A hand was stroking back her short hair; it was very pleasant; she was a cat that was being caressed. Jonquil smiled lazily. It was like the first day of the holidays, and her mother was standing by her bed, and they would talk. But no, not her mother. It was the wonderful-looking woman she had seen—where was that, now? Perhaps in the city, an eccentric who lived there, out walking in the turquoise of dusk or funeral orchid of dawning, when the star was on the lagoon. Very tall, a developed, lithe body, graceful, with the blue wrap tied loosely, and the amazing hair, so thick and blonde, falling over it, over her shoulders and the firm cupped line of the breasts, the flat belly, and into the mermaid V of the thighs.
“Hello,” said Jonquil. And the woman gave the faintest shake of her lion’s head in its mane. Jonquil was not to speak. They did not need words. But the woman smiled, too. It was such a sensational smile. So effortless, stimulating and calming. The dark, dark eyes rested on Jonquil with a tenderness that was also cruel. Jonquil had seen this look in the eyes of others, and a frisson of eagerness went over her, and she was ashamed; it was too soon to expect—but the woman was leaning over her now, the marvel of face blurred and the mane of hair trickling over Jonquil’s skin. The mouth kissed, gently and unhesitatingly. “Oh, yes,” said Jonquil, without any words.
The woman, who was called Johnina, was lying on her. She was heavy, her weight crushed and pinned, and Jonquil was helpless. It was the most desired thing, to be helpless like this, unable even to lift her own hands, as if she had no strength at all. And Johnina’s hands were on her breasts somehow, between their two adhering bodies, finding out Jonquil’s shape with slow smooth spiralings. And softly, without anything crude or urgent, the sea-blue thigh of Johnina rubbed against Jonquil until she ached and melted. She shut her eyes and could think only of the sweet unhurried journey of her body, of the hands that guided and stroked, and the mermaid tail that bore her up, and the sound of the sea in her ears. Johnina kissed and kissed, and Jonquil Hare felt herself dissolving into Johnina, into her body, and she could not even cry out. And then Jonquil was spread-eagled out into a tidal orgasm, where with every wave some further part of her was washed away. And when there was nothing left, she woke up in the pitch-black void of the silence, with something hard and cold, clammy, but nearly weightless, lying on her, an oblong in a gilded frame, the painting which had dropped over on top of her and covered her from breast to ankle.
She flung it off and it clattered down. She clutched at her body, thinking to discover herself clotted with a sort of glue or slime, but there was nothing like that.
She was weak and dizzy and her heart drummed noisily, so she could not hear the silence anymore.
“Let me speak to the house caretaker,” snapped Jonquil at the obtuse machine. Outside the booth, the ruin of the great square seemed to sway on the wind, which was violent, ruffling the lagoon in flounces, whirling small scraps of colored substances that might have been paper, rags, or skin.
“The caretaker is not available. However, your request has been noted.”
“But this picture is an important find—and I want it removed, today, to a place of safety.”
The machine had disconnected.
Jonquil stood in the booth, as if inside a spacesuit, and watched the alien atmosphere of the city swirling with bits and colors.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Jonquil. She left the booth and cowered before the wind, which was not like any breeze felt in civilized places. “It’s an old painting. A bad old painting. So, you’re lonely, you had a dream. Get back to work.”
Jonquil worked. She photographed all the carvings she had decided were relevant or unusually bizarre—Venus the goddess riding the crescent moon, a serpent coiled about a planet that maybe was simply an orb. She put these into the developer and later drew them out and arranged them in her room beside the salon. (She had already moved the painting of Johnina into the salon—she felt tired, and it seemed heavier than before—left it with its face to the wall, propped under the mirrors. It was now about twenty-five meters from her inflatable bed, and well outside the door.)
She went over the house again, measuring and recording comments. She opened shutters and regarded the once hive-like cliffs of the city, and the waters on the other side. The wind settled and a mist condensed. By midafternoon the towers of modernity were quite gone.
“The light always has a green tinge—blue and yellow mixed. When the sky pinkens at dawn or sunset the water is bottle green, an apothecary’s bottle. And purple for the prose,” Jonquil added.
In two hours it would be dusk, and then night.
This was ridiculous. She had to face up to herself, that she was nervous and apprehensive. But there was nothing to be afraid of, or even to look forward to.
She still felt depressed, exhausted, so she took some more vitamins. Something she had eaten, probably, before leaving for the city, had caught up with her. And that might even account for the dream. The dreams.
She did not go up into the attics. She spent some time out of doors, in the grotto of the courtyard, and in the garden, which the manual showed her with paved paths and carven box hedges, orange trees, and the fountain playing. She did not watch this holostet long. Her imagination was working too, and too hard, and she might start to see Johnina in a blue-gray gown going about between the trees.
What, anyway, was Johnina? Doubtless Jonquil’s unconscious had based the Johanus part of the dream on scraps of the astrologer’s writings she had seen, and that she had consciously forgotten. Johanus presumably believed some alien intelligence from the planet he observed had made use of the channel of his awareness. For him it was female (interesting women then were always witches, demons; he would be bound to think in that way) and when she suborned him, in his old man’s obsession, he painted her approximately to a woman—just as he had approximated his vision of the planet to something identifiable, the pastorale of a cool Hell. And he gave his demoness a name birthed out of his own, a strange daughter.
Jonquil did not recollect, try as she would, reading anything so curious about Johanus, but she must have done.
He then concealed the painting of his malign inamorata in the trick chest, to protect it from the destructive fears of the servants.
Only another hour, and the sky would infuse like pale tea and rose petals. The sun would go, the star would visit the garden. Darkness.
“You’re not as tough as you thought,” said Jonquil. She disapproved of herself. “All right. We’ll sit this one out. Stay awake tonight. And tomorrow I’ll get hold of that damn caretaker lady if I have to swim there.”
As soon as it was sunset, Jonquil went back to her chosen room. She had to pass through the salon, and had an urge to go up to the picture, turn it round, and scrutinize it. But that was stupid. She had seen all there was to see. She shut her inner door on the salon with a bang. Now she was separate from all the house.
She lit her lamp, and, pulling out her candles, lit those too. She primed the travel-cook for a special meal, chicken with a lemon sauce, creamed potatoes, and as the wing of night unfolded over the lagoon she closed the shutter and switched on a music tape. She sat drinking wine and writing up that day’s notes on the house. After all, she had done almost all that was needed. Might she not see if she could leave tomorrow? To hire transport before the month was up and the regular boat arrived would be expensive, but then, she could get to work the quicker perhaps, away from the house … She had meant to explore the city, of course, but it was in fact less romantic than dejecting, and potentially dangerous. She might run into one of the insane inhabitants, and then what?
Jonquil thought, acutely visualizing the nocturnal mass of the city. No one was alive in it, surely. The few lights, the occasional smokes and whispers, were inaugurated by machines, to deceive. There were the birds, and their subterranean counterpart, the rats. Only she alone, Jonquil Hare, was here this night between masonry and water. She alone, and one other.
“Don’t be s
illy,” said Jonquil.
How loud her voice sounded, now the music had come to an end. The silence was gigantic, a fifth dimension.
It seemed wrong to put on another tape. The silence should not be angered. Let it lie, move quietly, and do not speak at all.
Johanus wrote quickly, as if he might be interrupted; his goose pen snapped, and he seized another ready cut. He spoke the words aloud as he wrote them, although his lips were closed.
“For days, and for nights when I could not sleep, I was aware of the presence of my invader. I told myself it was my fancy, but I could not be rid of the sensation of it. I listened for the sounds of breathing, I looked for a shadow—there were none of these. I felt no touch, and when I dozed fitfully in the dark, waking suddenly, no beast crouched on my breast. Yet, it was with me, it breathed, it brushed by me, it touched me without hands, and watched me with its unseen eyes.
“So passed five days and four nights. And on the evening of the fifth day, even as the silver planet stood above the garden, it grew bold, knowing by now it had little to fear from me in my terror, and took on a shape.
“Yes, it took on a sort of shape, but if this is its reality I cannot know, or only some semblance, all it can encompass here, or deigns to assume.
“It hung across the window, and faintly through it the light of dusk was ebbing. A membraneous thing, like a sail. It did not move, no pulse of life seemed in it, and yet it lived. I shut the door on it, but later I returned. In the candle’s light I saw it had fallen, or lowered itself, to my table. It had kept its soft sheen of blue. I touched it, I could not help myself, and it had the texture of velum—that is, of skin. It lay before me, the length of the table, and under it dimly I could discern the outline of my books, my dish of powders, and other things. I cannot describe my state. My terror had sunk into a sort of blinded wonderment. I do not know how great a while I stood and looked at it, but at length I heard the girl with my food, and I went out and locked up the room again. What would it do while I was gone? Would it perhaps vanish again?
“That night I slept, stupefied, and in the morning opened my eyes and there the thing hung, above me, inside the canopy of the very bed. How long had it been there, watching me with its invisible organs of sight? Of course, its method had been simple: it had slid under the doors of my house—my house so long dressed for it, and named for its planet in the common vernacular.
“What now must I do? What is required of me? For clearly I shall become its slave. It seems to me I am supposed to be able to give it a more usual form, some camouflage, so that if may pass with men, but how is that possible? How render such a thing ordinary, and attractive?
“The means came to me in my sleep. Perhaps the being has influenced my brain. There is one sure way. It has noticed my canvases. Now I am to stretch this skin upon a frame, and put paint to it. What shall I figure there? No doubt, I shall be guided in what I do, as it has led me to the idea.
“I must obscure my actions from my servants. They are already ill at ease, and the man was very threatening this morning; he is a ruffian and capable of anything—it will be wise to destroy these papers, when all else is done.”
Jonquil turned from Johanus, and saw a group of friends she had not communicated with in three years, gliding over the lagoon in a white boat. They waved and shouted, and Jonquil knew she had been rescued, she would escape, but running toward the boat she heard a metallic crash, and jumped inadvertently up out of the dream into the room, where her candles were burning low, fluttering, and the air quivered like a disturbed pond. The silence had been agitated after all. There had been some noise, like the noise in the dream which woke her.
She sat bolt upright in the lock of fear. She had never felt fear in this way in her life. She had meant to stay awake, but the meal, the wine …
And the dream of Johanus—absurd.
Outside, in the mirrored nighttime salon, there came a sharp screeching scrape.
Jonquil’s mind shrieked, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. Don’t be a fool. Listen! She listened. The silence. Had she imagined—
The noise came again, harsher and more absolute.
It was like the abrasion of a rusty chain dragged along the marble floor.
And again—
Jonquil sprang up. In her life, where she had never before known such fear, the credo had been that fear, confronted, proved to be less than it had seemed. Always the maxim held true. It was this brainwashing of accredited experience which sent her to the door of the room, and caused her to dash it wide and to stare outward.
The guttering glim of the candles, so apposite to the house, gave a half-presence to the salon. But mostly it was black, thick and composite, black, watery and uncertain on the ruined faces of the mirrors. And out of this blackness came a low flicker of motion, catching the candlelight along its edge. And this motion made the sound she had heard and now heard again. Jonquil did not believe what she saw. She did not believe it. No. This was still the dream, and she must, she must wake up.
The picture of Johnina, painted by the astrologer on a piece of membraneous bluish alien skin, had fallen over in its frame, and now the framed skin pulled itself along the floor, and, catching the light, Jonquil saw the little formless excrescences of the face-down canvas, little bluish-yellow paws, hauling the assemblage forward, the big balanced oblong shape with its rim of gilt vaguely shining. Machine-like, primeval, a mutated tortoise. It pulled itself on, and as the frame scraped along the floor it screamed, toward Jonquil in the doorway.
Jonquil slammed shut the door. She turned and caught up things—the inflatable bed, the table—and stuffed them up against the doorway. And the mechanical tortoise screamed twice more—and struck against the door, and the door shook.
Jonquil turned round and round in her trap as the thing outside thudded back and forth and her flimsy barricade trembled and tottered. There was no other exit but the window. She got it open and ran on to the balcony, which creaked and dipped. The weed was there, the blue-green Venus weed which choked the whole city. Jonquil threw herself off into it. As she did so, the door of the room gave way.
She was half-climbing, half-rebounding and falling down the wall of the house. Everywhere was darkness, and below the sucking of the water at the pavement.
As she struggled in the ropes of weed, tangled, clawing, a shape reared up in the window above her.
Jonquil cried out. The painting was in the window. But something comically macabre had happened. In rearing, it had caught at an angle between the uprights of the shutters. It was stuck, could not move out or in.
Jonquil hung in the weed, staring up at Johnina in her frame of gilt and wood and plaster and night. How soulless she looked, how without life.
And then a convulsion went over the picture. Like a blue amoeba touched by venom it writhed and wrinkled. It tore itself free of the golden frame. It billowed out, still held by a few filaments and threads, like a sail, a veil, the belly of something swollen with the hunger of centuries …
And Jonquil fought, and dropped the last two meters from the weed, landing on the pavement hard, in the box of darkness that was the city.
She was not dreaming, but it was like a dream. It seemed to her she saw herself running. The engine of her heart drove her forward. She did not know where or through what she ran. There was no moon, there were no lights. A kind of luminescence filmed over the atmosphere, and constructions loomed suddenly at her, an arch, a flight of steps, a platform, a severed wall. She fell, and got up and ran on.
And behind her, that came. That which had ripped itself from an oblong of gilding. It had taken to the air. It flew through the city, between the pillars and under the porticos, along the ribbed arteries carrying night. It rolled and unrolled as it came, with a faint soft snapping. And then it sailed, wide open, catching some helpful draught, a huge pale bat.
Weed rushed over Jonquil and she thought the thing which had been called Johnina had settled on her lightly, coaxingly,
and she screamed. The city filled with her scream like an empty gourd with water.
There were no lights, no figures huddled at smoldering fires, no guards or watchmen, no villains, no one here to save her, no one even to be the witness of what must come, when her young heart finally failed, her legs buckled, when the sailing softness came down and covered her, stroking and devouring, caressing and eating—its tongues and fingers and the whole porous mouth that it was—to drink her away and away.
Jonquil ran. She ran over streets that were cratered as if by meteorites, through vaulted passages, beside the still waters of night and death. It occurred to her (her stunned and now almost witless brain) to plunge into the lagoon, to swim toward the unseen towers. But on the face of the mirror, gentleness would drift down on her, and in the morning mist, not even a ripple …
The paving tipped. Jonquil stumbled, ran, downward now, hopeless and mindless, her heart burning a hole in her side. Down and down, cracked tiles spinning off from her feet, down into some underground place that must be a prison for her, perhaps a catacomb, to stagger among filigree coffins, where the water puddled like glass on the floor, no way out, down into despair, and yet, mockingly, there was more light. More light to see what she did not want to see. It was the phosphorus of the death already there, the mummies in their narrow homes. Yes, she saw the water pools now, as she splashed through them, she saw the peculiar shelves and cubbies, the stone statue of a saint barnacled by the sea-rot the water brought into a creature from another world. And she saw the wall also that rose peremptory before her, the dead-end that would end in death, and for which she had been waiting, to which she had run, and where now she collapsed, her body useless, run out.
She dropped against the wall, and, in the coffin-light, turned and looked back. And through the descending vault, a pale blue shadow floated, innocent and faithful, coming down to her like a kiss.
I don’t believe this, Jonquil would have said, but now she did. And anyway she had no breath, no breath even to scream again or cry. She could only watch, could not take her eyes off the coming of the feaster. It had singled her out, allowed her to bring it from the chest. With others it had been more reticent, hiding itself. Perhaps it had eaten of Johanus, too, before he had been forced to secure it against the witch-hunting servants. Or maybe Johanus had not been to its taste. How ravenous it was, and how controlled was its need.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 40
