The Book of the Damned Read online

  "No, monsieur, wait a moment. There's some irregularity here."

  I halted.

  "Oh," I said, "What?" I thought he was going to say I must have a friend with me, one at least, but I would rejoin it was a formality and dismiss it.

  "The bullet in this fellow's gun - there is only the one, and in the one pistol only."

  I looked at him. "Well?"

  "Well, it is - '

  I said, "Silver?" he nodded.

  I put my head down, shuddering, as if I had received a blow, and the gunsmith's man caught at my arm. "Monsieur, you have every right to object - '

  "Yes, yes." I dislodged him. I moved on, towards the being in its white coat. If he was an icon, yet the black boots were planted on the ground. Framed in the priest's cowl of black hair, her face, unfamiliar and the same, its cruel changed lips compressed. And the eyes, waiting for me.

  Overhead, above the trees, the sky had bled out to nacre.

  "Are you ready to begin?" he said.

  "Why is there silver in your gun?"

  "An eccentricity. Humour me."

  "I can object to it, the man says."

  "But you will not," Scarabin said. "Or are you going to dare to prolong this?"

  "Where did you get it, the silver? Since you mean it for me, I have an interest."

  "Don't concern yourself," he said. "You will be penetrated only by the very best."

  One of the men chuckled, slimily.

  "Some heirloom," I said. "Holy silver from some priestly cross."

  He stood and gazed back at me, arrogantly, disdainfully.

  I said, "There was another before me. What about that one? Or do you think he will be no trouble?" Did you always do this service for her?"

  The men, his seconds (although I guessed he did not know them particularly, more of the Baron's tribe, perhaps), were faint outlines at his back. Did they realise what we spoke of, and think we were mad?

  I said to Scarabin, "I'm sorry now I acquiesced to pistols. That's too removed. I'm sure you were trained to the use of a sword, but I never was, or I would clamour now for two honed blades. I should like to cut that look off your bloody face."

  "Such a pity," he said.

  I stepped up to him and slapped him hard across the left cheek.

  His skin was so fair, the blood at once came up like thunder beneath it.

  "There," I said. I nearly laughed aloud. The contact with his flesh - had energised me. "I am ready to begin, when you are."

  "Oh, come then," he said, mockingly.

  We walked to the table. His hand settled on the nearer of the white pistols.

  "I shall require only this," he said. "You may take both your weapons, if you wish."

  "One will suffice."

  A man came between us and spoke the litany.

  "Gentlemen, your witnesses have been given to understand this meeting is by mutual agreement, and that both of you have made your arrangements suitably. It is understood that the affair can be settled only by a death. Then, gentlemen."

  I tasted frost in my mouth, but already the wind of dawning was combing over the sky. Birds sang. A rook's rasping bleat trailed like a flag as it passaged down into the City - I saw only the eyes of the man who must kill me.

  "… Paces to the count of ten. And on the count of ten, to turn and fire at will."

  The speaker stepped away.

  We stood, Scarabin and I, under heaven. Then turned, as instructed, to begin our walk.

  "One," said the man who counted, "two… three…"

  The cord that bound us drew tighter as we moved further from each other. It tautened, ready to recoil, and plunge us home, breast to breast, eye to eye.

  "… Six… seven…'

  But here is the day, and soon it will be gone. Here am I, but where, tomorrow?

  He is making sure, with his silver. Antonina is the quarrel between us, lying at ease in her white coffin now, a white dead hound coiled at her feet. He would take the ring off my finger, but the electric coldness of his touch I should not feel.

  Ten."

  I turned again, in a noiseless spinning roar of lights, and brought up the pistol, sighting along it, not seeing. Just the shining blur of him against the maze of dusk and morning. I moved my arm, letting the pistol tilt, to miss him, and fired direcdy. In the same second, he also fired at me.

  I heard the shot. I heard a tearing sound.

  There was an impact. It threw me over and the earth slammed against my shoulders.

  This then, was this death? No, he had not hit me. No.

  Into the white shield of sky, the elongated dark silhouettes of men came stooping. I lay under water and looked up at them. They wavered and were folded away.

  The pain was a spike driven into my arm. There was a rawness in my chest. Ah then, he had hit me. The left arm. I should be able to continue to write. Someone held me, as I lay along the ground, my head was supported. Russe? No, Russe was not with me -

  I opened my eyes and the surgeon leaned forward. He peered at me. How insignificant and human were his eyes. "There is nothing I can do," he said to me. "You are a dead man. You comprehend me?" Then, he raised his glance a short way and said to someone, "You have your satisfaction, monsieur. You will forgive my haste. Good day."

  He rose up once more into the sky and was gone. They were all gone. There, across the grass, a solitary figure stood, in dark livery, and on a leash, a black dog rippled in and out of existence, a phantom thing, and beside it, another. Their black eyes stared at me. They scented blood.

  Who was it held me, then, my head on his thigh, the blood staining his white coat?

  "Is it you?"

  Not a word came out of me, I thought, but he seemed to hear.

  "I'm above your City laws," he said, "and so not afraid to stay."

  "To be sure of me. Where - am I hit?"

  "In the heart. An astonishment you still live."

  I lay above the agony. I could not see him, only the red hair and the red blood, soaking across the skirt of his coat.

  "Take the ring," I said.

  "Not yet."

  "When?"

  "Presently."

  The tears ran out of my eyes and I did not feel them, or the grief. All my days reduced to Presently.

  "Go now," he said to me. His beautiful voice, it gleamed, like darkness. "You can hardly remain."

  "I haven't any last words," I said. "They must invent them for me. Someone must. Dying is like the final moments of the carnal act, I suspected so. The intimation, the galvanic tremor that foreshadows it, then the unavoidable giving way, the surge, the sinking. Yes, I was right. Did I die before, to know it?"

  But I had ceased speaking long ago. My lips were fractionally parted on the words I had not whispered. My eyes were wide. And then his cold hand came gently to my face, and closed my eyelids down, carefully, as a mother might brush a leaf from the face of a sleeping child. And I was dead.

  The bird was tapping on the inside of the shell. I heard the sharp beak, its noise grated on me. Tap, tap, tap.

  Be quiet. Let me think.

  I was moving now, it was not unpleasant, there in the dark, to be moving. It was the boat, surely, for it was a wooden thing. Hush then, you need only lie still, and let the rocking lull you back asleep.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The bird kept tapping at the shell. It sensed daylight. It wanted to get out.

  But I did not want the light, only the peaceful dark.

  Then the boat jolted, Charon making an error with his oar, or the Styx was choppy today. Well, I might open my eyes, might look to see what this country was like, after all. My eyes would not open yet. Well, there was no hurry. They were shadowy, the river banks of Hades, not much to gaze at.

  My thoughts, unable to lift my eyelids or operate any part of my body, swam up and down within me. Some sensation had returned, for I felt the wooden planks, and the touch of my own linen against my skin, and my own hair.

  Then abruptly th
e boat fell down. It fell and hit the bottom with a smack, rolling me about, making me move my hands and feet and head as I could not myself.

  Thereafter, cessation. And then a reverberating thud against the black air above me.

  It was the sound of a spadeful of soil flung in on to my coffin. I had not reached the shadowlands: I was still alive; and alive they were burying me.

  I tried to shout. I had no voice. I was not afraid. I lay in the dark, and listened to the earth thudding in to cover me up.

  This was a foolish thing. I had only to depart. He had told me, someone I had known, he had said to me, Go now. It was so close, the Shadow, the River, so near in all its vastnesses. Anything was possible, there. How had I lost my way.

  Tap, tap, went the bird. More earth slammed down. Tap, tap.

  When the burial was complete, and the last vague shakings and thumpings of my world had ceased, the vagrant thought in me composed itself. Though the bird continued to irritate me by random flinty pecks, the sheer comfort of this state allowed awareness to be reabsorbed. I abandoned the sensations of my outer skin, and sinking inward again, I glimpsed the threshold I had lost, quite suddenly, so accessible and near - and in that instant the bird's beak ripped through the shell like a knife.

  I screamed aloud and my eyes flew open. My hands flew up, and took hold of the flimsy botched coffin, and broke it. It shattered around me and the earth poured in, and like a fish leaping from some depth of water, I drove myself upward. I exploded from the pit in a fountain of blackness, soil and stones and splintered wood. Almost asphyxiated, I kneeled in the broken grave, retching and coughing and choking for air: all the horrors of birth.

  The moon rose later, as I was lying there. Next I heard bells telling the hour. Where was I? Some ruinous cemetery, with a little church. A coffin of plywood, and the diggers anxious to be off and drink the money from the job. A pauper's makeshift grave; the only reason I had got out of it.

  What city was this? Was it Paradys, or some other place? Did Paradys exist? It had been a dream, maybe.

  The moon was so cold, staring in my face. It made something glitter, too, lying near me. It had come up with me from the earth, a silver nugget of some sort. I took it in my hand. It was blunted and tarnished, but surely it had been pure?

  To leave the vicinity I had to claw my way through brambles, clamber over fallen tomb-stones - a deserted corner. When I came to the church, the door was firmly locked.

  As I stood there, I thought I saw a white greyhound rush across the cemetery. What was it chasing? I turned to see.

  Then I heard ordinary voices, and some light began to come, weaving through the thorn trees. Two men appeared, gallants going home from some feast, by way of death's garden. They were drunk. They saw me, and exclaimed. The one with the lantern came up to me, leaned over me by the church wall, holding the light high.

  "Now what has been happening to you, eh?"

  My voice would trouble me. I spoke very low.

  "As you see, something unpleasant."

  "Well if your sort will frequent such spots. Why are you dressed like that? Some brute made you, did he? The rotten scoundrel. What else did he do?

  He put his hand on my neck, his fingers into my hair. He leaned hard on me. Did I remember these things? Oh yes, long ago.

  "What's your price?"

  They put the lantern on the ground among the weeds. The first one had me the first, urgently. Then his companion took his turn, and time. When they were done, they left me a handsome sum of money, and as they were buttoning their breeches, the first said to me, "You were lucky, in meeting us. But another night, better be more careful, sweetheart. Go on home now, and put your dress on." The other said, "If she wants to dress herself as a man, I've no objection to it." And he grinned at me before they careered away through the briars under the moon.

  I met an old rag-picker, an old bent woman, as I was leaving the cemetery. She stared at me, as the moon had done. "Oh, lady," she said, "oh lady you are in a fix."

  "I shall be better soon."

  "I thought it was a man," she said, "a boy. But there's grave-dirt in your hair."

  "Do you know," I said, "is there a monument near here - a monument of plague?"

  "Oh, not far. Don't you know where you are, girlie? Been looking for someone, I suppose, trying to dig him out again. Well, it's a sad world."

  "Where is this place?"

  "How should I know? Some place without a name. What's my name? What's yours?"

  "I - forget - my name - '

  "There now. And so it is with that place. All those nameless bones. The headstones weather and wear, if there are any headstones put for them."

  "Young men killed in duels are buried there."

  "Yes," she snapped, "and old ones, too, that ought to know better."

  She raised her threadbare body an inch or so, and held my hand as she pointed away towards the Obelisk Gardens. There were no rings on my fingers. She could only be jealous of my youth.

  I crept down the ancient avenue, there was such an ache in my side, under my breast. I pressed my palm over it. My boots were too big for me.

  Grass grew between the stones, which were pied here and there from the sheep that had been herded through the day before, to the markets - but to which markets, now? And the Obelisk? Yes, the Plague Monument, I had been asking after. I recalled it. Nearby was the house. The house would help me, perhaps, if I met no one on its stairs…

  Further bells rang in the City. I did not note the hour they struck. The night seemed in suspension, between dark and dawn affording me as much time as I should need to reach my sanctuary.

  And truly, like a temple's high altar it was, the house, the moon behind it, the aisle of the street blotted all through by shadow.

  Up the steps, and oh, the ache in my heart, I went so slowly, and leaned my forehead on the door. Not boarded up. But locked, as the church had been, and yet I had a key - perhaps? I rifled the pockets of my curious clothes, and found a key which seemed the one I sought. It entered the lock of the door, and mastered it with the formal goodwill of a handshake.

  A black chimney, the house, with the spine of the stair ascending. Familiar scents were dying. New smells of vacancy. With the turning of the seasons, damp would come, beetles would eat the wood and mice gnaw through the walls. The house would collapse at last like a dead tree.

  I climbed, sometimes stopping to rest against the bannister. My debility was luxurious. If I wished, I could fall down and lie there. Who would ever come to disturb me? Yet I must reach the top of the skull, the attic. Why was that? Someone had left me something -it must be collected, for it was mine.

  The attics, when I did reach them, had a familiarity I had missed in the remainder of the house. For instance, I remembered reading the books lying about the floors, and hiding in various parts of the hoard. I had often ridden the rocking-horse. It was on one of these rides, it seemed to me, a child of perhaps nine or ten, that I made the decision I did not want to live as a girl or woman. There had been a contrary example constantly before me, a snow-blond male child of my own age. He had taunted me and provoked me. Always copying him, I was never quite successful, while I remained female. Eventually I took the logical step. I altered. I became what he was: a boy. And later I remained masculine as I grew up. Here I was still in both their clothes, the garments of the blond Philippe, and of the young man who, until very recently (but how recently?) had been myself.

  Presently I opened the press where Philippe had stored articles of his mother's wardrobe. She had been a tall, slender woman; we were of a size. The clothes would seem strange to me at first, as my voice had done. But that would not linger. (The fortunate mode of Paradys had outlawed any but the lightest corsetry). My body itself was a garment only partly recognised. There was a deep stain on the breast of the shirt, but nothing on my skin over the heart. The grime of the burial, too, had been shaken from me; it was mysteriously and satis-fyingly gone, which was as well, for th
ere would be no water left in the cisterns of the baths, no soaps in the jars. But here were ivory-backed brushes for my hair, and the pearl-handled nail-clippers. How did I seem now?

  My night-sight, sharpened by immersion in the ground perhaps, had been good enough for my wanderings and seekings so far, but, as I bound my waist with a sash, I had an urge to regard. There was a candle in the stand I located and lit with matches from a discarded male pocket. Holding my light, then, I went towards the one round unbearded window at the attics' end. There was no other mirror.

  And in the black panes I saw my dim reflection, a young woman with a cloud of long and curling hair reddened by 'Martian' henna. Nothing amiss with her, just a faint mark to the left side of the throat. I returned immediately to the press and took a woman's lace stock, and wrapped my neck and breast in it.

  I had just filled one of the mesh purses with all the left-over items of my male pockets, when I heard, four storeys below me, the house door grate, hesitate, then thunder open.

  All the house clanged like a bell, roof to cellars. A fine trembling like a fine dust was left in the air.

  Then came footsteps, jumping, stamping, running and stumbling up the house, just the route I had come, but headlong and precipitate.

  I took my purse, and the discarded apparel of Andre St Jean, and walked across the attic softly, as the other footsteps blundered nearer, shaking the building to its roots. I left the candle burning on a stack of volumes close to the rocking-horse - as .t passed the beast, too, I put a hand on its hindquarters and set it going vigorously. There was a large Italian chest by the window. Lifting its lid, I threw in the clothes, the purse, and got in after them. Here I was again, in my coffin. I lowered the lid of the chest, and the door of the attics burst wide with a crash.

  There were two arrivals. They paused as one. Then, through my wooden crate, I heard:

  "Look at the candle! And the horse prancing - my God, someone has been in this room."

  "But no one is here now."

  "They say it's haunted, this bloody place. How not, the things that were done here? Oh, perhaps."

  I knew both voices. What were their names? One deeper than the other, heavy as if leaden.