The Woman in Silk

by R. J. Gadney

  A slit of light from beneath a door induced a sense of sudden safety. Inevitably, it was extinguished accompanied by the sound of a switch’s metallic click.

  The faintest creak of a loose nail in a floorboard moaned, a picture wire whined, straining on its hook. The embracing aura was tightening; slowly suffocating him with half-memories, winding around him like a succubus.

  He stood still listening to the noise of silence, the hissing, the rushing liquid in his ears.

  16

  The Gothic Library was a rectangular musty room with high shuttered arched windows at each end. In summer it smelled of varnish and old carpet; in winter, of damp, mildew and dead mice.

  Rows of rosewood bookcases contained the assembly of the Stirlings’ unread books bound in many varieties of gilt and leather. Strips of cloth pinned to the edge of each shelf protected the most regularly used volumes from dust and dirt carried on The Towers’ cold drafts, molds, decomposing bugs and insects, mites and their excreta and human skin flakes.

  The uppermost shelves were within reach and for any of the rare visitors who couldn’t reach them wooden library steps were readily to hand. The lower bookcases contained alphabetically arranged statuettes and busts of Aristotle, Maynard Arcus, Darwin, Galileo, Machiavelli, Thomas Paine, Plato, Socrates, Adam Smith, Spinoza and Voltaire.

  Hal’s forebears had filled the bookcases with no apparent discrimination or logic of arrangement. This was a heart of learning where uninterrupted reading might take place for those seeking to polish their graduation from the university of life, and the Library had played its silent role in establishing the reputation of the Stirlings as men of literary, scientific and philosophical bent.

  This was the rich man’s display of learning he didn’t possess, the education he’d never had. One or other of them used to tell suitably impressed visitors that his offspring would realize there was a universe of learning to be found in the volumes, ready to be perused as the fancy took you.

  Here was where Stirlings had read The Times, Sporting Life, Country Life and Picture Post or browsed or dozed off in peace and quiet after dinner. Here too were the remains of his mother’s favored reading: the College of Psychic Studies’ quarterly Light; the newsletters of the International Institute for the Study of Death, Pembroke Pines, Florida; The Mercury, magazine of the British Astrological and Psychic Society; and the quarterly Circle of Light from Ryde in the Isle of Wight. She had designated a table for these papers and journals with notices on top of each pile written in copperplate: DO NOT DISTURB.

  One separate case was packed with the collected works of Maynard Arcus, disciple of Aleister Crowley.

  Above it was a framed text:

  The Revelation appeared in a cloud of incense. Imbibe the juice of mandrake root! Yield to the rasp of psychic orgasm and the intercourse of creation. Seek ye the Womb of Man and ye shall be God. Now and in life everlasting crowned in glory. For all is you. You are all. For evermore.

  Maynard Arcus

  He flipped through the pages of the Adventist magazine Youth’s Instructor, finding that someone had inserted a handwritten note: “Abuse not any that are departed, for to wrong their memory is to rob their ghosts of their winding sheets.” The scuffed Child’s Guide to Knowledge of 1828 had been thumbed through to near destruction.

  He was drawn to the novels of his fellow asthmatic Ann Radcliffe, known variously as “The Great Enchantress” and “Mother of the Gothic,” who, finally insane, is said to have been incarcerated in a Derbyshire lunatic asylum. The young Hal, briefly an aspiring poet of fear, pored over Radcliffe’s On the Supernatural in Poetry.

  The Library was also where he’d done his school revision in the holidays seated at the cloth-covered solid table with its sliding drawers and cushioned chairs, his feet on a mangy sheepskin rug beneath the table.

  Once he was tall enough he wrote at the standing desk, swaying and jiggling about to avoid cramp in his legs.

  Beyond the Library, to the left side of the fireplace, where Francesca had built the glowing fire, were the doors to what was effectively a separate and self-contained study: his father’s firmly locked and secluded “workshop of the spirit” with its recessed entrance doors suffused with a Miltonic deep religious light.

  Salvaged from a church in Mallerstang, the arched doors were of varnished English oak with decorative iron hinges painted black.

  Above them was a hand-painted sign with Milton’s lines from Comus asking: “What need a man forestall his date of grief / And run to meet what he would most avoid?”

  Milton’s question had summoned Hal long ago.

  FOUR

  Hard is it to die, because our delicate flesh doth shrink back from the worm it will not feel, and from that unknown which the winding-sheet doth curtain from our view. But harder still, to my fancy, would it be to live on, green in the leaf and fair, but dead and rotten at the core, and feel that other secret worm of recollection gnawing ever at the heart.

  H. RIDER HAGGARD

  She

  17

  Soon after his tenth birthday, Hal convinced himself that The Towers was possessed of an evil core, by phantoms, and wizards, and certain madness.

  He discovered that his father had played a part in fomenting disturbance of the soul by beckoning evil and dangerous spirits.

  Later still Hal would discover that the world of the spirits flew in the face of the conclusions reached by more reliable modern scientific minds.

  The map of his father’s spirit world was vast, its lands uncharted. His father was the cartographer of territories populated by apparitions, hags and crones, hobgoblins and wraiths.

  This first physical exploration of his father’s workshop of the spirit showed young Hal the evidence of what the man was about. At the time, of course, the innocent meddler was unaware of its implications.

  What lay behind the locked arched doors of oak? What was drawing him to find out? He decided or, more likely, some malignant fear stirring in his glands decided him to undertake a secret reconnaissance of the locked workshop of the spirit.

  Torrential rains had fallen almost nonstop for two days across the north. His father and mother had gone to Carlisle and wouldn’t return until early that evening.

  The affable if somewhat deaf woman cleaner, Crabtree, was at work far off in the upstairs bedrooms. Apart from Crabtree, pillar of the Ebenezer Church in Gretton, Hal was alone at The Towers. Crabtree wouldn’t hear a thing.

  The mission excited him. He thought briefly of taking apart some of his old fireworks, Standard Sky Rockets, and using their explosive to blast the oak doors open. Questions would be asked. No good. There had to be a way of getting in and getting out without anyone being any the wiser.

  Reconnaissance revealed the type of modern lock to be attacked. Taking a similar door lock apart he determined its mechanism. Easy. Release the pins; disable the cylinder enough and the thing would give way to his steady touch. Burglary seemed easy. A fine challenge. Thing was, you had to avoid getting caught. And this wasn’t actually burglary. He wasn’t going to steal anything. All he wanted to do was have a poke about.

  He made a pick out of a hacksaw blade and bent it a full ninety-degree angle, then found a thin-tipped flathead screwdriver in the garage: each implement fine enough so he could get both into the door lock.

  Face to face with the arched oak doors, he felt his apprehension turning into fear. It was a pleasurable sense of fear, the sense of heady danger like a moment free of restraint when you ready yourself to kill a quarry, an aggressive prey: the lock, the silent enemy. Hal began to live.

  Inserting the pick in the keyhole, he pressed it gently upward feeling each lock pin with the tip. As he delicately pushed them up he could feel them shift then slip back down as he decreased the pressure.

  One or two of the pins proved obdurate. This is where the tension wrench, the screwdriver, came in. He eased the torque, the twist or turning force, and up they went. Another of the pins was ve
ry awkward indeed; so he pressed it just enough to keep the spring from relaxing. He was trying to push—push the upper pin out of the cylinder cleanly. He paused to listen; heard the upper pin click and fall. He repeated the process: then the cylinder and the lock opened. Presto chango. He was in.

  The secret sanctum’s bay window framed the blurred view of the rainstorm, the blue-green woods and distant moorland. He could see the black weathercock on the end of the old stable buildings strained and buffeted by the storm.

  To the right was another window, small and narrow, set deep in the stone wall with a wooden shutter. Like the main window it had a stone transom across its top.

  High above it, just beneath the ceiling, was a sixteenth-century wooden carving—a succubus—looking down at the Turkish rugs spread across the parquet floor. Yellowed elephant tusks stood each side of the fireplace of Sienna marble, its Indian red, burned sienna and Prussian blue shot through with violet veins. Across the sanctum, set in shadow, a second door led through to the Billiard Salon.

  The workshop of the spirit boasted an early nineteenth-century Winterhalder & Hofmeier UhrenFabrik chiming clock. The clock was cased in solid oak with ormolu trim, wide brass urns on its top and a central dial. Hal had always loved the chimes: St. Mary’s on its eight tuned bells or Westminster on its four deep gongs. The clock chimed the quarter-hours and struck the hour on the hour.

  Near the fireplace was a Victorian walnut upholstered daybed or chaise longue with a scrolled arm. It stood on four turned feet of walnut with porcelain castors. The centerpiece of the room was his father’s imposing Edwardian mahogany partners desk. In front of it, matching the red of the desk’s leather top, was a red leather swivel chair.

  Beside the desk, two large faded black-and-white photographs confronted him. Mounted on card and propped up for display on an artist’s wooden easel, they showed a pretty, smiling oriental woman in a V-necked kimono.

  In the photograph on the left the four men surrounding her were grinning; in the one on the right, the two men by her side looked serious. One seemed to be wearing a military or police uniform.

  A small card beneath them bore the mysterious inscription—

  Who was this beautiful woman from the East?

  He tiptoed across the rugs to the desk and eagerly leafed through the ledgers, innumerable piles of manuscripts, reports, scattered index cards, sheaves and scraps of paper covered with his father’s notes in the familiar permanent red ink with emerald-green ink underlining.

  To begin with the crowd of words in red, almost as baffling as those of a foreign language, were beyond his understanding:

  SKOPTSY [скопцы]

  Christian sect. Imperial Russia. See: Ritual Castration.

  He memorized castration and sexual organs with a view to seeking out the meanings in whatever dictionaries and encyclopedias would explain them.

  His father was also apparently engaged in the close study of books, interleaved with index cards, their entries in red ink such as CAVEN, John. postmortem Examinations Methods and Technique.

  He sensed the hidden meaning was strange, unpleasant even. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, or ask his mother to explain; let alone his father.

  He heard the twelve noon Westminster chimes of the Winterhalder & Hofmeier clock. Crabtree would soon be knocking off for lunch.

  As if to confirm her present whereabouts he heard distant footsteps, walked back to the door and took one last glance at the workshop of the spirit.

  It was then he noticed the file on the upholstered daybed. It was a white file tied with a bow of red satin ribbon. In large and bold black ink was the inscription—

  —the sign that revealed the file obviously held the key to the woman’s identity. He felt a fierce attraction to her. Open me. She induced a pleasure he didn’t recognize. Let me tell you my story. You’ll never forget it. Be my friend. Touch me. Open me. That you may follow my way. Do what I do.

  Crossing the room he heard his voice saying louder and louder: I’ve read your secret in this file before. One day I will marry a woman like you in your kimono.

  He untied the red satin bow, opened the file and read what his father had written.

  Two hours after midnight at an inn in Tokyo, on Monday, May 18th, 1936, Sada Abe, sometimes known as Abe Sada, quondam author, actress, geisha, maid, prostitute and waitress, strangled her lover, Kichizo Ishida, with her obi or sash. Wishing to die while achieving orgasm, Ishida had invited Sada to strangle him. She wrapped her obi around his neck twice and tightened it.

  Using a kitchen knife, Sada then cut off her lover’s penis at its root, then his testicles and slipped the genitalia inside her kimono.

  She cuddled Ishida’s bloodied corpse for some hours and at sometime during the morning she carved her name into his left arm.

  For the next three days, wearing Ishida’s under-pants, she carried his genitalia around Tokyo in her handbag. Finally, she handed them in at a Takanawa police station confessing to what she’d done. When the interviewing officer asked her why she’d castrated her lover, she is reported to have replied:

  “Because I couldn’t take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back the most vivid memories. I felt attached to Ishida’s penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die.

  “I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me—

  “Then, I decided that I’d flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida’s penis all the while.

  “I loved him so much; I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived other women could embrace him.

  “I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.

  “In the end, I would jump from a cliff near the cherry blossoms on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.”

  It was a lie.

  Sada was adorable.

  I relieve and release your hurt that you may be set free.

  “I will always love you,” he whispered with ferocious innocence. “Always—”

  —haunted

  —By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

  “HAL?”

  “Coming, Crabtree,” he yelled, the shout echoing the length of the Great Hall.

  Still he hesitated, his curiosity aroused by a small velvet-curtained mahogany and brass cabinet against the wall.

  There was a black eyepiece at the cabinet’s front, beside it a small light switch. Perhaps it contained another photograph of the exquisite Sada Abe.

  Longing to see more of her, he knelt on the floor before the cabinet, flicked the switch and peered inside.

  The small electric bulb illuminated a miniature stage, above it a banner, no more than an ivory strip engraved: L’INFERNO DI GIOTTO DI BONDONE.

  He heard a curious scratching and, from a puncture above the large hand to the left, for a brief moment, narrow watery bloodshot rats’ eyes appeared, blinked and vanished.

  Had he imagined the eyes, or were they real? He leaned away from the eyepiece; turned off the light switch and let the velvet curtain fall back into place.

  The view of L’INFERNO DI GIOTTO DI BONDONE, the vast hand clutching the dead or alive naked figure between the legs and the flickering appearance of the rat intrigued him. Could there be a link to Sada Abe: what did these things add up to?

  With the vivid image of Sada Abe in his mind he left the workshop of the spirit just as he’d found it, relocked the door and danced toward the kitchen.

  “You’re LATE.”

  “I’m late,” he called to Crabtree. “I’m late …”

  Alice: But I don’t want to go among mad people.

  The Cat: Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

  Alice: How do you know I’m mad?

  The Cat: You must be. Or you wouldn’t have come here—


  —the kitchen

  —where Crabtree was fussing over a pan of mulligatawny soup, two plates of cold meat and a large baked potato. “Enough for two,” she said. “And what has Hal been up to?”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Lily Crabtree brought it back …”

  18

  Years after what he thought of as his pioneering exploration of the workshop of the spirit, he sought to get his mother to tell him quite where his father’s private researches in the sanctum had led him. What, in other words, were the subjects of his father’s obsessions? What had he achieved worth sharing with the world beyond The Towers?

  With a tone of wistful admiration she told him his father had uncovered “remarkable matters of psychology, natural sciences, the regions of the dead, the mind, the spirit; the world beyond, the infinite. The Truth.”

  He asked her whether she’d ever regretted that these remarkable matters had received no public recognition.

  “There will,” she said, “be a prophet among us who will speak the truth your father found as if in a dream.”

  By then, of course, Hal had long since worked out that his father’s interests in these matters were, frankly, best buried and forgotten. And yet, how far, he wondered, did his mother go along with whatever The Truth might be?

  “His papers and research materials,” his mother told him, “are under lock and key safe from the profanity of skeptics.”

  “Where?”

  “The Skoptsismic sect’s vows are secret. They will live on.”

  “For how long?”

  “For eternity. For as long as The Towers stands.”

  Long after his father’s death, at home on leave from Sandhurst, he again asked her to explain this eternal truth his father had, as she put it, touched upon.