The Book of the Beast Read online

  D'Uscaret turned from her. "Go search the bedchamber."

  Pale as their lady, two of the men went out. The few left behind looked half-mad. D'Uscaret sweated. Not one of them had declared these events must be impossible.

  Helise saw that her statement seemed obtuse, which was mostly due to a lack of carnal vocabulary. Feeling no reticence, she tried to put this right. "I mean," she said, "that when he was being a husband to me, when the fit comes, then he was changed." Suddenly a wild lament swept down on her. Tears gushed. She sprawled on the floor.

  Shortly after this, everyone went out, and locked her into the room.

  Helise wept until all awareness was wrung from her body. Perhaps she slept then.

  She wakened to torchlight. A steward of the house, and a woman who waited on Lady d'Uscaret, pulled

  Helise upright.

  "You will make no sound," said the waiting-woman.

  They took her through the mansion, along passages, up stairs, rather as she had taken herself earlier, searching for the secret apartment of her beloved.

  Finally there was another room, with sparse furnishings, a window of lactescent glass. A ghostly servant had arrived before them, and was putting out a ewer and cup, a covered basket. One candle burned.

  The servant, the woman, the torch-bearing steward, drew off from Helise, until she was alone in the middle of the gloom.

  She said, stupidly, and for no real reason, "What am I to do here?"

  "Stay, at my lady's will," rapped the woman.

  Then they went, and closed the door, and locked it on her as the other door had been locked. Helise crept to the neglected, ill-prepared bed. She felt nothing, no fear, and no alarm, no longer the

  agony of sorrow. She slept again, and only realised, reviving to sickly awareness at the entry of light through the vitreous window, that she had been imprisoned for her crime.

  They brought her food and water and a small amount of wine, her tiring table and embroidery, fresh linen. The room was cold, was summer waning? Although she sometimes asked the servant, they sent no logs for her fireplace, and only allowed her one candle at a time.

  There were no writing materials, and if there had been any, who would have agreed to be her messenger? Besides, to whom should she apply? Her family of la Valle had loved her only in as much as she had been wanted by d'Uscaret. Now d'Uscaret hated her.

  I prayed to the Devil. He granted my desire and now collects his fee.

  She slept a great deal, and dreamed of Heros. Nearly always he was breaking in to rescue her. But overcome with lust, they fell at once to coupling on the floor or bed. In the midst of this she would try to push him away, shrieking. Also she would dream she lay down and the pillow slowly changed into a staring, decaying eagle's head. And once, that her aunt's pet bird flew out of its cage and went for her eyes.

  She would wake in fear, or crying.

  They gave her no news. One morning, in desperation, she had muttered to the dull unkindly servant who brought the food, "What do they say of Lord Heros?"

  The servant sent her a glance.

  "Nothing, madam. He'sawayonhisjourneyfortheDuke."

  Helise was bemused. Later she began to see that d'Uscaret had used the proposed excursion Heros had intended, on Ducal business, as the excuse for his vanishment. He had merely set out a day or so in advance. The City, and half d'Uscaret's own household, were handed this tale, and would accept it. Probably it was put about that he hurried to escape the difficult young wife, who now turned hysterical at her lord's absence, hence her confinement to a remoter region of the manse. Had even the Duke himself been deceived?

  But meanwhile - where was it that Heros had gone to, or that thing had gone to he had become?

  Thinking of that all her nerve deserted her. She had a vision which seemed almost palpable. She imagined the creature on the roofs of the City, at upper windows, perhaps availing itself of chimneys. It flickered in and out of her inner sight. What it did she could not be sure. But they were deeds of darkness, hunger - and in the end it would hide itself. She did not know where.

  However, she had one other dream, and only once. She saw the thing (her husband) seated in his chamber in the very house, at that table under the round window and the triptych of Psyche. Among the paraphernalia of former studies he had paper, pen and ink, and was writing… she saw what he - it - wrote. Even in the dream… incongruous. For they were rhymes of love. She had not wanted to approach, had been afraid, but the creature did not see her, for in the dream she was incorporeal. Besides, its head lolled, the eyes were dull, and the tongue ran from its beak. The hands wrote busily, alertly, the claws scratching the paper. Some human facet of Heros, some memory from his man's brain,

  plainly supplied the task, at which the bird's head moronically attended.

  Close by on the desk, among the apparatuses of silver and glass, the balances and skeletons, lay some strands of hair, caked with blood at one end. There were also several teeth in a pewter dish, fresh and white but for the old blood on them.

  After this dream, Helise did not cry out or sob. She got up as if tranced and went to her tiring table, where the mirror was, and stared in at her own young, shrunken face.

  She had never before realised that her eyes were of this shade. Definitely, if looked upon closely, there was a greenish cast to them.

  On the thirty-eighth day of her captivity, Helise was visited by her second mother, Lady d'Uscaret.

  The woman entered the room and had the door shut behind her. She wore the black and viridian of the house like mourning. All her hair was covered. Her collapse, which seemed to have maintained itself, had not softened or fleshed out any part of her.

  "You may stay in your bed," she told Helise. "What else are you good for? I came to look at you. To see this insect which destroyed my son."

  Helise lay with the covers up to her chin, and endured the looking-at.

  "Merciless Heaven," said Lady d'Uscaret. "Is it a fact, you made the old fool Ysanne give you aphrodisiacs of Alexandria? Don't bother to speak. She was beaten, and confessed. A meddling wretch. But I am to blame. I judged the tales were lies, or advised myself they were. Who could live otherwise? Sometimes, one would say I was green-eyed. I should have guessed from that. My mirror reassured me. But the mirror was old and cloudy… And my son, that beautiful boy from such a loveless match - there are such eyes in other houses, other lands. Why attend to a legend, a story to frighten children with at the hearth in winter?"

  She spoke in a composed, indifferent way.

  "And you. I reckoned you harmless. He had his night, so I thought. There is proof, I thought. He took pleasure with her, and no uncommon thing occurred. He had always feared it. Unspoken. I would never listen. Until we walked in the garden, not long ago. "I must be away," he said to me. Then I knew. He'd left you untouched, was virgin still. The curse was in our blood. He dared not."

  D'Uscaret's Lady looked on with her eyes not green, nor black. "But you forced him to it."

  Helise was nailed on her pillow. She could not move or reply.

  "Make no mistake," said her second mother, Til have you killed. Expect it. Some bane in your drink, a cushion pressed to your face. Or a strong man will come and hang you."

  In her coffin of a bed, Helise could not even feel terror.

  Lady d'Uscaret opened the door and went out of it, and it was locked again. That, and its after-taste, were the thirty-eighth day.

  On the thirty-ninth day, women filled the chamber.

  They pulled her from the bed, washed her and dressed her, combed out her hair. There was a spurious air of the preparation for the bridal. No one said anything to her, nonetheless. They did not even address her as "lady" or "madam".

  When the women had gone, without explanation, Helise sipped the watery wine of her confinement, wondering if it had been doctored. She seemed to have a burning sensation in her throat, but then it passed.

  In the afternoon, men of the house entered, without p
reamble or apology. The steward said to her, "You must get up, and come with us."

  "Where?" she said listlessly. "That you'll learn."

  Where she was not an article of barter, or a sexual pawn, she had never been treated as an adult, only ever as a baby, save some of the cruelty might have been restrained in a baby's case.

  She went with them, and they took her away along the corridors and stairs, and she noticed the rotted tapestries, the lost chests mice had chewed. She did not pay much attention. She had no say in the world to be interested in it.

  Finally she did know where they carried her. She began to scent their fear, and then her heart stumbled and in their grip she almost sank down, but they hauled her on, up the twisting stair into the Bird Tower. The door was in front of her with its ring and falcon's mask. A hand flung it wide, and straight off the step she was lifted, into that chamber, that cell of the scholar, which had belonged to Heros d'Uscaret.

  At the hour they gave her no reasons. She was nothing to them, useful only for her femaleness and expendability. It was later that, by small sproutings of gossip, by a letter or two uncovered from forgotten cabinets, such things, that the brain of Helise evolved and ordered a theory of events.

  Her dream of him, as he wrote the uncouth verses, had verity. She was spiritually linked to him, she, the author of his damnation. In the moment of union, two becoming one…

  No sooner did she enter the room with d'Uscaret's men, that thirty-ninth day, than she glimpsed the strands of hair, the teeth in the dish, ink spilled on paper, on the floor. He had left other marks in that room, once so esoteric and cleanly. (The painting on the triptych had at last been overturned. Perhaps this was some vestige of human anger, or only the upsetting of flight.)

  The Duke had sustained d'Uscaret, and one other great house had reluctantly held its vengeful arm. But there had been atrocities in the City. Not only a daughter of Lyrecourt was won to a couch of blood, not only the rich and mighty howled for an end. The Duke had said, it seemed, he would leave d'Uscaret to its own affairs, whatever their nature, providing d'Uscaret would see to them.

  It did not always come to shelter by day in the Tower of the Birds. No, only seven or eight times did they detect it had entered there, going over the roof and in at that round window inaccessible to any other. It would possess scattered eyries. The vaults of chapels, wild land about the old City wall; it had been seen climbing the turret of a ruined church, by a man who took it for a monkey - but some, hearing the

  rumour, knew otherwise. Elsewhere, near the markets, two fornicators were scared in a corn-bin by a beast they swore was a giant beaked lizard that had on man's clothing.

  Yet the human memory, some urge, brought it now and then to d'Uscaret, and most often by night. It could be slain. No legend had ever prohibited that. How, was less sure. And they were afraid,

  sickened, loathing. Something must be put between them and the actuality.

  A drinker and feeder, it had another proclivity. The horrid reports had made this obvious.

  Lord d'Uscaret stood before the narrow monk's bed, and pointed to Helise, his daughter by marriage. Tut her there. Tie her. The cord round her waist, with enough slack. Let her go about the room if she

  wants. He'll smell her the sooner and come in."

  Like a bitch-dog then, they leashed her by a rope-girdle and a long tether. Nowhere in the room was anything that she might employ to hack herself free. She would not even have thought of it. The inevitability of their plan, of which she was so strategic a part, of which she had at that time scant grasp, gave her over for their use.

  They did not assure her men would be waiting, with drawn swords, with javelins and clubs, below in the lobby under the twisting stair. They were not, anyway, there for her protection.

  A watch would be kept on adjacent heights of the building. She would not even need to scream. She was the bait inside the trap, the distraction, the scapegoat for all their sins.

  Like Psyche, sacrificed on the mountain to save the rest.

  "He may not come tonight, or tomorrow," said d'Uscaret. "We may have to wait." A priest in black said solemnly, "We must go down and pray."

  They were glad to leave the chamber, with its strange tang, faint, like that of a hawk's mews. Glad to leave the scapegoat. The priest, who she had not seen till he spoke, did not offer her word or look.

  She roamed a while on her leash, up and down. She could not quite get far enough to right the triptych, or to finger the elements on the table.

  For her sustenance had been left white bread in a napkin, fish and mushrooms, cheese and grapes, milk and wine, and sweets.

  She ate with appetite. She was not frightened. She sang softly to herself, for company, as she had done in childhood.

  When the dark began to come, she spread herself on the low bed. He had slept here, her husband. She lay and thought of him, and suddenly her body was alive with desire. She longed to feel his weight

  lowering itself upon her, his caressing ravishments, the thrust of him against her womb.

  She remembered a tale at least as antique as the dooms of d'Uscaret, of the monster transformed to human beauty through love's kiss.

  Was it a miracle she might accomplish, she who had sent him into Hell, to bring him forth again into the light?

  She lay in the blackness, and her body moved with the rhythms of fire. She slept, and dreamed his weight crushed her, his strength pierced her. She was opened out, stretched to her limits, her brain shattered in stars.

  But nothing but dark and dawn entered the chamber, the thirty-ninth night, the fortieth day.

  The window was a bowl of jade, translucent twilight. Helise gazed at it, surprised to have slept so long. On the floor the panier and plate were empty. The food had not been replenished. A mouthful of wine was left. Shadows curtained the room, and silence had spun her web there. Helise shifted again on the bed, and sang a phrase of song, to hear the web quiver, then regather on the frame of the dusk.

  The rope had begun to chafe her ribs where it had ridden up over her gown.

  She lay and watched the window ebbing from green jade to marzipan grey. She might sleep again. Sleeping was benign. She had dreamed of loveliness, though she could not recall it now.

  Drifting, she heard a mild scrape-scrape at the window as if far away. A leaf or branch, unsettled by some evening wind. Or a bird against the panes. She was not inclined to look, to try to make it out.

  She drifted on, borne by a smooth river, the room a dark forest that rustled gently, and blew upon her an open breath of sky, until she bumped against the wharf of awareness, and her eyelids raised themselves.

  Where is this place? Not a forest, but a chamber, its one green eye now black. The aroma of a mews was stronger.

  Then she heard. A crisping of garments, a step on the floor. She heard, there in the darkness, unseen, a

  breathing.

  'Is it you, my lord?" she called softly, "my Lord Heros?"

  And the breathing was arrested, began again, and drew nearer.

  Somewhere deep-buried by forty days in a wilderness, Helise d'Uscaret knew that she should, at this second, be whimpering or shrieking, weak with horror, tearing at her fetters, crying to God. But all she felt was a slight curiosity, a glimmering want, to see again what she had shaped him to. And even in that, lust moved, lust murmured like a tide within her. She was under a spell. She was the Devil's dupe. She was damned as he was.

  "Is it you, my lord?" she said again, and held out her arms.

  The reek of a preying bird was thicker, musky, and there was too another darker flavour, like the scum of a marsh. The stink did not repel Helise. It intrigued her. Even the butcher's whiff of blood did not offend.

  "Heros," she said.

  She felt more than saw a blacker blackness between her and the window, beside the bed. Then the eyes, catching some flake of light from the sky, flashed, and turned on her their soulless motes. The eyes of Satan, pendant there in nothingness, t
his they might have been. But she was not afraid.