by Lee, Tanith
She lifted her eyelids and saw her room in the frenzy of the window of the temptation. She had only been dreaming again. Uncle Camillo had not opened the way into the tower. But she had not dreamed her encounter with Adamus. He stood out as solidly as a lighthouse in the sea of nightmares. Sleep well, he had said.
Chapter Five
In the library, Sylvian was busy.
He did not glance up from his work. Rachaela stood and watched him, placing the ebony ruler precisely, dipping the pen into the ink. Drawing a neat thin line. Another phrase gone. Another thought obliterated.
Rachaela went up to the table and, pulling out the chair, sat down opposite to him.
‘I wish I could make you stop.’
‘No, Rachaela. I can’t stop. This is necessary.’
She sat watching him. A desire to scream rose in her. She damped it down. Only another mad old man, Elsewhere these books thrived and were read. But perhaps not. Some of them were decayed and ancient. The only copies left in the house of the Scarabae and Sylvian ruling them through.
‘Why am I here, Sylvian?’
‘You belong here,’ he said, not stopping even now, but just a flash of the spiked eyes.
‘Where should I look to find Camillo?’ she asked.
‘Uncle Camillo goes here, there and everywhere. A will-o’-the-wisp.’
‘Uncle,’ she said. ‘Is he your uncle, Sylvian?’
‘The previous generation.’ Like Anna, Sylvian said. ‘He’s very old.’
Two hundred, three hundred,’ she hazarded lightly, her heart beating in her side.
‘More, more,’ said Sylvian absently. ‘Uncle Camillo remembers the flight from the last city. Another country. Long ago. I don’t recall the date. I was a baby then.’
As in the dream, Rachaela saw in her mind’s eye a burning house. A mob shouted and smashed the coloured windows with stones.
‘Tell me your age, Sylvian.’
‘Oh I forget.’
‘How old is Adamus?’
Sylvian ruled through a sentence, lovingly. Seen across the table the face of the page had assumed a beautiful matrix quality from the carefully spaced lines.
‘Adamus is your father,’ Sylvian said.
‘So he tells me. How old?’
‘You must ask him. I forget these things. Time drags on, yet it goes so quickly. A year passes like a month. A day becomes a year.’
‘And you won’t tell me about Camillo.’
‘He moves about the house. He followed you.’
‘Not any more. He’s lost interest.’
‘Anna may know,’ said Sylvian.
‘I never see Anna in the daytime. Hardly any of you, apart from your servants. What are they? Some lesser branch of the family?’
Sylvian had ruled over the final page. He put the book aside and drew another towards him.
Rachaela could no longer watch.
She asked them, those Scarabae she came on, where Camillo was. She believed in the augury of the dream. Camillo would show her the way into the tower. She could then break in on him as he had done on her. Beyond that point she did not venture. It was only that she did not like her powerlessness, the sense of which was growing on her.
Then again, the dream might be and probably was a wild illusion. She misled herself. But she did not know what else to do.
She went down to the kitchen. She meant to make her inquiries of Cheta, Carlo, Michael, Maria. None of them was there. They too had vanished.
She guessed at their whereabouts, the caverns of unlocated bedrooms, or narrow cells where they stood upright in the dark, propped on the walls.
The house was the tomb. These day-fearing things did not need to creep into a box. The double doors and sugar windows contained them.
She re-found the corridor with the drowning baby in the reeds and the stuffed horse. Camillo had left no traces, not even the armour.
She passed the painted mirror again. More hills had appeared. And the goat in the woman’s belly was indeed the result of one picture beneath another.
In the room of the dusty piano and unstrung harp someone had rested on a peg a yellow guitar. The window in the music room, which she had not looked at before, revealed an orchestra of beasts: tigers which played flutes; an elephant in charge of an organ; a crocodile with a viola. Perhaps meant to induce laughter, the window seemed decidedly frightful, like an hallucination in infancy. Somewhere else there had been a Noah’s Ark awash on the flood and two golden unicorns left behind. But the lion and the sheep were a product of the dream. Unless it was some clue her sleeping brain had provided.
Maybe Uncle Camillo did not know the way into the tower, had forgotten, or would not say.
A lion devouring a sheep ... the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb... the young lion and the fatling together.... It would be like them to have such a window. And a little child shall lead them.
A child. Where would a child go?
Rachaela raised her head. The naughty child Camillo—playing overhead in the playroom of an attic.
There was sure to be one. Dust and cobwebs and antique toys of the Scarabae when they had been young, centuries before.
She had seen no evidence of a way into an attic. She did not want to go there. If Uncle Camillo was there with his games and keys to the house, to the tower, he must stay undisturbed.
Rachaela waited in her room until she judged by the clocks the hour of luncheon had arrived. Then she went down to the dining room.
Somehow she had known and was not amazed on opening the door. The table was full. Not ten places but surely sixteen. She stood in the doorway and counted them aloud. They raised their old heads of silver and white wire, glanced once with their gunshot eyes.
Rachaela went to the head of the table, which was empty, stood there, and said off all their names that she had heard of, could call to mind, randomly, yet like a schoolteacher checking attendance:
‘Anna, Stephan, Peter, Dorian, Sylvian, Alice, Unice, Miriam, Sasha, Eric, George, Miranda, Livia—’
And when she ceased, like good children, the three she had missed spoke up shrilly:
Teresa.’
‘Jack.’
‘Anita.’
About the room were the other four, Michael and Cheta, Carlo and Maria. The two women were serving cheese omelettes, Carlo saw to the fire, Michael laid down salad.
Their behaviour was insectoid. They had gravitated to this spot like running water. Only Camillo had not come, the one she wanted. Camillo and Adamus, age and youth—for to them Adamus was a boy, and she—she was a baby.
Maria was beside her and began to set extra eating utensils for Rachaela, where she stood at the table’s head.
Rachaela sat down in silence, and ate what was offered her.
And the Scarabae began to chatter. They twittered and chirruped amongst themselves like a nest of small, harsh dangerous birds with razor beaks.
She heard odd words only, the hubbub was so great—lace, omelette, chesspiece.
And Anna, the usual spokeswoman, was talkative, and once or twice she directed at Rachaela a pitiless smile. You see how we can be, it said. Do you like this better?
On the edge of insanity the room crackled and vibrated.
Rachaela sat mesmerized, in a shrinking fascination. It was like being in a demented music-box. A twist of a key would silence them. But which key was it?
When the plates were polished clean, the fruit had gone round and been demolished in its turn, the teapots came, three this time.
Rachaela sat on in the aviary of noise. She drank tea.
Alice and Sasha were the first to rise.
Rachaela rose also and went up to them.
She had recognized Alice, who wore a plum-red knitted cardigan, a long string of crimson beads.
‘Alice, tell me about the attic.’
‘Oh, the attic,’ Alice said at once, like clockwork. ‘Full of trifles. A dress of my mother’s—’weird notion, this one had had a mot
her‘—on a dummy. And the old rocking-horse, do you remember, Sasha?’
‘How does one get into the attic?’ said Rachaela.
‘A stair,’ said Alice. ‘We’ll show you.’
The others watched as they went from the room. The noise did not subside.
They walked up to the landing and turned to the left. The corridor curved like a worm, branched. Alice chose left again. They passed through an annexe with a window of Salome dancing with the head of John-or so Rachaela interpreted the saffron and cerise glass. There were bare floorboards beyond, closed doors, a narrow stair going downwards and another up, uncarpeted. Rachaela had never come this way. It was gloomy, sulkily lit by glimmers of Salome, old reds of dying sunfall on a peeling wall.
‘Up there,’ said Alice. ‘Now you know.’
Sasha said, ‘Watch out for Uncle Camillo. He stores wine in the attic.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Alice, ‘he made ever such a lot. Quite horrible it was, very sour and add. Undrinkable. But he said he liked to do it, make the wine. In the kitchen the corks kept popping. So now he stores it up there.’
As Rachaela stepped on to the stair, Alice waved to her, ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ as if seeing her off on an epic train journey.
The attic door was free of webs, in use. There was a lock, but it stood ajar. She pushed it. The two women had gone.
The attic ran long and high. It was crammed with things. She saw chests, old wardrobes, stuffed birds, indeed a dummy with a scarlet musty dress, the rocking-horse in blood and snow suspended in a shaft of light. A window pierced the end wall, round and spoked like a wheel. The glass, dusty, greenish, was clear. A dream window in the wrong place. By its shining illumination she gradually saw the ranks of brown bottles standing up everywhere, and at last Uncle Camillo seated in a rocking-chair he had perhaps mistaken for the horse.
He was out of the shaft of light, yet the attic was sprinkled by it. It touched white sparks on his clasped and wiry hands, three rings, and lit the long hood of albescent hair. His eyes were shut, but as she stared at him, he opened them.
‘Giddy-up,’ he said to the rocking chair, and made it go. The creaks were like emanations of his etiolate body.
‘The light,’ said Rachaela.
‘You’ll have to put up with it,’ he answered. ‘Avoid the direct beam.’
‘It doesn’t worry me.’
‘It will.’
‘And you,’ she said, ‘aren’t afraid of the light.’
‘Too old,’ said Uncle Camillo, rocking. ‘Do you want to go down to the sea?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Is there a way into the tower?’
‘Adamus locks the door,’ said Camillo. ‘Adamus ran away. Into the outside world, alone. Then he came back.’
‘You know the way into the tower,’ said Rachaela.
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Over the roof.’
He pointed at the window. Rachaela walked into the full glare of the murky glass. There was a catch, the window might be opened. Outside lay a flat roof with a parapet of stone. One of the weather-vanes balanced at a crazy angle, it was a dragon. Beyond the flat roof was another, and then the cone of the tower. Under the lid of the cone a tall dark window, dyed glass and leading. It looked inaccessible.
‘Have some wine,’ said Uncle Camillo.
He did not sound as mad as she had thought him. He did mad things perhaps to camouflage an awful misfit sanity.
‘No, thank you.’ She opened the window. It was quite possible to climb through. She surveyed the roofs, the window beneath the cone. He might close and secure the window when she was outside, stranding her. He rocked, placidly. She did not think he would. He would, as he had advised her, avoid the direct beam of the light. ‘I’ll need to come back,’ she said. She did not believe she could get into the tower this way. She did not think that, even if the tower window might be opened, the man Adamus would open it.
She got through the window and stood out on the open roof.
Other roofs of the house spread below, hints of walls, and then the tawny ground, the trees of the garden and the wood. The sea gaped to one side, green today and restless. A thin drizzle fell.
She crossed the roof, stepped over on to the second.
As she approached the tower, she heard a piano playing, coarse brilliant strokes, a line of angry melody that matched the writhing of the sea, the boom of the foam.
She thought of a radio or record player in the tower. He was like her, he wanted music, and allowed modern machines to bring it to him. In there too the typewriter had clicked.
She reached the window. Following the heavy leading, she saw the shape of a lion standing over not a sheep but a warrior in armour. The dense colours were not to be made out. There was no apparent means of entry.
Rachaela rapped harshly on the window. Then drew back her fist, alarmed at what she had done.
But the piano music continued. Nothing moved in the tower to indicate she had been heard.
Rachaela went back through the rain. The attic window leaned open, Camillo was still rocking.
She climbed in more awkwardly.
‘Yes, I’ll have some wine.’
‘You’re welcome. Help yourself.’
‘I can’t open the bottles.’
‘Then you will have to go without.’
Rachaela said, ‘You have a key to the tower door.’
Camillo said, ‘Was he playing the piano? There’s a way in. Did you knock? Perhaps he didn’t hear you.’
She sat down on a low chest in the dust. Camillo rocked. He said, ‘I’m the oldest of them.’
‘They told me.’
‘Like to hear my age?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t. Can’t remember. Giddy-up,’ he said to the chair, and closed his eyes again. Then he said, ‘I know a way down to the beach. Walk by the sea.’
To humour him, she said, ‘All right. I’ll go with you.’
She expected another rebuff. Instead he got instantly out of the chair. He ducked with a skittish agility beneath the ray of light. A pile of armour glinted in the corner, a sword. He had taken the mouse out of the big cat’s mouth.
‘Come along then,’ he said, ‘Rachaela.’
Beyond the place where the path turned back into the wood, bushes overhung and obscured a flight of steps cut into the cliff. They were slippery and dangerous, and Rachaela descended with caution. But Camillo went down them like a ferret, fearless and coordinated. Beneath there was a high stranded beach, a cove, while either side the sea came in and cast itself against the obdurate skirts of the rocks.
‘At low tide,’ said Camillo, with the kind of air of one giving desired information, ‘Carlo catches fish.’
‘I thought the cat caught all the food.’
‘Gulls, rabbits,’ said Camillo. ‘Once it caught a robin and let it go. I saw.’
‘Mice,’ said Rachaela.
‘Did you like the mouse? It was perfect.’
‘Yes it was. Someone cleared it away, Cheta or Michael.’
‘Probably put it in the stew,’ said Camillo. He gave his high pitched madman’s giggle, as if he had left it too long.
They were in the daylight. Camillo did not bother with it any more than he bothered with the fine rain. His skin was like thin paper, the bones like a framework of hard sticks. He did not look frail.
‘Why does the family avoid daylight?’ said Rachaela.
‘It doesn’t agree with them.’
‘And you?’
‘Nothing agrees with me. I like the colours by day. Once I couldn’t bear them. I remember a night ride that ended in the dawn and I hid my head and wept.’
‘Somewhere else,’ she said.
‘Far away.’ He spoke very fast in another language. It might have been Russian or some Serbian tongue. He cackled. He said, ‘Shan’t tell you the family history. It’s all muddled up in my head. I remember a cathedral on Christmas Eve and a dunghill and two hundred women and all the dogs, but I fo
rget where or when. Why should I care? I’m not interested. Not even in you. Just a brief glimmer at first. But you’re so predictable, girl. Exactly what I would have guessed. Wandering about in your black clothes and your white skin. You’ll run away too, but you’ll come back. You’re the one. Like him.’
‘Adamus.’
‘The boy.’
‘Is he my father?’
‘If he says so,’ said Camillo. He crouched on a rock like a gargoyle and his long white hair fluttered in the wet wind. The sea burst and sank, like hopeless anger.
‘Why am I important?’
‘A gene,’ said Camillo. ‘We all carry it. It comes out in some. Adamus. You.’
‘What do you mean?’ She felt a stab of fear.
‘There were others,’ he said, ‘but they died. Only the two of you left. The rest of us would have liked to have had it. Glamorous and wicked. At first the family drove out the black sheep. Then it harboured them. The family revels in its differences.’
Suddenly Camillo sprang up. He executed a little gallop round and round on the strand. He used a whip. He neighed and the cove echoed with the equine human sound. The madness was his garment but he had put it on so often it claimed him. The mask had become the skin.
Rachaela frowned impatiently, waiting for the horse dance to end. But part of her wanted to gallop with him, make believe. She had never had a childhood. At eleven years the one doll she had had, a hard ungiving model child, was taken from her and deposited at a local charity shop. There Rachaela saw her in the window for a week; then someone bought her.
Camillo the sea horse rested.
‘He has to come to you,’ he panted, ‘or you go to him. It’s a pattern, unavoidable. And so you want to go to him, break in on his mystery.’
‘He watched me asleep,’ said Rachaela.
‘Unforgivable,’ said Camillo. Then, ‘I’ll show you the way into the tower. Any of them could have done it, but they love a game. Cheta or Maria or Michael would have taken you.’
‘I dreamed you have a key,’ she said.
‘A young woman dreams of me. I’m flattered.’
They went back up the treacherous steps. Rachaela slipped and saw the cliff and the sea whirl. She completed the climb nearly on all fours, in terror.
