Nightshades

  Nightshades

  Thirteen Journeys into Shadow

  Tanith Lee

  Copyright © 1993 Tanith Lee

  .

  First published in Great Britain in this collection in 1993 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

  First published in paperback in 1994 by HEADLINE

  Contents

  NIGHTSHADE 1

  — first ever publication

  THE MERMAID 101

  — first published in the USA

  AFTER THE GUILLOTINE 113

  — first published 1985 in Amazing Magazine (USA) MEOW 129

  — first published in the USA

  IL BACIO (IL CHIAVE) 141

  — first published 1983 in Amazing Magazine (USA) A ROOM WITH A VIE 159

  — first published 1980 in New Terrors 1 (UK)

  PAPER BOAT 175

  — first published 1978 in Arts Council

  New Stories 3 (UK)

  BLUE VASE OF GHOSTS 191

  — first published 1983 in Dragonfields Magazine (Canada) PINEWOOD 213

  — first published 1980 in Year's Best Horror Stories 14 (USA) THE JANFIA TREE 219

  — first published 1989 in Blood Is Not Enough (USA) THE DEVIL'S ROSE 237

  —first published 1988 in Women of Darkness (USA) HUZDRA 261

  — first published 1977 in Year's Best Horror Stories 5 (USA) THREE DAYS 281

  — first published in the USA

  THE NOVEL

  NIGHTSHADE

  In 1974, DAW Books of America accepted my fantasy novel, THE

  BIRTHGRAVE, and liberated me into the world of professional writing.

  I had already written three fantasies by then, with no eye to publication anywhere. They were the previously mentioned BIRTHGRAVE, and THE STORM LORD, and the SF novel DON'T BITE THE SUN.

  Strangely, the moment 1 got my break into fantasy writing, I conceived the idea of the following book, NIGHTSHADE. I knew it would not be suitable for DAW, but couldn't resist it. Although set 'somewhere' in the Mediterranean, and 'sometime' in the late Sixties (probably) it was and is what I would class as a contemporary novel.

  But then again… It certainly has some exotic and wildly fantastic elements.

  There is the Dionysos theme: this god, generally dismissed as the deity of wine - he is much more - has always intrigued me. The master of inner terrors and truths, the breaker of chains, his power passes through the freeing medium of drink, or any strong excitement, including madness.

  There is, too, the character of the anti-heroine, Sovaz.

  Elizabeth Taylor, surely one of the most beautiful women in the world, is proof that a beautiful human being may also possess great talent and character, and a fully operational soul. And yet I confess a fascination with those great beauties, male and female, who are, operationally, soulless. One glimpses them now and then, usually briefly. What, if there is no warmth, is making them tick? What, aside from beauty, has vampirized them? Some of this I have tried to investigate in the form of the pale, red-lipped icon of Sovaz.

  ONE

  It was seven o'clock; the sun was dying on the sea. The water, like the sky, was glazed by a smoky glare, which diluted at its edges before smashing itself delicately on the beach.

  The house stood on the highest point of the cliff overhanging the bay, the shoreline, and the wide sea falling away before it into the mouth of the sunset, the levels of the city falling away behind into shadow.

  The house was sealed from the city by a high wall, reminiscent of a jail, broken only by a pair of oriental wrought iron gates. The wall mostly shut off the elevation of the cliff, and the induced gardens which clothed it, yet a scent of roses, oleanders, peach and lemon trees filtered occasionally into the streets below. Rising from the gates, a hundred shallow stone steps, indented at their centres as if from age and great use, led in four tiers to the house. On each landing stood two marble columns with horses' heads.

  The house itself had a strange decaying look, the stucco of its balconies and arches purplish-brown as if steeped in incense, erupting into growths of vine and tamarisk.

  The first lamps and neons were spangling across the city to the south.

  The polarized windows of the house, losing the stain of the sun, became black.

  Sovaz stood at the window, telling the chain of pearls like a rosary, listening to the sounds that her husband made, putting on his clothes in the dressing room. Such immaculate, precise sounds: now the rustle of the linen shirt, now the icy clink of a cuff-link lifted from its onyx box. Presently he came into the room.

  'You aren't dressed yet.'

  'No.'

  'It's very dark in here.'

  Kristian touched the discreet electric bell. The door opened almost at once and the black girl, Leah, crossed the room and let down the drapes of the three tall windows without a word. Light came obediently, spreading from the master switch at the touch of Kristian's hand. Sovaz' suite was mainly black, the lamps gold or green silk with crystal pendants on jade stands. A scented joss stick was burning in an antique bowl of bronze.

  Sovaz glanced aside at Kristian in his perfect white dinner clothes, the little cold fires of emeralds winking on his cuffs. He was forty-eight: a very handsome man of excellent physique, his hair a rich blue-black which led women who had failed with him (most women) to suppose aloud that he had it dyed. His face was arrogant, remote.

  His eyes, a light but definite blue, seemed extraordinarily intent by

  contrast with the eyes of Sovaz which, even as she looked at him, appeared unfocused. She stood in her slip, playing with the pearls absently.

  'Leah,' Kristian said, 'help my wife with her dress.'

  The black girl lifted the dress from the bed and quickly, deftly, slipped Sovaz into it. Like the room, like Leah herself, the dress was black.

  'Were you intending to wear those pearls?' Kristian said. 'Where are the rubies? They would be more suitable.'

  'If you think so,' Sovaz said.

  Leah, who had already opened the ivory box, brought the rubies and proceeded to fasten them in position. Sovaz let go the chain of pearls; they fell into the rugs. (Leah bent immediately to retrieve them.) Sovaz went to the arrangement of mirrors. She touched hesitantly at her neck.

  'I look as if I had had my throat cut.'

  'If the rubies don't please you, then wear the sapphires. You have plenty of jewels.'

  The black girl, her tasks accomplished, perambulated silently about the room and out of it. Sovaz stared after her with that remarkable, apparently abstracted gaze.

  'Yes, I do, don't I?' The door was shut. Sovaz returned to her own image and extended the tip of one finger to her reflected face. 'So white.'

  'You should use your sun-lamp.'

  He himself was tanned to a healthy, satiny finish, like wood, from use of a lamp. She, who lived mainly by night, sensed her element. The sun-lamp obscurely frightened her; she was psychologically afraid it would scorch her blind. She did not answer but leaned to adjust the low neck of the black lace dress, then picked up a lipstick and slowly coloured her mouth.

  'Why do you burn this disgusting cheap rubbish?' Kristian said. He reached in and extinguished the joss stick.

  'They sell them in the night market on the quay,' she said irrelevantly.

  He took out his cigarette case and lit a cigarette.

  She had bought the joss sticks in the city three months before, the last night she had spent with her last lover to date, a boy twenty-two years old. Sovaz was twenty-five; the ages of her lovers had ranged from twenty-three to nineteen. There had never been anyone older.

  These amours did not offend or distress Kristian; if anything they fitted into his scheme of
things, as a hobby which kept the woman in the background of his life. Always, though indirectly, he vetted the young men. But their high standards of physical perfection, their sound health and good manners were symbols for him, for others, of his own opulence and taste, not pleasures he sought for her. The wife of Kristian might have only the best.

  He himself had not been to bed with her in four years. She had never interested him particularly except for a week or two at the start of their marriage, when she was virgin, novel, and unexplained. Now she was a convenience and an ornament, a showcase for his wealth and aesthetics, like the carious grandeur of the house.

  They had been married for seven years. She was the daughter of a friend, a librarian and scholar, a man a few years his senior, to whom Egyptian and Greek manuscripts were brought for translation.

  Kristian had seen the girl reading under a green and red stained window, the panes casting gems on her white skin, and her black hair down her back. Her eyes were so large, like coals, her body slender as a stalk, with a woman's breasts. He had been stirred by that picture. He did not know what she was reading but had hoped for some of the father's intellect in the child. She disappointed him. She gorged herself mainly on bizarre modern fantasies by writers with inelegant names, among the gracious ancient dusts of the great library.

  The old man (Kristian composedly thought of him in this way; although virtually contemporaries, physically they were quite unlike) became sick, and tuberculosis was diagnosed. He refused to leave his books to be cured, dismissing medicine as preposterous. 'I shall soon be better,' he would say. Kristian found his illness distasteful, like a bad smell. Presently the old man's lungs haemorrhaged and he died.

  Kristian, going to witness the aftermath, now acceptably clean and sterile, found Sovaz wandering like a lost pet animal among a welter

  of stacked furniture. The old man had died a pauper. Everything would go to bury him and to settle his debts.

  Kristian found the mess agitated him, a last unhealthy odour. He paid off the debts and took the girl into his house. Despite her vulgar leanings, the vile books and records she brought with her, her presence did not jar. She did not, for example, cry. She seemed a void that might be filled. He became fascinated by the task of remodelling her, forming her into his own creation.

  She was not precisely rebellious but he found he made no headway.

  The culture he wished to impose slipped off her surface.

  One night she found sleeping tablets in his dressing room and swallowed most of them. It was only three months since her father had died. She was eighteen.

  At least nothing about the affair had been public. Kristian's valet, finding her with the last tablet clenched in her hand, had forced an emetic between her teeth, and compulsorily brought her back to life.

  Five days passed before Kristian could bring himself to see her, however. When he did, he was startled by her quality, like a rare porcelain. She sat behind the house, looking out over the garden and the sea, the warm night wind, perfumed with jasmine, lifting up strands of her dark hair and setting them down again.

  He had not expected to find, after the sordid thing that had happened, something so exquisite.

  'I imagine you want me to go,' she said. 'I shall.' And again he sensed in her the unfilled, empty room.

  'My dear child, where do you propose to go to? You are quite untrained, unfit for anything, except possibly for factory work or prostitution.'

  'That then. Does it matter?'

  'I doubt very much if you would enjoy either. The work is hard and wages low.'

  'I shall have to bear it then, shan't I?'

  He felt a flicker of alarm. It was no secret she had been with him, here, in this house. If she deliberately left him for the filth, petty crime and squalor of the back alleys and doss houses of the slums, she would leave a smear of this dirt on his own life.

  'I suggest you think again, Sovaz. You're not a little girl. You have a brain, I believe. Attempt to use it.'

  He did not keep a watch on her then. Before dawn she was gone.

  It had taken him three days to find her. Tenacious as a lover, he had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to do so. His hands were clammy with a dungeon sweat. He was afraid the besmirching quicksand had already swallowed her. Prescott, the Englishman, had finally hunted her down.

  Evening on the quay, the wharves rife, active. A stink of rotting fish, oranges, cheap hashish, the rancid oil in the lamps bobbing and coruscating their moons on the glutinous black water below. Men waiting, smoking and spitting, alert for work on the smacks of the midnight fishermen, the pleasure craft with their fringed canopies.

  Kristian's valet pushing open the canvas door of a leprous overhanging tenement. A whore putting her hands on him, Kristian striking her off; some trouble with the pimp, settled by Prescott. The long climb up the broken stairs, the tang of urine on the treads, fumes of inferior opium and zombie laughter from small black holes passing as rooms.

  It was the attic, rafters sloping, lamplight and waterlight cast up on them, and a battered chaise-longue, where a girl was lying, smoking a green cigarette. It took Kristian some moments to realize this was Sovaz. Her hair was bleached, her eyes sticky with mascara.

  Prescott and the valet drew back beyond the door. Kristian crossed to the open window, and turned, staring at the creature which confronted him.

  'You look already like a hag seventy years old,' he said, 'riddled by disease and sick with opium. Is this the life you prefer?'

  She murmured: 'The madam is bringing a man here. Of some importance, she said. She has told him I am fifteen, but well developed for my age.'

  'No doubt.'

  'You had better be going, Kristian. You might meet him on the stairs otherwise.'

  'How many men?' he asked abruptly.

  She started. 'Do you care? Oh, none so far. This will be the first.'

  'Get up at once,' he said, 'you're coming with me.'

  'Leave me alone. You don't want me,' she said bitterly. Her eyes were very dull. He tapped his fingers impatiently. He wore gloves.

  'Get up,' he repeated, 'or I shall have Prescott fetch the police.'

  'I have chosen what I want.'

  'You talk like a melodramatic schoolgirl.'

  'You know,' she said, meeting his eyes suddenly, 'that I am in love with you. You, for your part, have scarcely ever exchanged a word with me that was not a criticism or an instruction. I am sorry to have failed your ideals so dreadfully. I am certain you see I can't possibly return with you. Now go. Please.'

  Outside a man was strolling by, harnessed with cages full of twittering birds.

  It had not before occurred to Kristian that the young girl might think herself in love with him. Yet she was impressionable and without anchor, the logic of it struck him now. Love. A clinging, cloying emotion. He found it almost offensive to be the object of her desires.

  If she had said she passionately admired him it would have been different. But love - it was too familiar of her, impertinent almost.

  Nevertheless, the filthy room, the weird light and smells, the hopeless laughing and twittering of the damned below, snapped his nerve. He must get out and she with him, for she had come to belong to him -

  her ingenuous confession only branded her more irrevocably his property.

  He went to her and pulled her up. Even in her tart's costume she was beautiful. At first he thought she would lean on him and be still, quiescent as before. But abruptly she began to fight him, using even her nails and teeth, putting him in mind of a white fox one of his father's gamekeepers had once trapped, which had immediately gnawed through its manacled foot in order to be free.

  Kristian began to sweat in earnest. The situation became immense and intolerable. Already his face and neck were streaked by her nails; disgusted panic took hold of him.

  'Stop it,' he rasped, afraid to speak more loudly for the valet and the

 
agent outside the door. And then, uttering the first promise that came to him to quieten her: 'I intend you to be my wife.'

  The effect of his words was not as he expected. Though she ceased fighting, she began instead to laugh.

  Nevertheless, he was able to propel her slackening body to the door.

  'As I thought,' he said coldly, 'there has been some mistake.'

  The two men accepted the ridiculous statement without comment.

  The woman and her customer were late in coming, it seemed; they passed no one on the stairs, but got down to the limousine without incident.

  Prescott stood at the street corner watching them drive off, his eyes impersonal behind green-tinted glasses, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his rumpled jacket.

  As a boy, Kristian had been brought up on his father's large European estates. It seemed to him in retrospect that those years were very nearly perfect. He had not precisely loved either father or mother, but he had respected them, a fastidious man of great erudition and intellect, a woman of elegance and finesse. It was easy to recollect the huge white house, burning from within all the long hot nights of summer, the indigo sky, the coloured lamps flickering across the slowly moving couples on the lawns, the black swans sleepless on the lake. To remember also the hunting parties at dawn, his father a faultless shot, and the beautiful guns, clammy with the dew, and the white brandy in the silver hip flask burning on his throat. In those years life had been confined to certain compartments, each item in its place, ready to be taken up when needed, to be replaced when finished with, like ornaments from a box. Times for dinner engagements, for shooting, for riding, for music, for literature.

  Everything was there to hand. Even women, if he wished for them, would come discreetly to his room, ask nothing except to please him, and never importunately, departing when he desired, gracefully and without question.

  The estates were a kingdom of sorts, in some ways rather more. His father presided at curious little courts of justice set up to contain disputes among the tenants and workers of the land. It was tacitly