The Book of the Beast Read online

  Then, from the bedfoot, the heat of a body came crawling up on her, the weight of the body covered her, and two hands slipped across her, her breast and throat, and there the talons scratched her, but it was glancing and inadvertent.

  In the dark, she put up her own hands and touched the roughness of the scales, and the emerald eyes floated, watching her, seeing her as she could not see, in the dark.

  He had not harmed her before. She had not been told what had been done, out in the City. Her images of those things were nebulous.

  Something swung across her face. It was the wicked beak, but she did not realise. Instead the questing, ugly, (invisible) tongue extruded, and sipped at the skin of her neck, strayed across her breastbone. Sinuous and serpentine, it described the mound of one breast.

  Lying on her, the monster from the myth made love to her in the blind dark, as in the blind dark the

  Unseen had made love to Psyche.

  Helise, who should have doubted, should have lit the lamp of her ordinary virtue and cancelled love with howls and screams, clung to darkness, which had the arms, the muscled back, the thin pelvis of a man, and which filled her with the organ of a man.

  She must not cry aloud, even in ecstasy -

  Just at that moment, as she twined him with her limbs, on the crazy threshold of abandonment - just then, Psyche after all kindled her lamp.

  Beneath his body, some black filaments of clothes, her eyes dazzled - she was conscious the door had been pushed wide, and the torch glare streamed into the chamber.

  Her silence, as maybe her screaming would have done, had betrayed them.

  Helise attempted to speak. To rouse her lover, to ward off the spurl of fires and men, the glint of weapons that came pouring down on them.

  But the lover of Helise, he knew. He knew, and did not leave her. As his loins thrust on, frantically, against her and within, the head of the monstrous bird was turned, to look sidelong into the crowd of assassins.

  A look. It stopped them. The men fell back. The weapons were folding over like blades of grass before a scythe.

  A sound came out of it, the thing that rode upon her, and turning again, it buried its fearful head among the pillows.

  Helise clutched at the shuddering muscles, cloth, silk, flesh, scales - the crowd in the room had no meaning. Enormous beats began to echo through the core of her, and in the insanity of delight, she beheld a woman like a long opaque shadow, push by the wilted kindred, the strengthless swords. In the carnivorous hands of Lady d'Uscaret was a soldier's spear. Her eyes were all the face she had. Her eyes were no longer black, but blazing green.

  The shock of the javelin, rammed into the body of her son by this woman, who thrust with death as he himself thrust with the weapon of life, rocked both lovers like the quake itself. And Helise felt the point of the spear, tearing through his heart, prick out to graze her breast.

  She gaped her mouth to scream after all. And on a back-cloth of lights and shadows, where the woman seemed to topple away (like a flat figure in a church window), there was a spurt of blood, a falling, a throe, of generation and of terminus.

  Helise, between all the many gates of Hell, was thrown into the Hell of ecstasy. She shrieked and writhed and a spear seemed to enter her also.

  In this state she was, flailing and lurching on the bed like a broken snake, until they dragged the dead thing out of her and off her, on to the floor.

  Then, only then, the delirium guttered and extinguished. And she was left behind.

  She lay, covered in his blood, soaked by that, by tears and sweat, and the waiting-woman of the mother of Heros leaned over her and said, "Drink this."

  Helise drank. She had no choice, for they held her.

  Long after, she became convinced that all the people had gone away. When she sat up, it was so. The chamber was black and shut, as earlier.

  When she stumbled from the bed and pulled herself on hands and knees across the floor, she encountered a bloody spear, but nothing else.

  They had taken their dead away. They had left her here with their poison in her to die in her turn. Already she could taste death, and in her arms and legs it stole like cool water. There was no pain. Sitting by the hearth, she attempted to perform a contrition. Would God hear? God had never heard her. Eventually she was in the fireplace. Still, she was not afraid. Her body was cold, but for her heart, and

  then her heart was cold too.

  She felt it cease, she felt herself die. It seemed irrelevant, pointless. What happened was this:

  The Lady of d'Uscaret went to her own chamber, and there she hanged herself. She was buried in state in a family mausoleum near the Temple-Church. It was explained she perished of sadness, learning her son had been killed by robbers on his journey. His body had been lost in foreign lands.

  For the bride of Heros, who took her life at news of his death, there could be no holy ground. But out of compassion they made her a bed in the walled garden.

  Not much after that, a feud sprang up between the houses of d'Uscaret and Lyrecourt. Its foundation was obscure, some insult or obtainment. Despite the stern jurisdiction of the Duke, the flower of d'Uscaret's young men were soon mown down, and the lord himself was slaughtered like a pig on his way from Mass. At least, his soul went well-prepared to Heaven.

  Inside a year, all the candles of d'Uscaret were put out. A few of the kindred, obscure relatives, old women and men, lingered in the mansion with their elderly servants.

  A decade, and d'Uscaret had become little better than a lodging house.

  Though there were yet some who, passing it at dead of night on the street, would cross themselves under its walls, not knowing why.

  PART FIVE

  The Widow

  Be a god and hold me

  With a charm! Be a man and fold me

  With thine arm!

  -Browning

  As if from the tomb, sleepily, he rose up from her narrative. (Which might be apposite enough.) She had anyway bewitched him. He had seen what she said, in vivid pictures, masterful paintings come to life.

  Raoulin stirred, and stretched himself, as he would not have done so freely in the presence of a lady. He took care not to look at her directly, but into the pallid glow of the fire, which had either been fed while he sat entranced, or which magically never went out.

  "But Demoiselle Helise," said Raoulin, sportive with the supernatural for there seemed nothing else to be, "if you died, here you are, and you haven't yet given me the alchemical formula for that. Besides - am I to take you for twenty-five or twenty-six years? Not more than eighteen, surely?"

  "Time for me has made a stop," she said. Her liquid voice thrilled him. The voice of a sorceress. One could not be blamed for anything under the same roof as a witch.

  At his own thought Raoulin struggled briefly. He reached back after the dead prostitute, the anguish that had brought him here. But a balm had been salved over them. They did not hurt any more.

  "Shall I," she said, "conclude my story at once?"

  Then he had to look at her. Into her eyes like emerald. He nodded. She said, "That part's swiftly told. The poison my husband's mother had administered was insufficient. I did not die, but lay inert, flexible

  and wholesome, and with a slight breathing that some doctor ascertained. They did not have the heart for more murder, to finish off the bitch's work. The feud was out with Lyrecourt, the Duke's frowns glowering. And there was Heros to be seen to. His corpse had rotted in one night, with a fearful stink, all bits, human and avian. So they made my tomb, and named it for me, and laid the box of his bones there under a proud drape. For me, I was hidden again in this room, and sometimes tended. After many months, it seems I began to revive. I recall nothing of that period, not for three or four years, rather as the infant does not. Then I became myself, and remembered what I had been and what they had done to me. I was content to be hidden, and to hide. I heard tidings of their various deaths from servants. One

  evening I was t
old how Lord d'Uscaret, my second father, had been bled on Satan's Way, under the Temple-Church. I laughed and had to pretend it was weeping, because I was still nervous of my jailors." Helise put up her hand and rested it on her delicate chin. "You see, Sieur Raoulin, it had driven me mad. You can't anticipate from me any fine feelings. I cackle at corpses, I burst into tears at the newborn baby's cry."

  Raoulin shivered. It was not her words, only some latent truth inherent in them for all mankind. "When most of d'Uscaret had gone, I began to win out of my prison. I was let go about. I caused no

  trouble with my walking of the corridors, my occasional peeking into cupboards. I learned a little, but did

  not take up arms. Like the old ones dying here, I was only and all acceptance. Now they think of me as a part of the masonry. I do as I wish. The two servants feed me and serve me when necessary. Of course, I'm spoken of as one deceased. They recall that much, it must never be admitted, my resurrection."

  When she said this, Raoulin was not moved to horror or distress for her. She seemed only reciting the part of a character in a drama, and not even very well. Her passions were dead even if her heart went on beating. But she startled him next.

  Her voice had an avidity when she said, "Yet, I've waited." Raoulin found himself, bewitched or not, on guard.

  "For what, lady?"

  "Why," she said, "I think, for you."

  "For me? I can't assist you - or, if you've some petition I could go to the courts with it - my father has some influence, but not in the City - and do you think - the tale, being or seeming, improbable - '

  "No, m'sieur. Be at ease. I want nothing like that."

  Raoulin was ashamed of his reluctance, yet now, as reality came back to him, uncomfortable as blood returning to a numbed foot, he began to yearn to be done with this. In the eldritch room he had formerly deemed coy and feminine, the miasma of her history shimmered. What hour was it? Surely Laude had struck -

  "I might have roamed the City, but that wasn't in me to do. My early training was as a daughter of a noble house. You'll understand, Sieur Raoulin, only aged men have recently entered d'Uscaret."

  Raoulin found himself staring at her again, into the jewel eyes.

  "Women also may burn," she said. "I've been chaste as the nun for all these years of my widowhood. The last violation, the monstrous intrusion - never, since then."

  While she had recounted those things, though they seemed enacted before him, they had not aroused. But now, abruptly, with an extreme pressure, lust possessed him. He got to his feet, not meaning to, and clumsily jarred the table where the wine cup stood - and he thought of the wine, Ysanne's drugs of Alexandria. And through the murk two ideas struck clear, like rocks in a flood. That despite everything, she was a woman of a line older than the City, higher than he could ascend with safety, and, of course, that though his flesh throbbed for her, he did not want to lie down with her, even in a falsehood, the resurrected girl who had pleasured a demon.

  But there in the firelight of the sorcerous hearth, Helise d'Uscaret was combing her blonde hair with her fingers, she was shaking her tresses so they flew about her like white foam from the sea. She was putting up her hands to the nape of her neck, the lacing of the gown. "Come here," she said, "and help me."

  And he discovered he was there behind her, eagerly fumbling at the undoing of her dress. And as it slipped from her shoulders, she drew his hands around her body, over the shift, to her breasts and belly. The fire shone through the linen as through the strands of her hair. The scent of her drenched his lungs, his mind.

  "There's a pact between us," she said. "This must be."

  "Amen," he muttered, and pulled her around to have her mouth.

  Indeed, could you credit her story? Yes, she was insane a little. The prologue to an enticement, all that rigmarole, with the old hag of the kitchen an accomplice.

  Somewhere in his brain, like a bell distantly tolling, some tocsin of unease kept on. But he forgot it as he brought her by the carved posts of the bed, and she threw off the shift and lay down before him like a nymph of pearl.

  She gave a low laugh when he entered her. It deterred him half a second. Then she had flung up against him, and he could do nothing but begin with her that dance of death called procreation, the invention of the fiends.

  Her cries came like those of one under torture. He lifted himself, and saw her, her face contorted with ravening agony or joy, her whole body pulsing as if rivers broke beneath her bones, as if she must

  dissolve. One look and he too was set off, like cannon by tinder. He leaned on her groaning and an exquisite needle seemed to pierce through the centre of his loins, into his spine, so he also shook and struggled to be impaled or to get release.

  And at the height of it, somehow he began to see her again, to see what clasped him and gave him this, and even in the instants of orgasm, some quarter of his brain started to rip at him, to tear him back into his senses. That quarter howled. Then sight and thought smote him together like blows.

  Raoulin shouted out - not in pleasure, not now. He tried to spring backwards, and fell heavily against a post of the bed. There, he lay. He lay looking at Helise. At what Helise had become. Became.

  The fever-image had been correct. For she was, it was a fact, dissolving. Her flesh was slopping off, the skeins of muscles showing, melting in their turn, pouring over the bones like heated wax. And the bones themselves were sere. As they came poking up through the deliquescent body, it was revealed they were old bones, meant to be naked a decade at least.

  She - no longer she - was a sludge, silt or mud, upon the sheet. And the bones rattled slightly, settling in their improper bed. About the skull, the brittle flax of hair, going every minute more to mould and dust. And in the death's-head, all stained with the passage of sudden decay, two green gelatines were fixed, the eyes of what she had become, of what had allowed her corpse to live, in waiting, all these hungry years.

  THE PURPLE BOOK From The amethyst PART ONE

  The Roman

  Easy is the descent to Hell

  Black Dis gates stand open night and day.

  -Virgil

  The Roman stood under the wall of the Insula Juna, listening to his wife crying in the room above.

  The apartment was on the first floor of the block; in the street, it was but too easy to hear her lament, through the hot noisy afternoon air. Perhaps she cried more loudly only to be heard by him, her heartless husband. Once she detected the sound of his horse's hoofs she might leave off.

  Better get on then. Better allow her the chance.

  He beckoned briskly, and the boy came from under the platanus tree with his cavalry mare. Vusca tipped him a silver denarius, that was the sort of times they were. The boy ran off, and the soldier mounted up and started the mare moving.

  Lavinia's threnody unravelled along the walls.

  As he rode through the shadier back lanes around the temple of Venus, and out on to the broad East-West Road, he thought of Lavinia as she had been, the girl he married. He first saw her in an orchard, just west of the town. He had gone out for the hunting, and come back chastened by

  un-success. The sun was low behind him, the dusty road fringed with dark trees that glowed after the day as if they kept the heat. On a curve of land that looked down to the cemetery and the town's west gate, was a villa one always passed going this way. It was a modest building, by now in need of some repair.

  Like all Par Dis, it had seen kinder days. Then, over a low wall, appeared the orchard, and by the plum trees in the mellowed light, this girl. Her skin was luminous, succulent. Her dark hair, drawn back into a simple knot, had mostly come unbound. He fancied her at once, and hoped she was some nicely-dressed slave. But although she looked admiringly at him in his leather tunic, the casual-wear of the Fort, and as recognisable as full parade armour and cloak of Tyrian purple, she did not answer his polite greeting, and next ran away. She was fourteen. She was not a slave, either, as he presently managed al
so to find out. When he started to find excuses to go back along that road, when he started to gossip with the stray servants, or beg a drink of milk at the villa farm, when he saw her very often and realised that she herself found excuses to be there at such times as a passing officer might happen by, then he learned she was the ward of the house.