Dark Dance

by Lee, Tanith

  But Camillo did not fear death, darted straight up and did not slip once.

  They went back into the house by the side door Camillo had used on leaving. It led via a passage into the morning room where Peter and Dorian breakfasted, and now sat post-luncheon, both slumbering in chairs before a fire. In sleep they looked dead. Camillo paid them no attention. The morning-room window showed a queen picking green grapes in a vineyard—Jezebel?

  Camillo did not take her back to the attic. He took her as far as the annexe with the Salome, and there pointed down the descending narrow stair.

  ‘Leads to a corridor, which ends in a door. Open the door and go into Adamus’s tower. Knock first.’

  ‘He didn’t knock when he spied on me.’

  ‘Don’t knock then.’ Camillo hopped upstairs.

  Rachaela hesitated and then went down.

  The corridor was unlit save by the stairwell, a pink sauterne Salome light.

  She passed shut doors, webby, which she did not want to open. The corridor bent round, and the light faded into a depressing eerie darkness. The ultimate door appeared, as in the dream straight ahead.

  Rachaela reached it. She listened. The piano still played, something of Brahms, it seemed to her, a piano concerto without the orchestra.

  She was not ready.

  She turned away and hurried back into the light.

  Rachaela put on her pale blue dress and a brooch of twisted silver she had once found lying in the rain outside the flats.

  She went down to the drawing room and stood by the white fireplace, waiting for Anna and Stephan. She was used to eating with them by now in the evenings. They did not come.

  Michael entered belatedly with the tray of bottles and decanters.

  ‘Where’s Anna?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss Rachaela.’

  Just as they had been unexpectedly at the cheeping lunch, now they would not appear.

  Rachaela dined alone on a fish casserole and gooseberry tart.

  The fire cracked and flared in little spurts as heavy rain came down the chimney.

  After dinner Rachaela found her way back to the unlit morning room. No one was there, the hearth black.

  Rachaela sat for an hour before the dining-room fire. No one entered. She spent ten minutes in the drawing room, where the golden clock kept silence. It had no hands.

  No one entered any of the rooms. It seemed to Rachaela that through the dregs of the afternoon no one had passed along the passage outside her door.

  Michael, who alone had served her at dinner, had now vanished.

  The house mewed and tossed like a tree in the rain and rising wind. It might now have been empty, but for herself.

  Rachaela returned upstairs. She went to the bathroom and prepared herself for bed. In the bedroom, she sat in one of the nightdresses before the fire. Outside the unruly weather sounded like a storm at sea. She heard the ocean itself rolling in on the land.

  Rachaela took a book and tried to read.

  She read the same paragraph over and over.

  The clock with the angels told her it was one o’clock: it was midnight.

  Rachaela got into bed.

  For an hour she tried to sleep.

  Beyond the wall and the window the storm of wind increased. The corners of the house shrieked and the glass was lashed by metal splinters of rain.

  If the lightning began it would be impossible to sleep. A pallid flash, the picture of Eve and Lucifer and the viridian tree imprinted themselves on the room.

  On such a night...

  Rachaela left the bed, She lit the lamp, dressed, powdered her face and crayoned in her eyes. Her black lashes cast shadows on her face, her mouth had a red ripe colour in the lamplight. It was the time for it.

  As before, she carried the lamp out with her, and as before the passage was in darkness and all the carvings of fruit dipped and swerved. She was afraid of meeting the abnormal cat, but this nervousness did not dissuade her.

  She went to the left and followed the corridor to its branch, went left again and found Salome leaden in the dark.

  Spiders clung on the narrow stair down, catching the light in their filigree webs.

  In the lower corridor the lamp glowed steadily, the ranked doors passed, and the other door manifested like a black oblong. Was this, too, locked?

  She came to it and without pausing tried the doorknob, which turned obligingly.

  As in the dream, inside was only blackness.

  Was he asleep, the one who lived here, lying in the sea of black while the storm roared about him? That would be justice, coming on him like Psyche on the monster in the legend, letting fall the scalding drop of oil from the lamp. But Rachaela would not be so careless. If she found him sleeping perhaps that would put the balance right.

  The light found a stair inside the tower, and Rachaela mounted it slowly.

  There was a faint reddish film above, the shade of a low-burning fire.

  She came up into a room. The lamp described the dark interior of the lion window she had seen from outside, and across it the black levels of a piano with dim paleness on the keys. He then, not any machine, had made the music which she heard.

  She turned away and let the lamp slide over the beams of the ceiling, the furniture of the room, to the hearth.

  The great cat lay there, watching her from half-moon eyes.

  Then a second light struck against her own.

  Three candles on the mantelpiece had come to life. She saw Adamus standing there in his black clothes, and the match quivered down into the fire.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said, as if taking up again their previous conversation.

  ‘Nor I.’

  He looked the same, as if always he must look the same. He leaned to ruffle the big cat’s ebony head, and lights streamered over his nonconformist face before shadow dippered it. He sat in a chair before the fire. His face was a stranger’s that she knew.

  ‘Come here then,’ he said, ‘sit down and say whatever you have to.’

  She walked forward and set her lamp upon the mantel. There was a mirror there covered by iron-black scrolls; a white clock which, she saw, was quickly running backwards.

  ‘I don’t have anything to say,’ she told him.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘I’m interested,’ she mimicked, ‘I’ve had to wait nearly thirty years, to see my father.’

  He observed her as she sat in the chair opposite to his own. The form of the cat lay between them, a living rug, head lowered now to paws. It was simple after all to accept the domesticity of the cat. Not his.

  On the edge of the hearth, on the tiles there, was set a bottle of red wine. There were two glasses, one full one empty. He leaned down and filled the second glass from the bottle. He handed it to her. She took it. He had been expecting someone, presumably her.

  ‘You knew I’d come here. You spoke to Camillo.’

  ‘I rarely speak to any of them. Camillo especially avoids me. He finds my—youth offensive.’

  ‘Anna and Stephan didn’t eat dinner with me. They always have. Yet at lunch they were all there. Even the servants. They chattered, tweeted. The noise was peculiar.’

  ‘Another game,’ he said. ‘They’re playing with both of us. You’d better understand.’

  ‘But you,’ she said, ‘typed the letter to me.’

  ‘Anna asked me,’ he said. ‘Anna can be very winsome, persuasive. She dictated the words.’

  ‘Who signed it?’ Rachaela asked.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Scarabae.’

  ‘My name.’

  She said, ‘You have a very melodramatic name. What did my mother think of it?’

  ‘She believed I was called Adam. In a way I am.’

  ‘Man,’ said Rachaela.

  He shrugged. Each of them, perhaps not meaning to, sipped from their glass at the same moment. The wine was rich, a deep metallic taste.

  ‘So here you are,’ he said a
fter a while.

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d return your call. And Camillo told me the other way into the tower.’

  ‘It’s usually locked.’

  ‘An oversight.’

  ‘I knew you would come.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Then that’s your problem, Rachaela.’

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘do you say my name that way?’

  ‘I enjoy your name. It’s a family name that I offered your mother as a title for you. She naturally originally rejected it with scorn and repulsion. She thought I’d come back to make an honest woman of her.’

  ‘Yes, she’d have preferred to be married. But I think she’d have settled for your support. For your being there.’

  ‘I couldn’t be there,’ he said. ‘I had no interest in any of it. It was something the family had brainwashed me into thinking I must do. I spent two years out of my prison and I hated them. I got you, and that was that. I needed to go back to earth, here.’

  ‘And you had no interest in me.’

  ‘No. As a child you were nothing to me. Something I’d accomplished.’

  Rachaela swallowed with the copper wine the bitterness of her mother, the twenty-five years of being with that warped and irate woman. There had been only those magics stumbled on by accident—classical music, books, the things her mother despised. So often the radio switched to the pop channel to cancel her dreams, or the book was snatched away: ‘You can wash those dishcloths through if you want something to do.’ ou left me,’ Rachaela said, ‘in a desert.’ She thought of a childhood where a tall dark man led her by the hand through a park, swans on water, bread for the ducks. She thought of a man’s voice reading to her. A shadow playing a piano. And the daggers of tears were in her eyes. She blazed with sudden pain. ‘But it would have bored you. A child.’

  ‘I must try to find you now,’ he said.

  ‘You’re too late. I don’t want you now. I don’t need you now. You’ve wasted it. I won’t let you in.’

  ‘But you’re here.’

  ‘Like you, I’m curious. To see who it was that abandoned me twenty-nine years ago when I was blind and dumb.’

  ‘Don’t, Rachaela,’ he said.

  And in his face she saw too an answering pain, his young man’s eyes and lips drawn with it.

  ‘It’s a lie, anyway,’ she said. ‘I still don’t believe you’re my father.’

  ‘There it is.’

  They sat in silence, and the cat rose up between them, stretching, its glorious coat rosy from the dying fire.

  ‘He wants the night,’ said Adamus. ‘I must let him out. Come on,’ he said quietly to the cat, which followed him from the room and down the stair, presumably to the lower door.

  Rachaela stared round her at the unequally lighted chamber, the blackness beyond the radius of the lamp and candles, where things sorcerously caught the red glint of the fire, the green umbra of the glass of the lamp, like eyes or thoughts.

  A taste of salt now in the wine.

  It was foolish for emotion to crowd in on her. She had not expected that, for surely it was all a sham, this interview with a pretend father.

  She supposed it was possible, if the Scarabae lived as long as they declared. But even that was probably a lie, some senile device between the wishes to amuse and to alarm.

  The darkness howled beyond the window. The lightning had died.

  She did not hear him come back. He appeared out of the air, the light not properly reaching him. A tall shadow.

  Instead of coming towards her, he went instead across the room. He seated himself at the piano.

  Unable to prevent herself, Rachaela held her breath.

  And in the dark he began to play.

  The music drifted up in long chords above the gunfire rattle of the rain. The sombre lower register fit with the white rivets of the higher notes. She did not know the composer of this melody racing across octaves. The storm of music covered the tempest furling round the tower.

  Rachaela shut her eyes.

  She sat in the chair, floating on the tide of sound, the glass of fire held loosely in one hand. Against her will she felt herself surrender to what he made.

  At last the tide drew out, separated in retreating rills. Ended.

  Not opening her eyes, she said, ‘Play again.’

  He said nothing. But after a moment the fast stanzas of a Chopin Prelude flighted into the room.

  What would she have been if she had had this in her childhood?

  The tears ran slowly down her face. She let them, drowning in the music.

  ‘You were asleep.’

  He stood before the hearth. The fire was dead. The lamp shone crimson in the glass of wine as he drank. The length of his bound-back hair astonished.

  ‘I heard it all.’

  ‘I know. You only slept when I stopped playing.’

  So soothed. The pain had left her in a flood. The petty anger and the greater anger, these too.

  ‘You have to let me come back,’ she said. ‘I want to hear you play again.’

  ‘Why not.’

  Like a child she pushed the hair from her face.

  The clock whirled from half past four to three o’clock and on towards two. It must be late into the early hours of morning.

  She did not want to leave but she was cold, and all at once afraid. How close to him she had come. And close to what? She did not know him, what he was, or who. He could see in the dark like the cat.

  He leaned forward and took her hand, and helped her lift herself to her feet. His hand was new. Male and warm. She marvelled at it—it was gone. She stood alone, exhausted.

  ‘Which door?’ she said.

  ‘Whichever the lady prefers.’

  The idea of walking to her room weighed on her tiredness. She must be quick and run away. She did not know what she was thinking.

  ‘This will do.’

  He walked with her back across the room, carrying her lamp.

  He handed it to her politely at the stair head. She took it and stepped through and down the stairs to the upper doorway, and into the overpowering close darkness of the corridor beyond.

  The door shut behind her, she listened for the scrape of a key, but did not hear it.

  Rachaela dreamed of her mother cooking a Sunday dinner which every six months or so she had done. There was always great business. Rachaela stood at the sink peeling endless sprouts, marking each one as instructed with a cross against Satan. Her hands ached.

  From the kitchen door, blurred in the dream, he called her.

  ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘You finish those sprouts.’

  But Rachaela left the sprouts in the bowl.

  At the door the man waited with outstretched hand.

  ‘You’re not to,’ said her mother. ‘You keep away from him.’

  But Adamus picked her up, although she was adult height, he picked her up and bore her away.

  Rachaela woke with this dream behind her eyes, very real, disconcerted.

  The tower clock said twelve-thirty-five. Ten, she supposed. She had slept late.

  She went to run a bath and found outside the door an exquisite thing lying on the carpet, a necklace of small shells, pale fawn and rose and ivory.

  Another gift from Camillo perhaps, out of the treasure trove of the attic.

  She stood with the shells in her hand, then set them on the dressing-table.

  When she came back from the bath, drugged rather than revived, she dressed and brushed her hair lethargically and the shells lay there.

  On impulse she took them up and held them, one by one, though they were too small, to her ear.

  Her mother had told her of this trick when she was a child, but at first it had not seemed to work. It was at a stall somewhere at the seaside, where they had gone for the day. It had drizzled and the wind from the sea was sharp. Rachaela fell over on the sands and cut her knee o
n a piece of glass. In the mother’s fish tea was a large bone, about which she had been incensed.

  There was of course no voice of the sea from the shells. The sea voice was already faintly in the room.

  Yet when Rachaela took the shells from her ear, a wave, a sound came.

  Rachaela.

  She heard her name on a whispered roar, as if the room, the stones of the walls, had spoken it out.

  A stupid illusion. It startled her.

  She put the shells down again. She thought of the stick of rock she had wanted because other children had them, and which the mother grudgingly bought her. ‘You’ll break your teeth.’ She thought of her mother, squashed into the wrong shape, lying in the coffin, dead as a door nail and patched with rouge.

  The tears came out of her eyes again, as on the night before. She wept wildly for a few minutes, and ceased. That was goodbye then. To something.

  Chapter Six

  Now that she knew a way to the beach, she sometimes nerved herself to the slippy steps, and got down. She explored the limited cove, which at high tide the sea covered, leaving behind seaweeds, driftwood, a dead jelly fish, flotsam she could not identify.

  Otherwise she kept up her arduous walks along the heath, tracking through the gorse and dry bracken, the rabbits fleeing before her and the gulls screeching overhead. She made herself walk, for sanity’s sake. She had nothing to do. It was all one long hypnotized holiday.

  She walked the house too, trying to fix its angles and parabolas into some coherent plan, but it stayed a labyrinth, even where she could find her way through knowledge. She had begun to try the doors again, and once or twice found Scarabae under these stones: old Anita knitting at a red and violet window, the funeral of a king, Miriam and Unice sorting through huge albums of photographs, beneath a jade window—perhaps Jonah riding on the whale.

  Miriam and Unice had drawn her in and shown her hundreds of the photographs until she was numbed. They revealed beautiful waxworks of men and women in bygone clothes, posed before scenery and palms in urns. There were no recent shots, nothing in colour. Rachaela found herself surprised the photographs had been able to catch the figures at all, for surely they must be as invisible as ghosts to the eye of a camera, just as, presumably, they did not reflect in their multi-ornamented mirrors.