The Secret Book of Paradys (110 page)

“You bloody liar,” said Tiraud.

“Don’t waste your breath,” said Desel. He took the money bag and began to walk up the road toward the loom of the asylum, which, from this juncture, looked like a weird mansion or fortress, probably romantic, in the half-light
and mist.

Tiraud made after him, as if afraid to be left alone and standing in the world.

The carter eyed their retreat.

“Mad things,” he said to his horse. “Madder than their charges.”

As he turned the cart, the sack rattled under the cover. It lay amid sacks of potatoes and swart cabbage, and once he would have taken more care to ensure it was jumbled, the unvegetable death, among his other goods. But this did not matter much now, for the way he went by, into Paradys, was watched by those with whom he was on friendly terms.

It was a winter morning, and the dawn star was very radiant, sending fine shadows away from the standing things of the landscape. A bleak scene, the road and the black trees that periodically flanked it. Here and there a shorn field. Presently there would come gaps where the earth swept down, and the City might be glimpsed, curled around its river and smoking as if deadly on fire. The morning fog preempted the sense of smoke. A silence pushed in against the cart.

“Mad people,” said the carter of cabbage and death. “The world’s mad. Take me. I could be snoring in bed. Take you, horse, letting me fasten you to this cart.”

Something moved in the cart’s interior. It might be potatoes tumbling through a sack.

The carter cocked an ear. He knew the noise of potatoes.

“What’s that, eh?” He did not look back. In his particular trade, he had heard the stories, the corpse that sat up, perhaps wearing the face of a loved one. But the carter had no loved ones. “Better keep still,” he wheedled. “I’m taking you somewhere lovely. I am. To help in the pursuance of knowledge.”

There was a sound now like a knife slitting a sack.

The carter mused.

“Just stay quiet,” he said.

Then something rose up in the cart, and dislodged the cover. Because the dawn star was behind it, its shadow fell across the carter and his lean horse.

“Christ, now,” said the carter.

He turned slowly, and looked back.

As he did so, a darkness fell through the air, and then a pallor, and something stung his cheek. It was a snowflake. And in the cart, on top of the sacks, was a huge rock of a bird, black-caped like a nun, with a breast of ice, and an amber blaze against the blade of its beak, which resembled – or might have been – obsidian.

The carter did not know what this creature was, although he had seen it
represented somewhere.

In the silence it towered over him. A smell came from it, the odor of spirits, killingly sweet. During those moments, before the carter could in any way respond, the reins jerked in his hands – the horse began to run.

As the carter clung to the reins and shouted, the darkness seemed to swirl about his head, and the only picture that was with him was of that stone beak like a dagger plunged between his shoulders. Yet he had no choice but to strive with the running horse.

Snow dashed in his face like pieces of a broken moon, a moon made of dead white flesh.

The horse grew tired suddenly and stopped still, the cart juddering and slewing to a halt behind it. With a loud cry, the carter turned again then, and saw the fearful bird thing had vanished from the cart. There instead strewn on the sacks, were the corpses of the dead girl and a little swathed thing that might have been anything small and once alive.

“Now,” said the carter, “now, now, now.”

He glanced over from the cart, through the flurry of the snow, and saw a hollow place into which they had almost fallen; the horse had stopped on the very brink. Below was a black pool not much larger than a well.

Touching the dead did not bother him, but now he would rather have not. Even so, it must be seen to. The money was lost, but he had cheated them anyway.

He hauled the girl and her fruit off the cart and flung them over into the hole of water. They went without a note, the water closed, and they might never have been.

When he was a mile farther off, the snow ceased. He gazed back and saw it falling still among the uplands and the raped fields. The trees had the shapes of birds waiting motionless, but for what?

Marie Tante moved with her lamp along a night corridor. She was searching for Moule, who always had gin upon her person. Sometimes Moule would slouch up to the room beside the chamber of the Waterfall, and sit behind the glass partition. Marie Tante had often come this way to find her. There beside the lever they would stare into the dim inverted bathtub, with its hanging serpent and the horror chair beneath.

At the unlighted corridor’s end, Marie Tante found that she had lost her way. She was not where she had believed she would be. For years she had come in this direction and by this route. She checked in surprise. Here she was on the other corridor, which led to the little cells where newcomers were confined. How could this have happened?

Marie Tante had no imagination. Cruel things stirred her obscurely, but
most of the nooks of her brain were closed up, or vacant. It might have been said she was a being who should never have been allowed to live but rather sent back at once to be refashioned, for her life had never gained anything for her, and to others, often, it had been the cause of atrocious evil, misery, and pain.

Lacking intuition, Marie Tante did not consider that something bizarre had occurred, although she knew she should not be where she was. She did not think anything had misled her, let alone that sections of her plane of existence had
shifted
. No, she merely retraced her steps, and got again onto the path toward the Waterfall.

Then however, as she was turning the corner, her lamp cast up a gigantic shadow on the wall high above her head.

Even Marie Tante was arrested.

She stopped, holding the lamp, and looking.

Then she looked back, over her shoulder.

Far off, at the passage’s other end, something moved. How its shadow had come forward, and so through her lamp, was a mystery. No other lights burned in these corridors when they were not in use.

Marie Tante could not be sure what she had seen. She took it for another warder, a tall man, and called. But the shape was gone now and the shadow also.

She went on and opened the door into the room that overlooked the Waterfall.

Something black rose up in a lump from the floor.

Moule balanced in Marie Tante’s lamplight, hugging herself, pulling faces. On the ground was a smashed bottle. So much for the gin.

“What’s up, you fool?” said Marie Tante.

“
Something’s out there
.”

“Yes, old Big Feet wandering about, or that other one, Bettile’s fancy.”

“Oh yes,” said Moule, “oh yes.”

“What did you think it was?” demanded Marie Tante, irritated by the lack of drink. She toed the shards. In a pool of liquid, the label floated, sodden.

“Do you remember,” said Moule, “when we cut off that girl’s hair?”

“What girl?”

“The one who died.”

“The ginger slut? What of it? You got your share of the money.”

“That baby. It was a strange color. Like her hair, the color.”

“Tiraud and Desel will have seen to that.”

Moule mumbled. She glanced into the chamber of the Waterfall, and squeaked. “Look, Marie.”

Marie Tante looked through the glass, where her lamp vaguely shone, and
saw that fluid was running from the hose above the chair.

“You dolt. Why work the lever now?”

“I didn’t. See, it’s in place.”

“Some fault in the apparatus,” said Marie Tante. “I’ll report it.”

The smell of the spilled gin was very intense.

“Let’s go away,” said Moule, spinning about like an unwieldy top.

She clutched at the lamp, but Marie Tante kept a firm hold on it.

“It’s the drink,” said Marie Tante, “it’s addled you.”

“Oh, it could be. Let’s go back, where the others are.”

“Yes, they may have some gin.”

Moule followed Marie Tante closely as a scared child, along the dubious, quiet, and unlit passageways.

Down in the courtyard, they passed a pile of furniture, wrecked chairs and parts of tables. Marie Tante seemed to remember it had been stacked up elsewhere, but she did not dwell on this, for obviously the pile had been moved.

The night was bitter cold.

“It’ll snow,” said Moule, staring up at the bright black hardness of the sky.

“So what? We’ll keep warm.”

The lunatics had been propelled, for the period of the dark, to their segregated dormitories. In one of the annexes off the vacated rooms of straw, the warders had a fire going. Into this area Moule darted and went shivering up to the hearth.

Desel and Tiraud sat among the men, smoking their pipes and gambling with the cards. Some of the wardresses too had a game, but Bettile was making a shawl, working the smoky wool cleverly, with harsh sharp twists. The hands of Bettile, which had inflicted so many blows, so much hurt, which had struck down Hilde when she would not parade before the actors, and later held her while another shaved the girl’s scalp, now forced into the shawl some awful psychometry. Only she, on a holiday, could have borne to wear it.

Tiraud got up abruptly. He had been uneasy since this morning’s transaction over the sack.

“Ah, he’s off to his harlot,” said one of the men. “Give Judit my kiss. Tell her I’ll be by.”

Tiraud spat. “Judit? That vermin. I’m only going to stretch my limbs.”

“Don’t take cold. The women’s pen has ice hung from the windows.”

Tiraud was away, removing in turn the lamp Marie Tante had brought in with her.

The room was sunny with firelight, a merry picture, dear friends gathered at a hearth.

There was the drink also. They portioned it out, starving predators with a kill, who must protect each other for the strength of the pack.

The fire described them, their faces and their hands, the angles of their bodies.

And one by one, it described how they flinched and touched at their cheeks or necks, and then gazed up.

A faint whiteness … fell softly through the room.

“Snow,” said Bettile, shaking it from her shawl. “The roof’s leaking. A fine thing.”

“How can it leak? There are the rooms above.”

The snow fell. It fell thickly now and swiftly. They got up. It sizzled in their fire and in the lamps, which flickered.

Then the snow stopped, and only the wet spots were on them, like the marks of God.

“Volpe must be told. Some crack in the wall –”

Marie Tante took a swig from her mug. The gin was hot and laced with sugar from the can on the table.

Moule crouched over the fire. She was thinking of a sister she hated, who lived north of the City, and how she might go calling on her very soon.

“Judit, you filthy cow. Open your legs.”

The queen of lands beyond Sheba and Babylon lay under Tiraud. Her face of a damask sphinx was exposed to the ceiling of the women’s dormitory, and so she saw the snow begin to fall at once. Judit smiled.

“Like it, do you?” said Tiraud. “Dirty whore.”

Judit raised her slim hands into the snow, and Tiraud finished in her with a series of unmusical grunts. As he left her, he stood up into the snowstorm.

On all sides the women were sitting up or getting on their feet. They made little noises like birds greeting the morning sun.

“What is it?” said Tiraud. His eyes were wide. He knew perfectly that the snow was falling in the room, out of the ceiling itself.

“Penguinia,” said Judit calmly, also getting up, her unclean skirt dropping to hide the vulnerable wound of her body. “The country of ice is coming.”

The women were romping now, in the snow, holding out their hands to catch it, rubbing it on their cheeks and eyes. The snow gleamed with its own light, defining the room with a beautiful silver deception, so that the meanness and foulness disappeared, the perspective of pallets and buckets and walls went on forever, becoming hills and distant tumuli. And the women looked young and fresh, lovely, tender.

Tiraud tried to flail the snow away from him like a swarm of wasps. He heard Judit say, “It’s warm as roses.” He rushed toward the door, grabbing up the lamp, flinging himself outside.

“What is it? It’s some trick. Some insane trick of theirs –”

And he heard, from the men’s dormitory, a sudden ululation, not the howls of distress or terror that generally went up there, but a full-throated, gladsome baying.

“Desel –” said Tiraud. He ran down the building, down a flight of stairs. A few lamps burned below, and he raced toward the light, for the darkness was not safe.

The snow had not been warm, not to him. He shuddered and sucked his frozen fingers as he ran. Of course, it had only blown in through the broken windows. What was the matter with him? Crazy as the stinking mad people.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairway, amazed at himself. And from the shadow just beyond the lamps, came a statue, walking.

Tiraud identified the creature at once. Laughable and absurd. And yet. It carried with it the soul of the darkness, and all the fearful majesty of some god of the Egyptian underworld. It was the spirit of the gin bottle, and only through that could Tiraud, ignorant of all things but self, have identified it: The Penguin.

It moved as a penguin moves, in a lurching waddle, but very slowly, ponderously, like a juggernaut of the East, a mechanism that had the power of ambulation. It was seven feet in height, perhaps taller. On its white breast the smudge of foxy color. Its head black as stone, black-eyed, and its beak was made to be a weapon of death.

From the dark it came, bringing the dark with it, and went across the space, not heeding the man who watched it, paralyzed, and away again into shadow.

Tiraud’s legs gave way and deposited him on the lowest step. Here he flopped, not able for some while to recollect motion.

Then at last he rose, cuddling the stair rail, and next shot himself staggeringly off into the passage
It
had left alone.