The Mammoth Book of Terror (44 page)

“What do you mean?” asked Geoff thickly, coughing suddenly. There was pain deep, deep in his throat. Another racking cough filled his mouth with blood.

And he knew what Froneberger meant.

TANITH LEE BEGAN WRITING
at the age of nine and she published three children’s books with Macmillan in the early 1970s. She became a full-time
author in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel
The Birthgrave
and followed it with twenty-six other titles.

She has now written and published around seventy novels, nine collections and more than 200 short stories. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages and she also had four radio plays
broadcast during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series
Blake’s 7.
She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was
awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel
Death’s Master.
In 1998 she was short-listed for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction
for her novel
Law of the Wolf Tower
, the first volume in the “Claidi Journal” series.

Her more recent books include
Piratica
, a pirate novel for young adults, and its forthcoming sequel
Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Lionwolf Cast a Bright Shadow
and
Here
in Cold Hell
are the first two volumes in an adult fantasy series set in a world ruled by magic and mysticism, while
Metallic Love is
a sequel to her 1981 novel
The Silver Metal
Lover.

Two works of lesbian fiction,
Fatal Women
and
Thirty-Four are
published by Egerton House, as is the detective novel,
Death of the Day.
She has also contributed a creepy,
contemporary romance novella to
When Darkness Falls
, published by Harlequin.

Tanith Lee lives with her husband, the writer and artist John Kaiine, on the south-east coast of England.

“John and I haven’t written many stories actually together,” explains Lee. “We wrote our first, however, a macabre and colourful piece called ‘Iron City’ in
1987, although this has since been mysteriously misplaced . . .

“Anyone who has seen much of my work knows I often acknowledge plot or story ideas from John. In the instance of ‘Unlocked’, it began with John’s writing of the journal
and grew further from my own abiding fascination with France, plus our mutual obsession with madness and/or asylums – see my
Book oj the Mad
and John’s metaphysical thriller
Fossil Circus.
”

THE TOWER AND TURRETS
of St Cailloux, so thin and dark against the terrible sky – I only saw them once. It was not possible to make out the bars,
nor to hear the cries. The lawns were shaven, and the trees had the controlled shapes into which they had been carefully cut, restrained by wire. Behind, far off, the mountains, broken and
unruly.

Some old chateau, so it looks to be, and must have been, once. No longer.

Now it houses the ones who scream and are kept in by bindings and bars and bolts.

I only saw it once. And that was in a photograph.

What a dreadful place. I want only to sell it, although I doubt it will bring in any money.

At the inn or hotel or whatever it thinks itself to be, an old man brought me a parcel, like a peculiar present.

“What’s this?” I tried to be pleasant, though he had suspiciously refused to sit down and ignored my offer of a glass of wine.

“Her book.”

“I see. Whose book?”

“Hers. Madame Ysabelle.”

“Ah – that’s the diary, then.”

“Her book,” he said, put it on the table, nodded angrily – they are all angry with me, the foreigner from the city who has inherited a piece of their landscape, which is the
whole world. The two old servants had been sent away before her death. That is a blessing. I can imagine how
they
would have been with me.

“It was found under a stone?” I asked. “By the hearth.”

“What kept it,” he said.

After he had gone, I unwrapped the paper and took out the diary. It is black and stained, the binding flaking away. But the stone had protected it, as he said. Something ironic in that, almost a
pun—

I opened the cover and saw, in a brownish ink, the characters of my distant relative, Ysabelle, the ornate handwriting so encouraged in her youth. But she had only been thirty-two when she died.
No doubt a great age here in the country. An old maid. But I had seen her picture. Quite tall, full-figured, with tight corsetted waist. Hair very dark. Long-fingered hands, and an oval face on a
long smooth throat. Dark eyes that gave nothing away, by which I mean
gave
nothing, pushed it toward one.

The writing said,
My Book.
Private, in the manner of a young girl. She had never married, “Madame” the rude courtesy of this primitive area, never allowed courtship, which was
blamed on her father. After his death, alone in her white house, all wood, as they do it here, with only the thinnest veneer of dropping plaster. A grape vine growing over the terrace, and the
cherry trees raising their gnarled hag’s arms, that in spring are clothed in blossom like a young girl’s skin.

By local standards too old then, Ysabelle, for wooing. At twenty, here, they gave up such hopes, unless she was a widow and wealthy, and really, despite the land, the two servants, there was no
money in her family.

I flicked through the pages. I did not particularly want to know her. Although her diary had survived, and insistently they had awarded it to me.

Here and there a sentence: “Nightingale in cherry tree. It kept me awake all night. Exquisite song, save when it stops to imitate an owl it has heard in the woods.” Or, “Mireio
says there are no eggs today.” Or, “The wind has been blowing. Has made my head ache and my eyes.” Then, this sentence: “I cut open an apple, seeds, the white flesh inside,
the juices, white as wine, nobody has witnessed this before.”

How odd. What a curious thing to say. Had Ysabelle, who seemed to have gone mad, never supposed anyone, not even Eve, had cut open an apple before?

Then I read, “The red apples all white inside. The leaves are dead, too hot, shrivelling the blooms, too passionate a heat. Bells toll in the next valley. Seeds and tears, poppy dreams.
Summer, hot, heat, the stifling heat. I dream of clouds. This brightness hurts me. The silver that the locket is made of – where from? Taken from earth, like black-berries, cherry trees,
grapes, peeling birch. Everything will burn. It is holding its last breath, blooming with the threat of death. Foxgloves.”

I put the diary down. It had felt hot in my hands. Smoke rose from it in my imagination.

Walking across to my trunk, I rummaged inside, and pulled out the other thing they had given me, the buckled, shapeless mass of the locket.

Why foxgloves, Ysabelle? It must be the old country superstition, not the poison which also gives life, but the black fox – cipher for Satan – who leaves his mark there, because he
is the ghost of a lover.

Was her secret here in this diary, then, and did they all know it, all these walnut-brown people of the valleys and slopes, who rose with the sun and slept when it fell, and would tell me
nothing, and not even drink a glass of wine with me?

I opened the diary in another place and read, “I saw them today. They were on the road in their little trap with the pony.
He
sits upright like a stupid rock. She leans, looking
this way, that way. Burning hair. Her hair is the sun, but only if the sun is pale as the moon. I waved. And she saw me, and waved too.
He
stared, then nodded, a king. Ernst and H
ā
na.
She had a purple ribbon in her chignon, but her hair is so massive, it drooped on her slender neck, shoulders. Purple like a wound in all that blonde.”

Under this, Ysabelle, dimly related to me by the wedlock of an unknown aunt, had drawn a line of vine leaves, rather well, in her brown ink that perhaps had been dark when she used it.

Beneath, she writes: “H
ā
na, Ariadne, Dionysos. Holy.”

And then: “Ernst. What a boring statue of shit.”

This startles me, and I laugh.
Ysabelk
, such
unfeminine
language. But it is her private book.

Even so, I suddenly think her modern, ahead of her time. This boldness in an old unmarried woman. And she is so coarse about Ernst . . . does she secretly like him?

The next paragraph only says, “I shall send Jean to advise him about the horse.”

I put the diary by my bed. Then, in the furtive manner of this place, pushed it
under the mattress.
I should read more in bed that night.

Was there even a lock on the diary, which the heat from above caused to melt?

Who else has read this book? Who else began by reading the last page first?

“I have a lock of your hair. I cut it from you as you slept. I kissed you there, where the scissors met. You never noticed it had gone. It is all I have of you, your hair. Blonde spirals
in a silver locket.

“The locket is cold between my breasts. Cold in the heat. Perhaps it is the heat of the locket which feels cold, as they say witches screamed, when they were burning alive, of the agony of
the great terrible freezing coldness. I sweat silver. Your curled hair next to my heart.

“But we are monkeys, not angels.

“Yesterday, when I returned to the old white house, I saw it freshly, as if I had never lived here, or had been away some years. Whose house is that one? Ysabelle’s. She lives alone.
Truly alone now, for in the town I saw the lawyers, and settled a sum of money on Jean and Mireio. At dawn today, I dismissed them. She was sulky and angry, and he accused me of sending them away
because he had tried to shoot the nightingale. Secretly, they were pleased, talking together when they thought I did not hear, of the tobacconist’s shop they plan to start together in the
next town. Here, a cooking pot and broom are all that remain of them, all they deigned to leave me.

“My new, empty house. I have always liked it. Liked it too well to leave. Nothing has changed since the days of childhood. The peeling painted wooden walls, ivy in the cherry trees –
now and then cut back, always returning – the well of broken stone. Such pretty neglect. But yes, the view has changed, the land shrunk and the sky grown. There are no clouds, now.

“I dream of clouds, as indeed I dream of you. Great black clouds to cover the sun, stormy skies to quell this heat. There has been no rain for many months, and I have heard a rumour too,
of a goat sacrificed in the woods – killing to bring rain, blood for water.

“I have a lock of your hair. And
this.
I have this, but this is not you. No. How well I remember when it was. For it was the very same height as you, and broader perhaps, than your
delicate, slender frame, like a spilling of your soul in silver. How we sat, night after night, brushing your hair, this entity of you, combing it out, both of us marvelling, for I
made you
marvel at the wonder of it that you had never seen it was. Combing, braiding, playing, plaiting with ribbons, silks, the nights you wore it loose, for me, around you like – a shroud. Oh,
H
ā
na. Your hair.