The Book of the Damned Read online

  "To pay our respects, naturally."

  "Naturally. You should dissuade your wife from wasting flowers on the dead. A silly custom. They do better in the houses of the living, or growing in the ground."

  "Monsieur, monsieur, can't I entreat you to reason?" He smiled, encouraging me. A wave of deadly nausea passed through me. I fought it away. On my lips, the touch of her icy fingers still burned ten times over, on and on.

  "You are too kind," I said. "Your wife would perhaps not like it, some wretched stranger in your carriage, at such a moment. Good day."

  As I crossed through the graveyard, I seemed to see an old man flitting about there, huddling down behind the stones, and two black dogs, slicked by wet, questing without hurry.

  On the cobbled alley, I walked in my trance. The rain rushed by, as it had that other day. I felt I might die before I reached the bottom of the hill. There was some sickness on me, some plague, something. Gladly I welcomed it. Come thou sweet night, close mine eyes.

  And all the books unwritten. Well, let them go.

  And all the songs unsung.

  And Philippe in his box, not hearing the rain.

  "They're to close up the house."

  "Like the damnable coffin itself."

  "Boarded. The neighbours are complaining, there are noises in the night. Hoary old Father Mouse-whiskers, that priest, has been asked to perform an exorcism. But is afraid to. Must apply to his Holiness to see if he may."

  "The servants meanwhile hold drunken parties in the basement. They don't give a that for any phantoms."

  "But whatever else, Andre," said Le Marc, "if you don't go there and collect those bits he left you, you will never get them. The bailiffs men are also reportedly to go in. A debt or two unsettled, we are given to understand."

  The onset of the soft and tender illness, which for a week now had sustained me with its shadow, had enabled me to resume my life. I would not have to put up with living much longer. So, as with an unwanted love shortly due to depart for ever more, I could afford to be polite. It might take months, of course, but months were nothing. Even a year or two was possibly to be borne. Every lissom overture of the malaise pleased me. It was sensuous, fastidious. A weakness, a loss of appetite, even of the appetite for drink, the desire to sleep a great while. The vague aching of the limbs was like a lullaby. I needed only to surrender, to collapse, for it to sink into a delicious nothing ambient to all the physical senses. There was the invalid's concupiscence also, febrile, intense, and entirely easy to accommodate, uncaring of object. From the depths of slumber I returned with an awareness of wonderful dreams, glowing with enjoyment and colour. Free of me, I was whole. I had begun to write, an outburst that surprised and energised me. Working, I passed through the outposts of the dulcetly aching messenger of sleep or sexuality, passed through with bright banners of words starting from the pen almost faster than my thoughts could envisage them… Surely faster than the ink could set them down. Until undeniable exhaustion at length put paid to me, snuffed me out and let me free again for that other world inside, beside, beneath, above, wherever it was, the heaven of my invention, liberty.

  In this condition I was amenable too. I would heed, and sometimes be kind. Now I would get up and hire a carter for a few coppers with his cart, and go to Philippe's house. I would climb, albeit slowly, up to the attics, and rummage, and take, and go away again.

  Despair, the worst of all the deadly sins, since it is denial of the self, of the god-in-self, since it is so seductive, like the snow-death, so warm. Ah, who would tear himself to pieces when he might lie down in such arms, in comfort, and cease. Bless you, my despair, my dear and loving despair. So painlessly you take my pain away. Oh Father, by no means dash the cup from my lips -

  The carter was solicitous. The wind was cold today, he said, blow-ing from the north. He tucked my muffler about my throat and did up the buttons of my greatcoat as if I were his child. It was entertaining. On the road where I was going, scarves and coats were not necessary. He had had a sad life, the carter, all about which he told me as he pushed the cart, on our journey up to the Wall Quarter. Dear friend, I nearly said, Why not abandon hope. Why not do as I do, and escape. Perhaps he had already contracted the plague from me, if it was contagious. Then again, the thought of him as a companion on a trip to the Underworld, constantly retelling episodes of his misfortuned days, as now he did, decided me against his inclusion in my party. One might ask Charon, of course, to push him off the boat into the River Styx. But you could not be sure of Charon. I had seen ferrymen like him, plying their slender vessels through the morning mists along the City river, looking for fish, or that night's drowning victims, who might offer a gem or a pocket-watch, or a fine head of hair to hack off and sell the wig-makers. Charon would be of that sort, maybe. Of some sort, anyway. For I did not suppose only nothing lay beyond the great gate.

  I fell asleep as I walked, and the carter woke me solicitously when we reached the house. I reminded him he should wait for me. He did not say, why else had he come?

  "Take care," he did say. "You're not looking too well, young gentleman."

  The domestics were now all out of Philippe's house, or else hiding under the boards like mice. Not a light showed, though the street was already cast for night. In the west, framed by the alligator scales of the roofs, a red sunset. The dome of the Observatory would appear to have a winged dragon seated upon it, but that was a cloud, or some hallucination. I turned from it in puzzled pleasure, and used the key with which Philippe's executors had presented me.

  Inside, the dimming house would soon be black. I would not bother to light a lamp, I should be able to find some candles upstairs. As I ascended, here and there a carnation shaft struck through the shuttered windows from the sky. One such pierced through the ruby scarab, that today I had put on again, red through red, such a colour the eyes were besotted by it. I stopped a full minute, gazing, until the sun had moved. Were her lips as red as that, her cheeks that red, after she had drunk the blood of Philippe? The old stories said so, but I did not credit it, any more than I trusted her hands could ever grow warm.

  The Devil, the Devil is in it. But where?

  On each floor I paused to rest, supporting myself on the bannister, breathing with a wonderful awareness of air, the machinery of lungs and heart. I bypassed the floor of the bathrooms without a qualm or even a jibe. On the final landing, below the attic stair, something was different. I had begun to breathe in long gasps. My heart beat untidily- My head swam, but it was not from weakness but in a dreadful resurgence of strength.

  My sinews, my very skeleton, seemed to toughen. Blood coursed, eyes went black, then cleared to a sharp perception.

  I stared upward, to shadows where the attics began. Then took the steps, opened the door, and went in.

  There was the clutter of centuries, much of it older than the house. Every one of the brief lizards had left something, like a pebble laid on a cairn. Remember me!

  What had Philippe left, then? What had he left for me? Some priceless volumes, some costume bodice of his mother's, crusted with pearls? No, I did not care at all. Already, instantly, across the stacks and mounds, the pillars and tomb-stones of things, I was searching. And there, a round window, shutterless, was burning with the last of the red sky. In its path balanced the wooden rocking-horse, black lacquer, with his fearful grin of teeth, his maenad eyes, and thin blood skimmed on his back from the sunset.

  I walked on, stepping around and over things. As I passed him, I touched his rump, to make him go. He creaked and leisurely fell into the motion, sounding like an oar grunting in its lock. Such sins that black horse knew, such confessions. The first taste of lust from the thrust of his hard lacquer saddle between the thighs, the first taste of flight, of getting away, poetry, vision, death-wish, dreams -

  Books all over the floors and I stepped on them. Where the Italian chest squared across the window, a movement, too. Then she stood on glass-paned red fire, black-cloaked, cowle
d like a priest - Yes, the Devil was in it.

  I felt her eyes, before I saw them; they drew me forward. If I had been bound, unable, physically, to go to her, my spirit would have gone to her in spite of the flesh, and my heart leapt out of my body. No. There was no need of that. No chain could have held me, seeing her there, her eyes looking into mine.

  "I have been waiting for you," she said. Her voice was very low, very dark. It did not seem to come from her at all, but out of the light, the shadow. "Since the funeral, I have come here each evening. Seven days, seven nights."

  There must have been a key he had given her. Or did she melt through walls, the way her kind might do - not her kind. There was only Antonina.

  "Such protestations," she said. "Then to make me wait."

  "I was here with you," I said. "I must have been."

  "Yes, I think you were. Sometimes, a flicker of the edge of your sleeve, your hair catching a burnish. There, or there. Your ghost. But now, it is you."

  There were also books scattered round the chest. Standing on them, careless of them as I had been, had made her taller than me. She stood above me, in the halo of the dying window, like a madonna. I could only just make out the pallor of her face, which I had kissed, the pale mouth, but the eyes, like the voice, were in a separate dimension. They lived and blazed on their own.

  I did not ask her why she had changed to me. It was superfluous; besides, only this made any sense. The denial was the lie.

  "Your husband?" I inquired, with no conviction.

  But she answered stilly, "He will do as I tell him. He is only my servant. He serves me. Him I may tell and instruct what he may desire of me."

  "What now?"

  "Whatever you wish," she said.

  "And you?" I said. "You, oh, you."

  She put out her hand and touched me then, first my forehead between the eyes, next the base of my throat, then above the heart. Finally she took up my left hand and touched the ruby ring. I felt each touch, cold flame, like a kiss on my forehead, starting a race in my breast. Even through the stone of the ring, I felt her.

  She said, "I divine that you understand, Andre St Jean."

  Her eyes held me, close to her, held me far off. I could do nothing to her yet, she would tell me when, and very soon.

  "Philippe's not watching," I said.

  "I thought that you imagined he might be."

  "No. He believed in nothing. No god. Nothing beyond himself as he was. Nothing after death. He's dead then."

  "But you believe differently. In God, do you believe in God, Andre?"

  "Death is God," I said. "Life is Man. The day we are born begins our love affair with death."

  Now, said her eyes.

  I stepped up on the books with her and she slipped down to a little height, her head against my shoulder, tilted back, her lips parting. Her hair was "like a river flowing through my hands, and the hooded cloak, and under it her skin, only some silken thing between us, and her small, her beautiful breasts -

  We slid down beside the carved chest, on to the dust and the books, with the window turning wan and grey above us. We slid into the dark -

  (Once, somewhere on the shores of those black spaces, the rocking-horse stirred, settling, as if someone had climbed up on to his back).

  How slow the rhythm, now, the rhythm of Death's River - it was she who guided me, through the deep spirals of the river's course, its deepest pools. Stars filled the attics, splashed on the air.

  Ecstasy was always near, it came and went, swelling, singing, widening, never finished, never begun. Her coldness was warm now, like the snow. Her lips which had come to my throat so quietly, had begun to burn. Her lips were fire. She drew me down and down, into the caverns of the night, where sometimes, far away, I heard myself groan, or her murmuring voice like a feather drifting - Her mouth was fire and her body was snow and the cradling night held both of us. The long endless resonant spasms came and went and came and went like the throb of strings, like the circling wake of the slender boat. She was the ferryman. It seemed to me I had not ceased to look at her. That never once, meeting mine, her burning eyes had closed.

  It was almost morning, and all the stars had died… Whose face was this, peeking into mine so dolefully? And these damned hands, fiddling with me, worrying at me.

  I struck him off. He recoiled.

  "Oh monsieur. Christ knows, I thought you were a dead man."

  I was lying flung across the volumes and the old carpets of the attics. Above me towered a hill of carven chest, and over there the wooden horse with its mad and pitiless eye. Between, miles up above me, the carter with a candle, and the bloom of false dawn on him from the window.

  "I waited for you, monsieur. And then, I confess, I went and got myself a drink or two. A cold study it was, waiting out there. But I thought, Well, he knows what he's about I suppose. But then, having come back, and nothing in the cart, the bell goes for midnight. I knock on the door. No answer. So then I curl up, in my cart, see, and I take a mite of sleep. No trouble. Once some woman passes. I think to myself, Did she come out of the house, now? Is that it? But then she vanishes away and I forget her. Then I'm blowing on my fingers for the cold, wishing I could do the service for my toes, and finally I hear five o'clock. Up to the door again, and now it's open.

  So I think then you meant me to come up, and up I come. What a house, monsieur. Horrible, so dark, and empty. They said in that drinking-place, it's haunted by the young man that died here. Vicious murder. But you know that. Then I can hear a noise. I nearly perish of fear I don't mind admitting."

  Through all this I had lain on my back, smiling, my eyes taking in the beams in the pointing ceiling, watching the light begin to return from the dead, the sky deciding if it would put on pinkness or only paleness. What sound could he possibly have heard? Some moan from me, perhaps, sprawled here with my shirt open and my breeches unbuttoned, a ludicrous shambles of some dream I had been having of a woman I wanted to possess.

  "It was that rocking-horse," said the carter, "creaking and bucking away. No one on it, unless it was you, monsieur, and you fell off. Well, then, here you are. I reckoned you'd been set on. Blood-stains on your shirt. But there's a bite there, on your neck. That will be a rat, no doubt of it. The house is full of them, all rustling away behind the walls. Now if you'll listen to me, you should go straight to a doctor with that bite. Nor you shouldn't have brought a lady here."

  Still on my back, I took out some money, and tossed it to him. He caught it, but looked at me reproachfully.

  As he watched me, I sat up and put my clothes to rights. The blood that spotted my shirt had dried to the colour of rotten plums in the half-light. It was the way Philippe's blood had appeared to me. When I tried to rise, I fell.

  The carter aided me down all the stairs.

  It was true then. Not a dream. Not, not a dream. Antonina -

  "And you have a fever, you're burning," the lugubrious carter congratulated me.

  I had not collected my bequest. The carter, not I, closed the door of Philippe's house with a senechal's attention. Then, strong-armed, he put me into his cart, where I lay semi-conscious, euphoric. In this manner I was trundled home, to my landlady's dismay.

  I threw myself on my bed, clothed and stupid. Let them have the day, any who wanted it. Sleep, let me sleep. Tonight I would go back to her. And she would come to me.

  Thinking of her, as she had been for me, all of it rushed up and overpowered me. Down I fell, through the abyss of the bed, past a grinning rocking-horse with the spectre of Philippe cavorting on its back, past Baron von Aaron in a waiter's uniform, past pages of my books, my childhood, past all the hours of my life, seen as when drowning.

  Unfinished, the manuscript lay on the table before the window. There was no need to write any more of it. Let me live it now, quickly through, to the last sentence. And there end. Amen.

  When I woke again, it was very late. I wakened with the knowledge of having made a grievous error - oh
God, the midnight bell was sounding from Our Lady of Ashes over the river. What had I done?

  I must get up, find myself clean linen, run across the City to the house -

  I remember I reached the table where the manuscript lay. Nothing else.

  I woke again, as in a nightmare, somehow on the bed and dawn was returning. Someone must help me now. Some demon or angel. My head seemed full of the galloping of hoofs as I hurried about. But I was stronger. I could wash myself, I could look into the pitted mirror and even pick up the razor with a steady hand.

  How long before I could be ready, how long before I could essay the stairs, the streets? My plan was already made. I must go directly to the house on Clock-Tower Hill. She had said, he was her servant, nothing else. The only impediment had been Antonina herself, when she was afraid of me, before she surrendered herself to the truth.

  There was straw on the roadway. This meant that someone on that wealthy avenue was seriously ill. They had put it down to muffle the wheels and hoofs of passing traffic, but there jvas also a liveried man sitting in the gate, to make sure of proper silence, and perhaps to turn away visitors before they jangled the door bell. It was her gateway he was seated in, and he wore the banker's livery.

  I went up to him. "What is the matter? Is the Baron unwell?" 'No, monsieur. It is Madame who is very sick." I gaped at him, and he, more circumspectly, at me. I was dishevelled enough. The day, growing hot, beat down on us both. "You say - she - Madame von Aaron - is sick." 'Yes, monsieur. Monsieur, please don't go up to the door." 'But I - must - I will inquire of the Baron -' 'Very well, monsieur. I will see to it. Who shall I say?" I swallowed, my throat seemed engorged and hurt me. I glared at the man haughtily. "Say Andre St Jean." 'Very well, monsieur. One moment." And leaving his post, he went in and around out of my sight, presumably to a side door. I waited a few minutes, expecting to be turned away, to make some scene there on the pavement before the house, having a picture of running to a window and smashing through it.

  Was it a plague, the ancient one called the Death? Had we both caught it, she and I, in the house near to the Obelisk where they had burned the corpses centuries ago? Only a hundred years ago, it had returned, that plague. Cloaked death had stalked the City. The crematory chimneys had turned the day sky black, the sky of night into blood, with their ceaseless smokes - so many of the writers of the day had left accounts of it in their journals.