Sleep, Pale Sister

by Joanne Harris

  The face mooned into my field of vision once more, its mouth opening cavernously…syllables oddly distorted beneath the water burst like bubbles in my face in a series of shapeless sounds. In some way the sounds were meaningful, but I could not recall why. I drifted for a while, as the face receded once more. But the sounds persisted, and more and more I began to hear meaning in their persistence. The face, too, was somehow familiar; the keen eyes, sharp nose and small pointed beard. I had once known that face.

  The mouth opened and I heard my name, spoken from a great distance.

  ‘Mr Chester. Mr Chester.’

  For the first time since my retreat I saw the bookcases behind the face; the door, the open window with its velvet curtain, the painting on the wall…reality yawned in my face with pitiless clarity.

  ‘Mr Chester? Can you hear me?’ The voice was Dr Russell’s. I tried to answer, but found that my tongue lolled at the doctor with a gleeful life of its own and a sound came from my mouth, a gargling noise which appalled me.

  ‘Please, Mr Chester. Will you nod if you can hear me?’ I felt my neck jerk convulsively.

  ‘You’ve had a stroke, Mr Chester.’ His voice was too loud, too arch, as if he were addressing a deaf child: I noticed that his eyes steadfastly avoided mine.

  ‘You’ve been very ill, Mr Chester. We thought we might lose you.’

  ‘Haaa…’ The braying sound which was my voice startled me. ‘Haa…How long?’ That was better. I was still hardly able to control my clenched jaw, but I could at least form words. ‘How long…since…’

  ‘Three days, Mr Chester.’ I could feel his embarrassment, his impatience at my laboured attempt at speech. ‘The Reverend even gave you the Last Rites.’

  ‘Aaah…?’

  ‘Reverend Blakeborough, from Oxford. I sent word, to your brother William, there. He suggested that the Reverend should come.’ For the first time I noticed the unobtrusive little man with a mild childlike face seated in the corner of the room. As he caught my glance—he was not afraid to meet my eyes—Reverend Blakeborough smiled and stood up: I saw that he was a rather small man.

  ‘I took over the parish when your father died,’ he said gently. ‘I was very fond of Reverend Chester and I’m sure he would have wanted me to visit you, but until now I never knew where you lived.’

  ‘Ahh…I…’

  ‘Now, then, please don’t exhaust yourself,’ chided Reverend Blakeborough. ‘The doctor—and, of course, your good Mrs Gaunt—have told me everything. You really must rest now—killing yourself is no way to bring back your poor wife.’ He looked at me with a compassion which tore at me; I felt my mouth gaping in silent laughter and my right eye shedding tears—but for whom, I did not know. Reverend Blakeborough took a step forwards and put his arm gently around my shoulders. ‘The doctor feels you need a rest, Henry,’ he said kindly, ‘and I do agree with him. A change of scene, the country air would do you more good than to stay in this dreary place. So come with me to Oxford. You can stay at the vicarage with me and your housekeeper can come and look after you if you like. I can recommend an excellent doctor.’

  He beamed at me. I could smell mint and tobacco on his breath and a comforting, familiar smell, like old books and turpentine, from his clothes…A sudden nostalgia overwhelmed me, a terrible longing to accept the innocent little priest’s invitation, to live in my old village again, to see the vicarage where I was born. Who knows, maybe the room with the blue-and-white china doorknob would still be unchanged, with my mother’s oak bed beneath the stained-glass window. I began to weep in earnest, with a shameless self-pity and a searing regret for the man I could have been.

  It was too much for Dr Russell: from my frozen eye I saw him turn and quietly leave the room, his mouth warped with disgust and embarrassment…but the priest’s kindness was unflinching; he held me as I wept for myself, for Effie, for Marta and for my mother, for wakened memories best left sleeping, for the cold little ghostchild, for the red room, for the silk wrap, for Prissy Mahoney’s first Communion, for the Christmas tree, still glittering with fake icicles…and for the fact that I wanted to go to Oxford.

  I wanted this little man’s kindness, the peace of his simple life, the sound of the birds in the cypresses, the college spires in the evening mist…More than anything I had ever wanted, I wanted those things; I wanted Reverend Blakeborough’s universal love. I wanted absolution.

  I drooled and wept and, for the first time, someone who was not a whore held me in their arms and rocked me.

  ‘Then it’s settled,’ said Reverend Blakeborough.

  ‘N-no!’

  ‘Whyever not?’ The priest was bewildered. ‘Don’t you want to come home at last?’

  I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  ‘Then why?’

  I struggled to keep my words clear; my mouth felt as if it were filled with mud. ‘Have…to…confess,’ I said painfully.

  ‘Well, of course,’ said the priest cheerfully. ‘But we’ll wait until you’re feeling better, shall we? Surely it can wait.’

  ‘No! N-no…time,’ I said. ‘Ha-as to be…now. In case I…You…have to…know. I…couldn’t come home…with you…unless…’

  ‘I see.’ The little priest nodded. ‘Well, if it makes you feel better, of course I’ll take your confession. How long has it been?’

  ‘Tw-twenty years.’

  ‘Oh!’ Reverend Blakeborough looked momentarily startled, but soon regained his composure. ‘I see. Well…ah…Take your time.’

  My story was long and laborious. Twice I stopped, too exhausted to continue, but the knowledge that I might never again find the courage to speak urged me on. When I had finished night was approaching, and Reverend Blakeborough had long since fallen silent. His round face was pale and shocked and when I ended my narrative he almost leaped from his chair. I heard him splashing in the bowl of water in the washstand behind me and when he came to face me again he was almost livid; his mouth was wry as if he had been sick and he could not meet my eyes. As for myself, I realized that my destructive impulse to confess had done nothing to alleviate my guilt; I carried it still, untouched and triumphant in the black shrine at my heart’s core.

  The Eye of God was not deceived. I sensed its inescapable malice—I had not evaded God. Worse still, I had corrupted this innocent little man; I had betrayed his confidence in the essential goodness of the world and its inhabitants. Reverend Blakeborough could hardly bear to look at me and his self-assurance, the impulsive kindness was gone from his manner, to be replaced by a look of bewildered confusion and betrayal. He did not repeat his invitation and he left by the next train.

  After that events were random things, threaded across the chasm of my life like beads on a string. My studio was emptied and the oil painting of The Triumph of Death presented at the Academy. Dr Russell came and went, accompanied by several specialists who proceeded to disagree strongly over what had happened to my heart. What they did agree upon, however, was the fact that I would most likely never walk or move my left arm again, although I did regain some control over my right arm and my head. Tabby hovered anxiously over me with my medicine—I was taking chloral every two hours now and I would begin to shiver and sweat if the dose were not regularly administered. A gentleman from The Times came to visit and was summarily dismissed by Tabby.

  And at night, as I lay in my bed, they came, my darling Erinyes, laughing softly in the dark, cold and triumphant, tender and merciless, their claws and teeth infinitely loving, banefully seductive. Together they explored the cavities of my brain, with a mother’s tenderness, tearing, slicing with exquisite delicacy…By day they were invisible, barbed gossamer beneath my skin, a mesh of finest steel tightening and contracting on to my heart’s bloody core. I prayed—or tried to pray—but God wanted none of my prayers. My suffering and guilt were tastier morsels. God fed well on Henry Chester.

  A week, seven days of obscene delirium at the hands of my darling succubi. Like God, they were hungry; vicious now in th
eir desperation.

  I knew what they wanted, snapping at the leash, snarling and foaming for a glimpse of prey. I knew what they wanted. The story. My story. And I wanted to tell it.

  The Hanged Man

  63

  I was between the rapacious thighs of my latest inamorata the day they arrested me.

  Oh, it was all very genteel. The two constables waited politely while I got up, robed myself modestly in a Chinese silk dressing-gown and listened as the older of the two constables informed me, in a slightly apologetic tone, that I was under arrest for the murder of Euphemia Chester, and that the London Police Department would be grateful if I would accompany him to the station as soon as it was convenient.

  I’ll admit that the comedy of the situation struck me forcibly. So Henry had revealed all, had he? Poor Henry! If there had not been the question of the money I might have laughed aloud; as it was, I think I carried off the situation in the grand manner. I smiled, turned to the girl (howling and attempting to veil her not inconsiderable charms with a sheet) and blew her a kiss, made a small bow to the constables, picked up my clothes and marched, Orientally silken, out of the room. I was enjoying myself.

  I waited for a dreary hour in a Bow Street cell while officers discussed my imaginary crime outside the door—I passed the time cheating at patience (I had found a pack of cards in my coat pocket)—and when two officers, one cranelike and phlegmatic, the other short and choleric, finally came into my cell the floor was a mosaic of coloured squares. I smiled ingenuously at them.

  ‘Ah, gentlemen,’ I said cheerfully, ‘how nice to have company at last. Won’t you sit down? I’m afraid it’s rather bare, but, as you see…’ I gestured towards a bench in the corner.

  ‘Sergeant Merle, sir,’ said the tall officer, ‘and this here is Constable Hawkins…’

  I’ll say this for the English police; they’re always respectful of class. Whatever a gentleman may have done he is still a gentleman, and gentry have certain rights. The right to eccentricity, for example: Sergeant Merle and his constable listened patiently as I explained the truth about my relationship with Effie, the business with Fanny and Marta, and finally our attempt to fake Effie’s death in the churchyard. The policemen remained stolid and unquestioning (Merle occasionally scribbling details into his little notebook) until I had finished my narrative, frozen into attitudes of respectful disinterest. Oh yes, I love the English police.

  When I had finished, Sergeant Merle turned towards his subordinate and said something to him in a low voice; then he looked at me again.

  ‘So,’ he said with a frown of concentration, ‘you’re saying, sir, that although Mr Chester thought that Mrs Chester was dead—’

  ‘She was in fact alive. I see you have grasped the salient points of the narrative with stunning alacrity.’ The sergeant narrowed his eyes and I smiled sweetly at him.

  ‘And…have you any proof of this, sir?’

  ‘I saw her that night, sergeant; and on several later occasions at Crook Street. I know for a fact that Chester met her the night he suffered the attack. She was very much alive then.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘I strongly suggest, sergeant, that you send a man to Crook Street to question Fanny Miller and her ladies. You will find that Miss Miller will corroborate my story. Mrs Chester may even be there.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Failing that, you would doubtless find it useful to open the Isherwood vault in Highgate cemetery, where Mrs Chester was supposedly buried.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And after you have done those things, Sergeant Merle, I should be grateful if you would bear in mind the fact that, in spite of my natural delight in helping the police with their inquiries, I do have my own life to live, and would like to be allowed to continue living it as soon as possible.’ I smiled.

  Merle’s frigid courtesy did not waver. ‘Just a formality, sir,’ he said.

  Hours passed. From the window of my cell I saw the sky darken, and a warden came at about seven with a tray of food and a mug of coffee; at eight the warden returned, taking the tray with him. At ten I hammered on the door of my cell, demanding to know why I had not yet been released. The warden was courteous and impenetrable; he gave me a pillow and some blankets and advised me to sleep. After a while, I did.

  I suppose I dreamed; I remember waking with cigar-smoke and the smell of brandy in my nostrils, my mind a blank, my perspective gone. It was almost dark except for the reddish light from the little lamp beside me on the bed; the walls were curtained in shadow, the window a blind eye on to the night.

  There was a round table in the middle of the floor in front of me and, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I recognized it as one which I had had in my study at Oxford years ago. How odd to see it there, I thought vaguely to myself as I reached out a hand to touch the polished surface and the worn inlay around the side…How odd. And someone had been playing cards, I saw; all around the edge of the table, in a concentric pattern, there were cards, very white in the gloom, almost seeming to glow with a soft reflective quality, like snow…

  I found myself standing, moving without thinking towards the table. A chair which had previously been tucked beneath it glided out and I sat down, my eyes fixed on the cards. No ordinary cards, these, I thought: each one had, painted in the centre, an ornate letter of the alphabet, intricately knotted into the card’s design in a baroque forest of leaves and scrollwork.

  I frowned vaguely, wondering what kind of game I had joined. As I peered at the circle of cards, trying to discover whether this might be some complicated kind of patience, my eye caught a gleam of crystal reflected against the table’s surface. A discarded glass, still half full of brandy, glinted in the red light. As I looked up, I must have knocked the table, because the glass tilted and fell, spilling the drink in a wide, gleaming arc. A couple of cards were caught in its path and carried to the edge of the table in front of me. Drops of the dark liquid trickled on to my hand as I saw that the cards were the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades: ‘Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique…’; the letters M and E.

  It was at that moment, of course, that I knew I was dreaming. The absurd symbolism, the wholly unsubtle reference to Baudelaire and the baroque imagery of death…the artist in me knew it at once, in spite of the oddly tactile nature of the dream: the smooth coldness of the polished wood beneath my fingertips; the wet patch on my trouser-leg where the brandy had spilled; the sudden chill in the air. It was so cold that my nostrils stung with it and my breath was a nimbus around my face. I looked at the table once more and saw that the spilled brandy had frozen, a spiderweb glaze across the dark oak, and the empty glass was misted with frost. I began to shiver in spite of my knowledge that this was only a dream—it was probably cold in my prison cell, I thought reasonably, and my sleeping mind had created this tableau (macabre enough to fill Henry Chester with enthusiasm) to entertain itself. Its title: Le Remors or The Phantom’s Patience; all it needed to make it a Gothic masterpiece was the Pre-Raphaelite lady, pale from her long sleep but deathly beautiful, the baneful damozel with blood on her lips and vengeance in her eyes…

  The thought was so absurd that I laughed aloud. Haunted by my own fiction, by God! Fanny would appreciate that. And yet I remembered Effie’s face, her pale lips, the bleak hatred in her voice as she said: ‘There is no Effie.’

  Only Marta.

  Damn that bitch.

  ‘There is no Marta!’ I said it aloud—in dreams I can do as I please—and felt a small release in tension. I said it again. ‘There is no Marta.’

  Silence absorbed my words.

  Uneasy silence.

  Then suddenly she was there, sitting in front of me at the table with a glass of milky absinthe in her hand. Her hair was loose, falling over the chair-back to the floor in a cascade of heavy ringlets which gleamed rich as claret in the crimson light. She was wearing the dress she had worn for The Card Players, a dark red velvet cut low over th
e bodice so that her skin seemed luminous. Her eyes were immense and fathomless; her smile, so different to Effie’s sweet and open smile, was like a slit throat.

  ‘Effie…’ I kept my voice light and level; there was no reason for my throat to tighten, my lips to parch; no reason for the trickle of heat to sting my armpits. No reason…

  ‘No, not Effie.’ It wasn’t Effie’s voice; it was that hoarse, scratched-silver whisper which was peculiarly Marta’s.

  ‘Marta?’ In spite of myself, I was fascinated.

  ‘Yes, Marta.’ She lifted her glass and drank; I watched as the clear crystal misted over and froze where she had touched it. A nice detail, I thought. I would have to use it in a painting one day.

  ‘But there is no Marta,’ I said again. In my dream it suddenly seemed very important to prove to her that I was telling the truth. ‘I saw you invent Marta. You made her out of paint and dye and perfume. She’s just another part you had to play, like the Little Beggar Girl or Sleeping Beauty. She doesn’t exist!’

  ‘She does now.’ That was Effie; that childish assertion. For a moment I even glimpsed her—or the ghost of her—then the dark eyes clouded over once again and she was all Marta. ‘And she’s very angry with you, Mose.’ She paused to drink again and I sensed her cold hate, her fury, like a draught of winter. ‘Very angry,’ she repeated softly.