Personal Darkness (2 page)

Somehow, she struck him after all as slightly childish.

He lent her the jeans and trainers, and offered her a spray of the scent that went with the bath foam. In his parents' bedroom he felt a touch savage, and also put upon Ruth's milk white ears a pair of large gold earrings. But Ruth, with a peculiar expression, removed these.

Another instant of unease then. She had come to him as a gypsy, but what had she been before? Had the possibly fantasized abusing father been very rich and cultured, hanging on the ears of his courtesan daughter orient jade and priceless pearl?

The blue-for-a-boy car took them neatly down to the Monte Doro, which happily opened at six on Saturdays.

The tables were robed in russet and apple green, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier of ice-green Per-rier bottles. It was not crowded yet, and the manager came rustling out and lit their candle hastily.

Timothy was glad he had brought his Visa card. Ruth had a starter of tomato salad with mozzarella and mushrooms, and went on to chicken wrapped in ham, with a cream and brandy sauce, new potatoes, broccoli and carrots. She wanted dessert too, a trifle topped by nuts and cherries, and then some goat's cheese and biscuits. Timothy was used to girls who had to watch their weight. Obviously Ruth did not, or else she was making up for the time lost in the wilds.

They had a bottle of frascati with their meal, and Timothy bought another bottle, with the help of his card, to take away with them.

He drove back carefully. He knew he was over the limit but it was not very far, and he reckoned he was a good driver; the drink had not affected him. Besides, he had had only one glass of wine in the restaurant.

The video he had picked up was
Dragonslayer
. He thought Ruth would like this, although he supposed it was fairly absurd. The photography, landscapes, and animation had not pleased him, but he believed the love scene might do something for Ruth. She was young, and female.

To his surprise, the dragon seemed to concern her most.

He had slipped his arm around her as they watched on the sofa before the big screen of the TV.

She grew tense. She did not like it when the hero attacked the dragon. She said, low and harsh, "He's hurt it," and then, "Shake him
off
. Kill him." She did not mean the dragon should die.

And when it did she was hard, like iron, under Timothy's supporting, barely caressive arm.

He had attempted to kiss her before, at the moment of the kiss in the film, and she had resisted. He did not press her.

When the film was over, he said, "You liked the dragon best."

"It was beautiful," she said.

"How'd you like to be sacrificed to it? Burned up?"

Ruth said primly, "I'd have talked to it. The magician knew how, but he didn't. All the people were stupid. Horrible."

Timothy opened the new bottle of frascati. To his dismay, Ruth asked if she could eat an orange. He was afraid she had an alcohol hunger and might be sick. But she ate the orange, and another, and nothing else happened.

"You know," said Timothy, settling beside her again, "you're gorgeous. You are. And your hair…"

She let him stroke her hair, and next her shoulder, but when he brought his lips near hers again, she said, "No, thank you."

Timothy sat up.

"I'm not your father. You have to get over that."

"No I don't."

"Oh, Ruth—"

A car growled, out in the street, a lion returning to its lair. He knew its voice, but this was not feasible. No. He heard the car draw to a standstill behind the Mini Metro.

They could not— They had meant to be gone all weekend.
No
.

Intuitively, Timothy's eyes darted about the room. The strewn gin glasses, the wine, the orange peel not quite on the plate, the video box—and Ruth. Smelling of his mother's perfume, barefoot, red in lip and nail. Black as night of eye.

"Oh, Christ. Oh, fucking shit—"

Feet on the steps.

A rumble of voices.

The key in the lock.

"Timothy?"

KNEELING IN CRIMSON ARMOR BEFORE his shield was a knight. Beside him ran a blue glass stream, at his back lay an emerald wood where a tower burned. The window was more like a tarot card than anything. It reflected all over the polished, deeply scratched round table that stood below. The scratches spelled out a word, but not in English.

The house was quiet and full of heat. And if she closed her eyes, the effect of shuttered hot silence and colored light, the smell of dust and powders, beeswax, cobwebs, damp, evoked the first house.

And yet everything was changed.

Changed—and duplicated. Perhaps not too much. Perhaps only so far as was bearable, or necessary.

She had watched what they would do. She had been borne along by it. But she could not really say she had participated. She was still a spectator. That was her role. Witness to the Scarabae.

Rachaela stood in the dark room under the blue, red and green window, and listened.

The sound came, just discernible, the firm summer breeze tossing the tall pines and oaks of the common. Almost, but not quite, like the sound of the sea…

Then a car noised dimly by, passing along the road two hundred feet below the house, where the common ended. There was not much traffic. Sometimes, people went that way, and usually stared at the house between the trees. It was quite large, with curious balancing architecture, turrets, and all the stabs of the stained-glass windows. Every one of the windows was of stained glass. All the outer doors were doubled, like air locks. There was a conservatory, and a walled garden. Like the first house. On three sides, the common spread away.

But down beyond the road there was a scatter of big houses, and then clusters of smaller ones, and next one of those villages of London, with its pubs and shops, library, and civic buildings. The steeples of churches sprang from the landscape. On Sundays the bells rang in the distance and an ice-cream van was just audible, playing "The Thieving Magpie."

Michael and Cheta did their shopping in the London village stores, perhaps classed as an eccentric foreign couple.

Books were brought from the library, and punctually returned. Also tapes and discs for Eric's machine. Tapes too were carried from Bonanza Videos. They liked the videos, particularly horror films and thrillers. These they watched with straight moral faces, reminding her of gray hamsters thinking.

Such things were very different from before. There had been no television in the first house. But here there were several. The greater one crouched in the drawing room. Eric, Sasha, and Miranda had each a set in their bedroom. A set had been presented to Michael and Cheta, and one installed in Rachaela's room. They had given her a music center too, and her own video, which she never used. She seldom watched her TV either. But one or all of the other sets were always on the go.

There were electric lights now.

In the kitchen, with its cream and black tiles and the collector's piece, an old, rusted, green mangle, standing by the wall, were now the mod cons: a washing machine, a dishwasher, an electric cooker, food processors, fridge. In the pantry stood a huge chest freezer where the servants inserted enormous joints of meat and the frozen swords of vast fish.

The house was not so large as the first house.

There were more bathrooms, adjoining all the bedchambers and sitting ready on each floor. The bathrooms were white and collectible, like the mangle, having claw-foot baths and brass Edwardian showers. They had green tarot glass windows. Rachaela had found that her bathroom window would open, and also the window in her room. This must have been especially arranged for her. She had a view out across the common. The undulating, heavily treed slopes, like a wilderness, a glade; where only occasionally some solitary walker might go by (staring up). At night, sometimes, an owl called.

The scarred table was in the drawing room.

Rachaela sat down at it. She did not touch the scratches.

Was she trying to understand them at last, the Scarabae, or only herself?

Rachaela, seated on the ground, her back against a tree, had watched the surviving Scarabae, as the house burned to the earth. They stood in a little loose group, at a safe, silent distance. Their clothes were scorched half-off. Bare, skinny witch arms, old, hard, naked legs, holes that showed antique sooty camisoles, withered lace.

In the house, burned, all the rest: Livia, Anita, Unice, Jack, George, Teresa, Stephan, Carlo and Maria. And with them, the already dead, Anna, Alice, Dorian and Peter, stunned by Ruth's hammer and impaled through the heart by hammered knitting needles. The staking of vampires. And, of course, Adamus, Ruth's father, and grandfather.

Beautiful, black-haired Adamus, cold as ice, now warmed through by fire. Hanged from a rope. Suicide.

And Ruth, murderess and arsonist, leaving the house ablaze from her handy candle, had fled across the heath. She had had the mark of Cain on her too. The bruise on her face where Adamus had struck her.

It was hard to dismiss this image of the fleeing Ruth. As it was hard to curtail the other image of her in the blood-colored dress, when the Scarabae betrothed her to Adamus, father, grandfather, and their names were written in the book.

But Ruth was not ready, not old enough, only eleven. She would have to wait for consummation. And Adamus had lost interest in her, vanished back into his dark tower to play the piano alone. And that was when Ruth, disappointed, turned on them with her needles.

The Scarabae were vampires. Or they thought they were. She killed them the proper way. And when she saw Adamus on the rope, she burned the house.

Ruth was a demon. Rachaela had always known. The black and white ugly beauty. The powers of silence.

Probably Rachaela was only too glad to see Ruth disappear into the darkness beyond the fire.

When the fire finished, there was only the darkness. And the Scarabae, all that were left of them, Eric, Sasha, Miranda and Miriam, Michael and Cheta, they stood there in it.

The Scarabae never went out in the daylight. Only Michael and Cheta, that was, muffled up and masked in sunglasses.

And darkness was on the land like mourning, but after that the sun would rise. What then?

The sun rose.

They gazed up into the lightening sky, not fearfully but with a bitter sadness. They had seen it all before, through their two hundred or three hundred years of life. Violence and destitution. Exile. The tyranny of the sun.

She heard Miranda say firmly, "We must go to the village."

Then Michael came over to Rachaela, and his black dusty eyes seemed diluted by the light.

"Miss Rachaela. We must go to the village."

She rose, wearily. There were tiny burns all over her, she could have screamed as if viciously nipped by a hundred miniature beasts.

"All right. How will they—"

But he had turned away.

Like survivors of a plane crash in the desert, they moved out over the heath.

They went the habitual way. The way Ruth had gone?

Skirting the stone like a lightning, going through the gorse and flowers, the dragon places, inland. Stands of pine. Gulls wheeling overhead. Birds loud in thickets, flying off at their approach.

It seemed to take hours before they reached the road. The Scarabae moved out onto it, as onto some desert trail. Rachaela recalled the cars which employed the road, now, but there were no cars.

On the road, she began to see them better.

They moved gaunt and upright. Their faces had been blackened and through the grime, like their bodies through the burned clothes, gaped pale old spaces of flesh. None of them seemed to have received actual burns. Yet material and even hair was singed away. They looked impossible, comic, and this was somehow dreadful. Rachaela felt vaguely frightened. She did not really know why. Was she the child and they the adults, and at their faltering she too lost her grip? That was absurd. She had been away from them twelve years. With Ruth.

She was in her forties. She did not look it. She looked twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Adamus—young, beautiful—had supposedly been in his seventies. No, that too, ridiculous.

Once she stumbled and tumbled on her knees. They did not wait for her, but they were progressing so slowly she caught them up with ease.

Miranda perhaps cried. If so, she did this very quietly, smoothing her face now and then with a piece of burned stuff. Eric did not cry. He marched in slow motion forward, like a soldier in a dream. Sasha merely moved. Michael and Cheta were possibly more resilient. It was difficult to be sure. They appeared—but it was hopeless to describe them, even to herself. They were beyond all things, fitted nothing. They must all of them be doomed.

But it was Miriam who suddenly fell straight down on the road.

The Scarabae, Miranda and Eric and Sasha, gathered around her. They did not lean to her. Eric said, "Miriam."

Miriam did not stir.

"Michael," said Eric.

And Michael came up at once and raised Miriam in his arms. She seemed like an old valuable doll. She had been wearing a plum dress with beads, and the remaining beads took the sun and flashed cheerfully, as though Miriam might after all be on fire.