The Secret Book of Paradys (89 page)

“Remember,” said Alain, smoothing her back, her folded wings, “if you leave me I shall die.”

But Owlsa lifted up into the sky, up and up, higher and higher until the light of the moon seemed to burn her out.

“Faithless. Lost,” said Alain. And he slammed the door of the cage angrily shut upon its riches.

Owlsa flew.

She flew across the tops of churches like palaces and churches like tem
ples. She saw the colored windows and heard the singing to God, which to her was like the sound of cattle lowing in the market, or the rush of the river beneath a boat. The river she saw also, its shining loops and flimsy bridges. It was as if she had forgotten everything. She flew above graveyards and parks. She saw revelry on the streets, where tables crowded the pavements and cold electric lamps were lit, for she was out very early.

She even flew about the Clocktower, and over the gaunt old house where Elsa Garba had had her room. But Owlsa had forgotten Elsa, and Elsa’s room was long since raped, the door smashed in, pin cushions thrown out in marveling disgust. A prostitute lived there now, as if in mockery, and her faint complaints could be heard to the music of the gramophone, which now played not Cassarnet but a tune with syncopation and a saxophone.

Owlsa flew and flew. She joyed in her freedom. The night was her tapestry, which she stitched with her wings. The hours were cast off her needles.

The moon turned thinner and gray, as if it might melt and reveal some shadow shape behind it, but it did not. Then toward morning there were only stars.

Owlsa flew toward the tenement that now contained her chamber of bars and beads, mirrors and flowers.

She came to the window of Alain.

She stood upon the sill.

The window was shut.

On the lopsided bed lay Alain in the arms of a young girl like a wilted chrysanthemum. They twined and groaned, and the girl sobbed, and Alain cried out in the way he had cried when Owlsa fed from him. Just the same.

In the cage, the camellias were dying.

Owlsa flew off from the sill like a cinder from a fire. She flew up into the sky, searching for the moon. She felt a frantic need to find the moon again, to follow it down to where it went under the world, and so she rushed with a rapid heartbeating of wings into the deathly west.

And the air tore by her, and the belfries and towers of the pitiless City that cared not even for itself. And as the wind rushed at her, she felt a peculiar loosening, at her face. It was as if a skin came painlessly away, and suddenly winged off from her. She saw it. It was black and feathered, tipped and rimmed with silver. It was the mask. The mask had flown from Elsa, in the sky.

And already and at once she felt herself changing. Her feathers were scoured away and she was only skin and bone. Her slender arms flapped meaninglessly, and her pale small hands. Her legs and feet weighed her to the earth. She fell.

And as she fell, she saw the mask fly on over the hill of heaven into the west, following the sunken moon.

Then she struck the ground. It was stone, and killed her outright.

She lay on a grave, on her back, all smashed. But her face was not damaged, and her face was the face of a beautiful owl-woman, with shining eyes yet open wide, and the long streams of her shining hair running off from her with her blood into the scythe-cut grass.

Those that came on her in the sunrise were amazed. They hid her quickly underground, knowing such things must not be thought of very much, for it was obvious she had fallen from the air.

But in our secret hearts we know: The moon is a mask; it conceals something that hides behind it, passing over the sky and watching us. What can it be?

Tired moons ask higher tides.

–
Zelda Fitzgerald

It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in gray mist. The sun had been invisible for years. The architecture of the City itself – decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns – was visible in shifting patches, or regularly to a distance of seven meters. So that, as Felion climbed the long stair of a hundred steps, his world sank away into a sea of fog from which a few ghostly towers poked. And above, the Terrace of Birds began to form around a single dot of light – which would be Smara’s lamp. That is, he doubted anyone else would have climbed up here. The unhinged citizens of Paradise were also sluggish and indifferent, obsessed with rituals and trivia.

Felion stepped off onto the terrace. Through the mist, the strange dim stone figures of bird-headed things perched on the balustrade, their long beaks moistly shining. In their midst, the amber lamp floated obediently in the air. Smara stood beneath it. Slim and blond as Felion, and wrapped in a sleek, pale dress, she stared at him with essential recognition. They were twins.

“I haven’t seen you for a week,” he said. “How are you?”

“Sane,” said Smara. “And you?”

Felion laughed. “We two,” he said.

He went over to her, took her hand, and laid it against his face. He loved her, but in the wrong way. Brother and sister, they were expected by their society to be incestuous, it was the custom. But then the customs of Paradise were wild and sometimes uncouth. The polluted chemical saturation of the atmosphere, which produced the eternal mists of Paradise and eroded the buildings, had influenced the minds that lived there. For some reason, Felion and Smara were not mad, at least not in the accepted manner. They had therefore no friends, no lovers. They had had an uncle, but he was gone.
Nevertheless, he was their reason for meeting at this place, for climbing up the hundred steps to his tilted mansion on the City tops.

“Do you remember when he brought us here?” asked Felion of Smara. “These bird statues frightened you.”

“That was your fault,” said Smara, “and you made it worse.”

“So I did. But you were the only one I had power over. We were just children.”

“I know why you wanted to come here,” she said. “But I’m not really willing. Don’t you think, after all, it would be an act of madness?”

“Perhaps. Isn’t that good?”

Smara looked away, down across the City. From the denser lower levels of the fog, the decayed towers of the cathedral rose. “Today it’s quite easy to see, the Temple-Church.”

“Yes. But tomorrow it may be hidden.”

“Don’t you think,” she said, “our uncle might have lied? We were children, as you said. I barely recollect what we saw.”

“I’ve never forgotten. I’ve dreamed of it for years. That wall of smoking
whiteness
–”

“No,” she said. “No, don’t.”

“You must help me,” he said.

“Why? If it
is
a labyrinth, it’s simple. One hand always on the left side wall, and it will bring you to the center. And the right side wall to return.”

“Then you don’t want to come with me to see –”

“Maybe it goes nowhere. Why should it go anywhere? He was mad, too.”

Felion gazed up at the bird things. He said slowly, “He named us as his heirs. That was straightforward enough. So we inherit this pile of stone, and we inherit the labyrinth, if it exists – and it does. And then there’s that rambling letter he wrote to us. The
rest
of the inheritance.”

“Suppose,” she said, “you and I are insane, like all of them. But we haven’t realized.”

He shrugged. She did not look alarmed – even, possibly, hopeful.

“We’ve done our best to act out madness,” he said. “What else can we do?” He took her hand again. “Let’s go in. Let’s see what the house is like, at least.”

They went over the terrace to the big door, and Felion spoke to it the numbers written in their uncle’s parting letter. The door opened, and a long dark hall stretched out, lined with marble abstracts, ending in a broad stair. High up, a round window let in the sinister light. Mist hung on the air.

They walked in, and for two hours they went over the mansion their uncle had willed to them. It was like everywhere else, no better, no worse, one with the other grand and rotting buildings of the City, bulging with furniture, art
objects, defaced books, and technological gadgets, which, usually, had ceased to function.

Finally they came down into the basement, and there they found the narrow door that neither of them, in fact, had forgotten.

“Shall we see if it’s still there? Perhaps it’s vanished.”

He told off the other set of numbers to the door, and when it swung away, he moved down the sloping floor beyond. After a moment, Smara followed him.

At the bottom, in blackness but for the glow of Smara’s floating lamp, was the odd little railway track and the carriage that ran along it. But the car refused to work. So then they walked along the track, between the blank walls, and so out into a kind of cavern, which must lie somewhere inside the hill, behind the hundred steps, and under the foundations of deserted houses.

At the far end of the cavern rose a white gleaming wetness.

It was another wall, but it seemed made, of all things, from ice. An arched entry led into it. Inside, only more of the whiteness was to be seen.

“Of course,” he said, “it would have scared you. You were afraid of winter, even though there never is a winter anymore.”

“It was the picture you showed me on that screen. The snowfields, and the frozen water.”

“But this,” he said, “how can it be ice?”

“It could be anything,” she said quietly. “
He
made it.”

Their gnarled uncle had claimed to be a scientist, a physicist and mathematician. That one day in childhood when he had brought them to his house, he had explained to them so many things that they had understood nothing at all. And then he showed them this.

It was a labyrinth, he said, built by him, that formed a connection between two worlds: the world of Paradise and the world of another city, similar but also different. In this other city the atmosphere was clear, a sun and a moon and stars shone down. Technologically, its society was not so advanced, but neither had it atrophied. And while an aspect of madness prevailed there, it was not the rooted insanity of Paradise.

“I believe,” said Felion, “that he did what he said. He reached the second city and he lived there. And as he approached death, he decided to offer us, too, the chance of freedom.”

“How spiteful of him,” she said, “to make us wait so long.”

“But time is changeable in the labyrinth, didn’t he say so? We could penetrate this world at any point in time, past, future – I don’t grasp the ethic of it. It must be random, uncontrollable.”

“Or a lie,” she said again.

“But he was gone for years,” said Felion. “Where did he go?”

“Oh, he concealed himself.”

The white wall remained there before them, empty, menacing; unavoidable?

Smara moved away, and began to return along the track in the floor. Presently Felion went after her.

They negotiated the slope and emerged from the door, which shut, back into the basement.

“Did you,” she said, “kill this week?”

“Oh, twice,” he said. “An old woman on the river bank, and a painter near the cathedral. I saved you his brushes.”

“I haven’t killed,” she said. “So I must. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Shall I come with you?” he asked, solicitously, gently.

“I prefer to work alone when I can. But thank you. Shall we meet at the bar beside the third broken bridge? I’ll kill someone with rings, and bring you one, Felion.”

After the storm the wrecked ship lay on the beach, against the bright broken gray of the sea. From the ship’s side spilled her cargo of smashed glass and oranges, like blood from a wound. Her sail hung, a snapped wing. In the sky, great white clouds massed.