The Secret Book of Paradys (100 page)

But Hilde turned and ran about the room, up and down, like a dog in a cage. She beat the walls with her fists, and her cries were so loud now they might be heard in the street.

Her mother rushed at her and slapped her hard again, two or three times, until Hilde fell on the floor.

“How can I live?” said Hilde. Her words were unintelligible. “How can I bear it?” She was, of course, too young to know that much of life involves the bearing of what cannot and should not be borne.

And Madame Koster, who did know, being seasoned enough, and who had the passion of a small gnat in her heart, imagined that her self-control was due to her superior type, and that Hilde’s lack of it was proof of Hilde’s revolting weakness and unworthiness. As Hilde lay there, madame her mother would have kicked her. For being all madame was not. Therefore an insult, a challenge, and a threat.

All love was gone. Dream love, and motherly love.

Hilde was locked into her room, where she lay in a stupor, not caring.

And then madame brooded. And presently she summoned her husband home.

The Koster house was built of respectability, of reasonable sane ambitions, formats and rites. Hilde was a spy of chaos who had got in, masquerading as a daughter.

Two doctors tested Hilde’s mind carefully. They conferred with monsieur. Madame shed a few dryish tears.

Only thirteen days had passed since Hilde’s return from the Goddess of Tragedy.

“It seems she is the victim of – monsieur, forgive me – a sexual delusion and a frenzy. It affects certain unlucky young women in this way. Such women are feeble, unformed. They are not meant for physical ardor and can’t withstand it. The proper female votive of sacrifice and tenderness becomes warped into obsession. She’s a danger to herself, and to others.”

The Kosters had put it about that their daughter was gravely ill, and when word came that she had abruptly died, there was speculation but no disbelief. Death did descend in this way, and the young were vulnerable. That the parents were secretive and sorrowful was only to be expected. The funeral was very private, indeed, clandestine.

A headstone appeared in the graveyeard. Those who discovered and read it were sometimes struck that it was a little odd. “Our dear daughter, Hilde, strayed from our lives …”

Massively drugged, insensible, Hilde was taken away in a closed carriage at three in the morning. It was all managed very discreetly. If people saw, they did not understand.

The carriage wheeled sedately through Paradys, along the cobbled lanes and up the wide paved roads, under the churches. Our Lady of Sighs, Our Lady of Smokes. Beneath the Temple-Church. Reflected in the river. It went up into the hills to where the last of the dark trees were, beyond the outlying architecture of the City, and came to a big brick citadel, sometime before dawn.

The walls were high, the gate was straight.

It was the lunatic asylum of Paradys. The madhouse.

The door slammed shut again, on Hilde.

In the garden room of her apartment, Smara had been working the clockwork cat. The clockwork, however, was wearing out, and the cat was no longer friendly, as it had been in Felion’s and Smara’s youth. It would pad a few meters, and then stop.

The garden room had plants made of black velvet and rubber, and sometimes Smara dusted them. Their mother had spent many hours here, before one day she flung herself off a high tower in the City. Their father was unknown to them.

When Felion arrived, they drank sweet wine and talked about ordinary things. Smara had killed a woman in a cemetery, managing to lasso her as she knelt over a grave.

Finally, Smara said, “But you went into the labyrinth, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Shall I tell you?”

“If you want,” said Smara. Her face was sharp and anxious.

Felion told her what he had seen in the passages of the ice, the visions of women, the glass building, the being in the web. He spoke of the empty heart at the labyrinth’s center, and how nothing disturbed him on the farther side, until he emerged into the studio of the artist their uncle had made his inheritrix.

Smara listened, but she kept moving about. She began to dust the plants, and the stone head that stood on a plinth against one window.

“And will you go back?” she inquired when he had ended.

“I think I will. There were stars, I saw them, Smara, through a skylight. The sky was a deep black, and there they were. I want you to see them too. And the sun. And the moon.”

“Oh, but I’ve seen that,” she said. “In pictures.”

Felion began to persuade her, to nag her and wear her down.

She allowed him to talk, but soon she got up and wandered from the room, and so from room to room of the apartment. Felion pursued her, still talking, nagging.

It grew dark, and the opaque gray blanks of the windows changed to ebony. Sometimes a light might shine out there from some height or other, and tonight there was one, quite fierce, and fluctuating. Probably something was on fire.

Felion was hoarse. He left off and only sat looking at Smara. There was nothing to eat in the apartment.

“Shall we go out and find some food?”

But now Smara said, “Why must I come into the labyrinth?”

“To reach the other city.”

“Is it so wonderful, then?”

“It must be.” He added, “You mustn’t be afraid of the ice. It’s not like winter.” This was a lie. “And I’d be with you.”

She did not reply then, but as they walked the wide smoggy streets, she said, “I’ve been thinking of it, the other city.” Then, as they ate burned potatoes in a café, she found a round rock, of course, cooked in with the vegetables. She said, “I asked for bread, and into my hand was put a stone.”

Felion flung the rock at the cook, who had appeared in the café. The man shied, laughing, and the rock only broke another window.

“We can go tonight,” said Smara. “Yes, I’ll try.”

He took her right hand at the entrance. In her left he had seen she carried her killing cord. He held up the torch, and the ice wall gleamed.

She looked frightened, but she did not hold back now.

They went in together. They were inside.

Then they walked forward, keeping to the left, not speaking.

The sounds came, the dim roar like oceans. Smara made no comment, asked no questions. Her hand felt as cold as the ice.

Felion waited for the visions, but nothing stirred.

Suddenly Smara said, “Oh, look!”

But Felion could see nothing at all.

“What is it? I don’t –”

“That old man in a garden … Isn’t it our uncle? He’s dressed as he was in the photograph, the one taken during the war. And look – oh,
look
! There are flowers – just like the ones the screens show.”

Felion could make out nothing, but Smara’s white face was alight with interest. Then she blinked. “It’s gone.”

“I didn’t see. But it must be one of the elements he said we’d find here – time slips, images of some other place. He said he went there, as well as to the city. He went there or would be going there … And so. Probably you saw him.”

“There was a glass building,” she said. “It had white and brownish panes.”

They went on. Smara moved quickly now.

No images unfolded before Felion, and Smara apparently saw nothing else. Quite swiftly, they reached the center.

Inside this icy oval, Smara hesitated.

She stared about her, and drew her right hand from Felion’s grasp.

“This is a terrible spot,” she said. “
Something’s here
.”

“No, nothing at all. It’s empty.”

“Yes, there is something. Something horrible and dangerous.”

“
No
.” Felion put his head on her shoulder.

Smara darted her head upward and pointed, into the height of the ice wall.

And something was there. A kind of hump bulging out in the ice. It had not been present before.

He said, “Smara, you must control yourself. You’re making this happen. It’s
you
.”

She covered her eyes with her hands.

The bulge in the ice did not go away, but it had now a fixed, inert appearance.

“How much further?” Smara whispered.

“I don’t know. Not far.”

All at once she broke from him and ran off.

He shouted after her, and also ran to catch her up, but although in the City he could have done this easily, here something prevented him. And so she was gone, flying ahead, vanishing. He called that she must keep to the left of the walls. He remembered how he had told her over and over that will had projected him through into the second world, and where they would be going: the studio of the woman artist.

Then, running, he reached the exit point, and saw, with hardly any forethought, the studio outside.

He rushed into it – but Smara was not there.

Again, as before, the house in the second world was vacant.

At first, he barely noticed, searching about in it, uncaring and unthinking, for his sister. Who mattered, what counted, but she?

But Felion did not find Smara.

Instead, he found other things.

The rooms were quaint, some orderly and clean, others jumbled. Dead flowers (flowers!) in a vase, the butts of cigarettes with a scented smell, books – intact – cast about lying on the carpets. There were glasses with the phantoms of alcoholic perfume, but no dregs.

On the walls hung interesting pictures. There were persons in them with the heads of beasts Felion recognized from the screens and portions of books in Paradise.

The furnishings were not so dissimilar to those he knew. That was a chair, and this a table, a cupboard, an ashtray, a cup.

But.

The windows.

It was dawn, he thought, and he saw a sun come up. It was an orb like a lamp, but quickly it became too bright to regard. Then the whole sky flooded with brilliance and color.

Did Smara see this? Where was she?

He hunted through the house of windows, and piece by piece the strangeness, the volume, of what he saw overcame even his concern for Smara.

He did not leave the building. And yet, outside, he beheld streets. There were old trees, growing and real. It was possible to see a long way, because there was no mist.

Felion wondered, if anyone entered the house, what he would do. But no one came to the house, and outside the calmest day went by. Vehicles passed now and then, and sometimes people walked along, in costumes that, as with the furniture, were not so unlike the clothing of Paradise, although he noticed no masks.

He could not find a cooking area, or anywhere to come on a drink; he longed for water. There seemed to be mechanisms that worked for the maintenance of the house, but he could not activate them, for the panels that apparently related to them were incomprehensible.

In the hallway at the bottom of the house there was some evidence of the passage of many people. He noticed that something had been done to the door, externally, which worked to secure it. A spangled woman’s shoe lay on the stair.

The day went with the passage of its sun, and bars of light and shadow roamed over the chambers, fascinating him. The whole house was like a clock.

At length, he went back to the upper attic room, the painter’s room.

He realized now, something seemed to have happened here, too. He was uncertain what. Some tubes of paint were stuck to the floor. With distaste, he found that someone had vomited in a corner.

As previously, the exit-entry point had disappeared, and in a sudden rage he crashed his fist against the wall.

“Let me through. I want Smara.”

It was what they had called
dusk
. He could hardly believe he had spent so much time here, when she –

The wall gave way. It was as much emotion, then, as will that caused the labyrinth to operate.

The tunnel of ice curled before him, and idiotically he glanced at the ground, to see if Smara had left lying there one of her shoes, to guide him. But there was nothing.

He stared around the attic again. He had looked at some of the canvases that were stacked against the wall. One had a blond man standing on a roof, high above a city that was devoid of mist.

Inside the maze, he walked backward, watching the aperture, until it abruptly dissolved.

As he came into the center of the labyrinth, Felion paused.

His heart beat heavily; he was conscious of great fatigue and mental enervation.

It was now incredible to him he had lingered so long in the parallel house of a painter (whose name his uncle had never bothered to tell him) when his sister had vanished inside the maze of ice.

He looked up, and there the bulge still was, in the ice wall. It had changed.

Above, the ice had sunk to a type of darkness, almost like some view of the misty night of Paradise. And in the space thus supplied, the frozen tumor had gone to a blocked and incoherent shape. But it was tall, and had a birdlike head –

In that moment, Felion heard light footsteps on the floor of the ice, tapping toward him. His blood leapt, he looked down, and saw Smara.