The Secret Book of Paradys (38 page)

It may have been, I had begun to think so, the last surge of his persona trying to prevent what was to come, had come, upon it. To baulk and escape, after all.

But, by throwing himself from the attic, he had placed himself for the fall, in the magic condition, the correct one. He was between heaven and earth.
In the air
.

Vlok’s face now was like the moon, idiotic, pale, expressionless. He spoke of things that had nothing to do with Vlok the agent, the man of his time. He said flatly, “You thought you saw him hanging from a rope, mademoiselle, but didn’t you see how the rope was, how it vibrated and smoked? Even as he was falling, suddenly one of the windows broke below – the blue windows – and as that happened, a substance started to pour back and upward, out of Louis’ neck, about the top of the spine. It was that stuff they called ectoplasm. I admit, I had to look it up to find out. A kind of flesh that
isn’t flesh. He was Tuamon, by then, you see, and Tuamon can do that, make a fleshly cord out of his own body. And the ectoplasmic rope shot back into the attic, and attached itself everywhere, to the walls, the floor, and it stopped his fall – not dangerously suddenly, but resiliently, like the safety net in the circus. And then I saw you looking out at it too, mademoiselle. At the time, I didn’t know any more than you did, what was going on.” (A touch of amusement, at his unenlightenment of then.) “As for poor Curt, he was gibbering behind me like a monkey. And then you left the house, I believe, so you didn’t see what took place. The rope of matter pulled Louis’ body gently up, back into the attic, and presently he told me who he, or perhaps I should say, she, was. And at that Curt lost control of himself and ran away, and I’ve told you the rest of that.”

There was a silence after this. Minutes passed again over the face of my clock, microcosm as it was, as all clocks are, of Time itself, that terrible enormous relentless thing we domesticate with porcelain and ormolu even while it preys upon us.

Eventually I said, with care only to Vlok, not to the other, “Why did you wait so long to come to me?”

“Till you had read the diary.”

“You knew when I did?”

“Tuamon.”

“Why is the name changed? Why not Tiy-Amonet?”

“Tuamon is the correct name. Tiy-Amonet was the name for the Roman’s use. Of course, she’ll want to be known by some other name now, of the City, the present day. For convenience.”

“And a further question,” I said. He waited as I swallowed more than once. “Why do I have to be told all this?”

“
To finish
.”

The voice terrified me. It terrified me every time now. But I had to say: “Finish – what?”

Another gap. Was it telepathy after all? Vlok said, as if instructed in the actual words, “He comes from Egypt. He was, and is, a sorcerer. You know about the hieroglyphs in their picture-writing? Well, mademoiselle, to an Egyptian sorcerer, writing is itself a magic, a sort of spell –”

“And old habits die hard,” I said, “like mutilation for vengeance. Louis began to write about all this, and in all sorcery, every ritual must be completed for the safe-making of spell and mage.”

“Exactly, mademoiselle.”

“And so he – or she, you keep changing the gender now – wants me to complete the account. To write down what you’ve told me.”

“Just so. Except it would be better if you begin at the beginning, that is,
if you will re-write, or copy Louis’ account. A broken sequence – it needs to be re-started, and then carried through as one. Also, you see, you are a professional at this – it is, if you will,
your
special branch of magic. You assume therefore the place of the sorcerer himself.” He waited, then said, “And I am to inform you that it doesn’t in the least matter if your view of Tuamon is – unsympathetic. You are naturally afraid and averse to Tuamon, and he expects nothing else. You must write as you feel and see. It will be irrelevant to the ritual, or to the person of the sorcerer Tuamon.”

“Yes. Very well, I do all that. Then what?”

He gazed at me. He put on a look, of an agent whose client may possibly have been exposed to a swindle.

“What could there be, mademoiselle?”

“No, I’m not such a fool as to expect to be paid. I’m inquiring if I’m not to be killed when I’ve completed the
task
.”

And then it – yes,
it
– it laughed.

This was so awful to me that I found myself on my feet, running towards the door – Vlok caught me. He must have caught Louis this way dozens of times, there was a distinct sense of practice.

“There’s nothing to be alarmed at.
She doesn’t need your death
.”

“But if I refuse to obey the task, I’ll be punished?”

Silence again.

In the end Vlok said, “There’s one more thing that you have to be shown. Then you’ll be left to yourself. You’ll write everything down. Then publish, if you want to, or not. That isn’t of any importance. Just the act of the writing. You can even burn the diary, and your manuscript, providing your own work is finished. Then nobody will trouble you, mademoiselle, ever again.”

I might have asked him if he liked being its slave, or if he grieved over Louis, or Curt. Or a hundred things. But I did not, and did not care. I cared only to have it over with. I said so.

“Then I’ll just step down into the street. Tuamon will show you. There’s nothing to be
afraid
of. Good night, mademoiselle.” And so saying he nodded and walked out, closing my door behind him. I heard his feet go down the stairs as I stood alone in the room in the gas-light with that thing, and waited for the concluding revelation.

I had wanted the key to the mystery, or it had made me want it.

Before Vlok’s footsteps had died away, it moved. The dull fire shone around the edges of the body which had been Louis de Jenier’s body. It was taking off the woman’s coat, her hat and gloves, her dress –

It was undressing itself in front of me, with no sensitivity.

I said nothing, made no protest. I sank back into my chair, and gripped my hands together. I already knew.

Louis’ frankness in his descriptions of the costuming of his rôles had told me anything I needed to know about his quite-ordinarily handsome male body. In these split seconds I became aware that this spider-witch, capable of producing from its own fleshly case a string of ectoplasmic gossamer, could thereby reshape and refashion as it chose. The smallness of the hands and feet, the truthful appearance of the breasts –

A silken camisole, silk stockings, suede shoes. Every stitch.

Yes. Now I understood. Presumably that would please, that I understood, so that I would write it accurately, here.

Physically, Louis was a male. Temperamentally, emotionally, a male. Ethically, a female. He was like one of a pair of twins, boy and girl, torn apart at birth. The female twin had been lost to him. He recaptured her – not through male lovers, who offended the maleness of his body – but by clothing himself to her various possible forms. And in that way he had remade himself into the whole double blossom, both sexes.

But Tuamon had always been that. His presence, now the woman’s garments were lying on the ground, was assertively masculine. The pose and the poise of him were masculine. Yet the face under the gleaming hood of hair was a girl’s face, with only a boy’s arrogance to the brows and lips, and the neck, the boyish shoulders and the arms and the firm apple breasts – a girl’s. There was strength in the limbs, in those rounded arms, and the long, muscled legs, the flat belly. And there was strength in the loins, which the room’s warmth, or the stillness, or arrogance itself, had caused to flower, so I should have no doubts. And then he – for it was, for all and everything,
a man
– he positioned himself, with no coyness or display, to let me view that the strong loins had also their vulnerability. That this man might be possessed as a woman, too.

Tuamon, taking the feminine name Tiy-Amonet to smooth the sensibilities of a Roman commander attracted to otherness. Tuamon was hermaphrodite. Male and female, in all particulars. The face and breasts of a girl, the essence of a man. The loins of both.

Timonie had been solely and only a woman. Outside and under the skin. She was discarded, and punished. But Louis, under the skin, under the skin of the soul, was potentially dual. He had been worth the centuries.

The gas was turning blue, and that part of the room where Tuamon stood became a vast hollow drum. I thought I glimpsed – lotus pillars, the dune-shaped sarcophagae of Egypt – but then I saw instead an azure sphere, flashing and dazzling with movement and with integral life. In the heart of it, the fabulous monster basked, its eyes like port-holes on a sea of sky, through which passed colossal waves, tidal clouds, while the evening star hung on its
forehead, the crescent moon and the full hung one from either ear. And on the disc of the full moon, a blue spider depended from a thread of pulsing ether.

And I did not want the vision to end.

I did not want the safe drab darkness to come back.

And I thought of Louis, closed inside, the food of this power, and I did not feel anything but hunger.

Then it too was done. Over and done.

Reality flooded back to me, and I was ashamed and petrified. And in this state I sat, hugging close my mother’s shawl. I sat and the shadow-of-night gathered up itself, and masked itself again, and went by me like a burning whisper, and was gone.

And after it was gone I remade the fire and turned up the lamp, and sitting at my desk, wrote this.

By the end of the first night, he knew that his lodging was haunted. From the night’s first minute, he should have guessed.

A hag greeted him on the threshold.

“M’sire Raoulin?” squawked she in her old-fashioned way. And in the dusk she held high one quavering candle. He learned at once by that the interior would be ill-lit.

“I am Raoulin. My baggage and chest have arrived?”

“You are to follow me,” she said, like a portress of the damned in Hell, who could not be expected to have luggage.

“To my host, your master?:”

She said, “There’s no master here. There’s no one here. M’sire No One is the lord in these parts.”

She led him in across a black cavern of a hall, over a blacker courtyard, up an outer stair, in at an arch, along two or three corridors, and in the light-watered darkness opened for him a wooden door with her keys. When she had lit a pair of candles in his apartment, she told him she would bring his supper in an hour, or if he liked company he might partake below in the kitchen with herself and the groom. Plainly he was not royalty, and she intended him to see she knew it.

Out of malicious curiosity therefore he said he would dine below. She gave him directions he was sure he would forget.

“And mind out, on the stair,” she said.

“Mind what?”

“For M’sire No One,” she replied, and cackled.

She was a cheery eerie old soul.

Raoulin was a tall, well-made young man, good-looking in his ivory-ebony mode, for he was by stock a black-haired northerner. His father owned horses and cattle, vineyards, orchards and numberless fields, and in the long low house, while the other sons toiled at the land or galloped off wenching, there was Raoulin, constricted by tutors. They swelled his brain with Latin and fair Greek, they made inroads on his spirit with philosophy and hints alchemical.

Raoulin was to go to the City and study at the university of the Sachrist.

When the hour came, he was not sorry. He had been set apart from his family by increasing erudition. It had come to pass he could not sneeze without being accused of some sophistry or conundrum. For the City, he had heard it was packed with churches, libraries and brothels. It was the epitome of all desired wickedness: teases for the intellect, pots for the flesh.

The lodging was arranged via his father’s steward, who told him only the place had been, a decade before, a great palace, the home of the noble house of d’Uscaret. They had fallen on hard times, through some political out-management, the steward believed. For the mighty families of the City had, even ten years before, been constantly engaged with one another, fighting their blood-feuds on the streets and cutting each other’s throats besides in the Duke’s council chamber.

Certain members of tribe d’Uscaret were still supposed to live in the mansion. It was said to be dilapidated but also sumptuous. A prestigious residence, a good address.

But no sooner had Raoulin ridden along the narrow twilight street and seen the towers of the manse arising behind their ruinously walled gardens, the ornate, unillumined facade, like that of some antique tomb, than he was sure of poverty, plagues of mice and lice, and that the steward of his father, altogether fonder of the other sons, had done him a bad turn.

Supper was not so bad, a large vegetable dish with rice, and a gooseberry gelatine, pancakes, and ale. Though money had been provided for his fare, Raoulin was not sure he would not be cheated. As it was, grandma tucked in heartily, and the bony groom, smacking lips and clacking their three or four teeth like castanets.

“Perhaps,” said Raoulin, “you might get me some beef tomorrow.”

“Maybe, if beef’s to be had. And my poor legs aren’t fit for running up and down to the meat market,” replied grandma.

“Then send the girl,” said Raoulin casually. “And by the by, I hope you’ll see she’s fed too.”

A silence greeted this.

Raoulin poured himself more ale.

The groom sat watching him like a motheaten old wolf, dangerous for all his dearth of fangs. The hag peered fiercely from her mashed plate.

“We have no girl. He and I, is all.”

“Then, she’s the lady of the house. I beg her pardon.”