Sleep, Pale Sister

by Joanne Harris

I dare to seek Scheherazade

  A thousand nights and one.

  I seek her in the waning moon

  And in the sinking sun.

  O who can keep Scheherazade

  Beyond the rising sun?

  I’ll seek her in the waning moon

  A thousand nights and one.

  On Thursday I came home earlier than usual: the vision of my half-completed Scheherazade was too powerful for me that day. I had left the studio in haste, omitting to change, my head suddenly filled with an ache which surged monstrously into the bloodshot orbits of my eyes. I had left my chloral at home and, as soon as I reached Cromwell Square, I ran directly to my room and the midnight-blue vial. I was halfway to the medicine closet, the bedroom door ajar behind me, when I saw her, frozen beside my writing-desk, as if by keeping quite still she thought she might pass unnoticed.

  For a moment I thought she was Marta. Then a giant anger bloomed inside my head, obliterating even the pain. Maybe it was the fact that she had seen me in my unguarded, vulnerable state, scrabbling among the medicine jars for the chloral; maybe because I almost cried Marta’s name aloud; or maybe it was her face, her doughy, idiot’s face, her blank colourless eyes and crone’s hair…or the letters she was holding in her hand.

  Russell’s letters! I had almost forgotten.

  For an instant I remained silent, staring at her, my only thought a distant: ‘How dare she; how dare she?’ Effie might as well have been stone: she met my eyes with her dull grey gaze and her voice was low but accusing.

  ‘You wrote to Dr Russell. You asked him to come.’

  I was rendered temporarily speechless by her impertinence. Could she possibly be accusing me, when she had taken my letters?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had written to Dr Russell?’ Her voice was flat and steady and she held the letters out to me like a weapon. There was such viciousness in her face that I almost stepped back towards the door. Rage ebbed from her in waves.

  ‘You read my letters.’ I tried to make my voice commanding, but my words were a formless shuffle of sounds, like a handful of spilled cards. My thoughts seemed suddenly very remote and slow, anger obstructing their growth. I tried again. ‘You have no right to look into my papers,’ I said, licking my lips. ‘My private papers.’

  For the first time I could recall she did not wince at the sharp note in my voice. Her eyes were like stone and verdigris; cat’s eyes.

  ‘Tabby told me Dr Russell had called. You never told me. Why didn’t you tell me you’d sent for him, Henry? Why didn’t you want me to know?’

  A slow, cottony fear began to chill through me. I felt small, somehow, before her scorching wrath, shrinking before her, becoming someone else, someone younger…the image of the dancing Columbine leaped abruptly into my mind like memory’s hateful Jack-in-the-box; and I realized that I was beginning to sweat. I forced myself not to look at the chloral bottle inches from my hand.

  ‘Now listen to me, Effie!’ I snapped. Yes, that was better, much better. ‘You are being foolish beyond permission. I am your husband and I have every right to take any measure I wish to ensure your good health. I know your nerves are bad, but that does not give you an excuse to pry into my personal papers I—’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with my nerves!’ Her voice rose furiously, but with none of the hysteria I would have expected from such an outburst. Instead there was a bitter sarcasm in her tone as she read aloud from the letter, mimicking the doctor’s ponderous accents with the accuracy of an impudent child.

  ‘Dear Mr Chester,

  Following our recent conversation I am in whole-hearted agreement with your own diagnosis of your dear wife’s nervous condition. While the mania seems not to be acute at present there does seem to be evidence of some degeneration; I would continue to recommend the frequent use of laudanum to prevent further fits of hysteria, as well as a light diet and a good deal of rest. I agree that it would be most unwise for the lady to walk abroad until I have made further verifications as to her mental state; in the meantime, I suggest that you keep her under close watch, reporting any instances of convulsion, fainting, hysteria or catalepsy—’

  ‘Effie!’ I interrupted. ‘You don’t understand!’ Even to myself the words sounded weakly conciliatory and I was again overwhelmed by that unsettling sensation of diminishment. My head was pounding and I did not dare take the chloral bottle while she was watching. Once I darted my shaking hand towards it, knocking it to the back of the cabinet among the other potions and powders…impossible to reach it now unless I actually turned my back on her, exposing the vulnerable nape of my neck to the evil potency of her eyes.

  ‘I only want to help you,’ I blurted. ‘I want to see you well again; I know you’ve been ill and I…you were so ill after you lost the baby…it was only normal that your nerves should be a little unsettled. That’s all it was, I promise, Effie. I promise!’

  Stonily: ‘There’s nothing the matter with my nerves.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, my dear,’ I replied, finding my balance, ‘and if you are right, I’ll be the first one to be thankful. But you mustn’t be foolish. This…this silly fancy of yours…This silly fancy that the doctor and I are somehow…conspiring against you: can’t you see that is what I was afraid of? You are my wife, Effie. What wife suspects her husband as you seem to suspect me?’

  She frowned, but I could see that I had shaken her. The pounding in my skull abated a little and I smiled and stepped forwards to put my arms around her. She stiffened, but did not pull away. Her skin was burning.

  ‘Poor darling. Perhaps you’d better lie down for a while,’ I recommended. ‘I’ll send Tabby with a cup of tea.’ I felt her rigid body jerk convulsively in my arms.

  ‘I don’t want tea!’ Her voice was muffled by her hair, but I guessed at the helpless petulance in her cry and allowed myself to smile. For a while there I had been worried by her icy, furious composure but, as I knew she would, she had reverted to type. I should have known that obedience was so deeply ingrained in her that she would not defy me for long. And yet I had seen something in her eyes…something which for a short time had dismissed me as if I didn’t matter, as if I didn’t even exist…

  Long after she left the room the memory of that moment persisted. Even the midnight-blue bottle was powerless against the jangling of my discordant thoughts, and when I finally subsided into a sleep I dreamed of winding up Father’s dancing Columbine. I was a twelve-year-old again, watching in awe as she danced faster and faster, writhing now in demoniac frenzy, arms, legs and bloodstained skirt a blur. And now in my dream I was possessed by the cold certainty that I had set some evil into motion, which was even now winging its way towards me through the years of my childhood, waiting to be given the chance to pierce through the veil of memory and strike…

  I reached through the churning air towards the blur of silk and knives that was Columbine—I felt my hand slashed as if by a razor but I managed to grasp her. She writhed in my hand like a snake, but I held firm and, taking my aim carefully, I flung her at the wall as hard as I could. There was a crash, a sizzle of gears and wheels, a final shiver of music…and when I dared look again she was lying broken at the foot of the wall, her china head smashed and her skirts drawn up around her waist. I felt a vast, hot wave of relief. And, as I began to move uneasily out of the dream towards wakefulness, I heard my own voice speaking, with eerie, dislocated clarity:

  ‘Should have stayed asleep, little girl.’

  The Ace of Swords

  40

  They came together now, like ghostly twins, their faces merging one into the other so that for an instant Effie would stare at me through my daughter’s eyes, or Marta’s laughter filter through the veil of Effie’s smile. At last she was there, almost visible, and it seemed that my heart would burst for love of her, love of them both. She was happy now, happier than she had ever been before, knowing that she had come home, that she was safe with her mother again, safe with her sister. Si
nce the night I asked her to name the Hermit I had not needed her memories: that part of her slept, sinking deeper into the murk of things best left forgotten, and she had stopped dreaming of the Bad Man and what he did to her long ago. In fact, with the help of my potions she remembered very little.

  She was content to sleep in her room with her books and toys around her; she played with Meg and Alecto and, when Henry came, she played with him, too. Every visit dragged him deeper; we dosed him with chloral and strong aphrodisiacs, flayed him with kisses which left him gasping on the floor long after Marta had left the room. He lost his power to distinguish reality from fiction and I am certain that if I had shown him Effie in her undisguised form he would not have recognized her. Her body had grown thin and sores bloomed on her arms and chest; but Henry was beyond noticing them. My Marta shone through Effie’s flesh, transcending it, growing strong; and he was hers, all hers. I watched him become vague-eyed and listless as weeks passed, jumping at shadows, and my heart was filled with black rejoicing as we fed on him, my daughter and I. Don’t let anyone tell you vengeance isn’t sweet: it is. I know.

  Mose came to see me twice. His creditors wouldn’t wait for ever, he told me, and he didn’t understand what we were waiting for. I lent him fifty pounds to tide him over and he seemed happy enough to play along for a while. Soon, I told him. Soon.

  Just give my Marta time to grow.

  Five more weeks passed and on five more Thursdays Henry Chester stumbled blindly up the steps of my house into a nightmarish rapture of lust. She walked right through him, my wraith, emptying him of all his assurance, his pretentious male superiority, his religious bigotry, his icons and his dreams. If he had not been Henry Chester I could have pitied him, but the thought of my sad little ghost and what she had once been cleared my head of all ambiguity. He had had no pity for my Marta.

  Those five weeks saw the fleeting of a grey, lustreless autumn; winter came early and a hard, ringing black wind brought ice to the roads and tore the sky into dark, tattered streamers of grey. I remember Christmas decorations in the London shops, fir trees on Oxford Street and tinsel along the gaslamps, but at Crook Street the windows and doors stayed unadorned. We would celebrate later.

  Henry came for the last time on 22 December: night fell at three that afternoon and by nine the thin rain had turned to sleet and then to snow, barely whitening the cobbles before turning black. Perhaps it was going to be a white Christmas after all. Effie came early, wrapped to the eyes in her thick cloak; I looked at the sky and almost turned her away, thinking that Henry would never come on such a bleak, dreadful night. But Marta’s faith was greater than mine.

  ‘He’ll come,’ she said with impish assurance, ‘especially tonight.’

  Oh, my lovely Marta! Her smile was so beautiful that I was tempted to abandon my revenge. Wasn’t it enough to have her again, to hold her in my arms and feel her cool skin against my cheek? Why risk that for a sterile victory over a man already damned?

  But of course I knew why.

  For the moment she was still his. In his eyes half of her was still Effie, and she would never fully be mine until he abandoned his claim. While he continued to see them as separate individuals they could never be truly united, never return to the good, safe place they had left. They would be two floating halves, disintegrating slowly in a void of forgetfulness from which only a mother’s love could drag them. She had to be freed.

  ‘Marta.’

  Her smile from behind Effie’s viridescent gaze was radiant.

  ‘Whatever happens, remember how much I love you.’

  I felt her little hand creep into the warm hollow of my neck.

  ‘I promise it will soon be over, darling,’ I whispered, my arms around her, ‘I promise.’

  I felt her smile against my skin.

  ‘I know, Mother,’ she said. ‘I love you, too.’

  41

  After that confrontation, my wife was the enemy: a soft shadow watching with cold, verdigris eyes as I moved through our haunted house. She had grown mantis-thin in spite of the quantities of sweetmeats she ate, drifting like a drowned mermaid through the thick green air of the gas-jets. I did what I could to avoid touching her, but she seemed to take pleasure in brushing against me as often as she could, and her touch was like winter fog. She hardly spoke to me but murmured to herself in a thin, childish voice; sometimes, as I lay awake at night, I fancied I could hear her singing in the dark: nursery rhymes and schoolyard chants and a French lullaby she had sung when she was a little girl:

  ‘Aux marches du palais…

  Aux marches du palais…

  ’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà

  ’Y a une si belle fille…’

  I spoke with Russell once more, and I allowed myself to be persuaded, with sighs and the suggestion of a few manly tears, that the only hope of a cure for my darling Effie was a spell of close supervision at some reputable hospice. I flinched visibly at the good doctor’s hint that grief at the loss of her child might have permanently unhinged Effie’s mind, but demurred when it was forcibly brought home that if I did not act soon Effie might do something to seriously injure herself. With an outwardly clouded brow and a hot, inward grin I signed a paper, which the doctor countersigned, and I tucked it carefully into my wallet when I left. On the way home I stopped at my club for lunch—for the first time in weeks—and ate ravenously. Over my glass of brandy I allowed myself the rare luxury of a cigar. I was celebrating.

  It was almost dark when I reached Cromwell Square, though when I looked at my watch it was only ten past three. The wind had risen, blowing drifts of black leaves hither and thither across the roads, and I thought I felt the sting of sleet against my face as I paid the hackney and hurried indoors. A freezing catspaw of gritty wind clutched at my coat-tails as I opened the door, sending a flurry of dead leaves into the house ahead of me; I slammed the door against the dark, shivering. There might be snow tonight.

  I found Effie in the unlit drawing-room, sitting beside the empty grate with her tapestry discarded across her knees. The window, absurdly, was open and the wind blew directly into the room. Dead leaves littered the floor. For a brief, nightmarish moment the old terror overwhelmed me again, the feeling of helpless diminishment, as if for all her Gothic pallor and ghostly appearance she had somehow made me a ghost in my own house, myself the wraithlike drifter and she the solid, living flesh. Then I remembered the paper in my wallet and the world reasserted itself. With an impatient exclamation and two steps forwards I rang the bell for Tabby, forcing myself to speak to Effie as I squinted at the grey blur of her face in the dark.

  ‘Now, Effie,’ I chided. ‘What are you thinking of, sitting here in the freezing cold? You’ll catch your death. And what is Tabby thinking of letting you stay here with no fire? How long have you been here?’ She turned towards me, a half-girl, her face bisected by the slice of gaslight from the passage.

  ‘Henry.’ Her voice was as flat and colourless as the rest of her. In the bizarre dislocation of her features only half her mouth seemed to move: one eye fixed mine, pupil drawn to a pinprick against the light.

  ‘Don’t you fret, my dear,’ I continued, ‘Tabby will be here presently. I’ll make sure she lights a nice fire for you, and then you can have some hot chocolate. We don’t want you to catch a chill now, do we?’

  ‘Don’t we?’ I fancied there was a faintly sardonic intonation in her voice.

  ‘Of course not, my dear,’ I replied briskly, fighting an urge to gabble. ‘Tabby! Drat the woman, she should be here by now. Tabby! Does she want you to freeze to death?’

  ‘Tabby’s gone out,’ said Effie softly. ‘I told her to go to the chemist’s for my drops.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There’s nobody else. Em has the afternoon off. Edwin has gone home. We’re alone, Henry.’

  The unreasoning terror swept over me again and I struggled to keep control. For some reason the thought of being alone with Effie, at the mercy of whatever strange t
houghts were playing through her mind, appalled me. I fumbled in my pocket for my cigar-lighter, forced myself to turn my back to her as I struggled to light the lamp…I felt her eyes like nails in the back of my neck and my jaw cramped with hatred of her.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it? Now we can see each other.’ That was right: brisk informality. No need to feel that she had somehow planned a confrontation; no reason to think that somehow she already knew…I turned to face her again, my jaw now aching with a smile I knew did not fool her for a minute.

  ‘I’ll close the window,’ I said.

  I took as long as I dared over the latch, the curtain, the leaves on the floor. I threw the leaves into the grate. ‘I wonder if I could get the fire going.’

  ‘I’m not cold,’ said Effie.

  ‘But I am,’ I replied with false cheerfulness. ‘Let’s see…it can’t be difficult. Tabby does it every day.’ I knelt down in front of the grate and began to arrange the papers and dry sticks on the coals. There was a brief flare and crackle, then the chimney began to smoke.

  ‘Dear me,’ I laughed, ‘there must be more of a knack to this than I thought.’

  Effie’s lips twisted in a knowing, hateful half-smile. ‘I’m not a child,’ she spat suddenly. ‘Nor am I a half-wit. You don’t have to talk to me as if I were.’

  Her reaction was so abrupt that I was again taken aback. ‘Why, Effie,’ I began foolishly, ‘I…’ Collecting myself I made my voice crisply patient, like a doctor’s. ‘I can see you are ill,’ I said. ‘I can only say that I hope later you will realize quite how hurtful and ungrateful your words seem to me. However, I—’