by Marvin Kaye
The bird which cries Shadily! Shadily! flies over the island above the boiling
afternoon lofts, and is gone, back to the upper city mainland, where there are more
trees, more shade.
In the branches of the snake-willow, a wind chime tinkles, once.
Yse's terrace is full of people, sitting and standing, with bottles, glasses, cans,
and laughing. Yse has thrown a party. Someone, drunk, is dog-paddling in the
alley of water.
Lucius, in his violet shirt, looks at the people. Sometimes Yse appears. She's
slim and ash-pale, with long, shining hair, about twenty-five. Closer, thirty-five,
maybe.
"Good party, Yse. Why you throw a party?"
"I had to throw something. Throw a plate, or myself away. Or something."
Carr and the fat man, they got the two lids up off the piano by now. It won't
play, everyone knew it wouldn't. Half the notes will not sound. Instead, a music
centre, straddled between the piano's legs, rigged via Yse's generator, uncoils the
blues.
And this in turn has made the refrigerator temperamental. Twice people have
gone to neighbours to get ice. And in turn these neighbours have been invited to
the party.
A new batch of lobsters bake on the griddle. Green grapes and yellow
pineapples are pulled apart.
"I was bored," she says. "I couldn't get on with it, that vampire story."
"Let me read it."
"You won't decipher my handwriting."
"Some. Enough."
"You think so? All right. But don't make criticisms, don't tell me what to do,
Lucius, all right?"
"Deal. How would I know?"
He sits in the shady corner, Shadily ! the bird cried mockingly [J'ai des lits!]
from Yse's roof) and now he reads. He can read her handwriting, it's easier than
she thinks.
Sunset spreads an awning.
Some of the guests go home, or go elsewhere, but still crowds sit along the
wall, or on the steps, and in the loft people are dancing now to a rock band on the
music centre.
"Hey, this piano don't play!" accusingly calls Big Eye, a late learner.
Lucius takes a polite puff of a joint someone passes, and passes it on. He sits
thinking.
Sunset darkens, claret colour, and now the music centre plays Mozart.
Yse sits down by Lucius on the wall.
"Tell me, Yse, how does he get all his energy, this rich guy? He's forty, you
say, but you say that was like fifty, then. And he's big, heavy. And he porks this
Anna three, four times a night, and then goes on back for more."
"Oh that. Vonderjan and Antoinelle. It's to do with obsession. They're
obsessive. When you have a kink for something, you can do more, go on and on.
Straight sex is never like that. It's the perversity—so-called perversity. That revs it
up."
"Strong guy, though."
"Yes."
"Too strong for you?"
"Too strong for me."
Lucius knew nothing about Yse's "obsession" with Per Laszd. But by now he
knows there is something. There has never been a man in Yse's life that Lucius has
had to explain to that he, Lucius, is her friend only. Come to that, not any women
in her life, either. But he has come across her work, read a little of it —never
much—seen this image before, this big blond man. And the sex, for always, unlike
the life of Yse, her books are full of it.
Lucius says suddenly, "You liked him, but you never got to have him, this
feller."
She nods. As the light softens, she's not a day over thirty, even from two feet
away.
"No. But I'm used to that."
"What is it, then? You have a bone to pick with him for him getting old?"
"The real living man, you mean? He's not old. About fifty-five, I suppose. He
looks pretty wonderful to me still."
"You see him?" Lucius is surprised.
"I see him on TV. And he looks great. But he was—well, fabulous when he
was younger. I mean actually like a man out of a fable, a myth." She's forgotten,
he thinks, that she never confided like this in Lucius. Still though, she keeps back
the name.
Lucius doesn't ask for the name.
A name no longer matters, if it ever did.
"You never want to try another guy?"
"Who? Who's offering?" And she is angry, he sees it. Obviously, he is no use
to her that way. But then, did she make a friendship with Lucius for just that
reason?
"You look good, Yse."
"Thank you." Cold. Better let her be. For a moment.
A heavenly, unearthly scent is stealing over the evening air.
Lucius has never seen the plant someone must have put in to produce this
scent. Nothing grows on the terrace but for the snake-willow, and tonight people,
lobster, pineapple, empty bottles.
"This'll be a mess to get straight," he says.
"Are you volunteering?"
"lust condoling, Yse."
The sunset totally fades. Stars light up. It's so clear, you can see the Abacus
Tower, like a Christmas tree, on the mainland.
"What colour are his eyes, Yse?"
"… Eyes? Blue. It's in the story."
"No, girl, the other one."
"Which—? Oh, that one. The vampire. I don't know. Your vampire had yellow
eyes, you said."
"I said, he made me feel like a king. But the sex was good, then it was over.
Not as you describe it, extended play."
"I did ask you not to criticise my work."
"No way. It's sexy. But tell me his eyes' colour?"
"Black, maybe. Or even white. The vampire is like the piano."
"Yeah. I don't see that. Yse, why is it a piano?"
"It could have been anything. The characters are the hotbed, and the vampire
grows out of that. It just happens to form as a piano—a sort of piano. Like
dropping a glass of wine, like a cloud—the stain, the cloud, just happens to take
on a shape, randomly, that seems to resemble some familiar thing."
"Or is it because you can play it?"
"Yes, that, too."
"And it's an animal."
"And a man. Or male. A male body."
"Black as black is black. Not skin-black."
"Blacker. As black as black can be."
He says quietly, "La Danse aux Vampires."
A glass breaks in the loft, and wine spills on the wooden floor—shapelessly?
Yse doesn't bat an eyelash.
"You used to fuss about your things."
"They're only things."
"We're all only things, Yse. What about the horses?"
"You mean Vonderjan's horses. This is turning into a real interrogation. All
right. The last one, the white one like a fish, escapes, and gallops about the
Island."
"You don't seem stuck, Yse. You seem to know plenty enough to go on."
"Perhaps I'm tired of going on."
"Looked in the mirror?"
"What do you mean?"
"Look in the mirror, Yse."
"Oh that. It's not real. It won't last."
"I never saw a woman could do that before, get fifteen years younger in a
month. Grow her hair fifty times as thick and twenty times longer. Lose forty
pounds without trying, and nothing loose. How do you feel, Yse?"
"All right."
"But do you feel good?"
"I feel all right."
; "It's how they make you feel, Yse. You said it. They're not beautiful, they don't
smell like flowers or the sea. They come out of the grave, out of beds of earth, out
of the cesspit shit at the bottom of your soul's id. It's how they make you feel,
what they can do to change you. Hudja-magica. Not them. What they can do to
you."
"You are crazy, Lucius. There've been some funny smokes on offer up here
tonight."
He gets up.
"Yse, did I say, the one I followed, when he went into his grave under the
headstone, he say to me, You come in with me, Luce. Don't mind the dark. I
make sure you never notice it."
"And you said no."
"I took to my hot heels and ran for my fucking life."
"Then you didn't love him, Lucius."
"I loved my fucking life."
She smiles, the white girl at his side. Hair and skin so ivory pale, white dress
and shimmering eyes, and who in hell is she? "Take care, Yse."
"Night, Lucius. Sweet dreams."
The spilled wine on the floor has spilled a random shape that looks like a
screwed-up sock.
Her loft is empty. They have all gone.
She lights the lamp on her desk, puts out the others, sits, looking at the piano
from the Sound, forty feet away, its hind lid and its forelid now raised, eyes and
mouth.
Then she gets up and goes to the piano, and taps out on the keys four notes.
Each one sounds.
D, then E, then A. And then again D.
It would be mart in French, dood in Dutch, tod in German. Danish, Czech, she
isn't sure… but it would not work.
I saw in the mirror.
PianO. O, pain.
But, it doesn't hurt.
8. Danse Macabre
A wind blew from the sea, and waxy petals fell from the vine, scattering the lid
of the piano as it stood there, by the house wall.
None of them spoke.
Jeanjacques felt the dry, parched cinnamon breath of Nanetta scorching on his
neck, as she waited behind him. And in front of him was Vonderjan, examining the
thing on the terrace.
"How did it get up here?" Jeanjacques asked, stupidly. He knew he was being
stupid. The piano was supernatural. It had run up here.
"Someone carried it. How else?" replied Vonderjan.
Did he believe this? Yes, it seemed so.
Just then a stifled cry occurred above, detached itself and floated over them.
For a moment none of them reacted to it; they had heard it so many times and in
so many forms.
But abruptly Vonderjan's blond head went up, his eyes wide. He turned and
strode away, half running. Reaching a stair that went to the gallery above, he
bounded up it.
It was the noise his wife made, of course. But she made it when he was with
her (inside her). And he had been here—
Neither Nanetta nor Jeanjacques went after Gregers Vonderjan, and neither of
them went any nearer the piano.
"Could someone have carried it up here?" Jeanjacques asked the black woman,
in French.
"Of course." But as she said this, she vehemently shook her head.
They moved away from the piano.
The wind came again, and petals fell again across the blackness of its
carapace.
Jeanjacques courteously allowed the woman to precede him into the salon, then
shut both doors quietly.
"What is it?"
She looked up at him sleepily, deceitfully.
"You called out."
"Did I? I was asleep. A dream…"
"Now I'm here," he said.
"No," she said, moving a little way from him. "I'm so sleepy. Later."
Vonderjan stood back from the bed. He gave a short laugh, at the absurdity of
this. In the two years of their sexual marriage, she had never before said anything
similar to him. (And he heard Uteka murmur sadly, "Please forgive me, Gregers.
Please don't be angry.")
"Very well."
Then Antoinelle turned, and he saw the mark on her neck, glowing lushly
scarlet as a flower or fruit, in the low lamplight.
"Something's bitten you." He was alarmed. He thought at once of the horses
dying. "Let me see."
"Bitten me? Oh, yes. And I scratched at it in my sleep, yes, I remember."
"Is that why you called out, Anna?"
She was amused and secretive.
Picking up the lamp, he bent over her, staring at the place.
A little thread, like fire, still trickled from the wound, which was itself very
small. There was the slightest bruising. It did not really look like a bite, more as if
she had been stabbed on purpose by a hat pin.
Where he had let her put him off sexually, he would not let her do so now. He
went out and came back, to mop up the little wound with alcohol.
"Now you've made it sting. It didn't before."
"You said it itched you."
"Yes, but it didn't worry me."
"I'll close the window."
"Why? It's hot, so hot—"
"To keep out these things which bite."
He noted her watching him. It was true she was mostly still asleep, yet despite
this, and the air of deception and concealment which so oddly clung to her, for a
moment he saw, in her eyes, that he was old.
When her husband had gone, Antoinelle lay on her front, her head turned, so
the blood continued for a while to soak into her pillow.
She had dreamed the sort of dream she had sometimes dreamed before
Vonderjan came into her life. Yet this had been much more intense. If she slept,
would the dream return? But she slept quickly, and the dream did not happen.
Two hours later, when Vonderjan came back to her bed, he could not at first
wake her. Then, although she seemed to welcome him, for the first time he was
unable to satisfy her. She writhed and wriggled beneath him, then petulantly flung
herself back. "Oh finish, then. I can't. I don't want to."
But he withdrew gently, and coaxed her. "What's wrong, Anna? Aren't you
well tonight?"
"Wrong? I want what you usually give me."
"Then let me give it to you."
"No. I'm too tired."
He tried to feel her forehead. She seemed too warm. Again, he had the thought
of the horses, and he was uneasy. But she pulled away from him. "Oh, let me
sleep, I must sleep."
Before returning here, he had gone down and questioned his servants. He had
asked them if they had brought the piano up on to the terrace, and where they had
found it.
They were afraid, he could see that plainly. Afraid of unknown magic and the
things they beheld in the leaves and on the wind, which he, Vonderjan, could not
see and had never believed in. They were also afraid of a shadowy beast, which
apparently they, too, had witnessed, and which he thought he had seen. And
naturally, they were afraid of the piano, because it was out of its correct situation,
because (and he already knew this perfectly well) they believed it had stolen by
itself out of the forest, and run up on the terrace, and was the beast they had seen.
At midnight, he went back down, unable to sleep, with a lamp and a bottle, and
pushed up both the lids of the piano with ease.
Petals showered away. And a wonderful perfume exploded from the inside of
&nbs
p; the instrument, and with it a dim cloud of dust, so he stepped off.
As the film cleared, Vonderjan began to see that something lay inside the piano.
The greater hind lid had shut it in against the piano's viscera of dulcimer hammers
and brass-wire strings.
When all the film had smoked away, Vonderjan once more went close and held
the lamp above the piano, leaning down to look, as he had with his wife's bitten
throat.
An embalmed mummy was curled up tight in the piano.
That is, a twisted knotted thing, blackened as if by fire, lay folded round there
in a preserved and tarry skin, tough as any bitumen, out of which, here and there,
the dull white star of a partial bone poked through.
This was not large enough, he thought, to be the remains of a normal adult. Yet
the bones, so far as he could tell, were not those of a child, nor of an animal.
Yet it was most like the burnt and twisted carcass of a beast.
He released and pushed down again upon the lid. He held the lid flat, as if it
might lunge up and open again. Glancing at the keys, before he closed them away,
too, he saw a drop of vivid red, like a pearl of blood from his wife's neck, but it
was only a single red petal from the vine.
Soft and loud. In his sleep, the clerk kept hearing these words. They troubled
him, so he shifted and turned, almost woke, sank back uneasily. Soft and loud—
which was what pianoforte meant…
Jeanjacques's mother, who had been accustomed to thrash him, struck him
round the head. A loud blow, but she was soft with grown men, yielding, pliant.
And with him, too, when grown, she would come to be soft and subserviently
polite. But he never forgot the strap, and when she lay dying, he had gone
nowhere near her. (His white half, from his father, had also made sure he went
nowhere near his sire.)
Nanetta lay under a black, heavily furred animal, a great cat, which kneaded her
back and buttocks, purring. At first she was terrified, then she began to like it.
Then she knew she would die.
Notes: The black keys are the black magic. The white keys are the white magic.
(Both are evil.) Anything black, or white, must respond.
Even if half black, half white.
Notes: The living white horse has escaped. It gallops across the Island. It
reaches the sea and finds the fans of the waves, snorting at them, and canters
through the surf along the beaches, fish-white, and the sun begins to rise.
