The Secret Book of Paradys (101 page)

She stepped into the heart of the maze nearly indifferently. She was not pale, but nearly luminous, as he had seen her after a particularly fortuitous murder.

She too looked at him, and stopped.

“Here you are,” she said.

“You ran away,” he said. “Where did you go?”

“Into the painter’s studio, where else?”

“But – I was there. I explored the house. I didn’t find you.”

“Nor I you.” She frowned. “Somehow that seemed to be all right. I knew I’d find you
here
.”

“We must,” he said, “have gone into the studio on different planes of time. Did you see her, then?”

“No, The room was empty.”

“What hour of day was it?” he asked. He trembled with relief at discovering her, did not mind what they said, or where they were.

“Day, I think. There was
sunlight
. It fell across the floor from the two windows.”

“The window in the roof?”

“No, one in each wall. One gave on a bank of vines. The other window had a view. A lawn and trees, some buildings …”

“We weren’t in the same place,” he said.

Smara scowled, as if he had accused her of some misdemeanor, as had sometimes happened in their childhood. “It was her studio,” said Smara. “There was an easel with a painting on it.”

“Of what?” he asked darkly.

“A ship,” said Smara.

“Do you recognize a ship?”

“… Yes, from a picture. It had a sail. Things were spilling out of it. I don’t know what.”

“The bitch must have two studios. What did you do in this room?”

“Very little. I was only there a few minutes. Then I came back to look for you.”

“How?”

Smara lowered her eyes. She seemed angry also. “I cried out your name at the wall. I’d got in there.”

Felion swept his arm upward.

“What’s that?”

Smara glanced. She became pale again and distressed.

“I didn’t do it.”

“It’s your fear. It’s some sort of bird of ice. It’s formed itself there.”

“I won’t stay here,” she said. She was immobile.

He went to her and took her hand. She still held, limply, her strangler’s cord.

“We’ll go back, then.”

They walked away into the convolutions of the labyrinth. He said, “Don’t be afraid of birds.”

“You used to flap with the sheet and say –”

“I was horrible. Please forgive me and forget it. We were only seven.”

“I saw the picture of a bird once. It was black and white. It had a terrible beak.”

“I looked for it in the books,” he said, “specially. It was a totem of the peoples of the northern ice waste. A spirit fashioned as a bird, with a black head and a white breast. And it was a good spirit, which they invoked to bring them help. It cured the sick.”

“Are you pretending?” she questioned.

No visions came, the ice walls slid curving around them. They did not run.

“It’s true,” said Felion.

“In her room” Smara said, “I did something.”

“What?”

“Will it hurt?” she said.

“I don’t know. Damn her, who is she? Who cares?”

“I painted in something white on her picture. I don’t know why. A ball of ice.”

“How?” he said, again, curious and unnerved. He had done nothing.

“One of the brushes you gave me,” she said, “from the man you killed. I had it with me. I used her paint. It was as if I’d always meant to, and –”

“Yes?” he said.

“I hid her spare canvases. The ones she hadn’t used.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I hate her. She lives
there
.”

In the winds of the ice, he turned his sister toward him and kissed her forehead.

“Forget her,” he said. “Then she won’t be in our way. Did you like the sun?”

“Yes.”

“Wait,” he said, “until we see the moon by night.”

Smara had shut herself into her apartment. Felion knew that she was there, although she would not answer his signal at the door. She had not been out for days, save for one night when, turning into her street, he saw her gliding up the steps of her home. By the time he had reached it, she was inside.

He too killed desultorily, with the strangler’s noose. But he was not interested in the activity now.

The idea of the labyrinth, and the city beyond, had come to obsess him.

He thought about the parallel endlessly, visualizing for himself how it might look, its heights and depths, its river – for surely, like Paradise, it had one.

His own room was in a hovel. He preferred this, he disliked possessions, for they seemed to gain a hold over him. To the clockwork cat, for example, he had had a loyalty, insisting on trying to make it work, to carry out its old antics of play and purring. But the cat was stubborn. It had “died.” Smara only used its leftovers for a distraction, it did not disturb her.

In Felion’s room, which was in a ruined building near a quay once known as Angel, Felion kept a hammock to sleep in and a steel safe in which lay his weapons, a few fragmented books, and some clothes. Across the door, which was itself off its hinges, stretched an electrical device that kept out intruders.
One day, probably, this too would break.

Felion stayed in his room or walked by the river.

Gigantic rats, quite beautiful, but savage, prowled the edges of the water. Sometimes Felion fed them with parts of bodies, but not often. He did not want the rats to become a responsibility.

After two weeks, when Smara was still locked away, he returned to his uncle’s labyrinth.

As he walked forward, he counted the turns of the ice wall. He was just inside the fifth turning when the first vision appeared.

Felion stopped, staring.

Like Smara, or as Smara had claimed it, it seemed to him he saw his uncle. But not in a garden. The old man was shambling through an alley, an alley of the elsewhere place, with no mist, and only a light on him that came down from the sky. Felion looked up, and so he saw it, the moon by night.

It was the moon – round as the perfection of all circles, russet as parchment,
bright
– it was the moon, not his uncle, that pulled Felion into the vision.

And the image did not burst or fade. It stayed whole about him.

He was brave, blasé. He thought,
I can get back, in and out as I want. I’m somewhere he told me not to go. So what?

Felion followed his uncle along the alley in the moonlight and so up onto higher ground.

It seemed to Felion his uncle was younger, but that might only be an effect of the amazing darkness. Felion heard his uncle’s feet on the cobbles and in slicks of mud. Heard his
own
footfalls.… But the uncle of Felion did not turn. He seemed, the uncle, immersed in some dream, now and then gazing up at the moon. Just as Felion did.

Smara, you should have seen – you will see
.

There was a bar or drinking shop up the slope beyond the alley, and Felion’s uncle went in there. Felion stalled. Then he, too, made to go in. There was a sign hung over the door: A half-transparent figure hurried over a hill, under which was a rim of light; a ghost fleeing the dawn, as in Paradise, maybe, it would not have to? On a wall in the picture curled something with the black head of a bird. Felion did not understand this sign, nor the writing beneath. The letters of it were like those of Paradise, but not the language. His uncle had not warned him that in Parad
is
they would have to learn to speak a foreign tongue.

Inside the bar, under the beams, Felion’s uncle sat drinking and writing on a tablet of paper.

The clothing of the people here was not quite like the garments Felion had glimpsed from the artist’s house. It was, evidently, a different time.

From another table, a gang of evil-looking humans raised their glasses to Felion’s uncle.

“Here’s health to you, poet!”

Felion withdrew, back into the street.

In the alley a women was selling herself to a man. As Felion went by, she smiled at him, over her customer’s bowed skull. “Only wait a moment.”

It came to him that after all he understood their speech, only their writing was incomprehensible.

Felion reached the end of the alley, and walked back, as he meant to, into the labyrinth of ice.

How easy. He must assure Smara again of how straightforward the adventure was.

No other visions come.

He reached the heart.

He made himself look up, and there that bird thing was, still shaped out of the ice.

Across the murky floor had been scattered some scraps of brown sugar, or glass.

Felion turned around. He did not want to go on without his sister. He would have to bully her again. He wanted her to see the moon.

He walked back out of the maze, and nothing happened. It was as if he had cheated or mocked it, and he expected trouble, but there was none.

Below the hundred steps leading to his uncle’s house, Felion found a woman and, with a kind word, strangled her abruptly. He took her earrings of pearl for his sister and put them through the receptor of her door, impatiently, when still she would not let him in.

A day after, they met by accident in the nave of the cathedral. No one else was there but for a corpse lying in a side chapel, unknown by sight to either of them.

“Come back into the other city.”

“I went there,” she said, “in a dream.”

“That isn’t the same,” he said.

Smara shook her head sternly. “How can we know? I saw
her
studio again, by night. I was outside and I opened the door. Someone was sleeping there, but I didn’t go in. I stayed outside. There was an elevator.… Downstairs there were lawns and tall trees. In a lighted window was a man peering out at me. I ran back again. There was,” she added, “a house of glass with a vine of fruit in it. But the vine was dead and the glass had broken.”

“Was the glass brown?” he said.

“I don’t think it was.”

“Come with me,” he said.

Smara said, “Not today. Not yet.”

Hot summer light: The room seemed arid, and larger than before, and Leocadia sat with her robe across her lap, examining the tear at its hem. She must have got out of the bed and wandered around the chamber, and caught the silk on something. On what? Some shred of broken glass the mechanical device had not cleared? (During the night the second broken glass had also been cleared up, the glass she had dropped when she saw a black pillar with a beaked dagger of head standing there across the room.)

The panel that supplied music and told the time had also a small button to summon the attendant.

Summoned, the girl in the dark uniform now knocked and entered. It was always the same girl. Or could it be that they simply employed a number of girls who closely resembled each other, sisters perhaps?

“Yes, mademoiselle? Would you like a cooked breakfast? There are some excellent rolls, just made –”

“No, I don’t want breakfast. I want to see one of the doctors.”

“I understand, mademoiselle. Are you feeling worse?”

“Worse. You mean, I’m always ill, so now I must be worse. I’m neither. Duval will do. Or Leibiche. Even Saume, probably.
Not
Van Orles.”

The maid – one thought of her as a maid, rather than a jailor – smiled. “Very well, mademoiselle. I’ll take your message. But I can’t promise anything. The doctors are always very busy.”

When she was gone, Leocadia went to her refrigerator. She opened it quickly. Chill air smoked out, winter in little.

Last night the refrigerator had been warm and she had basked against it.

Now she poured out vodka, and drew forth a long sliver of white cheese.

If the temperature of the refrigerator had failed, the food would be spoiled, and it was not.

Had she still been dreaming? The warmth, the apparition? No, for another of the glasses was missing, the one she had dropped in startlement.

Leocadia glanced aside. Nothing was disturbed, no shards of glass on the floor. Her canvases, removed by Van Orles when she was out, were still missing.

He must be amused, gratified. All her painting materials left to her, and no means for their use. Of course, even such a fool would know what this would do to her.

If one of the other doctors came, doubtless he would have been told Leocadia herself had demanded the subtraction of the canvases, or made some threat having to do with them. It would be unwise to accuse Van Orles of anything, let alone report his graceless lechery.

How many, trapped here, had submitted, to him or to some other? And would she have to prostitute herself to get her canvases back? After all, anything could be taken away from her, a reason could always be found, since she was insane.

All afternoon, no one had visited. Nor at five o’clock, the usual time.

Leocadia went down into the garden.

No one was there, either.

The summerhouse and flower bed, empty. A pigeon flew away from the Medusa’s head at Leocadia’s approach.

The lawns and walk were vacant, and across the grass, through the trees, the buildings of the madhouse were like old rocks in a desert.