It was dark when the door opened and an old woman entered. She went to the bedside and sat down, stroking Andrew’s hair. In the darkness, he whispered, “Mum?”
“I will be your mother, your father, your God, my son. And you will be my greatest joy. Lie still, remember all that has been your life, and feel the joy and pleasure that innocence brings. I will not cause you pain, or touch you. In turn, your fear will pass, your cares and longings will lessen.”
Andrew tried to sit up. Her hand went softly to his chest. “No, Andrew. Trust me. This will be like a dream. Lie still.”
He obeyed. The woman had a quality even more compelling than the Granddad. Her eyes shone in the dark, the same pale blue, her pupils sharp pinpoints floating in the center. She smelled of cedar wood and orange blossoms, though it was more like distant smoke from a smoldering fire than emanating from her. She put her hands over him, as if warming them on the heat that rose from him. He closed his eyes and the dream came.
Nightmares, really. First, he saw his mother, young and naïve, silly and carefree. She went to the pub to drink ale with her girlfriends, until a tall, handsome man came in and broke up the girls. He cornered Bernadette and filled her full of flattery. She kissed the man she hardly knew and let him paw her right there in the pub. His hand went under her skirt and she was wet with desire.
The man walked her to his car and proceeded to take her. They were like two naked organisms, undulating and folding into and out of each other. After he was done with her, he told her he loved her. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t dare. They kissed passionately, he promised he would call on her, and then he dropped her at her parent’s flat.
The next night, she found another man, and the next night another. None of them ever called for her, and none of them was around when she found herself pregnant. So, she began sleeping with her sister’s husband Phillip, who had always fancied her more than the plain Molly. She claimed Phillip was the father. He killed himself rather than face the shame, and Molly. Poor Molly.
Phillip had mortgaged the house to the limit, had gambling debts and expense accounts for presents to the lovely young Bernadette that were begging payment. Molly lost the house, destitute, on the dole, but when her sister came crawling for help with the brat, Molly swallowed her pride and went to live with Bernadette in their parent’s house. In the end, Molly thought, the baby boy could not have been Phillip’s. The timing was off by almost three months. Phillip had just been another one of Bernadette’s fools.
Then there was poor Aunt Molly; stealing from the people she cleaned house for, taking a ring here, a watch there. Nothing they could prove Molly had taken, things they could have easily misplaced. In the dream, Andrew saw her standing at her wardrobe, a box of booty in her arms, thinking of the life she’d have when she hocked it all and bought herself a flat of her own. Her antipathies for her bitter sister were evident in her wish that all that was Bernadette’s turn to dross. That Andrew was more her child than Bernadette’s and one day she would tell Andrew the truth. That his mother was a whore, not a secretary at Babington Hospital. She laughed then, deeply, loudly, without remorse.
The nightmare ended. The woman swooned, sated, as he awoke. He looked up to her. She had an aura of light around her that twinkled and pulsed. She sat down on the chair beside the bed and wept. Andrew sat up. In his mind, he thought to go to her, comfort her. She sobbed on. But he could not seem to muster the concern to move. He watched her until she went quiet.
“What happened to you? Why do I feel like this?”
She seemed to wake from a reverie, and then fixed him with her bright eyes. “He did not tell you?”
“The Granddad? No, he just talked about essence and treasures. Was it me made you cry?”
The old woman rose up, took a few steps away. She thought a moment about what she might say, then said nothing. She opened the door.
“Please.” Andrew said flatly.
“Oh, what’s the harm.” She returned to the bed. “You will know as soon as you talk with the other children.” She sat down, leaned against the bedpost.
“My son, do you see some of the uglier truths of your life now? Do you feel the sorrow in that truth?” She waited but Andrew remained impassive, silent. “I have lifted the veil of ignorance you have relied on all of your ten years. Do you not feel different for the weight of your innocence now gone into me?”
Andrew looked within. It was as dark and wet as the night the Granddad had taken him, but there was no glistening.
“You are unlucky in that you are mine. I will always weep at your loss and the sweetness of my fullness. It confuses. In time, you will no longer be confused. You will just be.” She laughed dryly, as the Granddad had. “And to think that some of the silly human race rather reveres that state … be-ing. They call it ‘enlightenment’ and spend a lifetime seeking to attain it.” She rose again, chuckling, went to the door and smiled a smile like dice without dots. “Until tomorrow.”
When the door shut behind her, Andrew looked at his hands, felt his face. They were the same as always. He had not changed, really. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would look and see if they had a library with any books on Turkey. He hadn’t finished the one he’d left behind. Somewhere.
VENUS RISING ON WATER
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee (1947–2015) did not learn to read—she was dyslexic—until almost age eight, and then only because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to her, and by the following year she was writing stories. She worked in various jobs, including shop assistant, waitress, librarian and clerk, before Donald A. Wollheim’s DAW Books issued her novel The Birthgrave in 1975.
The imprint went on to publish a further twenty-six of her novels and collections. Since then, she published more than a hundred novels and collections, including Death’s Master, The Silver Metal Lover, Red as Blood, and the Arkham House volume Dreams of Dark and Light. She also scripted two episodes of the BBC series Blakes 7, and her story “Nunc Dimittis” was adapted as an episode of the TV series The Hunger.
She was a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award, and she received Life Achievement Awards from the World Horror Convention, the World Fantasy Convention, and the Horror Writers Association.
“I’ve written several novels about vampires,” revealed the author, “or types of vampire, and quite a lot of short stories of various lengths. Vampirism, to me, is one of those themes where somehow another idea or twist is always making itself known to me. The subject seems limitless, perhaps because the vampire seems somehow to have woven itself among the human psyche.
“‘Venus Rising on Water’ came initially from a fascination with Venice. It’s about the clash between the future and the past—although the denouement, however odd or apparently fortuitous, demonstrates the hold everyday Real Life can get on the strangest matters.”
LIKE LONG HAIR, the weeds grew down the façades of the city, over ornate shutters and leaden doors, into the pale green silk of the lagoon. Ten hundred ancient mansions crumbled. Sometimes a flight of birds was exhaled from their crowded mass, or a thread of smoke was drawn up into the sky. Day long a mist bloomed on the water, out of which distant towers rose like snakes of deadly gold. Once in every month a boat passed, carving the lagoon that had seemed thickened beyond movement. Far less often, here and there, a shutter cracked open and the weed hair broke, a stream of plaster fell like a blue ray. Then, some faint face peered out, probably eclipsed by a mask. It was a place of veils. Visitors were occasional. They examined the decaying mosaics, loitered in the caves of arches, hunted phantoms through marble tunnels. And under the streets they took photographs: one bald flash scouring a century off the catacombs and sewers, the lacework coffins, the handful of albino rats perched up on them, caught in a second like ghosts of white hearts, mute, with waiting eyes.
The dawn star shone in the lagoon on a tail of jagged silver. The sun rose. There was an unsuitable noise—the boat was com
ing.
“There,” said the girl on the deck of the boat, “stop there, please.”
The boat sidled to a pavement and stood on the water, trembling and murmuring. The girl left it with a clumsy gracefulness, and poised at the edge of the city with her single bag, cheerful and undaunted before the lonely cliffs of masonry, and all time’s indifference.
She was small, about twenty-five, with ornately short fair hair, clad in old-fashioned jeans and a shirt. Her skin was fresh, her eyes bright with intelligent foolishness. She looked about, and upward. Her interest clearly centered on a particular house, which overhung the water like a face above a mirror, its eyes closed.
Presently the boat pulled away and went off across the lagoon, and only the girl and the silence remained.
She picked up her bag and walked along the pavement to an archway with a shut, leaden door. Here she knocked boldly, as if too stupid to understand the new silence must not yet be tampered with.
Her knocking sent hard blobs of sound careering round the vault of greenish crystal space that was the city’s morning. They seemed to strike peeling walls and stone pilasters five miles off. From the house itself came no response, not even the vague sense of something stirring like a serpent in sleep.
“Now this is too bad,” said the girl to the silence, upbraiding it mildly. “They told me a caretaker would be here, in time for the boat.”
She left her bag (subconscious acknowledgment of the emptiness and indifference) by the gate, and walked along under the leaning face of the house. From here she saw the floors of the balconies of flowered iron; she listened for a sudden snap of shutters. But only the water lapped under the pavement, component of silence. This house was called the Palace of the Planet. The girl knew all about it, and what she did not know she had come here to discover. She was writing a long essay that was necessary to her career of scholastic journalism. She was not afraid.
In the façade of the Palace of the Planet was another door, plated with green bronze. The weed had not choked it, and over its top leaned a marble woman with bare breasts and a dove in her hands. The girl reached out and rapped with a bronze knocker shaped like a fist. The house gave off a sound that after all succeeded in astonishing her. It must be a hollow shell, unfurnished, half its walls fallen …
These old cities were museums now, kept for their history, made available on request to anyone—not many—who wished to view. They had their dwellers also, but in scarcity. Destitutes and eccentrics lived in them, monitored by the state. The girl, whose name was Jonquil Hare, had seen the register of this place. In all, there were 174 names, some queried, where once had teemed thousands, crushing each other in the ambition to survive.
The hollow howling of her knock faded in the house. Jonquil said, “I’m coming in. I am.” And marched back to her bag beneath the leaden gate. She surveyed the gate, and the knotted weed which had come down on it. Jonquil Hare tried the weed. It resisted her strongly. She took up her bag, in which there was nothing breakable, seasoned traveler as she was, and flung it over the arch. She took the weed in her small strong hands and hauled herself up in her clumsy, graceful way, up to the arch, and sat there, looking in at a morning-twilight garden of shrubs that had not been pruned in a hundred years, and trees that became each other. A blue fountain shone dimly. Jonquil smiled upon it, and swung herself over in the weed and slithered down, into the environ of the house.
By midday, Jonquil had gone busily over most of the Palace of the Planet. Its geography was fixed in her head, but partly, confusedly, for she liked the effect of a puzzle of rooms and corridors. Within the lower portion of the house a large hall gave on to a large enclosed inner courtyard, that in turn led to the garden. Above, chambers of the first story would have opened onto the court, but their doors were sealed by the blue-green weed, which had smothered the court itself and so turned it into a strange undersea grotto where columns protruded like yellow coral. Above the lower floor, two long staircases drew up into apparently uncountable annexes and cells, and to a great salon with tarnished mirrors, also broken like spiderwebs. The salon had tall windows that stared through their blind shutters at the lagoon.
There were carvings everywhere; lacking light, she did not study them now. And, as suspected, there was very little furniture—a pair of desks with hollow drawers, spindly chairs, a divan in rotted ivory silk. In one oblong room was a bedframe with vast tapering pillars like idle rockets. Cobwebby draperies shimmered from the canopy in a draught, while patches of bled emerald sunlight hovered on the floor.
Jonquil succeeded in opening a shutter in the salon. A block of afternoon fell in. Next door, in the adjacent chamber, she set up her inflatable mattress, her battery lamp and heater, some candles she had brought illegally in a padded tube. Sitting on her unrolled mat in the subaqueous light of a shuttered window which refused to give, she ate from her pack of food snacks and drank cola. Then she arranged some books and note-pads, pens and pencils, a magnifier, camera and unit, and a miniature recorder on the unfolded table.
She spoke to the room, as from the start she had spoken consecutively to the house. “Well, here we are.”
But she was restless. The caretaker must be due to arrive, and until this necessary procedure had taken place, interruption hung over her. Of course, the caretaker would enable Jonquil to gain possession of the house secrets, the holostetic displays of furnishings and earlier life that might have been indigenous here, the hidden walks and rooms that undoubtedly lay inside the walls.
Jonquil was tired. She had risen at 3:00 a.m. for the boat after an evening of hospitable farewells. She lay down on her inflatable bed with the pillow under her neck. Through half-closed eyes she saw the room breathing with pastel motes of sun, and heard the rustle of weed at the shutter.
She dreamed of climbing a staircase which, dreaming, seemed new to her. At the foot of the stair a marble pillar supported a globe of some aquamarine material, covered by small configurations of alien landmasses, isolate in seas. The globe was a whimsical and inaccurate eighteenth-century rendition of the planet Venus, to which the house was mysteriously affiliated. As she climbed the stairs, random sprinklings of light came and went. Jonquil sensed that someone was ascending with her, step for step, not on the actual stair, but inside the peeling wall at her left side. Near the top of the stair (which was lost in darkness) an arched window had been let into the wall, milky and unclear and further obscured by some drops of waxen stained glass. As she came level with the window, Jonquil glanced sidelong at it. A shadowy figure appeared, on the far side of the pane, perhaps a woman, but hardly to be seen.
Jonquil started awake at the sound of the caretaker’s serviceable shoes clumping into the house.
The caretaker was a woman. She did not offer her name, and no explanation for her late arrival. She had brought the house manual, and advised Jonquil on how to operate the triggers in its panel—visions flickered annoyingly over the rooms and were gone. A large box contained facsimiles of things pertaining to the house and its history. Jonquil had seen most of these already.
“There are the upper rooms, the attics. Here’s the master key.”
The woman showed Jonquil a hidden stair that probed these upper reaches of the house. It was not the stairway from the dream, but narrow and winding as the steps of a belltower. There were no other concealed chambers.
“If there’s anything else you find you require, you must go out to the booth in the square. Here is the code to give the machine.”
The caretaker was middle-aged, stout and uncharming. She seemed not to know the house at all, only everything about it, and glanced around her disapprovingly. Doubtless she lived in one of the contemporary golden towers across the lagoon, which, in the lingering powder of mist, passed for something older and stranger that they were not.
“Who came here last?” asked Jonquil. “Did anyone?”
“There was a visitor in the spring of the last Centenary Year. He stayed only one day, to study t
he plaster, I believe.”
Jonquil smiled, pleased and smug that the house was virtually all her own, for the city’s last centenary had been twenty years ago, nearly her lifetime.
She was glad when the caretaker left, and the silence of the house did not occur to Jonquil as she went murmuring from room to room, able now to operate the shutters, bring in light and examine the carvings in corners, on cornices. Most of them showed earlier defacement, as expected. She switched on, too, scenes from the manual, of costumed, dining and conversing figures amid huge pieces of furniture and swags of brocade. No idea of ghosts was suggested by these holostets. Jonquil reserved a candlelit masked ball for a later, more fitting hour.
The greenish amber of afternoon slid into the plate of water. A chemical rose flooded the sky, like color processing for a photograph. Venus, the evening star, was visible beyond the garden.
Jonquil climbed up the belltower steps to the attics.
The key turned easily in an upper door. But the attics disappointed. They were high and dark—her flashlight penetrated like a sword—webbed with the woven dust, and thick with damp, and a sour cloacal smell that turned the stomach of the mind. Otherwise, there was an almost emptiness. From beams hung unidentified shreds. On one wall a tapestry on a frame, indecipherable, presumably not thought good enough for renovation. Jonquil moved reluctantly through the obscured space, telling it it was in a poor state, commiserating with it, until she came against a chest of cold black wood.
“Now what are you?” Jonquil inquired of the chest.
It was long and low, its lid carved over with a design that had begun to crumble … Curious fruits in a wreath.
The shape of the chest reminded her of something. She peered at the fruits. Were they elongate lemons, pomegranates? Perhaps they were meant to be Venusian fruits. The astrologer Johanus, who had lived in the Palace of the Planet, had played over the house his obsession and ignorance with, and of, Venus. He had claimed in his treatise closely to have studied the surface of the planet through his own telescope. There was an atmosphere of clouds, parting slowly; beneath, an underlake landscape, cratered and mountained, upon limitless waters. “The mirror of Venus is her sea,” Johanus wrote. And he had painted her, but his daubs were lost, like most of his writing, reputedly burned. He had haunted the house alive, an old wild man, watching for star-rise, muttering. He had died in the charity hospital, penniless and mad. His servants had destroyed his work, frightened of it, and vandalized the decorations of the house.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 38
