. She made a convulsive movement as if in a last self-thwarted attempt to escape his magnetic field but his candle seemed the only light in the shrunken, darkened world. Yet she was determined to keep face, even if the world contracted a little more because she refused to take advantage of his offer.

  ‘I’m tired, now,’ she hedged. ‘Besides, it’s raining.’

  He rearranged his face into an indecipherable smile. At his back stood Adam and Eve.

  ‘How much … how much did it hurt when he tattooed you?’

  ‘Nothing hurt me so much before or since. Why do you have such a morbid interest?’

  ‘It is like the mark of Cain.’

  ‘It was your brother I killed, not my own,’ he said and pettishly snuffed out the candle flame with his fingers so they were in the dark again. At that, the wind began to howl dreadfully and Donally to savage the organ with his drunken fingers. Discordant chords zigzagged about the landing like bats. Marianne thought: ‘He will wake the whole house up’ and then realized the house was already stirring and waking. Points of light appeared at the mouths of rooms and footsteps began to patter, scarcely distinguishable from the sound of rain, for it was by now the moist beginnings of a new day. When they reached Jewel’s tower, they found Mrs Green had been there before them and packed away the pots of paint, the jewellery, the weapons, the furs and the mattress into his wooden box, leaving only a rifle, some knives and his immediate clothing. He loaded the rifle in the opaline dawn, which almost entirely surrounded them for the wind and rain had brought the rest of the roof down and the room was now in the open air. The floor was an inch or so deep in rainwater; now the room belonged only to whatever birds might choose to nest in the walls next spring, to the rustling tree and to the devouring elements. A bird plopped on to the holly tree and shook its marbled feathers. It was a magpie.

  ‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy,’ said Jewel. He seemed to take a wry pleasure in this scrap of folklore.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The sea. Down south. For the winter, it’s warmer. And we trade furs for fish and so on.’

  In the meadow, the cavalcade was once again forming. The horses whinnied and stamped and the carts creaked, piled high with chattels. A cow lowed and an escaped goat ran frisking down towards the river, followed by a horde of screeching children. In their minds, the tribe was already up and away; the mansion echoed with the sounds of imminent departure and seemed quite hollow, once more abandoned. The kitchen was full of men snatching breakfast standing up; their already wet clothes steamed in the heat of Mrs Green’s last cooking fire. Surrounded by incomprehensible business, Marianne detached herself; she found some bread and meat and took her accustomed place by the fire.

  ‘You go in the cart with Mrs Green, like a bloody lady.’

  ‘I’ll go wherever you go.’

  An expression of terror briefly crossed his face; she could not fail to recognize it, printed as it was on her memory.

  ‘Oh, no, you won’t, you’ll do as I say.’

  ‘Oh, no, I won’t, I’ll do as I want.’

  He scowled and vanished into the throng. Gradually the room emptied but Marianne remained on her broken chair. Her eyes kept closing and at last she fell asleep, for she had not slept at all the previous night. In the bustle, she was left oblivious and when she woke abruptly, some time later, the kitchen was quite empty. Even the joints of meat were gone from the hooks in the ceiling. A child had deserted a crude wooden doll, which lay face down on the floor and the door swung on its hinges, creaking faintly, and that was all. In all the huge pile of rotting masonry nothing was left alive but the last embers in the hearth and they were dying. Marianne was stiff and cramped; she stretched and went to the door, momentarily hoping they had ridden off without her, but a black horse and a dappled pony stood together, ready saddled, in the yard, nosing for grass between the flagstones, so Jewel had evidently accepted her presence beside him as inevitable, with however many curses. The half-witted boy’s plate lay turned over on its face. Marianne went back into the house, looking for Jewel. On the outside wall of the chapel, Donally had penned a last slogan, in case the wind blew anyone after them into the house and they might be able to read. The letters were slurred and staggered dreadfully but Marianne was able to make out the following: I THINK, THEREFORE I EXIST; BUT IF I TAKE TIME OFF FROM THINKING, WHAT THEN? She despised him for resorting to rhetorical questions. Jewel appeared in the doorway of the chapel, carrying a burning branch.

  ‘They’re all off on the road,’ he said. ‘I have stayed behind to burn the house down.’

  She followed him along the aisle. She approved his decision.

  ‘Will it burn in all this rain?’

  ‘Rain’s easing off.’


  He pitched the brand at the organ, which was made of old, dry wood. In a few moments, the gilded cherubim were blazing cheerfully. Jewel and Marianne, united in a joint purpose, retreated to the doorway and watched the chapel consume itself; when the hides over the windows began to smoulder and the wax effigy spilled down its own front, they left the fire to proceed by itself and went to the hall. Just inside the front door, she found Jewel had already constructed a spiky pile of dead wood. He produced a fuse of fire by means of a tinder box which interested Marianne very much for she had never seen one in use before. They waited to make sure the flame had taken and then walked round the house, along the terrace, past the backs of the disinterested statues.

  They built another large bonfire in the kitchen on top of and around the central table; on this, they emptied the contents of the hearth. She had never seen the kitchen so well lit before; she noticed the ceiling was totally covered by a grey canopy of cobwebs. Flames leaped from shelf to shelf of the dresser. They went out into the yard, mounted their horses, who were now beginning to be agitated by the flames and smoke issuing from the kitchen door, and rode through the empty meadow, across the river and up the bank, towards the woods. It was a clear, grey morning and the rain came only in intermittent gusts but the wind blew Jewel’s hair like innumerable black flags. At the crest of the bank, they halted and turned.

  She saw the valley was now quite deserted, sunk in dreary autumn, for it was growing late in the year. The silence of the dripping woods oppressed her. She buried her hands in the pony’s mane. The Barbarians had come and gone and left only the dung heap already dissolving in the rain, a few shards of broken pottery, a grave marked with the skull of a horse and a forlornly flapping shirt, left out to dry on a bush and forgotten; but Jewel intended nothing should remain. For a moment, the shipwrecked building glowed with interior incandescence; then there was a tremendous roaring crash and the roof caved in, releasing a spiralling jet of flame so tall it licked the lowest clouds and turned the sky pink.