Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire (46 page)

I
laughed nervously. ‘Really? You mean, she
eats
people?’ I was not in the position at that
time to refute it. Anything seemed possible then, in that haunted,
sleepy afternoon. I thought of the dim room I had run from, the
glowing girl swaying towards me, the promise, the menace, the
unexpected release.

Moomi shook
her head. ‘Not bones and blood,’ she said. ‘Dere are ancient
peoples, Lexi, very ancient. Place like dis, it lure dem. Dere is
much for dem here. But not you...’ She stood up. ‘You be safe now.
I sure.’

And I was
safe. I never saw Ast again. But I dreamed of her. Just once, but
enough for to have it stay with me all my life.

The dream came
that same night.

In the dream,
I woke up and got out of my bed in the dark. My father and Moomi
slept nearby, but they did not stir. I dressed and went out of the
hostel. The streets of Charidotis were empty, which proves it must
have been a dream, because even at night, the city was alive and
thronged with people. Now, the streets were still and the buildings
loured overhead against a purple sky, glistering with pulsing
stars.

They were
moaning on the Pyramid; all those carvings. As I approached I saw
them move, heard the faint distillations of their cries that came
to me down a tunnel of centuries. Dancing girls, kings, saints and
soldiers. As I passed through the first portal, I felt their stone
hands grab for my back, but I did not look round.

Inside, a
ribbon of candles led me onwards. Each flame illumined a tiny space
around it, but otherwise all was in darkness. I followed the faint
lights through every echoing room until I came to the ante-chamber
of the tomb itself. She was waiting for me there, blocking the
portal. Her veils were cast back from her face; she smiled at me
kindly, and beckoned me with a slim arm. We did not pass into the
inner chamber, but into the darkness of the ante-chamber, beyond
the feeble, flickering lights. She led me to a stone stair. ‘Hold
on to me,’ she said, for there was no light. I followed her up the
steps, stumbling, grabbing hold of the floating blue that wafted
around me. I could sense that I was high above the ground, knowing
that one wrong step would send me plummeting down to the floor: I
would be maimed or killed. Ast climbed with a firm tread, seeing in
the dark like a cat. Presently, a stone passage-way absorbed us,
and there was faint, sepia light.

‘
Follow
me.’

We negotiated
a maze of corridors. There were echoes all around us; the merest
hint of cries and laughter, music and the bleating of animals. The
air smelled strongly of a deep, earthy musk, enough to make me feel
nauseous. It was a concentration of the perfume I had smelled upon
Ast, when I had first met her in the Library. ‘Where are we going?’
I asked her.

She laughed,
and the sound seemed to come from far overhead. She slapped at my
hands, so that I lost my grip on her floating veils. Then, she
began to run from me. I tried to follow her, stumbling and
tripping, but it were as if an invisible mesh of strings impeded my
feet. Her form grew smaller before me, her blueness dimmed. I
called her name, crashing from wall to wall in the narrow passage,
but all sound was muffled. I groped my way along the wall, suddenly
terrified, and eventually my scrabbling fingers found an open
doorway. There was light within; blue light. I stood at the
threshold and could see this had once been a library, but all the
books were cast onto the floor, their spines broken, their pages
scattered. Blue candles, with sapphire flames, dripped molten wax
onto the ravaged books. I seemed to hear voices coming from the
open pages; quatrains being recited, but faintly, without hope,
fading out. Knowledge lost, destroyed. I went into the room, and
bent to pick up one of the volumes. The smell of hot wax was
overpowering.

Something fast
and heavy knocked me to the floor. All that happened afterwards
occurred so quickly, that even for a dream, it is difficult to
recall.

I remember the
blueness, the floating blue, the ferocity of the attack, the
strength I could not resist. Why, in the dream, I transformed Ast
in that way, I cannot say, but maybe it wasn’t of her I dreamed.
There was lust, yes, but not mine. It hurt me. It hurt me terribly,
but like the mating of animals it was swift, a quick brutal reflex,
and I escaped, half naked, screaming and running, hitting out at
things that were no longer there, the pages of violated books
swirling round my head. The nightmare carried me down endless stone
passageways, and always I feared pursuit. Then I was spilled, like
a barrel of bones and loose flesh, into a brightly-lit room.
Lurching to my feet, I recognised the sarcophagus of Mipacanthus.
Whether I sought sanctuary or spiritual comfort, I cannot say, but
I threw myself across the tomb. However, there was no crystal plate
to arrest my fall. I landed in flowers, thick, fleshy flowers that
exuded a hideous sickly perfume. I fought with the petals, gasping
for breath, and found the body of the dead prophet beneath my
hands. Then I was upright, gazing down in shuddering, mindless
rigour at what lay there.

It was
Mipacanthus.

It was
her.

Ast, naked in
the flowers, her eyes closed, her perfect breasts rising and
falling as if in light sleep. A beautiful woman, yet not. Hers was
the body of Mipacanthus. She was male. Below the slight torso, the
tiny waist, were the hips and loins of a youth. The hands, too. I
should have realised about the hands.

She opened her
perfect black eyes, those gutting eyes. For the last time, she
impaled me. Her face was pale as marble, her lips a livid wound.
‘The tomb is flesh,’ she told me. ‘You ran from me, Alexi, and in
running, you changed your own future. There is no end, for I am
eternal. Hear my prophecy now. We shall meet again. I have seeded
you, Alexi. Through the children of your children, I will come back
to you. For that is the way. It has always been so.’

And there it
ended, or nearly so. Dream fragments of flight through the sleeping
city, the laughter of writhing stone carvings, the leaning colossi
of the buildings threatening to topple, to engulf me in ashes, in
petals.

That was
all.

Now, the
memory of the last few days I spent in Charidotis is blurred. I am
sure that very little happened, and I cannot even remember the
homeward journey. None of it. Strange how certain recollections
stay with us through the years.

I have met no
blue woman since. And yet, all these years, Ast has been with me.
It has not been a lone vigil for me. There have been other women,
true and ordinary women, women who cheered my heart and quickened
my flesh. I loved, I married, and I lost to age and death. Ast, as
she told me, is eternal. I try to remember her as she was in her
darkened room, not as the violating monster of my nightmares. And
yet, there must have been at least some truth in the dream. Perhaps
I should not have run from her, even though I knew the fact of it,
the knowledge that spawned the malformed image of the dream. All
was magical in the haze of youth. I tell myself she was a freakish
creature, but, oh, so lovely. Would it have harmed a boy to have
touched her, to have tasted that experience?

The night is
long, and I have been waiting here, as I have waited every time,
for the birth. This will be my sixth daughter’s seventh child. Time
passes so swiftly in the winter of our lives. I am not long for
this world now, but still I await Ast’s prophecy. I am a stupid old
man, for I think of it still. She will come back to me. I know it
was nothing but a dream, yet it haunts me, becomes more vivid as my
mind and body withers. I find myself wondering whether I carry it
within me, a secret seed, an infection, but then I fight it with
denial. If it were to happen, it surely would have done so by
now.

There, now, I
can hear them: the screams of the girl in labour. It will be soon.
How many births have I attended in my life? Too many. We are a
fecund family. She screams so long, so desperately. It is always so
with women. I pity them for their beds of blood and birth. Can one
woman make so much noise? It is like a song, a hymn of terror. Poor
creature.

A plait of
sounds, of voices, floating out over the river. Burning dead, the
ashes swept into the water.

The dawn is
coming.

I never went
back to Charidotis, though I thought of it often. Now it is too
late.

Too much noise
for one woman. They are all screaming! The mid-wives, the
priestesses. What is that? I can hear the pound of feet along the
passageway outside my room. I hear a man’s voice, calling
hoarsely.

There is a
wall between myself and the door. I cannot pass through it, yet I
must. On the table beside me, three candles burn in silver cups. My
eyes are dim, but I can see them flicker. The flames are blue.

She comes,
then, a restless spirit, to her resting place, a new, sweet
sarcophagus of flesh.

The Heart of Fairen De
’ath

As with several of my other stories, when I decided to try
and sell this one, I changed the male protagonist to a female in
order to make it more acceptable to conservative editors.
(Mercifully things have changed a lot since the 80s). It eventually
appeared in
Weird Tales
in
America. Here, as with the other stories, is a re-edited version of
the original, restoring Filerion’s gender to its original
state.

It shares
another trait with various other pieces too, in that it was written
as a kind of magical spell for a sad friend; an exorcism for a
broken heart, if you like. I remember that when I came to sell the
story, the friend in question was rather put out that I’d changed
the gender of the protagonist and felt I was selling out, bowing to
social pressures. I argued that I needed to make a living and at
the time fantasy with homoerotic overtones was not widely
acceptable. I hope that in restoring this piece to its original
state, my friend will be somewhat mollified!

Filerion had
dwelled in the heart of the forest, in the house of black stone,
for two years. Other people lived among the trees, in dark and
hidden glades, but Filerion rarely saw them. It was a lonely life
he led, and one quite different to that he had left behind in the
lakeside town of Celestia. Filerion was not upset by this; his
seclusion was wholly voluntary.

One night,
what now seemed such a long time ago, he had sat outside an inn
along the Avenue of Red Eyes and, over his sweet but vicious
cordial of direthorn and spice, had faced the sadness and
disappointment that had become the sum total of his life. His
mother had recently died – there was no father he could remember –
and had left him worse than penniless. More creditors than friends
had attended the funeral and, to satisfy them, Filerion had been
obliged to sell the lease to his mother’s spacious rooms and
millinery workshops. He had then moved all the possessions he could
not sell into smaller and meaner accommodation. But it had not been
enough.

There had been
a series of jobs, each more poorly paid than the last; most of what
he earned passing straight to the purses of the merchants and
storemen to whom his mother had owed money. Filerion wished he’d
paid more attention to family finances in the past, and considered
bleakly that luck must have fled along with his mother’s spirit. If
luck was currency, perhaps the dead woman had owed more than
earthly debts.

Barely more
than a boy, Filerion’s only recourse to survive had been to open
his cloak along the dark alleys of the Footways of Perfect Desire,
and receive coin for the brief pleasure his flesh could bring to
others more financially fortunate. The reality of this trade
revealed itself less dreadful than the intention of it, Celestia
being a town where courtesans were respected rather than reviled.
They could earn themselves legendary status if they were
clever.

Furtive,
masked gentlemen, whose breath smelled of cloves, enticed Filerion
into their carriages, where they fumbled through cramped couplings.
Sometimes, pairs of pampered, spoiled boys would come giggling to
the Footways and Filerion would take them to his lodgings to join
in their laughter and offer them the delicious, dark pleasures they
yearned. Also, sleek young daughters of wealthy houses sought his
services, all claiming, in bored voices, they were there because it
was necessary to sample all of life’s spices; it was merely
curiosity.

Filerion did
not care about their reasons. He took the money and walked away. It
was not important. He never experienced shame or self-hatred, but
knew that his youth, however fresh for now, would not last forever,
and when it left him, he would have to think of a different way to
earn his coin. Affairs of the heart, though plentiful – for many of
his patrons were intrigued enough by his mystery to become regular
– had always ended in sorrow. It was a game to them, an act of
rebellion and daring. Should wives, lovers or parents ever begin to
suspect, they fled, never to return. Filerion was tired of trying
to convince himself he did not care. Resolve hardened within him.
He must seek a new life, elsewhere.

Perhaps crazed
by the moon, for it was full and powerful that night, he gathered
up his belongings, left a brief, vague note in his lodgings, and
walked northwards out of the town, through the shuttered merchant
quarter, past the low, sprawling temples, whose chimneys gouted the
smoke of burnt offerings and incense. He wondered how long it would
take for him to be missed. Tonight’s regular patron would
undoubtedly already be fractious at his absence from his usual
corner, beneath the magnolia trees. He wondered whether he’d miss
the generosity of his customers. No, he decided. All they’d given
him was coin and material things. Filerion suspected there was more
to happiness than that.