The Book of the Beast Read online

  The earth gave way and the room broke off in shards. She clung to him and he kissed her, a kiss of serpents, his tongue in her mouth.

  His hands were those of a saviour, supporting, rescuing her in tumult, but also the hands of one who would destroy her, finding purchase on her body, ripping at the laces of her gown -

  She had unleashed desire, the carnal entity. His breath burned on her throat. He held her so tightly she herself could not breathe. He bore her backwards and the hard floor was harsh under her uncushioned slimness. His weight pushed her down. A sore sweetness shot through the core of her breasts as he drew on them with his lips. Almost delicious but partly horrible - almost a torment - and then a tickling and

  probing between her thighs so her instinct was to evade - but he would not allow her now to evade him, and then came a terrible pressure, like that of a thunderbolt trying to cleave her, and she felt she would be burst, but there was only a shrill tearing, like a broken string.

  She saw his face as he invaded her. She did not know him. He bore upon her, his skin engorged with lust and his eyes opaque and perhaps unseeing. There seemed no longer any contours to his face. He did not behold her and was unrecognisable. His hair tossed about him, shaggy as the mane of a beast, lank and dark with sweat as if with blood -

  The thrusting of his body within hers was a punishment, a horror that was nearly an ecstasy, and far worse for that.

  Helise heard herself moaning and pleading in pain. The fire-making action of his loins scorched her. She struggled, and the ghostly ecstasy surged in her again, and she no longer cared what had mounted on her, what killed her there on the ungiving ground. It was not Heros. It was some hideous thing, some creature of the Devil, torturing her in Hell for all her sins -

  She heard terrible sounds rising in her throat, and then the spasm hurled her apart. She was screaming. It would never end. In animal fear she let go her clutch upon the excruciating peak, and fell away.

  Only then was she revolted, finding herself on the floor, ground into the tiles under the weight of him, a hard mass of flesh that still moved upon her, still thrust mercilessly inside her.

  He was lifting himself up, his head thrown back -

  On the arch of his throat, the weltered light caught a dull sequin that all at once flashed, and then another, and another -

  Helise lay pinned under his racking body. She stared at the altering skin of his throat. It was coming out in tiny jewellery slates, which ran together. His neck was scaled now. It was all a perfect tesselation.

  Something scraped along her breast. Her head rolled and she saw a black claw retracting from her behind a thread of blood.

  She could not scream. Her screams had been spent. At that instant, the quake of his crisis rocked through her, and it was he that cried out. It was not the cry of a man.

  A whirling clotted the air, a fume of candles shaken by a gale.

  The sword of flesh unsheathed from her. She was filled only by pain. Something rose up, many miles high against the ceiling.

  She did not want to see. Her eyes refused to close. The shape of a man, but the face, the head…

  It must be a mask, a visor - it was a bird. A bird's head, formed from a streaming mosaic of scales, but for the blackish carved beak, the thin black worm of the tongue… the eyes were green bulbs. There was no intelligence in them, yet there was being. They lived.

  Helise lay on the floor. She had no breath, no reason. Her heart had stopped, her blood was frozen cold. Yet she saw.

  The thing moved from her, left her. It lurched across the room. It came upon the fireplace and there it

  squatted, and then suddenly leapt. It was away up the chimney. It was gone. PART THREE

  The Jew

  I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht,

  A wicked whisper came, and made

  My heart as dry as dust.

  -Coleridge

  The Jew had laboured into the night, poring over the antique scrolls, the tablets of wood, the books bound in vellum or horn. Haninuh the Scholar, so they called him. The Jew's House they called his dwelling near the corn market. There was no ghetto in Paradys. No Jewish area even. Those Hebrews who inhabited the City were of the travelled kind, accustomed to a gentile world. Some had committed themselves to the Christian faith, some had given over God entirely in their intellectual venturings. The Jew Haninuh was not precisely of these orders. Then, too, other than the Jewish mezuzah, his door was guarded by a Grecian head of Hermes. Called "Scholar", Haninuh was reckoned to be versed in mysteries.

  It was not rare with him, to spend the hours of darkness in study. Tonight, however, he had felt restless, and was unable to keep his mind on his reading. The cause of this unease was not personal. Rather it was that kind of nervousness particular to certain animals before a storm.

  Haninuh neither sought to quell his discomfort or explain it away.

  About two in the morning, he left his books, and went up through his house to a pavilion he had had built on the roof.

  Here he found, kneeling on a bench before one of the pavilion's open shutters, a small girl-child of no more than eight years, arrayed in an embroidered shift and quantities of curling black hair.

  "Now, Ruquel," said the Jew, "what are you doing there?"

  But Ruquel, who was his daughter by a slave woman long since laid asleep in the earth, only answered, "What a bad night it is. What shadows there are."

  With these statements Haninuh could not argue. He had been aware for some while that his child seemed to have inherited a sensitivity to occult things; he had already, for her protection, in simple ways begun to prepare and train her.

  "Yes, my Ruquel," he agreed therefore. "It is a night of some meaning. But perhaps you'll trust me to keep watch in your stead?"

  At that the child nodded, and getting down from the bench yawning, kissed her father, and returned to her bed.

  Haninuh then took up his vigil in the dark, going slowly from one window to another of the six-sided pavilion. All the shutters hung wide on the close black night, and from this high vantage, at this unlit hour, one saw clearly the brightest stars caustic above Paradys. Below to the northeast wandered the river, coils of which, leadenly glimmering like a dragon, were partly visible between the roofs. Southwards on the heights stood the ghost of the great Church.

  What could there be in this dark like so many others, which set the hairs electrically upright along the body?

  Haninuh tensed, and leaned slightly forward, his hands upon the uprights of the window. Keen-eyed, he had seen something moving, away along the south-west scallops of the City roofs. This in itself was not bizarre. A cat might be hunting there, or a robber. And yet something in the manner of the movement did not suggest either feline or man.

  Haninuh the observer saw again a curious flapping lunge, like the wing-beat of some huge raptorial bird. Of too large a size -

  And whatever went about there in the night was capable, it seemed, of running up stonework, folding itself over housetops, and sliding to the street below like water flowing from a jar.

  Haninuh was abruptly very glad he had sent the child to her bed.

  Half-unconsciously he murmured, "From the visions of the night, when deep sleep sinks on men, fear came on me which made my bones to shake, and then a spirit passed before me and the hair of my flesh stood up - '

  Haninuh fell silent. The apparition had poured suddenly from view.

  There was then a long second of the sort in which, as they said, death might pass over; the space between two breaths.

  But then, from the black hollows of the City there tore a frightful wail, a wavering shriek so truly appalling that for a moment the Jew doubted his ears.

  The night seemed splintered, and dropped back in pieces. An abysmal quiet staunched the wound of the single cry.

  Every nerve a quill, Haninuh poised to see a hundred windows lighted, a hundred people dash out on the streets.

  Nothi
ng occurred.

  Like a thrown flint, the grisly screech had gone without a trace into the swamp of night. If any others marked it they did not act.

  Only far off a dog or two howled, nearby a rat scuttled. Presently the notes of Laude drifted from a convent by the quays. The stars swung noiseless overhead.

  Some drunkard has been throttled in an alley, or some old score settled with a knife. One had witnessed nothing.

  The Jew turned from his watch, listening intently now to be sure his own house stayed peaceful. It did. One must be grateful for that. For the rest, it was the world's way.

  The vice which tuned and strummed the night had not let go, but only slackened somewhat. Yet Haninuh was weary. Spared a revelation, he could descend now and sleep, as a soldier slept between his watches.

  "Blessed be the Lord at our lying down and blessed be He at our rising. Into thy hand I commend me, my redeemer, O God."

  Next morning, Haninuh awakened with a feeling of oppression. This did not surprise him, nor was it due to lack of sleep. He spoke a prayer of thanksgiving for the new day; in the house above he heard the beaded laughter of his child.

  Having some business near the upper markets, Haninuh went in that direction, southwesterly. The route shortly took him into a square with a public fountain. A crowd was gathering here, jostling and exclaiming, and it was impossible to proceed.

  "What is the matter?" Haninuh asked of a man in the crowd that he knew, a cobbler by trade.

  The cobbler turned to him hotly and said, "Something happened during the night. A murder in the gate of the tanners' yard. An apprentice found the body not an hour ago."

  "There are frequent murders in the City," remarked the Jew. "Just exactly. But not like this."

  "Why, what is its novelty? Murder is murder."

  The cobbler was about to speak when a party of the Duke's soldiers rode into the square and breached the crowd.

  Unable to go by, or to get closer, Haninuh waited impassively.

  A stillness was settling. The soldiers had grouped at the tanners' gate. Suddenly a woman cried out wildly: 'Oh! Oh sweet Jesus!" And there was a small commotion as if perhaps she had fainted.

  Rumour ran like a current back through the crowd. Men mouthed it in each other's faces. It came to the cobbler and to the Jew. "The throat and eyes all gone."

  "That's what I heard," said the cobbler, complacently afraid. "What does it mean?" said Haninuh.

  "Some animal with the madness must have done it," said the cobbler, "ripped out the lad's eyes and his throat - and the whole body's in ribbons, and the entrails expressed. He was a poor weaver's assistant coming late from his work."

  "Did nobody hear his cries?"

  "No. None at all. A street woman said she thought she heard a yell, between the second and third hour. But one cry can mean anything, even enjoyment, begging your pardon, sir Jew. Then supposedly if it had him by the throat, he couldn't cry again."

  Another man close by, in the apron of the tannery, morosely said, "They'll want to push the blame on us. We've a feud with the weavers' guild."

  Yet another man said, "Only a monster could make such injuries, a unicorn, or a tiger."

  Soon the body had been covered and removed. The Duke's soldiers grimly warned the crowd to disperse.

  Able to continue on his way, the Jew noticed, under the tanners' gate (the place at which, last night, he had watched the bird-like thing pour down the wall) a black slur on the cobbles, and trampled in it, one pointed, broken shoe.

  Violent death, as Haninuh had remarked, was not unusual in the City. Many mornings carried a small cargo of corpses along the river; the alleys of the lower bank were often paved with cold flesh.

  Even so, this other death, which thereafter began to be a feature of the nights of Paradys, though frequently un-reported, undiscovered until its unique signs had been obliterated - this death was a different death. It was a rending, debauched death. It bore an older mark.

  While locks and bars were checked on and enhanced in many a house, the house of the Jew acquired (they said, those that spoke of him) less obvious safeguards. For example, from the street had been noted some bunches of herbs hanging in the narrow lower windows. For the Hermes at the door, it was freshly cleansed, and had been anointed, too, in a pagan way.

  The City, where it knew, discussed these matters.

  Otherwise Paradys went about its business, as it had always done. As do all cities, like ancient beasts, which, on a strong soiled hide, only idly scratch the little embers of disease.

  A month had moved over the calendar and was gone. The Jew walked up into the Scholars' Quarter of the City, along the canals of aged libraries, and by the new university. He went to visit an elderly rabbi, a black-robed old lion, who dwelled near the river.

  They sat together in a low-ceilinged room that smelled of books. "And you tell me you watch every night, Haninuh, from your roof?"

  "Every night without fail. Sometimes I detect some disturbance. Never the relevant one. I've seen nothing since the first night. And on that night I do believe I saw a thing, a thing I can barely describe, let alone envisage."

  "Is it not," inquired the other, "dangerous for you to watch in this manner? Do you have, I think, a child in the house, a daughter of your handmaid who is dead?"

  "My Ruquel is well-protected. I've seen to that above all else, by forms you know I can command." "Ah, then. But for yourself?"

  "This is strange," said Haninuh. "There is that in my blood which recognises this thing as a natural foe. The memory of our forefathers in me contains some glimpse of it, so I reckon now. And have been

  attempting, from scrolls and parchments I possess, to learn the source."

  "Now I will relate," said the old rabbi, "a story of a recent death among the gentiles here. Perhaps you will not have heard of it, for the affair is smothered."

  He then regaled Haninuh with this:

  A young girl of good family, closely kept, had let slip to her maid that a gallant lover had begun to court her. He must have seen her on her way to Mass, for this was one of the few times she was allowed from the house. He approached near midnight and somehow climbed up the wall, perhaps by means of the ivy which grew there. Then he attracted her attention by scratching on the shutter. Naturally, the damsel did not go to the window, but, having an imagination, she had already decided on the cause of the nocturnal visitation. Sure enough next morning she found, on opening the shutter, a scrap of paper fixed there with

  a thorn. Some ill-scrawled words of love (they were later seen by others) and a line of poor poetry, confirmed her in her triumph.

  The maid, another silly girl, resolved to help her mistress in the interesting adventure. She spied from a lower window the next night. Sure enough, the ardent lover again climbed to the upper window, and getting no reply, except maybe a stifled giggle, left again a slip of paper with a couplet. The maid for her part was able to attest the suitor was most agile, though rather odd in his mode of ascent. For the rest,

  she had made out the slim figure of a young man in a cloak who, for his protection, seemed to be wearing some kind of eccentric mask. Later too, in the hideous aftermath when she was called to account, the maid detailed this mask more fully as that of a peculiar bird.

  For several nights more, the fun and games went on. Until at last, moved beyond reason, the damsel dared to open the shutters, hoping for a look at her love.