The Secret Book of Paradys (8 page)

Out in the hallway, I gazed up at the curving stair, and for a moment I seemed to hear the piano being played, above in the salon, but the music only rang through my head.

“There, monsieur,” said the kindly placid cuckold. “Now do as I say. Return this evening, or I’ll send for you if there is any improvement. But that is of course unlikely. It is improbable.”

As he finished speaking, an awful, unearthly, etheric cry tore through the house. The shock of it threw me round on him again, almost taking him by the throat – “What in God’s name –”

“That is her dog, monsieur. Howling. The dog knows, monsieur.”

It was not until I had left the house, not until I was on the hill again, that I comprehended what I had all this while known. It was I who was the murderer. In the blissful whirlpool of adoring, death-wishing delirium, I had never thought
I
might be the poison. Or had she foreseen – was it that which
made her hold me off? That fear which finally brought her to me?

I had no strength now. None. But I would return in the evening, duly as he said. Come back and die with her.

The dim piano continued to play within my skull, and now and then the dog howled there, or voices spoke to me, as if into my ears. The borders between unconsciousness and waking, between dream and reality, had long since given way.

Above the door of the
Cockatrice
, the sign of the scaled, snake-headed cockerel turned its look on you and blasted you to a stump. Then you went inside to the damp and greasy cave, where sometimes only the spits turned, or coloured lanterns were lit in the ceiling, so it became hell. Today it was gloomy.

They had all avoided me, the intellectual riff-raff of the tavern. I was a plague-carrier, I was accursed, and they knew it by instinct. No one I had ever known well was present. I guarded my corner like a wounded dog, and nobody drew near. A meal was served me I did not eat, and wine. Sometimes I wrote a line or two on pieces of paper I had found in my coat pockets. Generally I slept. Time had stopped. The day would not move, it sat there on the sills of the slit-eyed windows. The bells, the clocks, they continually kept striking the same hour, three o’clock, over and over. When would I be done with it?

Then I woke and there was a new shadow running with the spilled wine from the bottle. The windows had pulled closer and day been shoved out. I poured the last glass and took a mouthful. The room was unusually silent, and two men in black were before me by the table. How long had they been there? Were they there now, or did I conjure them?

“Are you real then?” I said, with a flippancy that oddly stirred me.

“You are to come with us,” one said to me.

In the cock-snake’s cave, eyes glittered out on us. We were an event.

“Sergeant Death, are you arresting me?” I said. “Who sent you, and why must I go with you?” My heart had stopped, I could not feel it beat. “From von Aaron? Is she dead?”

“We do not belong to the Baron. But that is the house. Get up, monsieur.”

“Or will you make me?” I said.

“If necessary.”

“It will not be.” I put down the glass. My heart flickered, it had only been sleeping. I did not feel as I had done. I was alert, I was expectant. What had happened? Oh she was alive. That must be so. She was alive. She had sent them for me. Yes, they were hers, these creatures white-faced in their black. “We’ll go then,” I said. “as quickly as you like.”

I went out jauntily with the death’s-heads, one on either side. Plainly, I
was a prisoner on my way to execution. Yes, the silken rope about my neck, the dagger of pleasure driven through and through.

People turned to look at us on the streets. The infernal escort, the happy condemned. They did not prevent me when I whistled a popular song of the City, or when I plucked a spray of flowers off a bush growing in a wall, and insanely twirled it. Sometimes I spoke to my guards. I asked them if they had had difficulty in finding me. Not much, they said, my haunts were known. Now one spoke, now the other, but each seemed to have use of the same voice.

From a height, I glanced behind me once, and saw the river, a scimitar of pure metal, white-hot, as the City lapsed in the shallows of the dying afternoon. A boat or two moved on the water, the brotherhood of Charon was out early.

Then they took to the alleys, avoiding the Observatory Terrace, and going around at the back of the tall four-faced clock on the hill, not wanting me to be seen by the influential or the fashionable of the district.

My excitement increased. Sex and anguish were mingled in it, doubt and nervous delight. Most of the straw was swept from the street. No man sat to bar the gateway of the house. I hurried up the steps and rang the bell, and they came on behind me, the two black dogs who had hunted me and brought me soft across the City in their mouths.

The door was opened. I burst in, then stood looking about as if I owned the property.

“If you will go up to the salon, monsieur,” said the domestic.

I ran up the stair. I had not felt the paving stones under my feet throughout our walk here. Twirling the flower-spray, I thought, None of them either conducts me or follows me. I am to go there alone. Something pristine in that. Only the purified accolyte may enter the presence of the high priest.

The salon was full of the last flare of sunlight, its blinds raised. All the dazzling brilliance centred in one flaming entity, before the fireplace.

Antonina stood there.

It was not Antonina.

A man in a white satin coat, all in white but for the long black loosely-curling hair that was the Freedom mode of Paradys for both male and female. Her black brows, perhaps a little more thickly accented, her heavy-lidded eyes, heavily and blackly fringed, blackly burning in the pale triangle of the face that was larger and cut with a bolder hand, and as hard now as white granite.

He looked at me, out of a different distance, for he was some inches taller than I. He said nothing, did nothing, only the left arm, leaning on the mantle, the left hand with a pair of white kid gloves in the long fingers – her hand exactly, grown a size or two, a man’s hand, elegant, ringless – that gave a little flick, a little omen of gesture.

I cannot say how long this moment lasted, while he looked at me, and I at him, seeing her, losing her.

Gradually I became aware that von Aaron stood to one side, and two other men with him, advisers or lawyers, or merely witnesses. But even then, I could not look away, look at them. My arms had fallen to my sides. They weighed on me like lead. The boom of my heart shook me. And the black eyes went on burning into my skull. That was all there was.

Then the Baron spoke soflty, maybe even timidly, from the wings.

“Monsieur St Jean. I can’t prepare you. The news is bad. My wife – we lost her a few hours ago. I see that you already knew it. Well. This gentleman –” He did not go on, I sensed him slip away again, only his mute gaze on us.

Then the man in white spoke to me.

“I am her brother. Perhaps that is obvious to you?”

“Yes, quite obvious.”

He nodded, as if I had done something clever, a clever trick.

“And you,” he said, “what are you? In my eyes, what are you? It chances,” he said, in his exact and musical voice, “that I arrive here and find this. Her husband,” he did not glance aside, “will do nothing, but, Andre St Jean, I am not insensible to my sister’s honour, or to the cause of her death.”

She could not die. I could not proclaim as much.

The light and the dark came with the crashings of my heart, ocean on to rocks.

Well, let him get on with it.

“What do you say now?” he said.

I shrugged, and let the spray of flowers fall to the floor as I did so.

“I will give you my name,” he said. “It is Scarabin. Anthony Scarabin. You got hold of a certain ring, I believe. A ruby scarab. Yes, well you will give it back, I will take it back tomorrow, after I’ve finished with you.”

“You mean to kill me,” I found I said. “Will it be so easy?”

“Nothing,” he said, “easier.”

He moved from the hearth. He walked across to me, and with his gloves slapped my cheek, so lightly, it might have been an idle caress. He smiled. Her mouth, changed. And the skin, fine and fresh as hers, but more dry, and roughened by shaving.

“What will you have?” he said.

“Whatever suits you.”

“Pistols, then. That is the vogue in your city, I think. Pistols at dawn. Can you come by a gun? How splendid. Will six in the morning be convenient?”

“Most inconvenient. I’m not by choice an early riser.”

He raised one of the black brows at me. Cold, as once she had been.

“Don’t play,” he said. “Answer me.”

“I will accommodate you,” I said.

He said, “The choice place, I hear, is the wood below the Observatory. Bring your seconds,” he said, “I shall have mine.”

No one else spoke a word. There was not a noise in the house. Only the sunlight seemed to scrape faintly, as it crept down the windows.

What next? I need only turn and leave the room. It had all been arranged, and now there were things to do besides. How mundane this was. I had not predicted the deadly ordinariness of death.

I would not request that they let me see her body. There was no body. All that remained of her was here, was
him
, this other.

I felt neither exhilaration nor fear. As I walked from the salon, I heard him give a contemptuous little wordless sound, like a note or a chord of music, low down in the register.

Don’t play, answer me
, he had said that before to me, on Sacrifice Hill. He would know that I remembered him. But then, on that former occasion, when I would have held out the ring, he turned and was gone to his hunting. All this had had to come between. Besides, then, he had only been a demon.

Satanus est
.

I walked away into the city, and found a notary. By his reluctant candlelight I set my affairs in as much order as I could, and allocated such possessions as might be of any worth. I had never thought I should do such a thing, or that there would be any margin to do it. For I would be assassinated on the street, or perish in some stupor. Nor was there left me a Philippe, unreliable, impassioned, to take the residue of my writing to the printers, if he ever would have taken it. Would it concern me, in hell or in the grave, to recollect my unpublished works? Who would remember me in a year or two? But in two centuries, who would remember anyone, and in a hundred hundred years, all the paper would have transposed to paste, and dust. All the words, all the concertos, all the shrieking and the shouts, lost in the void of life. Oh, let it go.

The business with the gunsmith did not take long. The barber’s took longer.

It did occur to me that perhaps I might also seek a priest, and make to him my confession. But in the end, I had visualised it so thoroughly I seemed to have done it. And I did not want to go over all my sins again. Instead, I composed an ambiguous letter to Russe. I did not call on him. I wanted no one with me when I died but Death himself. He should surely be sufficient.

Having paid my landlady, and told her only that I was going away, I went to bed.

At first I woke several times, choking and panic-stricken. Then I slept deeply. I knew I would wake at the four o’clock bell, and so I did, with a mild surge, as if cast up by a wave upon a beach.

Because I was to die in public, last night my vanity had determined it had better be as beautifully as possible. And so, last night, the barber’s shop, with
its hirable bath, and then my hair washed and curled and freshly laved in “Martian” henna. From the launderers’ came the shirt with all its ruffles starched, the linen and muslin immaculate (Philippe’s coat), and so on. Even to the boots my vanity went, and had them polished up again with a rubric molasses to bring out their red.

I had put on the ring. He would have to take it from my hand himself.

The gunsmith’s man had been told he must make his own way over to the duelling place, with the case of pistols. But he knew where to go. As Scarabin had said, it was the preferred venue for those who wished to kill each other. The Senate winked at such illegal fights. Who could say what went on, at sunrise, in the thick woods below the planet-searching dome of the Observatory, which saw only space and stars?

The sky looked nowhere near light when I went down the stairs and out into the City. All Paradys seemed to lie dumbfounded under a high black lid. Not a window awake. The street lamps glimmered, drunk to their dregs; many were out. There was a tingle of frost on the air.

Two or three times I paused to drink from a small brandy-flask, a worthless metal thing from which, for a while once, I had never been parted. I was glad of it now. All natural feeling was gone, yet the world seemed far too real, and so insistent. It rubbed its bony sides against me. To die had no glamour left, because the practicalities of its arrangement had revolted me. Yet I wanted it more than ever, with a kind of hunger, and a desperate dread of its complications.

It appeared to me I wandered more than walked, but I had left plenty of time to get there. I even went along a little way by the river, but no slender ominous boat came drifting from the mist.

Then, as I began to climb up into that gorge of masonry, up towards the Observatory hill with the woods lying dark upon its lap, a kind of quickening came again, just as on the stairway of Philippe’s house. A terrifying brilliancy, a sumptuous fear. Not the reality I had just stumbled through, but the true reality, dramatically plunging its beak and talons in my vitals, and bearing me up on its wings.

The vault of the night had swung higher, and eastward some rogues had set fire to the sky. I came to the railings and got over them, and walked up the mound of frosty turf, and into the trees.

In the hollow, where it is done, they were waiting. A group of three men there, and there another group of two, where the folding table had been set up and the cases of guns put out. The surgeon sat nearby on a camp-stool, recognisable from his bag beside him, his arms crossed, indifferent. Up on the other slope of the hollow, a couple of carriages stood under the trees. They would have come in by the lane that ran past the Observatory, and
would go out again by the same route. I wondered if I should be packed into one of them, or simply left lying, as sometimes happened.