Gazing across the starry arch of night, I found myself wondering the same thing. I climbed back in the car, somewhat amused with myself.
“A shame,” said Gilzern, “that my men, for their long march, will not be rewarded with a battle. But I say again, the real prize, when the horns have blown, is Lianderin.” Yet even as he spoke these words, he was reminded by his instincts that not often were prizes of such rarity obtained without a cost...
A sign stated the proximity of the Schloss, and I wondered where my excitement had gone. The words of the innkeeper tarried, but without the haunting quality of before. My roadside study of the night sky seemed to have stolen the flutter.
I rounded a turn and the road leveled. Houses oddly modern, out of setting, slipped by. German symmetry, French nonchalance, American overtones. The trees among which they were built fell away, and, sooner perhaps than I had expected, I found myself looking out over the valley and upon the castle perched on its own hill above the surrounding village. The to-do I remembered was absent. The floodlights were off, the Schloss standing dark and silent at its enviable site amidst the hills, and yet all the more lovely for its solitude and lack of occasion.
As every eye turned to the firmament, Schloss Lianderin stood silently by. Solitudinous, majestic. A prize oh so easy, oh so effortlessly won, and yet, as they were about to find out, so profoundly, so utterly unobtainable.
Yes, it does seem to be that, I thought. Not in its design, for it lacked as a fortress. Not in its location, for wasn’t it meant to impress more than to discourage? Its presence was what made it the prize it was, and no floodlight could adorn that perfect fact.
I sighed, moved.
Since then, upon every hundredth anniversary, as a reminder and a warning to any who would dare consider mounting an assault upon her, Lianderin has suffered no visitors. This is not to say that she has remained untouched by the great wars which have passed this way, for no thing has. But woe to those aggressors whose ambitions are within her power to thwart. Whatever form they may assume, it is to them she speaks. For even today the shadowy ones are among Lianderin’s residents, and in spite of their swift and utter victory over the invaders that night, the insult remains.
The obligatory overlook before driving down into the village. Although a second-time visitor, I stopped here to absorb the vision, to enjoy it the way commercialism had not allowed the first time. But as I stepped out of the car, I detected a disturbance—
…from above and all four corners of the compass…
My eyes shot upward. The sky—yes, the gods above, it had become, in an instant, just as described—fragmented!
Not a whapping, leathery, batlike fury, as would seem to better fulfill the imagination, but a dance of glass, alternately opaque and translucent, the seam of every fragment shimmering in the light of the moon, and perhaps their own intrinsic energy as they gathered over this trespasser in their domain.
As I leapt into the car, they descended. As I swung the wheel and roared away in the direction from which I had come, they fell upon the car, faces flashing in the windshield, eyes telling the story in a way the innkeeper, eloquent as he was, never could have; mouths twisted in a savagery matched only by my desire and determination to be down the mountain and away from this place. How I managed to avoid wrapping the car around a tree during those first seconds of the ordeal I cannot accurately say. Perhaps it was that almost as soon as I began my flight, I brought the car to a screeching halt, failing to throw the creatures from the vehicle as it skidded sideways, coming to rest at odds with the direction of the road.
What inspired this reaction was not the vigor and madness of their assault, which I only wished to flee, but a sudden stench, an acrid, sickeningly pungent, almost palpable stench that entirely effused the interior of the car. I swung around, looking for the flames, the burning bodies, the whatever it was that fueled the foulness permeating the air, but found only a fresh perspective on the dark blizzard that consumed the car. I spun the wheel even before turning my shoulders square again, and laid hard on the accelerator. I was absolutely blind, my heartbeat racing to velocities incomprehensible as I called upon the intervention of a greater power—over and above any instinct I might have had at my disposal—to save me from the grab bag of fatal conclusions awaiting me.
Then all at once my attackers relented. They rose as one unit from the object of their assault, lifting up into the funnel of their own whirlwind, Elijah upon a chariot of black flames, from this earth and unto heaven.
The world whirred by with the kilometers I put between myself and unholy Lianderin. Within the hour I was brought, by destinies beyond my own to pilot, to the door of the inn in Larochette. Of the drive there I remember little, except how unbearably smothering the close confines of the car. Despite the cold November air, I drove the distance with my window down.
Presuming the bar would be empty, I went to the main door. I wondered what time it was. I had not thought to check the clock in the car. Apparently the house was yet to sleep, for soon after the bell rang, the door opened and the face of a pretty young girl greeted me.
“Hallo,” she said—and even as the word issued from her mouth, that pretty face twisted into an ugly one, as though beset by something detestably foul.
The innkeeper’s last, almost incidentally presented paragraph, a footnote of suddenly horrifying proportions, emerged from the revulsion I witnessed on his daughter’s tender face. Words which could not begin to prepare me for the reactions that, starting here and tonight, would plague me for the rest of my days.
For those who are allowed to escape Lianderin on anniversary night, there is a fate infinitely worse than perishing at the hands of her shadowy residents. And that is, to be the bearers of the memory. A memory not as the mind provides but a physical one. A memory of that fateful night when the High Lord and as many of his soldiers as material would allow were mounted to poles around the castle, and piles of brush and branches were set to flame beneath their suspended feet. That same night when their often still conscious remnants were left to hang there on the scorched poles to be lusted over by scavengers until gracious death finally came. And after death had come and gone, still they hung there. Hung there to be ravaged by the carrion crows while decomposition took its lazy course. It is said that for weeks after, Lianderin stank of burnt and rotting flesh. But the memory of it never fades. In those who carry it with them from Lianderin, it survives in all its vivid, putrescent, reeking detail.
Dandelion Girl
Smiling, she held the tooth of the lion before her, between our faces, and dreamily blew its cottony wisp of a flower into a scatter of spinning weightless snowflakes. That is how I shall always remember her. With her light summer dress, green as the grass, anklets woven of silver and vine, and a dandelion in her hand. The tooth of the lion, she translated from the Latin. Because of its jagged leaves.
She brought a picnic basket along, and wore no shoes as she sat on the blanket, legs crossed, and braided the wild leaf of the forest into adornments. Of the food she had packed, she ate only an apple, and perhaps that was her way of speaking to the nature of evil without actually reviving the subject. It was one of many topics we had carelessly touched on at the party the night before. Last night when she announced, quite without preamble, that she was a witch.
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Come now, Lyla…”
“Mm?”
I searched for the smartest words. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re a student of the philosophy that good and evil, truth and illusion, beauty and ugliness differ only in our interpretation of them.”
“You have forgotten ecstasy and agony.”
“Are you flirting with me, Lyla?” For she was already in the touchin
g way by then. My arm, my knee, my beard.
She had been wearing a simple dress at the party, too. Only black, and of a more revealing cut. I picture her sitting there on the stool, tanned thighs exposed, reflections from the overheads captured in the elegant curve of her wineglass...I picture this, and the image, as always, fails. It dissolves, whether by preference or necessity, into the softer vision of the dandelion girl. Sleepy eyes, delicately rounded lips all the more alluring for the absence of makeup, that social apparatus behind which apparently even witches are inclined to disguise themselves. But it is the emotion involved that separates these images. For as the puff of flower was blown spinning on the air, I thought I might find it within me to love and treasure this creature, whomever, whatever she was.
“I want to take you to my special place,” she told me after I kissed her goodnight. I thought for a fleeting, shallowly masculine moment that she had changed her mind, that she would invite me in after all, rewarding me at least with a nightcap. I would be instantly glad I misread her intentions, for we bachelors do not really enjoy floating from one party to the next, simultaneously camouflaged and exposed in our own brand of makeup, we just pretend we do. We are really just divorcés without former wives—divorcés of the stereotype, lonely and needing and loathing ourselves and each other.
“Your special place?” I said, recovering.
“My special place in the forest. It is there I have sought to explore the question we spoke of earlier.”
“Which question?” For there had been a number of them. Spoken and unspoken.
“The nature of evil.”
Perhaps I was being seduced at that. I hoped not. I hoped so. God, she was a beautiful creature.
But when I picked her up the next day, she was another sort of beautiful. A softer sort. The bloody shade of lipstick, the eye shadow blue, even the bun in which she had worn her hair, were gone. That soporific quality still, with her falling lids and the words coming lazily from her lips. But these traits, these features, were natural to her, at least long developed; not put on like coffee, the evening news, affectation. As I stood there at her door looking at her and her old-fashioned picnic basket, I decided I liked her very much.
“My Wiccan lady,” I greeted her, our hands brushing as I took the basket. Even the touch of her was softer somehow.
She wore sandals which crisscrossed up over her sun-browned ankles. Her anklets shone silvery and delicate against the green leather, the windows of skin. She said something, I don’t know what. I said something back. We touched again as I held the passenger door for her.
As we drove she offered these words which I haven’t forgotten: “Daniel…” Which is my name actually, as lordly as it sounded from her. “Daniel, I enjoyed talking with you last night. I enjoyed our being together. Becoming acquainted is a necessity, I think.”
A necessity? As applies to what…
“Before we can experiment further, I mean.”
Experiment further? Was there a sexual connotation or was it my brute in-spite-of-myself acting up?
“Mind if I take off my sandals?”
I don’t have a foot fetish, I won’t be accused of having one, and I won't admit to it, needles under my fingernails. But damned if she hadn’t worn the very sandal I so can’t stand to look at. She saw me looking and simply smiled as if it were our secret.
She brought her feet up under her, cross-legged, hem rising carelessly, revealingly, with unabashed abandon. My eyes ached with the strain of keeping the road in front of them. We came to her special place none too soon for me.
A dirt road infrequently traveled, another perhaps never used anymore, and we were in the deep wood, and welcomed by the embrace of an easy summer breeze. Summer it was, and her bare feet and summer dress, and me in my shorts, less than bulbous muscles working to get us there. We followed a narrow deer path into the deeper domain, my eyes, her bottom and its melodious motion, and soon we came to her special place, how lovely it proved to be. We spread the blanket, brought forth the apples, the wine, the cheese, the ham. And all the while dandelions surrounding, swaying on the whispers of the wild clearing, island of weeds cut upon its rims and fringes by sheer, skyward rock progressions, bluffs and outcrops and still an hour of sunshine in which to explore.
With the flowers of her garden, she wove and braided, and her ankles were adorned, a wreath about her head. I kissed her, this the second time, and there was an alarming ease about it all, no, I absolutely shan’t fall into the snare of matrimony, and my mom will die of shock and happiness when she is informed. Lyla began to dance, to twirl among the wild weeds, her hems catching upon her hips and her long legs, and the grace of her amazing me, enchanting me. Wild Wiccan dreams and the tumult of reality receding, and I had never been about town and its false pleasures and the money in my suit, and my buying the lady a drink, and chatting till the hour of bedtime and bedtime’s false pleasures. I lurched to my feet, and the gracelessness of me, spilling my wine as I came, and I swept her up in my arms and the teasing suppleness, lightness of her in my embrace. We spun and we spun, and the dandelions that blew, and the whole universe exploding in cotton snowflakes and the whim and flurry of the moment, cherished moment, smothering us in its ecstatic envelope. We will die here, you in my arms, she laughed, pressing her breasts against me, arching her head backwards, towards the waning day. You will die in my arms and join the spirits that haunt this my special place, the nature of things indeed.
I released her, wanting only to lay her in the weeds and thrust myself inside her, hear the noise of her as we achieved fruition, shared souls that we were. I wanted only to know her, to bathe myself in her, bleed with her in our bliss and to die in her arms. But she fell, she crumpled, and she was a dandelion herself, frail as the flower, and I had harmed her, I had squeezed her too tightly, I heard the escape of a wounded and baleful sound…
Song of liquid torturous pain and loss, grief and agony, rue and suffering and endless night flowing in waves as I realized it was not her voice I heard but a collective one. Her estate was full of them, stretching in endless torment and underscored by the rattle of bones, the chatter of fleshless teeth, the suck, gargling suck of worms and insects upon the deteriorating material of mortal vestiges and signs.
Her arms lifted as wings, and the magnificence of her was unimaginable as she stared down at me with those suddenly aware lucid vessels.
“What is it…” I uttered. Dumbly.
“What is the nature of evil?” she said back. “That has been the question since the beginning, when your eyes devoured me and the saliva slung from your lips. You wanted me, you want me now, here I am Daniel and you will die knowing what I am, for I am neither.”
She bared her breasts to me, and the hunger was like a knife up through the abdominal regions, down through the bowels, through the groin. She seized the growing size of me and she laughed for my remembering her, for my acknowledgement of the Lyla of summer dresses.
“Come,” she beckoned, and she flitted away towards the rock rising above, and in perpetual sighing accompaniment to, the acre of weeds and skeletal flowers amidst which we had spread a blanket and called it play.
A vertical cleft in the rock, its narrowing seam evident above the large stone that stood blocking the way. A gesture of her hand, black legerdemain, and the stone awoke, the sound like wrenching freedom and captivity as it moved out of the way and opened up the cave, lair of the dandelioness. The blast of stench and profundity momentarily swallowed me up, and then I let it be the progression of things, entering upon the offering of her hand and the phantom traces of her summer frock before.
“I,” she said behind me. “I am that nature which is evil. I am that chasm which is night.”
I whirled on the voice, confused as to our relative positions
in space, and she was waiting for me, the lapels of her flesh and bony protection torn back and the heart that pulsed within the cavity exposed nakedly before me, muscular and black, shades of night and rapture eternal.
Holy sweet Christ and his disciples, I whispered without breath. How terrible and strange our nightmares, and what the fuck art thou, Lyla?
I moved backwards into the throat of her lair, pushed by her presence and anatomy and the truth and ghastly beauty of her. I stumbled over something, looked and beheld. Skull. And then another, and the scatter of bones, and the ragged bits of flesh that still clung. The clatter and innermost sanctum of her special place.
The song spread forth, echoing against the hidden walls of the cave, enshrouding us in its ecstatic, awful lament. Wisps of light and the texture of light as phantasmagoric, elongated shapes passed through the shadows, intertwining with one another and then escaping in reeling, spiraling moments of themselves, eternal moments, victims of Lyla and the nature, beautiful nature of evil. Evil...her substance and soul, what she was, the witch of dandelion fields and dreams, delights, sweet angel of truths simultaneously realized. I sought to pass but she stood in my way, heart hammering its black deathdrum, blood spewing from her mouth, spraying over me, seeking to drown me in the soaring bliss of becoming with her.
But I would not be hers. Though by all accounts Daniel had been in the lioness' den since the beginning, I would never be hers. I beckoned her, cravenly, as if it must be at her pleasure, my partaking of this meal she offered me. She came with a smile, a knowledge that was false, and yet utter like death itself. As she descended I brought my hands forward, two claws, seizing her black heart and its ventricles in the clamp formed of them. Her scream was one of purest ecstasy as the organ burst like a melon in my hands. The lantern-light dance of the phantasmagoria fluttered and died as it succumbed to a roiling, saturating pitch of shadow, perhaps the black soul of her as it filled the tomb. Darkness, stillness, Lyla and her shell clutching me as if I were the artery through which all blood flowed. Behind her, the entrance of the cave like the invite of her parted legs.
A Dirge for the Temporal Page 20
