And he knew what Froneberger meant.
TANITH LEE BEGAN WRITING at the age of nine and she published three children’s books with Macmillan in the early 1970s. She became a full-time author in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave and followed it with twenty-six other titles.
She has now written and published around seventy novels, nine collections and more than 200 short stories. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages and she also had four radio plays broadcast during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blake’s 7. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master. In 1998 she was short-listed for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction for her novel Law of the Wolf Tower, the first volume in the “Claidi Journal” series.
Her more recent books include Piratica, a pirate novel for young adults, and its forthcoming sequel Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Lionwolf Cast a Bright Shadow and Here in Cold Hell are the first two volumes in an adult fantasy series set in a world ruled by magic and mysticism, while Metallic Love is a sequel to her 1981 novel The Silver Metal Lover.
Two works of lesbian fiction, Fatal Women and Thirty-Four are published by Egerton House, as is the detective novel, Death of the Day. She has also contributed a creepy, contemporary romance novella to When Darkness Falls, published by Harlequin.
Tanith Lee lives with her husband, the writer and artist John Kaiine, on the south-east coast of England.
“John and I haven’t written many stories actually together,” explains Lee. “We wrote our first, however, a macabre and colourful piece called ‘Iron City’ in 1987, although this has since been mysteriously misplaced . . .
“Anyone who has seen much of my work knows I often acknowledge plot or story ideas from John. In the instance of ‘Unlocked’, it began with John’s writing of the journal and grew further from my own abiding fascination with France, plus our mutual obsession with madness and/or asylums – see my Book oj the Mad and John’s metaphysical thriller Fossil Circus.”
I kissed thee ere I kill’d thee, no way but this,
Killing myself to die upon a kiss.
—Shakespeare: Othello
THE TOWER AND TURRETS of St Cailloux, so thin and dark against the terrible sky – I only saw them once. It was not possible to make out the bars, nor to hear the cries. The lawns were shaven, and the trees had the controlled shapes into which they had been carefully cut, restrained by wire. Behind, far off, the mountains, broken and unruly.
Some old chateau, so it looks to be, and must have been, once. No longer.
Now it houses the ones who scream and are kept in by bindings and bars and bolts.
I only saw it once. And that was in a photograph.
When they took me to see the land, they explained all over again, as the lawyer had in the town, that the house was “lost”. The land was a shambles too, under that bone-dry sun. Tares and weeds, as in the Bible. And the magnificent old cherry trees, all swarmed with serpents of ivy, although the little apple orchard had no snakes. There could be real snakes underfoot. They warned me. In the black ruin of the house, a glimmer of motion, sun catching something – pale, shimmering.
What a dreadful place. I want only to sell it, although I doubt it will bring in any money.
At the inn or hotel or whatever it thinks itself to be, an old man brought me a parcel, like a peculiar present.
“What’s this?” I tried to be pleasant, though he had suspiciously refused to sit down and ignored my offer of a glass of wine.
“Her book.”
“I see. Whose book?”
“Hers. Madame Ysabelle.”
“Ah – that’s the diary, then.”
“Her book,” he said, put it on the table, nodded angrily – they are all angry with me, the foreigner from the city who has inherited a piece of their landscape, which is the whole world. The two old servants had been sent away before her death. That is a blessing. I can imagine how they would have been with me.
“It was found under a stone?” I asked. “By the hearth.”
“What kept it,” he said.
After he had gone, I unwrapped the paper and took out the diary. It is black and stained, the binding flaking away. But the stone had protected it, as he said. Something ironic in that, almost a pun—
I opened the cover and saw, in a brownish ink, the characters of my distant relative, Ysabelle, the ornate handwriting so encouraged in her youth. But she had only been thirty-two when she died. No doubt a great age here in the country. An old maid. But I had seen her picture. Quite tall, full-figured, with tight corsetted waist. Hair very dark. Long-fingered hands, and an oval face on a long smooth throat. Dark eyes that gave nothing away, by which I mean gave nothing, pushed it toward one.
The writing said, My Book. Private, in the manner of a young girl. She had never married, “Madame” the rude courtesy of this primitive area, never allowed courtship, which was blamed on her father. After his death, alone in her white house, all wood, as they do it here, with only the thinnest veneer of dropping plaster. A grape vine growing over the terrace, and the cherry trees raising their gnarled hag’s arms, that in spring are clothed in blossom like a young girl’s skin.
By local standards too old then, Ysabelle, for wooing. At twenty, here, they gave up such hopes, unless she was a widow and wealthy, and really, despite the land, the two servants, there was no money in her family.
I flicked through the pages. I did not particularly want to know her. Although her diary had survived, and insistently they had awarded it to me.
Here and there a sentence: “Nightingale in cherry tree. It kept me awake all night. Exquisite song, save when it stops to imitate an owl it has heard in the woods.” Or, “Mireio says there are no eggs today.” Or, “The wind has been blowing. Has made my head ache and my eyes.” Then, this sentence: “I cut open an apple, seeds, the white flesh inside, the juices, white as wine, nobody has witnessed this before.”
How odd. What a curious thing to say. Had Ysabelle, who seemed to have gone mad, never supposed anyone, not even Eve, had cut open an apple before?
Then I read, “The red apples all white inside. The leaves are dead, too hot, shrivelling the blooms, too passionate a heat. Bells toll in the next valley. Seeds and tears, poppy dreams. Summer, hot, heat, the stifling heat. I dream of clouds. This brightness hurts me. The silver that the locket is made of – where from? Taken from earth, like black-berries, cherry trees, grapes, peeling birch. Everything will burn. It is holding its last breath, blooming with the threat of death. Foxgloves.”
I put the diary down. It had felt hot in my hands. Smoke rose from it in my imagination.
Walking across to my trunk, I rummaged inside, and pulled out the other thing they had given me, the buckled, shapeless mass of the locket.
Why foxgloves, Ysabelle? It must be the old country superstition, not the poison which also gives life, but the black fox – cipher for Satan – who leaves his mark there, because he is the ghost of a lover.
Was her secret here in this diary, then, and did they all know it, all these walnut-brown people of the valleys and slopes, who rose with the sun and slept when it fell, and would tell me nothing, and not even drink a glass of wine with me?
I opened the diary in another place and read, “I saw them today. They were on the road in their little trap with the pony. He sits upright like a stupid rock. She leans, looking this way, that way. Burning hair. Her hair is the sun, but only if the sun is pale as the moon. I waved. And she saw me, and waved too. He stared, then nodded, a king. Ernst and Hāna. She had a purple ribbon in her chignon, but her hair is so massive, it drooped on her slender neck, shoulders. Purple like a wound in all that blonde.”
Under this, Ysabelle, dimly related to me by the wedlock of an unknown aunt, had drawn a line of vine leaves, rather well, in her brown ink that p
erhaps had been dark when she used it.
Beneath, she writes: “Hāna, Ariadne, Dionysos. Holy.”
And then: “Ernst. What a boring statue of shit.”
This startles me, and I laugh. Ysabelk, such unfeminine language. But it is her private book.
Even so, I suddenly think her modern, ahead of her time. This boldness in an old unmarried woman. And she is so coarse about Ernst . . . does she secretly like him?
The next paragraph only says, “I shall send Jean to advise him about the horse.”
I put the diary by my bed. Then, in the furtive manner of this place, pushed it under the mattress. I should read more in bed that night.
Arriving back in my room quite early, for they lower their lamps at nine o’clock, and yawn, and shuffle, and frown at you – I sat perversely with the diary, leafing through it, so reluctant to start at the beginning. Surely I shall be bored. What is there here to read? The reflections of an unbalanced, lonely woman, possibly obsessed by her new foreign neighbours, this exciting Ernst made of shit and the woman, his sister, with all that pale hair . . . Then something, no, let me be honest, I know precisely what, and it is prurient, ghoulish, makes me turn to the last page. Beyond this page lies the drama of death. The fact that the house of white wood burned, leaving only its hearths and stone floors, and two tall stone chimneys, and Ysabelle’s bones, and her diary safe under the hearth stone. Bones and stones. Her neighbours were gone by then, Ernst, Hāna, to their separate places. And by the time of the fire, those who would speak of it, had thought Ysabelle mad. The hot weather was not kind to women. The horrible wind that blew from the mountains. The roar of light from their flanks, that had been visible too from the house, and still is from its ground. She had set fire to the house in her craziness, Ysabelle. It was only the kindness of the priest that allowed her Christian burial. She might, after all, have knocked over a lamp. And everything was so dry, flaring up at once—
Was there even a lock on the diary, which the heat from above caused to melt?
Who else has read this book? Who else began by reading the last page first?
“I have a lock of your hair. I cut it from you as you slept. I kissed you there, where the scissors met. You never noticed it had gone. It is all I have of you, your hair. Blonde spirals in a silver locket.
“The locket is cold between my breasts. Cold in the heat. Perhaps it is the heat of the locket which feels cold, as they say witches screamed, when they were burning alive, of the agony of the great terrible freezing coldness. I sweat silver. Your curled hair next to my heart.
“But we are monkeys, not angels.
“Yesterday, when I returned to the old white house, I saw it freshly, as if I had never lived here, or had been away some years. Whose house is that one? Ysabelle’s. She lives alone. Truly alone now, for in the town I saw the lawyers, and settled a sum of money on Jean and Mireio. At dawn today, I dismissed them. She was sulky and angry, and he accused me of sending them away because he had tried to shoot the nightingale. Secretly, they were pleased, talking together when they thought I did not hear, of the tobacconist’s shop they plan to start together in the next town. Here, a cooking pot and broom are all that remain of them, all they deigned to leave me.
“My new, empty house. I have always liked it. Liked it too well to leave. Nothing has changed since the days of childhood. The peeling painted wooden walls, ivy in the cherry trees – now and then cut back, always returning – the well of broken stone. Such pretty neglect. But yes, the view has changed, the land shrunk and the sky grown. There are no clouds, now.
“I dream of clouds, as indeed I dream of you. Great black clouds to cover the sun, stormy skies to quell this heat. There has been no rain for many months, and I have heard a rumour too, of a goat sacrificed in the woods – killing to bring rain, blood for water.
“I have a lock of your hair. And this. I have this, but this is not you. No. How well I remember when it was. For it was the very same height as you, and broader perhaps, than your delicate, slender frame, like a spilling of your soul in silver. How we sat, night after night, brushing your hair, this entity of you, combing it out, both of us marvelling, for I made you marvel at the wonder of it that you had never seen it was. Combing, braiding, playing, plaiting with ribbons, silks, the nights you wore it loose, for me, around you like – a shroud. Oh, Hāna. Your hair.
“I have made it into a noose, threaded, sewn with faded mauve. A noose is all now it is worthy to be, this, that was your wedding train. Life, that will be death.
“They call the asylum also the Valley of Wolves – St Stones, St Cailloux. A sort of pun. And this is, too, for I shall put it under the stone of the hearth, and who knows who will ever find it, my Book. But I hope they will, for I want them to know, yes, even if they rage and curse, I want them to know of you. And that my last thought will be of you, dying on a kiss. Good night, Hāna.”
For weeks, the valley and the village were alive with gossip concerning the strangers, who were strange in all ways – educated, and not badly off, from another planet – that is, another country – and unrelated even in the faintest sense, to anyone of the locality.
The village people spied on the newcomers, and presently told each other that here was Madame Ysabelle’s chance. For the foreign householder, Monsieur Ernst, was unwed, not poor, nor very young, and of the same social class as Madame Ysabelle, who after all, was not bad-looking, and had her land, if only she would bother to see it worked. The single potential stumbling block might be Monsieur Ernst’s sister, also unmarried, who lived with and looked after her scholarly brother, in just the same way as Ysabelle had looked after her scholarly father until his death, three years before. The sister was old, so the spies decided, who had only seen her from a distance. She had white hair. These females were often the very worst, and the evidence suggested she must have kept him from union before.
The two houses, though, were only half an hour’s walk from each other. One day or another, the man and the woman must meet.
It was a fact, there were dual elements in the village, indeed in all the villages and farms of the region. A sort of peasant bourgeoisie existed, gossipy, religious, caste-conscious, exacting. But, too, there was the more feral peasant blood, which had other values, and was considered little better than a pack of wild beasts. These latter had actually troubled properly to see Mademoiselle Hāna – she was yet young enough for that, twenty-four years, which to them looked nineteen. Two men had carried boxes to the house of Monsieur Ernst. A woman had brought eggs, and later come to see to the washing. These people knew quite soon that it was the brother who was the stiff one. If he had not married, it was because he had never seen a woman he liked sufficiently. And his sister gave him the best of care – she was what the middle shelf of the region would have termed devoted. To the “wild beasts”, perhaps, she was dutiful, and this while she was not the sort of girl who would be naturally constrained. She too had vestiges of the wild woods, where once witches had danced with flowers in their hair, just as they had ridden from the mountains on their broomsticks not thirteen years before.
Of Ysabelle also this wild quality might have been noted, in her girlhood. They had seen her, wandering the fields with blood-red poppies in her basket. Or watching the moon from her window while her clever father pored over his books.
To the Wild Beasts, Hāna did not represent an obstacle nor Ernst a rescue. Although they were not insensible to ideas of rescue and obstacle in the arrival of the foreign couple.
Ysabelle met Ernst one morning. He was riding along the lane, or road, that ran by the wall of the garden at the front of her house, and she was standing there with Mireio, over the scattered feathers of a chicken some fox had taken in the night.
Mireio was cursing the fox, and promising that Jean would set a trap, and Ysabelle impatiently was desiring that rather than do this, the house of the chickens should be repaired.
They argued in the way old servant women did with mistres
ses they had known as children, and youngish mistresses with old servant women who had almost been their mothers but were not.
Ernst stopped the trap, and frankly watched, in cool amusement.
When Ysabelle looked, he raised his hat and introduced himself.
Doubtless he could see the old servant eyeing him, evaluating him, but with Ysabelle there was none of that. As he had heard, she was educated and well-bred, and he liked the look of her, her coal-black hair softly but neatly dressed, her dark dress, still in part-mourning apparently, for an adored, respected father. Her lush figure, too, her graceful features, her sensitive, noble hands.
She answered him politely.
Ernst said, with his perfect command of language and dialect, “I hope my sister may come over and visit you? Of course, there’s no one else suitable for her to see, for miles. She’s an absolute angel to me. I want her to be happy, but how can a woman be happy with no other women sometimes to chatter to?”
Ysabelle dipped her raven-coloured eyes. She did not smile. As she was doing this, Mireio said, aggressively, “There is the duck, Madame. I said it was too much for us. But for a proper supper for three, it would be perfect.”
Ernst let out a roar of laughter. This was as good as a comedy at the theatre, and really he had no objection to sitting over a good country meal, and looking at Ysabelle, and watching her come around to him.
“Well, I should be honoured,” he said, “but Madame hasn’t yet asked me.”
Ysabelle glanced at him. No smile. Quiet as silence. She said, however, “Mireio has decided you must taste her cooking. Please come and taste it.”
They agreed an evening, and Ernst rattled away to the town, whistling, and that night told his sister they were to meet a true witch of a woman, who, he was sure, had already laid a spell on him, because he was going to take with them a bottle of his best wine.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 33
