The Secret Book of Paradys (30 page)

Then a film of shadow began to hover in the radius of the inner circle, something not to do with candlelight or gloom.

Pierre came awake. He looked intently.

The shadow had an odd glow, dark on lesser dark, turning first black, then to a muddy hue and texture. A being was after all about to appear.

What would Pierre see! The Fallen One, the Angel who had defied God, envious of the creation of man, seizing the world away to corrupt and ultimately to destroy it?

Out of the mass of shadow something rose. It was the colour of a dead moon, glaring dully with a light that was lightless.

The worshippers screamed, calling a hundred names of the pantheon of Hell – those of Satan himself, and of his demon captains – there was some discord, it seemed, over who the apparition was taken for.

But Pierre knew what he saw. He saw the Devil.

It was the body of a huge man, a giant, and the face of a bestial thing. Its eyes were pits of nothingness. From its lips snaked a serpent’s tongue. Horned and clawed and tailed. Deformed, blasted. Ugly, evil and pitiless, and
glad
.

This was the vision of Pierre. He dropped senseless on the floor.

In the years to come, his images of paint and stone would reveal glimpses of an awful revelation. His Hell would leap with rending flame, his cyphers of the Last Judgement of Mankind, and World’s End, would display Satan in all his might, eating souls alive, while the earth burned.

In a week, or less, I shall be dead
.

Having written this on his card, he handed it to me.

“Why?” I said.

“I’m under sentence of it,” he said.

“Again, why?”

“Ah. There’s the story.”

“I’m expected to listen?”

“Perhaps not. I’ve left an account, a sort of diary, and various papers. My address, you will see, is on the front of that card, with my name. Are you familiar with the Observatory Quarter?”

“Quite. What I would rather discover is your reason for approaching me in this way.”

“Dear mademoiselle, you are a stranger. So far at least, you’ve heard me out. Those that know me, mademoiselle, won’t credit a word.”

“I seem to know you better with every passing second.”

He smiled, and sat down opposite me.

The name on the card was Louis de Jenier, and the address, as he said, on a street among the steep, stepped terraces and balconied apartments that banked the Observatory. He himself was so handsome that he remains difficult to describe. Elegantly dressed, and with a silk neck-tie, his lavish dark hair was parted on the right side, and his hands manicured. His eyes were of an extraordinary unreal saturated blue, impossible to penetrate, like those of a statue, or, more actually, a doll. Since I had never met him before, I could not tell if he were unusually pale, sickening for illness, or had gone mad. He had come directly to my table through the crowded café, most of which had stared, as they do in the north, especially in Paradis, at his novelty of looks and style. Now he said: “Mademoiselle, let me add that I know you write for the journals, albeit under a male pseudonym. Yes, I’ve found you out, and tracked you
down for a purpose. I gamble on you. I think you begin to be curious.”

“Not very, monsieur. I assume someone has threatened your life, maybe after a love-affair. Why not go to the City police, if you have no influential friends who could help you.”

“No, no one can help,” he said.

When he spoke, a shadow fell, the way it does when a cloud covers the sun. It was not that he sounded fearful or even dismayed. But it was like that moment which comes, for the first time, to each of us. The moment which says “One day, incredibly, I too will die.”

And in that instant, as I stretched forward mentally towards him, we were interrupted.

Two men were forcing their way through the café. One called excitedly to him, “Louis! Louis!” But the other, as they reached us, said, “For God’s sake, what are you playing at now?”

He glanced at them, with the cruel contempt of a beloved and misunderstood – and so deeply angry child.

“Well, you were boring me rather.”

“Excuse us, mademoiselle,” the second man said to me, tipping his expensive hat. The other only tipped his eyelids.

“Don’t,” said de Jenier to me. “Don’t excuse them.”

“Louis, shut up. Oh this really is too much.”

“Hunted down,” he said to me. “Well, good-bye. It was a great pleasure to meet you.”

His eyes held mine, but conveyed nothing, only colour. Then he rose, and turning aside with the two men, went away in their company.

My immediate impulse was to follow up his invitation. Not today, for when I emerged on to the street, already the dusk was coming down, the blue hour, and along the boulevards they were lighting the lamps, while on the summits of the Sacrifice and Clock Hill the neons of the theatres and the nightclubs had begun to blaze. Tomorrow then, at midmorning. Not too early, for I sensed he would rise quite late, not too late, for then, I sensed, he would be gone.

I had an article to finish that evening, and went to my apartment on the Street St Jean.

At midnight, when, work completed, I turned down the gas, I had already started to have doubts on the other matter. De Jenier might so easily be a poseur.

Next day, rather than seek his address in the Observatory, I attempted to discover his nature from colleagues and acquaintances. A few thought they had heard his name. My editor at the office of
The Weathervane
believed that there was an actor named Louis de Jenier, a southerner, however, obscure.

Daunted, by my own initial eagerness more than by anything else, I did nothing more. The day went, and the night, in uneventful pursuits and ordinary sleep. And after that some further days and further nights.

Of course, he was so beautiful, and he was a man and I a woman – worse, he had unmasked me as a woman, casting away my literary shield. It was all very dangerous. I had come to value the calm sky-pool of my life.

And then it struck me, walking out one morning to the bright sunlight of spring, birds twittering on the roofs, and the women everywhere with their baskets of dew-beaded violets – it struck me that this was the last day of the week he had postulated for his life.

I stood amazed, the violets I had just bought glistening like coloured shards of glass in my hand.

Thissot, who was with me, laughed at my aberration. He pinned the flowers to my lapel. “What have you forgotten?”

“Somebody’s death.”

“Dear God. So serious?”

“Perhaps.”

But I breakfasted with him before I set out. It would not do, I felt, to upbraid the liar on a sinking stomach.

Once, the ascent to the Observatory had been wooded parkland. Duels were fought there under the misty trees, and in a number of ruinous little cemeteries all about, lay the unknown bones of the stabbed and shot. But now the cemeteries were wedged between the high walls of tenements. And where the cannon had pounded at the end of the Years of Liberty, neat flats now stood one upon the head of another, with bell-flowers and papery gentians pouring through the loops and slots of iron balconies. De Jenier’s street was tucked down between two others. Three or four largish houses dominated it, his being the third. On arrival, seeing its number, I learned the whole building belonged to, or was rented by, him. It was a very new house, I thought, not even ten years old. Nothing had been done to it to give it any character. It looked like those villas at the seaside, occupied for only a couple of months a year, kept up by workmen and gardeners, never properly lived in.

I went up the steps and rang the bell. I expected a servant, but when the door was suddenly opened, I saw the face of one I knew. It was the second, talkative man who had come to arrest de Jenier in the café.

It seemed he also remembered me.

“Ah – mademoiselle. Did you –? That is, I’m afraid I can’t let you come in.”

I was not in the least surprised. I felt only dull horror.

“But you must,” I said.

“No, no. Louis – that is – no. It won’t do. If you’ll leave your card, mademoiselle, a telephone number if possible, where we may reach you –”

I did not want to say, Where is the corpse? Because that would be incriminating, perhaps. I said, “He told me to come here. Let me in, or shall I call the police at once?”

The man quailed. Oh indeed, so they had not yet resorted to the means of the law.

“All right,” he snapped. “In, then.”

He hustled me through the narrow opening which was all he would allow.

The hall was clean and empty of anything except for an equally empty umbrella-stand. Two closed doors, a passage leading away below, and an uncarpeted stair leading up.

We stood in this oasis. I said, “Upstairs?”

“All right.”

He directed me to go ahead of him. The heels of my shoes clacked on the treads, and a strange light began to come down. I hesitated, to look up, but he fussed behind me. I went on without looking and reached the first landing to be told, “Go on. Go on, then.”

On the top floor under the attics, a double door stood wide, and out of it came the densely-tinted light that had fallen into the stair-well. The room stood at the back of the house, of medium size, a sitting room perhaps, but it was entirely bare. In the polished wood of the floor, the marble fireplace, and on the plaster walls, reflected four cobalt pillars of light from four west windows blind with cobalt glass.

What a fancy. What an artifice. I thought of opium-smoking and other drugs, where the eyes are affected and require deep shade. The window-glass was like a drug in itself. You stifled, grew drunk, stumbled and lost the awareness of balance. It was like being hung up in a thunderous evening sky. No oxygen available. Blue above, beside, below. Nothing substantial anywhere.

I thought we should have to stop there, maybe until I was overcome and fainted or ran away. But now the second man moved before me, also weaving, holding his hands away from his sides slightly, a wire-walker. He took me through another door into a study.

It had a skylight, it was not drowning in blue. I could breathe again, and looked about. Sofas and chairs crouched under dustsheets. On a sheetless desk lay dramatic impedimenta – polished pens never used, a tidily stacked column of books, scholarly artifacts, such as a skull of quartz, and a leather diary and pencil. One chair stood away from the desk, also unsheeted. Its back had been broken, and some wood splinters scattered along the Persian rug.

On the wall beyond the desk, over the small fireplace, a convex mirror was flanked by two big photographs, both depicting women. One, to the left, wore period costume, perhaps of the Liberty Days, with a corseted, sashed
waist and plumed hat, pearl bracelets, long, dark, curling hair. She was beautiful, and had been labelled in copperplate:
Anette
. To the right of the mirror, the other was a contemporary of my own, her figure freer, her face more obviously powdered and mascaraed; she was clad in a sequined evening gown, furs across her breast, her hair, also dark, pinned up with lilies. Her label read:
Lucine
. It was apparent both were the same person in a different role. Across the convex mirror in between them striped a colossal gash. Since glass can only be scratched by diamond, I supposed a ring had been used, but over and over. In fact, the marks were more like those made by a set of claws.

Of the dead body of de Jenier there was not one trace.

“Wait here,” said the man who had brought me. He turned towards the blue room.

I did not want to wait. I did not like the feel of the room with the desk, and the blue chamber outside had unnerved me.

“Where is he?” I said. I reached out and caught the man by the sleeve.

“Let go. This is disgraceful.”

“Yes it is. What’s happened?”

He worked his lips. “
Something’s
happened,” he said, idiotically.

“I asked you what it was?”

“You’re no one he knows. To invite you here was just his joke, Louis told me. You shouldn’t have come.”

“Let me see him then,” I said boldly. “I’ll go at once.”

“You can’t see him. He – he’s not on the premises –”

“You carry on, monsieur, as if he is dead and you have hidden the body.”

I was being rash, but my nerves now drove me. As for this man, he was more nervous than I was. We both trembled. Finally he said, “You must
wait. Please
. I’ll return directly.”

He scurried out. I stood a while and looked at the chair and the claw-marks on the mirror. Nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. I picked about, cautiously lifting a corner of a dustsheet, peering down at the splinters on the rug. I was partly afraid of finding something. But what?

That man was taking a devil of a time.

Suddenly I resorted to the desk, and picked up the leather diary. This was, probably, the written account de Jenier had referred to. It was unlocked. I opened it. The inside cover formed a pocket into which a number of documents and papers had been carefully compressed. The fly-leaf had pencilled untidy writing on it, his own. It said, “For you, Mademoiselle St Jean, to do with as you think fit.”

St Jean
was the literary pseudonym I used, after the wild poet who is said to have lived on my street and for whom my street is named, and who one day mysteriously disappeared for ever. Either Louis de Jenier did not know
my true name, or he had kept this as a sort of password between us.

Whatever, he clearly meant the book for me.

I slipped it, with scarcely a qualm, into my purse, and walked quickly out of the study. It was now evident to me that the man who had let me in, having no answers to my annoying questions, did not intend to return. All the doors of the house, but for these two and that of the front entry, were doubtless locked. There were to be no clues. They only wanted me gone. It might anyway be unwise to remain.