The Secret Book of Paradys (75 page)

Sobbing in agony on his bed, Cesar de Venne plotted a revenge upon all mankind, but first and foremost upon the only one of its numbers he could hope to reach, hapless Grisvold.

To this end Cesar had sworn his sister to secrecy and collusion, for he was determined now that Grisvold should suffer and he, Cesar, go unscathed – although in Cesar’s opinion, “If he beat me like that again, I’d die, I’d die in front of him, and serve him right.”

Cesar’s sister had not entreated Cesar to reconsider what he meant to do. She was flattered to have been included in the villainy, which would involve her saying that she and her brother had been together during a particular time. She did not like the idiot either, and did not, naïve as she was, truly grasp what they were about.

Neither of them knew, indeed, exactly the nature of Morcara’s room in the old tower. All the firm information they had ever gleaned was that the tower was unsafe and full of rats, therefore to be avoided. But too there was a sort of rumoring among the servants, which everyone had somehow garnered, including Cesar, and including Grisvold, that a female ancestor had slain herself there and haunted it.

“I’ll make him go up,” said Cesar, “into the tower. Perhaps he’ll meet the ghost. That’ll show him.”

Given some supernatural choice, Cesar would doubtless have preferred to send his father to this shock and horror, but only Grisvold was available.

“You’ve always wanted to know what these words say,” said Cesar to Grisvold the following morning, when they met in the garden behind the kitchen. The words in question were engraved in the wall, and related to the shrubs and vegetables grown beneath, their order being strictly adhered to, since various poisonous items also willfully came up there. Grisvold had a strange kind of lust for reading, limited to things suddenly come on or seen rather than to the mystery of books. “Well, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you slowly, so you learn, and then you can go in and say them to your mother, and won’t she like that, won’t she be proud?” Grisvold, who had been fooled this way on another occasion into saying something obscene before his mother, for which he was beaten, had already charitably forgotten that. He stared at the words in the wall. He was still pale and sweaty from his latest thrashing. He said, gently, “Tell me.”

“Not yet. You’ve got to do something first. Something so I’ll know you’re brave. Because you weren’t brave about the well, were you?”

“Mam says thee lied, there ain’t no monster down in it,” said Grisvold, doubtfully.

“Of course there is,” snapped Cesar, “and she’s impertinent to say I lie. Don’t you know you make a monster strong by being afraid of it? We all go to the well as if it’s nothing to fear, and then the monster can’t do anything. But
you
–”

Grisvold was abashed. He did not protest that Cesar had not explained before this salient point.

“Now,” went on Cesar, “I’ll let you prove you’re not a coward another way.”

“How’s that?” said Grisvold.

Cesar told him.

“But there’s a hant in the tower, thee knows it,” said Grisvold. “And the door’s boarded, and the top door’s locked.”

“The boards are all loose on the bottom door,” said Cesar; they were. “And I know where the key’s to be got.” He did. Prolonged observation of his father, his father’s routines and concealments, a study made like the other before him at school, perforce (know your enemy) had led Cesar one day to notice an enormous key that seemed constructed from stone, which hung in the west wine cellar. As it was not the key to the cellar itself, Cesar had pondered on it and decided at last it had to do with the west tower. He might have been wrong, but he was not wrong, and therefore once Grisvold had been got to take the key, peel off the rotted boards, and enter the tower, with Cesar, someone was in a position to undo the door of Morcara’s room.

Cesar’s plan was to remain the far side of it, and to bolt at once, so adding to Grisvold’s terror. He would then return secretly into the house, and to his sister’s company, where, if questioned, they would both declare their unity in a project to do with the pressing of plants, and encyclopedias.

As for Grisvold, anything might befall him.

The chosen hour was dusk, when the area of the west tower was unfrequented, Cesar supposed at his preparatory work, and the servants busy with their supper.

That Grisvold might disobey Cesar’s orders crossed no one’s mind. Least of all Grisvold’s.

He stole the key and had it in his grasp when Cesar approached him in the twilight under the tower.

Most of the boards had already worked away from the door. Grisvold’s inopportune brawn had soon removed their vestiges. The warped outer door also gave before it.

In the gathering of the dark, as bats flitted over the yard, they stared together, these bad companions, up the stony corkscrew of the stair.

“It’ll be pitch-black, it will,” said Grisvold.

“No, I’ve brought a candle.”

They went in by the base of the steps, and Cesar lit the candle with a vivid splutter from the big match.

A bleak and grim place it was, the vein of the tower, all fissures and rats’ nests, the steps dank and pocked with ancient stinking rains that had come through and collected there. They went up, Grisvold first as he had been told to do. The candle flung great wheeling arcs that seemed to topple the stair, so they clung to the unsafe railing. Cesar was already unnerved and had a want to fly constantly. But Grisvold’s chittering fear sustained Cesar. Helpless in his own world, Cesar wished, godlike, to see to what depths his subject’s fear might go down.

At the top of the spiral was the vast timbered door, girded by iron, and with the great iron lock that had been established some two hundred years before.

“Try the key,” said Cesar firmly.

Grisvold hesitated, shaking and muttering, and in that instant Cesar beheld that some message had been scratched in the wood above the lock. “Wait,” said Cesar, and shone his candle there.

“What do it say,” gabbled Grisvold, sweating violently and shivering all over. “Thee tell me.”

And Cesar, without properly thinking, read aloud the words some admonisher had inscribed there, that the warning not be lost (who that was was never learned; everyone currently in the household disclaimed it).

All you who dare to enter here will die
.

Grisvold tried to turn, and Cesar struck him lightly and correctively, another lesson learned from Papa.

“
No
. Do you want everyone to think you a ninny and a coward? Open the door. Open the door and prove you’re a man.”

Grisvold bleated in abject terror. But he turned back to the door, got the key into it, and by dint of his strong hand and wrist, forced the door to give and so swing wide.

Cesar too had waited on this. He was half petrified, and yet his reason had not deserted him. The warning cut in the door concerned entry to the room. As for
looking
, he would allow Grisvold to do that. Cesar crept, stiff with fright, back down two or three steps, and so he never saw, never chose to see, what the room contained. Obviously, bones, for the dead woman who had laid the curse had prevented anyone’s ever shifting her to hallowed ground. There she must have sat, propped in her chair, in the desiccated ruins of her gown, and with the eternal diamonds still cold and bright upon her. Worse than a ghost, very likely, the actuality of mortal death.

Above him, where the candle held high in Cesar’s hand could reach, and where the dusk faintly came through the chamber’s broken window, Grisvold stood quaking, and noiseless now, staring at something which was undoubtedly Morcara’s skeleton. And the Devil, who but the Devil, made Cesar whisper loudly, through nausea and panic, “
Go in
, Grisvold. I dare you to.
Go into the room
.”

And Grisvold, like a stage magician’s doll, took some unflexing cloddish steps, and went into the room, into the room of Morcara’s curse, and was there perhaps the half of one minute, before coming out again. And standing on the top step, the doorway of the room behind him, Grisvold looked down on Cesar his tormentor, and said to him, “It’s death to go in. It says so. And thee made me. Thee killed me.”

Then he dropped flat with a thud that seemed to disturb the foundations of the tower, and did not move, and Cesar fled, throwing away the candle as he did so.

There was, as the brother and sister described it, a deal of fuss. For Grisvold’s mother went to look for him, and then some of the grooms went, and they found him halfway down the stair of the tower, where, somewhat recovering, he had crawled. He was carried to his mother’s room, and there on her bed he raved and burned, so the doctor was called from the village. But by morning Grisvold was dead.

Then all the old truths of Morcara’s room were brought out shamelessly, and Cesar’s father went up alone, shut the door, and locked it. And coming out, gray himself as the stone, he set about ordering bricks and cement to seal the tower’s lower door forever. A fortnight later this was done.

As for Cesar, when questioned he and his sister adhered to their pretense. They were not believed, but neither was it feasible to disbelieve them, for that must be to accept that two children, below the age of twelve years and of good birth, had perpetrated something evil.

Presently Cesar was sent away to school, where he was subjected to all he had dreaded, and worse, and might have felt, if he had thought there any need, to have expiated his sin. Mademoiselle de Venne paid in other ways for a crime she soon shifted totally to her brother. The copious diaries of her girlhood contain only one reference to Grisvold’s death, as follows:
Cesar once did, in childish ignorance, a very wicked thing, and made me lie for his sake. I have no luck, nothing goes right for me. Have I too been doomed by Morcara’s curse
?

When they had finished their story, the two mummified objects at the fire fixed on Rendart their glassy eyes. After a few moments, the young man sighed. That was hardly response enough.

“What do you say to it, eh?” demanded Monsieur de Venne. And reaching out almost absently, he rang the bell for the stoat-faced maid, since his brandy decanter was empty.

Rendart sat considering. He had rather astonished himself by being deeply offended. Not only at the appalling viciousness of their childhood personas – which still in some form persisted, flutter about
poor Grisvold
as mademoiselle had, and make intimate confession as had monsieur. But also at the insane stupidity that had preserved the pair of them, to this very night, in the crediting of Morcara’s curse.

It was true, Rendart would have liked to punish them, but sternly he had put this idea behind him. Then he was only left with the much harder puzzle of how to bring them to their senses in a tactful and open-ended way.

At length, after several quite harsh or insistent promptings from monsieur and mademoiselle, and after the brandy had been refilled by Pierre, Rendart spoke.

“I take it, the lower door of the tower is still bricked up?”

“What else?” flared Monsieur de Venne.

“I have to tell you,” said Rendart, “it could be unbricked tomorrow, and the remains of Morcara Venka removed for burial. That might allow her peace. Perhaps you might feel easier.”

“God have mercy!” cried Mademoiselle de Venne. “How could it be possible?” she said. “No one can enter that room and live.”

“I’ve heard the words of the curse on the room,” agreed Rendart. “But I wouldn’t put any faith in their effectiveness.”

“Haven’t you had proof enough?” grated monsieur, recharged with brandy fire. “Morcara herself. The man who broke in the door. And bloody Grisvold.”

“Yes, I’ve heard what you’ve said,” murmured Rendart, “but it seems to me the first man who rushed into the chamber by accident rushed out again in horror, missed his footing, and fell quite naturally, if unfortunately, to his death. Poor Grisvold, from what you say, was subject to undiagnosed fevers, which may have been linked to an inflammation of the brain. He had also been recently and savagely beaten in a manner, dare I say, the awful beatings given monsieur perhaps did not approach. Add to that a superstitious and overwhelming terror, and I must suppose his latent disease erupted and carried him off. As for Morcara,” added Rendart determinedly, as alcoholic waves and pale flappings threatened from the fire, “I rather think she took her own life. From what’s been said of her she would brook no denials. To live her life without a man she genuinely had come to desire would have seemed to her dramatic spirit an imposition. Neither man nor God should tell her what to do. So she shut herself up and concluded her existence with poison.”

“Ridiculous!” roared monsieur.

“Not at all,” said Rendart. “Mademoiselle has herself assured me the
garden abounded in dangerous and venomous plants; I myself spotted three or four. You picture Morcara in her ball gown, with flowers in her hand. Probably they were one of the deadlier species, and she ate them to effect a swift dispatch.”

A space of wordlessness followed this statement, during which the fire and some clocks ticked away the minutes. Seeming to understand what they did, it was Mademoiselle de Venne who quickly if hoarsely broke the silence.

“But remember the words, Monsieur Rendart. They are scratched to this day on the door.”

“I do indeed remember them, perfectly.
All you who dare to enter here will die
.” Rendart paused, and let his pity for them both, even his pity of their nastiness, their evil, come back to him. He would spare them, he must. “Suffice it to say, mademoiselle, if you wish me to undertake the commission, I’ll see to it the tower is unbricked, the upper room entered, and the bones removed to holy ground. For myself and those I hire for the work, I haven’t any fears. I guarantee their safety – and their wages – and if you like, I’ll furnish proof of their survival for, say, a year after the reburial. I’ll even go so far,” said Rendart, with a sudden smile, “as to set up a tomb for Morcara Venka, at my own expense. Out of respect for her romance.”

They sat dumbfounded, glaring at him. They loathed his interference and yes, they would like him to perish of the curse of Morcara’s room; they would give their permission.