Jonquil tried to raise the lid of the chest. It would not come up.
“Are you locked?”
But there was no lock. The lid was stuck or merely awkward. “I shall come back,” said Jonquil.
She had herself concocted an essay on the astrologer, but rather as a good little girl writes once a year to her senile grandfather. She appreciated his involvement—that, but for him, none of this would be—but he did not interest her. It was the house which did that. There was a switch on the manual that would conjure acted reconstructions of the astrologer’s life, even to the final days, and to the rampage of the vandals. But Jonquil did not bother with this record. It was to her as if the house had adorned itself, using the man only as an instrument. His paintings and notes were subsidiary, and she had not troubled much over their disappearance.
“Yes, I’ll be back with a wrench, and you’d just better have something in there worth looking at,” said Jonquil to the chest. Doubtless it was vacant.
Night on the lagoon, in the city. The towers in the distance offered no lights, being constructed to conceal them. In two far-off spots, a pale glow crept from a window to the water. The silence of night was not like the silence of day.
Jonquil sang as the travel-cook prepared her steak, and, drinking a glass of reconstituted wine, going out into the salon, she switched on the masked ball.
At once the room was over two hundred years younger. It was drenched in gilt, and candle-flames stood like flowers of golden diamond on their stems of wax, while the ceiling revealed dolphins and doves who escorted a goddess over a sea in a ship that was a shell. The windows were open to a revised night hung with diamanté lamps, to a lagoon of black ink where bright boats were passing to the sound of mandolins. The salon purred and thrummed with voices. It was impossible to decipher a word, yet laughter broke through, and clear notes of the music. No one danced as yet. Perhaps they never would, for they were creatures from another world indeed, every one clad in gold and silver, ebony and glacial white, with jewels on them like water-drops tossed up by a wave. They had no faces. Their heads were those of plumed herons and horned deer, black velvet cats and lions of the sun and moon lynxes, angels, demons, mer-things from out of the lagoon, and scarabs from the hollows of time. They moved and promenaded, paused with teardrops of glass holding bloodlike wine, fluttered their fans of peacocks and palm leaves.
Jonquil stayed at the edge of the salon. She could have walked straight through them, through their holostetic actors’ bodies and their prop garments of silk, steel and chrysoprase, but she preferred to stay in the doorway, drinking her own wine, adapting her little song to the tune of the mandolins.
After the astrologer had gone, others had come, and passed, in the house. The rich lady, and the prince, with their masks and balls, suppers and recitals.
The travel-cook chimed, and Jonquil switched off two hundred elegantly acting persons, one thousand faked gems and lights, and went to eat her steak.
She wrote with her free hand: Much too pretty. Tomorrow I must photograph the proper carvings. And said this over aloud.
Jonquil dreamed she was in the attic. There was a vague light, perhaps the moon coming in at cracks in the shutters, or the dying walls. Below, a noise went on, the holostetic masked ball which she had forgotten to switch off. Jonquil looked at the chest of black wood. She had realized she did not have to open it herself. Downstairs, in the salon, an ormolu clock struck midnight, the hour of unmasking. There was a little click. In the revealing darkness, the lid of the chest began to lift. Jonquil knew what it had reminded her of. A shadow sat upright in the coffin of the chest. It had a slender but indefinite form, and yet it turned its head and Jonquil saw the two eyes looking at her, only the eyeballs gleaming, in two crescents, in the dark.
The lid fell over with a crash.
Jonquil woke up sitting on her inflatable bed, with her hands at her throat, her eyes raised toward the ceiling.
“A dream,” announced Jonquil.
She turned on her battery lamp, and the small room appeared. There was no sound in the house. Beyond the closed door the salon rested. “Silly,” said Jonquil.
She lay and read a book having nothing to do with the Palace of the Planet, until she fell asleep with the light on.
The square was a terrifying ruin. Hidden by the frontage of the city, it was nearly inconceivable. Upper stories had collapsed onto the paving, only the skeletons of architecture remained, with occasionally a statue, some of them shining green and vegetable (the dissolution of gold) piercing through. The paving was broken up, marked by the slough of birds. Here the booth arose, unable to decay.
“There’s a chest in the attics. It won’t open,” Jonquil accused the receiver. “The manual lists it. It says, one sable-wood jester chest.”
The reply came. “This is why you are unable to open it. A jester chest was just that, a deceiving or joke object, often solid. There is nothing inside.”
“No,” said Jonquil, “some jester chests do open. And this isn’t solid.”
“I am afraid you are wrong. The chest has been investigated, and contains nothing, neither is there any means to open it.”
“An x-ray doesn’t always show—” began Jonquil. But the machine had disconnected. “I won’t have this,” said Jonquil.
Three birds blew over the square. Beneath in the sewers, the colony of voiceless rats, white as moonlight, ran noiselessly under her feet. But she would not shudder. Jonquil strutted back to the house through alleys of black rot where windows were suspended like lingering cards of ice. Smashed glass lay underfoot. The awful smell of the sea was in the alleys, for the sea came in and in. It had drowned the city in psychic reality, and already lay far over the heads of all the buildings, calm, oily and still, reflecting the sun and the stars.
Jonquil got into the house by the gate-door the manual had made accessible, crossing the garden where the blue fountain was a girl crowned with myrtle. Jonquil went straight up over the floors to the attic stair, and climbed that. The attic door was ajar, as she believed she had left it.
“Here I am,” said Jonquil. The morning light was much stronger in the attics and she did not need her torch. She found the chest and bent over it.
“You’ve got a secret. Maybe you’re only warped shut, that would be the damp up here … There may be a lining that could baffle the x-ray.”
She tried the wrench, specifically designed not to inflict any injury. But it slipped and slithered and did no good. Jonquil knelt down and began to feel all over the chest, searching for some spring or other mechanism. She was caressing the chest, going so cautiously and delicately over it. Its likeness to a coffin was very evident, but bones would have been seen. “Giving me dreams,” she said. Something moved against her finger. It was very slight. It was as if the chest had wriggled under her tickling and testing like a sleeping child. Jonquil put back her hand—she had flinched, and reprimanded herself. At her touch the movement came again. She heard the clarity of the click she had heard before in the dream. And before she could stop herself, she jumped up, and stepped backward, one, two, three, until the wall stopped her.
The lid of the chest was coming up, gliding over, and slipping down without any noise but a mild slap. Nothing sat up in the chest. But Jonquil saw the edge of something lying there in it, in the shadow of it.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and went forward. She leaned on the chest, familiarly now. Everything was explained, even the psycho-kinetic activity of the dream. “A painting.”
Jonquil Hare leaned on the chest and stared in. Presently she took hold of the elaborate and gilded frame, and got the picture angled upward a short way, so it too leaned on the chest.
The painting was probably three centuries old. She could tell that from the pigments and disposition of the oils, but not from the artist. The artist was unknown. In size it was an upright oblong, about fifteen meters by one meter in width.
The work was a full-length portrait, rather w
ell executed and proportioned, lacking only any vestige of life, or animation. It might have been the masterly likeness of a handsome doll—this was how the artist had given away his amateur status.
She looked like a woman of about Jonquil’s age, which given the period meant of course that she would have been far younger, eighteen or nineteen years. Her skin was pale, and had a curious tint, as did in fact the entire scene, perhaps due to some corrosion of the paint—but even so it had not gone to the usual brown and mud tones, but rather to a sort of yellowish blue. Therefore the color scheme of clothing and hair might be misleading, for the long loose tresses were yellowish blonde, and the dress bluish gray. Like the hair, the dress was loose, a robe of a kind. And yet, naturally, both hair and robe were draped in a particular manner that dated them, as surely as if their owner had been gowned and coiffured at the apex of that day’s fashion. She was slender but looked strong. There was no plumpness to her chin and throat, her hands were narrow. An unusually masculine woman, more suitable to Jonquil’s century, where the sexes often blended, slim and lightly muscular—the woman in the painting was also like this. Her face was impervious, its eyes black. She was not beautiful or alluring. It was a flat animal face, tempered like the moon by its own chill light, and lacking sight or true expression because the artist had not understood how to intercept them.
Behind the woman was a vista that Jonquil took at first for the lagoon. But then she saw that between the fog-bank of blued-yellow cloud and the bluish-greenish water, a range of pocked and fissured mountains lurched like an unearthly aqueduct. It was the landscape of Johanus’s Venus. The artist of the picture was the mad astrologer who had invested the house.
How could it be that the authorities had missed this find?
“My,” said Jonquil to the painting. She was excited. What would this not be worth in tokens of fame?
She pulled on the painting again, more carefully than before. It was light for its size. She could manage it. She paused a moment, close to the woman on the canvas. The canvas was strange, the texture of it under the paint—but in those days three centuries before, they had sometimes used odd materials. Even some chemical or experimental potion could have been mixed with the paint, to give it now its uncanny tinge.
A name was written in a scroll at the bottom of the picture. Jonquil took it for a signature. But it was not the astrologer’s name, though near enough it indicated some link. Johnina.
“Jo-nine-ah,” said Jonquil, “we are going for a short walk, down to where I can take a proper look at you.”
With enormous care now, she drew the picture of Johnina out of the attics, and down the narrow stair toward the salon.
Jonquil was at the masked ball. In her hand was a fan of long white feathers caught in a claw of zircons, her costume was of white satin streaked with silver veins, and her face was masked like a white-furred cat. She knew her hair was too short for the day and age, and this worried her by its inappropriateness. No one spoke to her, but all around they chattered to each other (incomprehensibly), and their curled powdered hair poured out of their masks like milk boiling over. Jonquil observed everything acutely, the man daintily taking snuff (an addict), the woman in the dress striped black and ivory peering through her ruby eyeglass. Out on the lagoon, the gleaming boats went by, trailing red roses in the water.
Jonquil was aware that no one took any notice of her, had anything to do with her, and she was peevish, because they must have invited her. Who was she supposed to be? A duke’s daughter, or his mistress? Should she not be married at her age, and have borne children? She would have to pretend.
There was a man with rings on every finger, and beyond him a checkered mandolin player, and beyond him, a woman stood in a gray gown different from the rest. Her mask covered all her face, it was the countenance of a globe, perhaps the moon, in silver, and about it hair like pale tarnished fleece, too long as Jonquil’s was too short, was falling to her pelvis over the bodice of the gown.
A group of actors—yes, they were only acting, it was not real—intervened. The woman was hidden for a moment, and when the group had passed, she was gone.
She was an actress, too, which was why Jonquil had thought something about her recognizable.
Jonquil became annoyed that she should be here, among actors, for acting was nothing to do with her. She turned briskly, and went toward the door of the chamber that led off from the salon. Inside, the area was dark, yet everything there was visible, and Jonquil was surprised to see a huge bedframe from another room dominating the space. Surely Jonquil’s professional impedimenta had been put here, and the inflatable sleeping couch she traveled with? As for this bed, she had seen it elsewhere, and it had been naked then, but now it was dressed. Silk curtains hung from the pillars, and a mattress, pillows, sheets and embroidered coverlet were on it. Rather than the pristine appearance of a model furnishing, the bed had a slightly rumpled, tumbled look, as if Jonquil had indeed used it. Jonquil closed the door of the room firmly on the ball outside, and all sound of it at once ceased.
To her relief, she found that she was actually undressed and in the thin shirt that was her night garment. She went to the bed, resigned, and got into it. She lay back on the pillows. The bed was wonderfully comfortable, lushly undisciplined.
Johanus’s house was so silent—noiseless. Jonquil lay and listened to the total absence of sound, which was like a pressure, as if she had floated down beneath the sea. Her bones were coral, and pearls her eyes … Fish might swim in through the slats of a shutter, across the water of the air. But before that happened, the door would open again.
The door opened.
The doorway was lit with moonlight, and the salon beyond it, for the masked ball had gone. Only the woman with the silver planet face remained, and she came over the threshold. Behind her, in lunar twilight, Jonquil saw the lagoon lying across the salon, and the walls had evaporated, leaving a misty shore, and mountains that were tunneled through. The bed itself was adrift on water, and bobbed gently, but Johnina crossed without difficulty.
Her silver mask was incised, like the carvings in the house corners, the globes that were the planet Venus. The mask reflected in the water. Two silver discs, separated, drawing nearer.
Jonquil said sternly, “I must wake up.”
And she dived upward from the bed, and tore through layers of cloud or water and came out into the actual room, rolling on the inflatable couch.
“I’m not frightened,” stated Jonquil. “Why should I be?”
She turned on her battery lamp and angled the light to fall across the painting of Johnina, which she had leaned against the wall.
“What are you trying to tell me now? In the morning I’m going to call them up about you. Don’t you want to be famous?”
The painting had no resonance. It looked poorly in the harsh glare of the lamp, a stilted figure and crackpot scenery, the brushwork disordered. The canvas was so smooth.
“Go to sleep,” said Jonquil to Johnina, and shut off the light as if to be sensible with a tiresome child.
In the true dark, which had no moon, the silence of the house crept closer. Dispassionately, Jonquil visualized old Johanus padding about the floors in his broken soft shoes. He thought he had seen the surface of the planet Venus. He had painted the planet as an allegory that was a woman, just like the puns of Venus the goddess in marble over the door, and on the ceiling of the salon.
Jonquil began to see Johanus in his study, among the alchemical muddle, the primeval alchemical chaos from which all perfect creation evolved. But she regarded him offhandedly, the dust and grime and spillages, the blackened skulls and lembics growing moss.
Johanus wrote on parchment with a goose quill.
He wrote in Latin also, and although she had learned Latin in order to pursue her study, this was too idiosyncratic, too much of its era, for her to follow. Then the words began to sound, and she grasped them. Bored, Jonquil attended. She did not recall switching on this holostet
, could not think why she had decided to play it.
“So, on the forty-third night, after an hour of watching, the cloud parted, and there was before me the face of the planet. I saw great seas, or one greater sea, with small masses of land, pitted like debased silver. And the mountains I saw. And all this in a yellow glow from the cloud …”
Jonquil wondered why she did not stop the holostet. She was not interested in this. But she could not remember where the manual was.
“For seven nights I applied myself to my telescope, and on each night, the clouds of the planet sensuously parted, allowing me a view of her bareness.”
Jonquil thought she would have to leave the bed in order to switch off the manual. But the bed, with its tall draped posts, was warm and comfortable.
“On the eighth night it came to me. Even as I watched, I was watched in my turn. Some creature was there, some unseen intelligence, which, sensing my appraisal, reached out to seize me. I do not know how such a thing is possible. Where I see only a miniature of that world, it sees me exactly, where and what I am, every atom. At once I removed myself, left my perusal, and shut up the instrument. But I believe I was too late. Somehow it has come to me, here, in the world of men. It is with me, although I cannot hear it or behold it. It is the invisible air, it is the silence of the night. What shall I do?”
The holostet of Johanus was no longer operating. Jonquil lay in the four-poster bed in the room that led from the salon. The door was shut. Someone was in the room with her, beside the bed. Jonquil turned her head on the pillow, without hurry, to see.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 39
