The Secret Book of Paradys (78 page)

It had been so vivid, so real, something that awed her, for she was of course unused to the persuasiveness of dreams.

She had woken from sleep into silence. It was the silence, in the dream, that woke her. She went to the window, to see.

There was a moon, in the dream. It was very large, low, white. She knew, in the dream, she had never seen a moon of such size, and yet it did not frighten her. She thought perhaps it had drawn nearer to the earth, and that this must change everything, but in what ways she did not consider. Beyond her window a flight of steps that never before existed ran down to the garden, and over the wall was the City of Paradys. She had a curious sense as she looked at it, in the dream, of the thousands who, as she did, must have regarded it by night through all the ages of its sentience. She saw towers and hills, the loops of the river, and yet it seemed to her that its architecture was not as she had remembered, some buildings more ruinous or in better repair than she had seen them, and some not in the places that she recalled, even to the mass of the cathedral-church, which, rather than dominating the heights of the City, had drawn down into a valley of the river, as if it went there to regard itself in the water. Nowhere were there any lights, the moon had canceled them.

And then she stepped out of the window and onto the stair. She descended, and went across the little garden, which suddenly in the dream was full of palm trees, the giants of an African shore, ages old, their pineapple stems firmly fixed amid the borders of wallflowers.

Outside the garden wall, the street she had known since childhood glided into the City. Jausande walked up the street. It was very wide. On either hand, the buildings, with their peaked roofs and striped railings, seemed half a mile off. The road was paved with huge white blocks. The buildings too were extremely white in the moon, and where there were shadows they made a sort of network of black.

Jausande walked up the street she had known since childhood, which
went on for much longer than she remembered, between the moonlit white buildings fretted with shadow. She thought of two lines of a poem; she could not recollect who had written them. They moved in her head, again and again, as if they were a password for traveling the City by night.

A password to travel was perhaps necessary, for there was no one else out on the street, nor when it ended and she turned in to another, was there anyone there. No windows were lit. There was no sound at all. She wondered if she could hear her own footsteps, and then she listened, and heard them very faintly, for her feet were bare, and she had on only her nightgown and dressing robe. She realized that none of the street lamps was burning. Or perhaps there were no street lamps anyway. Astride the second street was an arch of white stone, skeletal and strange, with slender shining tines that rayed against the moon’s disk.

Under the moon, the City had become marble, had become another city altogether, with bone-white towers, with terraces like ice.

She passed beneath the arch, and entered a park. Tall trees of a kind she did not know clustered across the smooth gray lawns, and things moved among them, grazing, but she could not tell what they were and did not want to see them distinctly. Above the park rose a rounded hill, and on its top was an eye of crystal. This did not startle her by now, not even when it moved, scanning over the sky. The eye was beautiful, like a great clear jewel.
I am almost there now
, she thought.
But where
?

Behind the park, rising up the hill where the observing eye tilted and quested on its axis, was a dark wood. She went into its nocturnal velvet and fragrance. And in the wood, deep inside, was a light that was not the moon. And even in the dream, she pictured to herself a shape, a kind of being, there in the light. She could not be certain of anything about it, save that its hair moved and was alive, and that it was winged.

Jausande felt then the feeling that had come to her since adolescence, at dawn, or with the westering sunfall. She felt that beckoning enticement. It was now so fierce, so heady, poignant to the edge of pain. For here the promise, whatever it was, was terrifyingly at hand, here the wish could come true.

I shall have to leave everything behind
, she thought, and left her robe behind her on the bushes. And in an agony of excitement and abandon, a radiance of hungry fear, she began to run toward the burning center of the wood.

And woke.
Woke
. The shock – had been horrible. Like a fall, a faint. But she fainted into consciousness. She was in her bed. And that – had been a
dream. Which in a few moments more was nothing but a mist upon her, vague, not urgent, until now. Now, in the Labonne house, when it had returned with such power.

Jausande got up and looked about at the few books teetering on the Labonne shelves. Would the library of her father furnish her the poem from the dream?
The spider moon
–

Outside the window, the light ravished, darker and more lush, more blatant than before. The spider moon would not rise until eleven o’clock.…

The door opened, and Madame Labonne bustled through.

“My dear, how pale you are!”

“I’m unwell,” said Jausande Marguerite. “I must go home.”

“But Paul –” exclaimed Madame Labonne.

And being a fool, amiably misinterpreted the violent toss Jausande gave with her head, like that of a starving lioness distracted a moment from her kill.

Because she had always been amenable, Jausande had her way. She was sent home in the carriage, and Paul, arriving ten minutes later, was vexed. He hoped aloud Jausande would not turn out after all to be one of those women given to “vapours.” She would not. He would never see her again. None of them would.

Those that did see her the last, they were an assorted crew.

Her own father was the first of them. He found her in his library, and was mildly surprised, thinking she had been going to dine with her fiancé. All about Jausande on the table were her father’s precious books of poetry. She glanced up at him, like a stranger. And that was usual enough, for they would meet in the house rather than dwell there together.

“Papa,” she said, “I can’t find my poem about the moon.”

“There are so many,” he said. He smiled, and quoted parts of them. Jausande interrupted him. She spoke the lines from her dream. He frowned, at the interruption – which was unlike her – and at the words. “Now, let me see. No, Jausande, it isn’t a poem. What you have is a peculiar doggerel … from Pliny, I believe, the other Pliny.
Aranea luna plena
… As I recall:
The full moon, like a spider, lets down her light that covers the earth, as with a web, and there we mortals helplessly struggle, we flies of fate, until the night devours each one of us
–” His daughter rose. He said, with mild disapproval, “A very poor translation. Where can you have discovered it?”

“I forget,” she said. Then she bade him good night and went away.

And this was the last
he
saw of her, the pretty, unimportant girl who lodged in his home.

In the dead of the dark, that was not dark at all, for the high round moon
stood over Paradys at one in the morning, Jausande had let herself from the house. None of the servants witnessed this, but on the fashionable street outside, a flower seller wandering homeward from her post by the theater beheld a young woman with her hair undone, clad in a satin robe, and under this nothing, it would seem, but her petticoats and corset. The flower seller had, in her time, been shown many things. Jausande Marguerite in her robe was not the most amazing of these. Yet, she was odd, and the flower seller did not like her looks, and hurried away toward her burrow.

The City was not empty, nor especially quiet, even at that hour. In three more the sun would rise again, and the turmoil of the markets would begin; even now wagons were passing in from the country, while at the taverns and less salubrious hotels an all-night noise went on and the lights roared.

Near the Revolutionary Monument, two whores saw Jausande Marguerite and almost took her for one of their own. But as she went by, they thought otherwise. “Why, she’s had some fright,” said one. They stole up after her and asked what had happened to the lady, could they help her. But Jausande apparently did not hear or see them, and they fell back.

Perhaps through sheer accident, no police of the City happened on Jausande. Or maybe she directed herself away from the areas they frequented.

In a small park, near the Observatory, once a graveyard and still stuck here and there with an awkward blackened slab, a thief, resting from his night’s ingenuities, jumped up as Jausande moved by him. He assessed her fine robe and the sparkle of a gem on her finger. A somnambulist, he reckoned her, for so she looked to him. No one was near. He caught her up and walked at her side.

“Sleeping, are you?” he said. “You shouldn’t be out alone in the dark. You need Pierre to see you safe. Now, where is it you”re going? You can tell me,” he wheedled after a moment. His knowledge of those tranced was limited to an act he had once seen performed in the street, when a fellow hypnotized a girl from the crowd, whereat she would answer all types of lewd questions with a fascinating honesty. The sleepwalker, though, did not reply. Pierre the thief dogged her. She seemed about to go up into the cluttered streets above the park, where all manner of ruffians might be lurking. “Now, now, lovely,” said Pierre, “you’d be better off with me. Perhaps someone’s lost you? Perhaps they’d like to give me something nice for bringing you home?” And then he took her hand gently, to see if he could ease off the ring. It obliged him most kindly. It was new, a betrothal gift, and had not adhered to her flesh. Pierre slipped it in his pocket, and at that moment they had come out of the park of graves, into a winding alley.

Pierre later told his tale to his cronies. He was not ashamed, and did not
believe he had imagined what he saw. No one taunted him. The places of the night they trod were filigreed with weirdness. Each had some anecdote of a haunt, of jewelry with a curse on it, for, moving outside the law, they were exposed to lawlessness of many conditions.

The walls of the alley, which were the sides and backs of decaying houses, were hung with weeds. The girl moved between them, with her sleepwalker’s eyes still fixed inward. And Pierre loitered after. And then it was as if a curtain, which all this while had hung across the alley and the sky, shivered and twitched aside. And for two or three seconds, only two or three, Pierre saw the girl was walking in a forest of gigantic trees. It was like, he said, the world of a million years before, for he had seen paintings of such scenes in a museum. A primeval landscape, great ferns that swung into the upper air, and the stars there glaring and flaming, and the moon too big, too low. And maybe there was a suggestion of buildings, also, but not any that he had ever seen, either in Paradys or in any painting. He did not care for them, or the forest. But that was only for one or two seconds. In the final second, Pierre saw a sort of bubbling and glowing up ahead.

“God knows,” said Pierre, “what that was.”

The girl ran toward it. And Pierre ran the other way. He ran, and somewhere he threw the ring he had stolen over his shoulder.

“It was as if there was a second curtain behind the first. The first was lifted up for me to see, but the second was being
melted
away. I had my choice, to run or to stay and look and turn into a pillar of salt.”

Pierre, then, was almost the last to see Jausande Marguerite on her journey.

Her ultimate witness was a sleepless small boy in the window of a poor apartment near the Observatory. He saw a lady with loose hair mount a flight of stairs toward a narrow door along the avenue. As she approached the door it turned molten, it blazed and gaped – and the child hid his eyes but knew better than to cry, for his drunkard father would beat him, any excuse. And in the morning, the door was only a door, as it had always been.

The disappearance of Jausande made far less motion in the pond of the City than her re-emergence, later, from its river. There was no hushing that up. And the police, who had formerly tried here, there, and everywhere, gathered themselves to the narrow flat of The Conjuror. It seemed certain persons had once overheard a whispered threat offered by this man to Jausande Marguerite. He had told her that he could make her do whatever he wanted. She, and they, had laughed at this. But suppose –?

The flat was vacant. Nothing was in it but for the rats in the walls. The windows had not been ventilated for years. Clouds of dust billowed about.
The search extended itself, spreading like a ripple from Observatory Hill, beyond the rim of Paradys, out and away into the far bays of other cities. And like a ripple, growing less and less. Who had heard of him, The Conjuror? The very world seemed vacant of him, the rats busy in its walls, its shutters fastened, its dusts blowing. The curtain that encircled it closed
tight
.

T
here was one who searched about this graveyard, as we are doing, but more intently. He was looking for his lost love, who perished almost as a child. They had loved as children, uncarnally but surely, and she had been taken from him first by her parents, next by death. He did not know where she lay, save it was over some other’s grave, for she had been buried in secret during an epidemic of typhus. So he confused the authorities with tales of a buried treasure, a jewel, dropped in some grave, and uprooted all those of which he had a suspicion.

The jewel was really in his own possession. At length he pretended to find it and gave it over. A small price.… It was a black diamond, or some white pearl of unusual size.

By then he had unearthed his dead love. She was gone, she was bones, but he raised the skeleton and kissed the toothy lipless smile of the skull. To him she was beautiful still, fresh and childish, unwithered, let alone rotten.