The Secret Book of Paradys (97 page)

Probably the strangest time had been when Mademoiselle Varc had taken Leocadia for an old schoolfriend, and both women had then seemingly become adolescent girls. They had sat under the summerhouse in the shade of the trees, and Mademoiselle Varc had confessed she had no idea what a man and a woman did together. Leocadia had told her a carefully constrained amount, and Mademoiselle Varc had giggled girlishly, even blushed, though Dr. Duval had revealed that Mademoiselle Varc had borne six children.

When she had returned from the sun-fallen garden, kindly driven in with Mademoiselle Varc by the warden in his dark uniform (before the trees could come alive and eat them), Leocadia stepped into the dusk of her room and heard the door shut with its final click, which meant her little freedom was gone until tomorrow.

There was autonomy in the way of lamps, and she switched them on in the sitting area of the room, and going to the refrigerator, she drew out a bottle of white wine and a narrow glass.

Then she moved into the painting area and turned on the working lights.

On its easel, the picture of the ship, the beach, the spillage of oranges.

Leocadia studied it coldly.

Was it some response to the other thing upon an easel? Asra, raped and choked with orange paint, her bare flesh adorned by islands.

The doctors who had oozed charm over this painting had seen it as such; they must have done.

But she, what had she been doing?

The ship was not Asra, and yet the ship was feminine. And the sea had split her, and she … bled.

Leocadia drank her wine. A swirl of panic rose deep within her like a beast in a bottomless lake. How long before it would reach her surface?

She tossed the glass against the wall, where it broke. Later the wall would suck up the bits.

But not quite yet.

So interesting, the knives for her food, the glasses that might be smashed.

Leocadia went close to the painting. Yes, it could well be seen as some expression of inner horror at Asra’s murder, which murder she had performed, and then forgotten.

Massed sky, the vessel with its snapped wing. And the little shells she had added. And there – what was
that
?

She leaned nearer. She could not make it out. Something white on the sand, a small distance from the shells. But not a shell.

She had not painted it. She did not know what it was.

Then again, it was done in her style, in tiny feathering brushstrokes, half its curve delineated as if cut.

Of course, they could copy her.

Leocadia crossed the room and turned about the two paintings she had previously executed here.

One a scene of a mountain, smoking over a peaceful valley. The other, a road leading into a wood. Both were dark, lowering, sinister. Neither contained a hint of orange, or any image she did not recall putting into them.

Leocadia dreamed not of distant bells but of screaming. It was full-throated and savage. It echoed and swerved through the building of the Residence. On Thomas’s stone the Medusa poked out her tongue farther.

Leocadia woke up, and got out of the bed, which squeaked its incontinence plastic at her.

She went to the worktable and picked up a tube of orange paint, which she had employed without thought, as if to prove her innocence.

She uncapped it, and squeezed.

The tube screamed.

It screamed in her hand.

Leocadia kept hold of it. As her fingers relaxed, the scream stopped.

She put it on the table and pressed down on the tube with her whole hand.

Now the scream came vivid and awesome, rocking the room, dizzying her ears.

As it faded, she heard an afternote, like the boom of a massive organ in the Temple-Church twenty miles away.

Not me
, Leocadia thought, concisely. It was the drugs in the food and drink, and in the light and sound and air. Or could it even be some other trick, like the orange that bled, the white ball entered in her painting?

“Or is it me?”

She seemed to stand above herself on a height, looking down into her soul, not with brief compassion, as she had gazed at the curtsying Mademoiselle Varc, but despisingly, as if at an expensive, once-reliable machine, which failed.

“Come along, Lucie,” cried Mademoiselle Varc. “I’ve found such an interesting place. It’s rather dirty, but you won’t mind, will you? You’re always braver than me.”

Leocadia had been sitting on the hot lawn near the empty birdbath, and now Mademoiselle Varc came up and filled the bath with cold tea from her breakfast pot.

Lucie was the adolescent friend, but she and Mademoiselle Varc seemed to have grown even younger.

Leocadia was not in the mood now for role playing.

“Not today,” she said, as if to a fractious infant.

But Mademoiselle Varc took no notice. She put down her alabaster hand and caught Leocadia’s arm.

“Come
on
. Before they catch us.”

Leocadia guessed correctly from this expression that although it was not in fact barred to them, Mademoiselle Varc wanted to go over the fence to the madhouse.

“No.”

“Oh, yes. Oh do. It’s really fascinating. There’s all sorts of things there. I found it last week, but I didn’t tell.”

“No one will prevent you, if you go,” said Leocadia.

“But they will. They’ll spank us. It’s an awful place. You know something terrible happened there. You’re not scared? I dare you, Lucie.”

“Of course, something terrible,” said Leocadia. “What else, there?”

The old lunatic asylum. Not like the modern Residence. There had been a story about it, but then was that not the other story about the shells – that the sea had washed in over the building? No, this could never be right.

Leocadia got up as Mademoiselle Varc tugged at her like a ferocious moth.

They hurried by the summerhouse, passing Thomas the Warrior. The young spider man was creeping along and raised his face in delight to Mademoiselle Varc, saw Leocadia and lolloped away.

They rushed across the walk, and over the grass. Oak trees and gray cedar towered above them. Then there was the dilapidated fence.

It was like a boundary in a dream. But Leocadia reasoned she had perhaps already, the previous night, crossed whatever boundary there was.

Mademoiselle Varc tottered over and sat abruptly in the uncut grass the far side, but laughing.

Leocadia followed more easily.

The sun burst on the ruined hothouse and the raisin vine, black, as if mantled with bursting tarantulas.

“We have to go among the old buildings,” said Mademoiselle Varc.

“Very well.”

Marigolds grew wild in the long grass (and Leocadia thought of the marigolds in ice, which had prevented nothing) and pure white daisies.

Mademoiselle Varc stumbled, but she was a little girl again, only about ten, and she made nothing of it.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked Leocadia. “If you look at the windows you might see them. Even by day. Women in a row.”

Leocadia shrugged. She raised her eyes to the foul blank windows, seen closer now than ever before, but they were dead as ever, the optics of corpses.

Pipes thick with rust coiled from the walls of the buildings like flexible bones which had pierced the skin.

They came onto a paved place sprung with weeds. The buildings loomed above.

“This way. Down here.”

Mademoiselle Varc led Leocadia toward a sort of alley between the light biscuit walls.

There was no sound. That was, one heard the sizzling chorus of cicadas, and the tweets of passing birds; insects buzzed among the rogue flowers. High, high in the sky, a plane purred almost silently over, a silver cigar with fins. All these ordinary noises. And yet, it was like the loud singing in the ear of utter soundlessness. And everything so still, as if, rather than stunned by heat, the area had been frozen.

The alley was drowned in shade.

Mademoiselle Varc darted along it in quick marsupial spasms.

Above, the ranks of corpse windows, black with grime and weather and time. From the pipes hung cakes of filth.

The alley opened in a square, around which the buildings of the madhouse reared and onto which the windows continued to stare without sight. Three big doorways seemed shut like the gates of hell.

And in the center of the square was a great heap of rubbish, stretching up five meters or more, as if constructed over some more solid base.

“See – see –” Mademoiselle Varc sprang at the garbage mountain eagerly.

Noises were fainter here, and though the sun splashed in between the roofs, it was like being in a new block of bright, thick atmosphere.

Mademoiselle scrabbled at the grisly pile.

“There!”

Leocadia observed.

She saw Mademoiselle Varc was holding up a gleaming rope of syrup, a necklace of amber beads.

How bizarre. How could such a delicacy have been overlooked? Unless Mademoiselle Varc herself had deposited them here, in order to “find” them.

Leocadia glared into the coalescence of rubble. And as she did so, she felt the eyeless windows watching, as if sudden specters had gathered behind their masks.

A pile of garbage. Old newspapers, a destroyed chair raised high as a throne. And lower down, slabs of tin and wool and corrosion.

“Look!” squeaked Mademoiselle Varc.

She raised a wooden doll with jointed arms and legs and black cotton hair.

How was she finding these things? She must have placed them here, her treasures.

“Here’s another,” said Mademoiselle Varc, and pointed Leocadia into the heap of debris. A wooden limb poked out, and sure enough another wooden maiden emerged into Leocadia’s hands. This one had flax hair and cool glass eyes.

“I wonder what else we shall get?”

It was a festival. It was a barrel of goodies into which you must plunge your fingers.

Something was dislodged from higher up and swiveled down the rubbish with a frantic sound.

It fell at Leocadia’s feet.

“Oh just see. It’s given you something.”

Leocadia bent down and raised the artifact.

It was an old brown bottle, curiously shaped, square, with a four-sided neck and a four-sided mouth. On the front, a label. It showed clearly a weird landscape of ice and glaciers, and before them a black and white penguin with a marigold flash beside its beak. Above, the name.
Penguin Gin
.

Leocadia examined the bottle in a trance. It was very old. It was clean, and bright. The penguin pleased her, for it was realistically portrayed, and into her head came the thought:
I have a model now. I can paint penguins
.

“Yes, I’ve heard of it,” said Mademoiselle Varc, peering over. “There was a slogan for that gin.” She held a wooden doll in either hand, the amber beads about her neck, along her whiteness. “Penguin Gin, it eases pain.”

“Not in your youth, surely,” said Leocadia.

“Oh no. Long before. Long, long ago.”

Something shuddered in the pile of rubbish. A thin black smoke uncoiled from it.

“That’s enough,” cried Mademoiselle Varc. “We must go.”

She sprinted back into the alley.

Leocadia turned slowly, watching the deadly walls above. Nothing was in the windows.

But she would take the bottle. She would paint penguins.

Someone knocked on the door to Leocadia’s room, the way the female attendant did when she brought a hot meal.

“Yes,” said Leocadia.

The door was opened.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the doctors, when they came, arrived at five in the evening. Yet here was Van Orles, all alone.

“What do you want?”

“Why, to see you, mademoiselle.”

Leocadia wore her cream housedress, which had so generously been sent to the asylum for her. She had no makeup on. She had been about to don her working smock and prepare a canvas.

Van Orles looked at her insidiously.

“Here I am, as you see,” said Leocadia.

“Well, shall we have a little talk?”

“If we must.”

“Always so bristly!” merrily chided Van Orles, and he came bouncing into the room. He wore another of his pasty cravats. Sitting down on the couch he lit a pipe. Leocadia opened the second window. “You never ask for cigarishis,” said Van Orles. “Don’t you miss them?”

“I seldom bothered with them. They had no effect on me.”

“Yet still you drink.”

Leocadia propped up a canvas on her table.

“And you began to drink when you were eleven years old, I understand.”

When Leocadia did not reply, Van Orles puffed away at his pipe as if considering her silence an answer.

Leocadia was irritated. She did not like to work with anyone near her, as all her lovers had soon discovered. She went to the dressing table and began to brush her curling hair with harsh strokes.

“What a lovely girl you are,” murmured Van Orles. “Don’t you miss other things? Companionship? Dalliance?”

A faint livid light was ominously blooming up from nowhere. She tensed. The distasteful man seemed to be making a pass at her. Leocadia swung slowly around and smiled at him. Van Orles appeared taken aback. Leocadia lifted the brown bottle off the dressing table where it had lain through the afternoon and night.

“Look at this, Where do you think I got it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“In a junk heap in a yard of the old building.”

“Which building is that?” he inquired innocently.

“The madhouse.”

“Ah. How quaint. The lunatic hospital. Really, that place should be walled off. The masonry isn’t safe.”

“Don’t you think it’s a pretty bottle?” said Leocadia. “Quite old itself, I should say, from its shape.”

“Very likely.” Van Orles got up carefully and came to stand over Leocadia. “And you are interested in such items?”

“Oh, yes. Why don’t you tell me about the madhouse?”

“Now, we shouldn’t call it that. They were awful days. The poor sick people weren’t treated well. Sometimes they were even displayed to the public, to make others laugh. Immorality and disease ran rife –”

“But what happened?” said Leocadia.

“How do you mean?” Van Orles crouched closer.