The Secret Book of Paradys Page 26

  Louis walked into the light, which had now spread all through the channel of the stair, and climbed upwards. He became aware of a faint smell, rather cloying, like a kind of joss-stick.

  Nothing else happened, just the light and the throbbing noise, until he got up to the landing of the blue room. The doors were open, and the familiar wave of cold drove out and drank up all his body-warmth. The dead needed that, a live temperature drunk in, to make their show. But before, there had also been heat. And what was that for?

  Then the girl was there, in the room.

  Her hair was cut in a new way, and the earring glimmered from her right ear. She wore a long skirt of some pleated translucent stuff, held up by a type of silver braces. Her small breasts were bare and her long slender arms and ankles. It was that style known as Garb-Egyptian, taken to extremes, but she looked less oriental and classical than like some artist’s model, a bijou waif … All but her eyes, of soaking, starving indigo. She started right at him. It was a terrible stare.

  “Are you there?” she said. “Is anyone out there?” A reverse of what the still-mortal thing is supposed to say when questioning a presence.

  Then the wave of heat came. It almost knocked the breath from his body. When it passed, or when he had accommodated it, he began to go forward, slowly, looking at her, wondering all the while, though he knew she could not, if she really did see him, and if it would be possible to touch her.

  He had drunk, for him, a lot of wine at dinner, preparing for this. It was what Vlok would call a “loosener.”

  “Who,” he said to her, “are you? Were you? – Is that more politic? Won’t you tell me your name?”

  But she was only a recording, a photograph on the room. Time had not somehow slipped. No, he could see it in her starving eyes. She and he were of a height, so the eyes fixed directly into his. They fixed in and on him, and through him, still looking for something. He had got very close to her now, wondering what he would feel. There was a slight disturbance in the air about her, even inside the spectral light. And a sort of clammy quality, the aura of fever.

  “Why won’t you?” she said. “You tease. You know you meant me to have the earring.” And coaxingly, “Are we the same?”

  Are we the same? How odd. There was a resemblance. Not only the eyes … He put out one hand, letting it alight on her breast, something he would never dare do with a woman of flesh and blood, who would then expect more. This one did not seem to register the caress, and he saw, as in all the supernatural clichés, that his hand, insisting, presently passed right through her.

  For some reason it was that which turned his stomach.

  He drew back.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Are you there?” she said.

  And abruptly they both burst out laughing bitterly.

  It was nothing shared, only a coincidence, caused by a fluke of their characters, a similarity of reactions.

  “Go away then,” he said.

  He did not think such an exorcism could work and was dismayed when suddenly she disappeared from in front of him.

  The light went out also, and the throbbing ceased, came back – and was only the jumble of his own pulses in his ears.

  The violin had been the strangest part. But that did not mean she had read his mind. He did not know what it meant.

  Near morning he wakened, and thought he heard her again, walking about nearby, on bare feet. He thought too he would have to be careful. There might sometime be a genuine break-in, and he, complacent, would assume it was only his pet ghost-girl. Then he wondered if, recorded thoughtless phantom or not, she would pursue him to the bedroom. He experienced then a sort of sexual stirring to which he was quite unaccustomed. He lay on his belly, floating in the sensation that was between dreamy anomia and dreamier lust, half awaiting her fingers on his neck, his spine – passing through him, and how would that feel?

  Then he slept until Curt woke him about ten, rapping insistently on the front door below.

  It was a blowing day, a febrile wind tore about the street, coated with rent blossoms. Wilted, one more broken stem, Curt was propped in the doorway.

  He had brought, as required, scattered and scribbled through a notebook, “as much” as he could “reasonably get” on the previous tenant of the house. Curt had a knack of worming out information, of finding what was in hiding.

  Curt followed Louis back upstairs.

  “Did you see it again?”

  “What, Curt?”

  “Her.”

  Louis would not reply, and finally Curt grew tired of watching him returned to and lying in bed, drinking mineral water and reading yesterday’s papers. There seemed no chance of communication or breakfast. Even the notebook lay unviewed.

  “Were you just telling lies again?” said Curt. “Rudolf says he’s through with you. Every hour brings another tantrum. We’re to go south, without you. He has plans to sue.”

  “He’s actually planning to come over here again. Keep him away, Curt, please. And I’ll buy you a present. What about that jacket you said you saw? Yes, that jacket. Now go to your hotel and pour laudanum and aspirin into Rudolf’s coffee.”

  “Well, you’d better buy me the jacket.” Curt smoothed his collar, thinking of collars to come. “You haven’t bothered to read my notes, there. You should be contrite. It’s a gruesome tale. I need soothing.”

  When Curt was gone, Louis opened the notebook. He kept these notes, in appalling shorthand, making a precis in the diary later.

  Female, blonde, rich, she had been noted also for her unusually blue eyes. She had no family, and appeared in the City in the way of such beings, as if from thin air.

  For a while she moved from apartment to hotel to apartment, incurring the wrath of each establishment by late and licentious celebrations, drunk guests, lovers of all sexes, drugs and loud music. She was also subject to crazes. A craze to paint the walls and ceiling of one apartment black, a craze of enormous plants. Later came a bicycling craze, during which she might be seen flying up and down the steeps of Paradis, generally attended by bicycling young men. On one occasion, one of these attendants escalated down Clock Hill into a hospital bed. Later yet, there was a monkey craze. That ended in a rescue by a zoological organisation. For, like the paint, plants, bicycles, young men, once a craze ebbed, its constituents were neglected.

  At length, she had taken the house in the Observatory Quarter, and put in the cobalt stained glass. She was now in another epoch, where she had begun to call herself Timonie.

  This ultimate craze (it was to be her last) seemed to commence with her purchase of an antique earring. A City museum had been forced to offer for auction certain treasures. In with a stash of Roman marbles and lamp-stands dug from the river mud came one jewel. The catalogue presumed it had been the property of the Egyptian mistress of a Roman commander then in charge of the river fort. She was remarkable for being of the Greek Alexandrian strain, blonde and blue-eyed, but skilled in the old temple arts.

  The modern girl in her sleek day-gown, lace gloves, high-heels and flowered hat, bid for and claimed the antique earring of the sorceress-mistress, whose name the catalogue gave as Tiyamonet.

  Garb-Egyptian was then coming into vogue, and Timonie entered the vogue by throwing “Egyptian” orgies at her new house. They drank thick beer, and burned fake kuphi, the temple incense of the Pharaohs. Timonie often appeared at these gatherings in dresses of transparent gauffered linen that sometimes left bare the breasts.

  Then the orgies ended. The doors were closed. After some while, two cleaning women, unable to gain customary entry, called the police.

  No one was amazed at Timonie’s death, even at the manner of it (listed by Curt). As moths to candle-flames, so a Timonie to a ritual butchering. “I performed a test then.” (Louis, writing in the diary.) “I went into the room, where the earring was still lying under the window. It was easy enough to take it to the small garden at the back of the house. Here I buried it about a qu
arter of a metre down in the soil, and marked the place with a lump of stone. During that afternoon I wrote this, and I paste it in here:

  Timonie. Self-obsessed. But unable to clarify, externalise, and so centre, as someone taught me to do. “Lovers of all sexes,” says Curt. He even alludes here to the monkeys – and, wilder, the bicycles. Unlikely, not human. As I saw her it was love before a mirror or an invisible audience. Passion so strong it forms the print of an astral photograph on that room. Who is she inviting? She said – Tease. You meant me to have the earring. Are we the same? It must be the other, then, Tiy-Amonet. Waiting and coaxing an Egyptian sorceress. And so the earring becomes all-important and acts like the photographer’s silver fixative. Now I’ve put the fix into the earth. What will happen tonight?

  “And that night nothing happened, except a foolish telegram came from Rudolf. And in the restaurant I was taken up by yet another stranger, my bill paid, and I barely got away with a whole skin.

  “But in the house complete silence and absence. Unable to sleep. I lay awake all night.

  “Then the plan came, to steal her from herself. Timonie. A rape, the usual way. How to dress her, more decorously as I should have to, for the obvious reasons. And how the hair should be done. Planning it, I could see more and more a likeness between us, or how one could be created. I liked the sexlessness of her disembodiment. All look, no substance. I would have to catch that too.” Coming back from expeditions along Sacrifice Hill, in a booming dusk scraped by the flails of winds, Louis encountered Curt, bent and bowed at the corner of the street.

  “Curt. Good news of your coat. Go for a fitting tomorrow.”

  But Curt curiously was not cheered.

  “Horrible dreams, Louis. That girl. That house must be full of it. Don’t stay there.”

  “She won’t harm me. If it even happens.”

  “Perhaps it happens in your head.”

  Louis smiled, for he had considered that too, and did not find it threatening.

  “Where have you been?” said Curt in a whine.

  “You can tell Rudolf,” said Louis, “that I’m creating a new character, very exotic. That’s why I need the privacy.”

  “Her.”

  “The same.”

  “Don’t,” said Curt.

  “Hush, Curt. You’ll adore her. You’ll rush me to a photographers,’ again, to have her immortalised.”

  “I kept dreaming,” said Curt, “pale blue flesh – the way she was – after –”

  “She wouldn’t like you to conjure her up that way. She seems to want to be seen all in one elegant piece. I don’t think she remembers the murder. No, she’s stopped her life before that point.”

  Curt abruptly extended a page of print. He had torn it from a book in the library of a museum. He explained this with a foolish pride, and how he had felt it needful to undertake this unasked extra of research.

  “It tells you about the other one, the Egyptian.”

  “That was Timonie’s interest. Not mine. My interest is only Timonie.”

  Curt stood in the stream of the wind, his eyes watering and teeth clenched. He said, “I don’t like spiders. The jewel in the earring is a spider, and there’s a thing about it there. When I was a kid, they used to drop on my face where I slept. I used to wake up screaming and my father beat me with his belt. If you pull off their legs, they grow another one. Eight legs. It’s happening in your head, and it happened in her head. But it can get out of your head, it can get out.” Curt whimpered. Then he straightened up and turned his back to the wind. “Don’t tell Vlok what I said.”

  But Louis was not affected by any of this, Curt was subject to odd turns from time to time, and to a superstitious dread of his own beginnings. Louis did not comment, but he invited Curt kindly to dine with him, and was delighted when Curt refused.

  Tucking the torn page inside the coat, Louis forgot it a while, as he had previously forgotten the earring.

  For some nights, then, nothing took place. No manifestations of any sort, no manifested glimpses of the girl. It was a playful season with him, and he began to miss her, and he vowed to dig the earring up from its grave in the garden. He would soon want it himself in any case, for her costume. (He had sent Vlok a letter, mentioning this treat, and so partly appeased him.)

  It was at this time that Louis began to keep the diary, putting in earlier events as a detailed preface. Nothing was now occurring, everything was dull and normal, and yet he mentions at once an atmosphere in the house, as if the building were a kettle on a low flame.

  That week he bought the violin, and placed it in the blue room, ready to be fiddled at ghostly whim. He began to have the idea, when next she manifested, of appearing before her as herself, the earring hung from his ear by silver wire, in the correct way. He would be mirror to her mirror, if a mirror they were to each other.

  “A couple of interesting dreams. I don’t often dream, or if I do, remember. But, saw Timonie on her bicycle, her hair tied up in a scarf and great rolls and fetters of beads round her neck, looking like a fourteen-year-old from a convent in her divided skirt and black stockings. She whirled down Clock Hill, two or three young men in her wake. It was a dare, all of them hooting with mirth, and carts of fruit and flowers getting in the way, some swerves and abuse, and then a clear stretch past the florists and fashionable dress-shops on the west of the Hill, with just a disapproving face or two at windows. Last of all rattled along a fourth fellow. I saw at once he was dismayed, and as he came hurtling off the top of the Hill on his bicycle, he began to beat at the air, first with one hand, then with both. He beat, and smacked, and tried to push away something from behind him. There was nothing there. By now his face was white, frightened, and – something more. From how his hands went now, it was becoming obvious the invisible sprite riding pillion was intent on a seduction. All at once the eyes of the rider blurred. He leaned back, lying on the air, giving in to an irresistible ecstasy or hypnotism. The bicycle, left with no guide but the impetus of the Hill, went careering on and crashed into a pile of wooden crates and a lamp-post.

  “The second dream, which came after this one, woke me. It had a quality of the Arabian Nights. If I were at all a serious writer, I’d be tempted. There was a vaulted sort of cavern, or hall, classical but obscure to me. The man – he might have been a merchant, some traveller – was well-dressed, in a long robe, but I can particularise nothing of his clothing. He walked up the cavern-hall with an air of unease and determination, for some – what do they call them – some jinn had promised to show him the face of the Devil.

  “At the end of the cavern was a kind of curtain. It fell and rippled like water, or perhaps steam. The traveller stood before the curtain, and after a moment or so, it swirled and opened, and in the opening showed a stern pale face in middle life, bearded, with shrewd dark eyes. The traveller started back. He made some sign over himself, and then began to shout. He had some cause, for the face he had been shown in the mist was his own. His language baffled me, yet I know what he said. Then the jinn came. I didn’t see it, but the traveller did. He spoke more guardedly, but no less angrily. One of those ethical legendary bargains had been dishonoured, he wanted recompense. And then the jinn – I heard its voice, rough and oddly pitched, like a boy’s voice when it’s on the point of breaking, the jinn said something to the man, which I understood to mean, Look again, and I will show you instead the face of God.

  “At this, a proper altercation. Of course, to see the Devil was one thing, but surely God was not accessible, at the beck and call of lesser spirits. But the jinn persuaded the traveller. So the man looked again at the mist or steam, and it parted. I knew what was coming, and so maybe did he, for now he made no comment. It was the same face, shrewd and bearded, just out of its prime. God’s face was the traveller’s face, as the Devil’s had been.

  “I woke up in silence, madly overawed by the depths of my own theosophical sense. I never thought I had that side to me.”

  After this ent
ry there is a gap of several lines. At the bottom of the page he wrote:

  “In a kind of calm hysteria. Something is going on. I can’t hear or see or smell it, it leaves me alone. Forces gathering? What forces could there be. Perhaps poor T is angry, I’ve stopped her expression by burying the focus. It seems I’m reluctant to go out and take away the stone in proper Christian manner, and dig up the prize. Yes, I am reluctant. I’ve so seldom been any more than nervous of anything. I don’t know. Am I afraid? Is this fear?”

  Turning the page, you saw he had written:

  “I tried to find the place. Something, perhaps a neighbourhood cat, has moved the stone. I dug about where I thought it must be, found nothing. I’m distrait. I feel as if a cane has come down sharply on my fingers. Bad Louis. Bad negligent child.”

  In a dream, the mise-en-scène may simply exist. And so, a hot black night, starred with diamond brooches, moonless. A broad black river, without a bridge, the starlight plinking on it, and frogs faintly chorusing in the reeds. It might have been almost anywhere in a warm climate. On the dim banks shapeless shapes that gave no clue – mounds, huts – beyond, the rising of hills. And here and there, eastwards, a cresset on a wall-tower … The fort too lay east, behind now, with the beacon burning in the great iron brazier on the roofwalk. Dis’ light.

  It was not that he walked inside the skin of the one who walked before. But he walked so close, he was her shadow, and invisible. The intimacy of it seemed normal in the dream. He knew himself separate, a witness. He knew himself involved, and not impartial.

  There were trees now, heavy castaneas, a wood beside the water, and there an altar of stone against the post of the ferry … He saw these things as she glanced at them, knew them by some trace that came from her. They did not interest her, these known things.