Dark Dance (11 page)

‘Easier said than done. There’s no transport. The only telephone for miles is broken.’

‘I see,’ he said. ‘They do mean you to stay.’

His face had drawn inward. The eyes were as she had seen them first, still and shadowed.

‘Didn’t you know?’ she said.

‘Oh, I expect I guessed. You’ve no choice then. You’ll have to remain.’

‘For what?’ she said quickly.

‘For whatever happens next.’

‘Don’t spy on me again,’ she said. ‘You have no right.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘rights.’ He said, ‘Put a chair under the doorknob if it worries you.’

‘Would that keep you out?’

‘I’ve seen you now,’ he said. ‘I’m satisfied.’

‘That the family line goes on.’

‘You’re mine,’ he said. ‘A natural curiosity.’

‘I’m not
yours.
How dare you say something so inappropriate. I’m nothing to you. My mother was nothing to you.’

‘There you are correct.’

‘Then you can’t make any claims.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘No claims at all. You’re still mine. I created you.’

‘Fucking nonsense,’ she said stonily. ‘You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that.’

‘I meant to make you,’ he said. ‘I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me. I knew she would. When I went back to her that night I knew what I’d find.’

‘All her life,’ said Rachaela, hearing the false desperation in her voice, ‘she hated you and what you’d done. It was a constant struggle. She made me pay for you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without expression. ‘But it’s over now, isn’t it?’

‘Why didn’t you leave me in peace?’

‘You’d had your peace long enough.’

‘You bastard,’ she said. But he was not her father. He was a man out of the night who held her there, not touching her, and the fire climbing the log, gilded both their faces. She could not leave. She rose. ‘I might as well go to bed.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sleep well, Rachaela.’

To her consternation tears scorched into her eyes. He spoke without tenderness, and he was nothing to her, and yet it was as if, across the twenty-nine years of her life, this simple and insincere wish had lain in waiting, gathering true sentiment.

She had no reply.

She took the lamp, and left him in the firelight, while the great cat hunted somewhere through the pitch-black night.

Through the lilies and the sunburst, she regarded herself in the winged mirror.

She was naked, framed in black hair.

Her white body, creamed of all its down, only the sable fleece at her groin. Long and slender, like something carved from a bone, but full-breasted, the little sweets of the nipples dilute-rose. A blue-green shadow reflected on the whiteness, something undersea.

She stared at her body, what she could make out of it portioned by the mirror, trying to know it as her own.

Rachaela had never seen her mother’s nakedness. Her sagging defeated frame had stayed swathed in zippered day clothes, and nighties and tent-like dressing-gowns. And once the knock on the bathroom door and her mother’s harsh frightened voice, ‘You can’t come in.’ Her mother had been scandalized that Rachaela slept naked. In the same way she had been scandalized at the frequent hair washing, and Rachaela’s habitual lateness at her places of work. All the same, all condemned.

Her daughter was a being from Venus.

She had bought Rachaela sensible nightdresses and marked the shampoo bottle and set the alarm clock in her own bedroom to wake her so that she might come in and shake Rachaela awake. ‘They won’t stand for it. Do you know you used almost the whole bottle when you washed your hair? Why don’t you get it cut and set?’

A lily stood up against Rachaela’s navel, its green glass stem bisecting her pubic fleece.

She turned from the mirror and got naked into the bed.

She had placed a chair under the doorknob.

This was foolish. He had seen her.

She did not sleep for a long time, and twice muted steps went through the passageway, and she thought of the great cat slipping past, brushing the door with its flank, something dead in its mouth.

Rachaela was standing at the base of the tower.

There was no light, but glass lilies grew between the treads of the stair, which was scarlet, moist, littered with feathers.

He stretched down his hand to her.

She would not take his hand.

She climbed up and up the tower. The ascent was endless. All the while some terror was tight in her throat. She meant to reach him and was afraid to do so.

At last she came into a wide round room under the cone of the roof. To her amazement there were windows of clear glass. They showed the woods, the cliff and the sea.

Adamus, if so she must call him, was not there. The room was vacant. And Rachaela began to cry.

❖

The picture in the corridor window was a dreadful one, a lion slaughtering a sheep, and its vivid colours were strewn everywhere by the excluded sunlight.

Rachaela was searching the house aimlessly.

The corridor was very long and it seemed to her it led to the library, but she could not recall for certain. Sylvian would be busy in the library, crossing out the words, or Alice would be there, scratching with a hat pin at the globe.

She saw the Scarabae hounded over the face of the globe. Burning houses glowed behind them as they fled in the snow, and the snow was red from firelight.

Someone was following her.

Was it the cat? How would she deal with the cat, alone? She would not dare to touch it.

The corridor was so very long. She had passed so many doors, some of which she tried, and they were locked.

What was behind the locked doors of the Scarabae?

She heard a rusty panting behind her, a giggling like that of a naughty child.

Camillo.

Was this a cause for relief? Lost in the byways of the house with a madman snuffling behind her. Did he have the sword?

The corridor turned, and rounding the turn, Rachaela saw it ended in a door.

The door was bound in black iron. Could it be another way into the tower? Locked also then.

At that moment Camillo’s steps became pronounced, flapping down on the carpet behind her. He was running. Running, this mad old man, to catch her up.

Rachaela shrank against the wall and naughty insane Uncle Camillo sprinted by. He giggled as he passed her, and ran up against the door.

He had a key, and with it he unlocked the door, and an oblong of blackness appeared, night in day.

Camillo bowed, holding open the door for Rachaela on the oblong of night.

She lifted her eyelids and saw her room in the frenzy of the window of the temptation. She had only been dreaming again. Uncle Camillo had not opened the way into the tower. But she had not dreamed her encounter with Adamus. He stood out as solidly as a lighthouse in the sea of nightmares.
Sleep well
, he had said.

In the library, Sylvian was busy.

He did not glance up from his work. Rachaela stood and watched him, placing the ebony ruler precisely, dipping the pen into the ink. Drawing a neat thin line. Another phrase gone. Another thought obliterated.

Rachaela went up to the table and, pulling out the chair, sat down opposite to him.

‘I wish I could make you stop.’

‘No, Rachaela. I can’t stop. This is necessary.’

She sat watching him. A desire to scream rose in her. She damped it down. Only another mad old man, Elsewhere these books thrived and were read. But perhaps not. Some of them were decayed and ancient. The only copies left in the house of the Scarabae and Sylvian ruling them through.

‘Why am I here, Sylvian?’

‘You belong here,’ he said, not stopping even now, but just a flash of the spiked eyes.

‘Where should I look to find Camillo?’ she asked.

‘Uncle Camillo goes here, there and everywhere. A will-o’-the-wisp.’

‘Uncle,’
she said. ‘Is he your uncle, Sylvian?’

‘The previous generation.’ Like Anna, Sylvian said. ‘He’s very old.’

Two hundred, three hundred,’ she hazarded lightly, her heart beating in her side.

‘More, more,’ said Sylvian absently. ‘Uncle Camillo remembers the flight from the last city. Another country. Long ago. I don’t recall the date. I was a baby then.’

As in the dream, Rachaela saw in her mind’s eye a burning house. A mob shouted and smashed the coloured windows with stones.

‘Tell me your age, Sylvian.’

‘Oh I forget.’

‘How old is Adamus?’

Sylvian ruled through a sentence, lovingly. Seen across the table the face of the page had assumed a beautiful matrix quality from the carefully spaced lines.

‘Adamus is your father,’ Sylvian said.

‘So he tells me. How old?’

‘You must ask him. I forget these things. Time drags on, yet it goes so quickly. A year passes like a month. A day becomes a year.’

‘And you won’t tell me about Camillo.’

‘He moves about the house. He followed you.’

‘Not any more. He’s lost interest.’

‘Anna may know,’ said Sylvian.

‘I never see Anna in the daytime. Hardly any of you, apart from your servants. What are they? Some lesser branch of the family?’

Sylvian had ruled over the final page. He put the book aside and drew another towards him.

Rachaela could no longer watch.

She asked them, those Scarabae she came on, where Camillo was. She believed in the augury of the dream. Camillo would show her the way into the tower. She could then break in on him as he had done on her. Beyond that point she did not venture. It was only that she did not like her powerlessness, the sense of which was growing on her.

Then again, the dream might be and probably was a wild illusion. She misled herself. But she did not know what else to do.

She went down to the kitchen. She meant to make her inquiries of Cheta, Carlo, Michael, Maria. None of them was there. They too had vanished.

She guessed at their whereabouts, the caverns of unlocated bedrooms, or narrow cells where they stood upright in the dark, propped on the walls.

The house was the tomb. These day-fearing things did not need to creep into a box. The double doors and sugar windows contained them.

She re-found the corridor with the drowning baby in the reeds and the stuffed horse. Camillo had left no traces, not even the armour.

She passed the painted mirror again. More hills had appeared. And the goat in the woman’s belly was indeed the result of one picture beneath another.

In the room of the dusty piano and unstrung harp someone had rested on a peg a yellow guitar. The window in the music room, which she had not looked at before, revealed an orchestra of beasts: tigers which played flutes; an elephant in charge of an organ; a crocodile with a viola. Perhaps meant to induce laughter, the window seemed decidedly frightful, like an hallucination in infancy. Somewhere else there had been a Noah’s Ark awash on the flood and two golden unicorns left behind. But the lion and the sheep were a product of the dream. Unless it was some clue her sleeping brain had provided.

Maybe Uncle Camillo did not know the way into the tower, had forgotten, or would not say.

A lion devouring a sheep
... the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb... the young lion and the fatling together.
... It would be like them to have such a window.
And a little child shall lead them.

A child. Where would a child go?

Rachaela raised her head. The naughty child Camillo—playing overhead in the playroom of an attic.

There was sure to be one. Dust and cobwebs and antique toys of the Scarabae when they had been young, centuries before.

She had seen no evidence of a way into an attic. She did not want to go there. If Uncle Camillo was there with his games and keys to the house, to the tower, he must stay undisturbed.

Rachaela waited in her room until she judged by the clocks the hour of luncheon had arrived. Then she went down to the dining room.

Somehow she had known and was not amazed on opening the door. The table was full. Not ten places but surely sixteen. She stood in the doorway and counted them aloud. They raised their old heads of silver and white wire, glanced once with their gunshot eyes.

Rachaela went to the head of the table, which was empty, stood there, and said off all their names that she had heard of, could call to mind, randomly, yet like a schoolteacher checking attendance:

‘Anna, Stephan, Peter, Dorian, Sylvian, Alice, Unice, Miriam, Sasha, Eric, George, Miranda, Livia—’

And when she ceased, like good children, the three she had missed spoke up shrilly:

Teresa.’

‘Jack.’

‘Anita.’

About the room were the other four, Michael and Cheta, Carlo and Maria. The two women were serving cheese omelettes, Carlo saw to the fire, Michael laid down salad.

Their behaviour was insectoid. They had gravitated to this spot like running water. Only Camillo had not come, the one she wanted. Camillo and Adamus, age and youth—for to them Adamus was a boy, and she—she was a baby.