Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (21 page)

The girl, still with a trace of the magical smile on her lips, went to the chair, and seated herself, ladylike and graceful.

“Good, that is good. Now we will talk.”

The girl waited obediently, her eggshell face uplifted.

“The gardens. A bench,” said the man. Viktor noted, all at once, that along with everything else incongruous, the foreigner still wore his greatcoat, securely fastened. “It is late in the morning. I have sat beside you. Good-day, m’mselle.”

“Good day,” she replied aloofly, turning her head a little away.

“I hope I do not disturb you?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Have I seen you here before, m’mselle?”

“It’s possible. Sometimes I walk my dog here.”

“Ah, yes. Your dog. A delightful little fellow.”

“I am training him to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Perhaps you would be so kind—”

“But of course. Ah! How clever he is.”

“Thank you. I should be very lonely without him.”

“But are you alone, m’mselle? A lady like yourself…”

“Quite alone.” The girl sighed softly. Her eyes were lowered. The extraordinary playacting went on and on. “My uncle, you understand, has business affairs which take him often from home.”

“Then, you spend all day in an empty flat?”

“Just so. It is very tiresome, I’m afraid.”

“But then, m’mselle, might I ask you to take luncheon with me?”

“Why—” the girl hesitated. Her eyes fluttered upward, and stayed, their attention distracted. It took Viktor several moments, so objective had he become, to understand it was on him her gaze had faltered and then adhered. She had seen him peering in under the blind.

Stricken with dismay, he seemed changed to stone. But the man, with a flap of his black wings, paid no heed to the
direction
of her eyes.

“Continue,” he barked sharply. “Go on, go on!”

The white girl only gazed into Viktor’s horrified stare. Then suddenly she began to laugh, rocking herself, clasping her hands—delighted wild laughter.

“On! On!” She cried. She bubbled, almost enchanting, somehow not. “On!”

The man reached her in two strides, and shook her.

“Be quiet. Quiet!” The girl stopped laughing. She became composed, and so remained as he coldly and intently ranted at her. “Was it for this I bought you in that slum, sores and verminous bites all over you, for this? You will be still. You will attend. You will
learn.
You hear me?”

The effect of those repeated words upon Viktor was awful. They seemed to deprive him of all the strength of his inebriation. Stunned and totally unnerved, he came noiselessly to his feet. He crossed the veranda, praying she would say nothing of having seen him. But she would not, surely. She was not quite normal, not even quite sane—He reached the veranda step and misjudged it, saw his misjudgment in the moment he made it, could alter nothing, and fell heavily against the railing.

The clamor seemed to throb through every wooden board and timber of the house. Before he could regain enough balance to break into a run, something crashed over in the lighted room, and then the main door flew open and a black beast came out of it.

He had known this would happen. Somehow he had come here for this—this goal of self-destruction.

“What are you doing?” the thing demanded. It caught hold of him, and he was brought about to face it again. All the rich light was behind the man now, full on Viktor. There were no excuses to be made. He flinched from the man’s odorless cold breath. “You are here? You dared to come back?”

Viktor pulled some part of himself together.

“Of course I dared. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You trespass.”

“No. I came to see you.”

“Why? This island is private. You were told to keep away.”

“You have no right to—”

“Every right. It is mine. I warned you.”

“Go to hell,” said Viktor. He was afraid. Could not control his limbs, barely his voice and the slurred movements of his mouth.

“No,” said the man. “It is you who will go there. I will send you there.” And with no further preliminary, he punched Viktor in the arm and, as he stumbled away grunting with shocked pain, on the side of the jaw. Viktor fell backward in the grass, and saw through a sliding haze, the man coming on at him.

As he rolled bonelessly against the legs of the veranda, the man kicked him in the side. The impact was vicious, filling him now with terror more than pain. Somehow, Viktor came to his feet.

“No,” he said, and put up his arm. Like a big black bear the man lunged at him, bringing down both his fists together, sweeping away the protective arm as if it were a rag. The pain was awful this time, and the blow had been meant, clearly, for his head. Viktor had an impulse to curl up on the turf, allowing the man to beat him until he wearied himself and left his victim alone. Instead, Viktor’s own fist lashed out. He caught the man on the nose, which began at once to bleed dark runnels of blood. But the madman scarcely hesitated. He flung his whole body after Viktor and caught him round the waist.

For a moment then Viktor felt himself trapped, and envisaged dying. To be weary would not be enough for his enemy. Only death could turn him aside. The man was squeezing him, choking him; stars burst in Viktor’s brain.

“I warned you,” said the man.

Some remnant of self-preservation—actually a story told him once by a prostitute—caused Viktor spontaneously to knee the hugging bear in its groin.

There was a dreadful sound, a sort of implosion, and the paws let him go. Staggering, Viktor ran.

There followed a nightmare sequence during which the china animal in the bushes tried to trip him, the grass and tree roots likewise. Then he plunged into water, found a rope, tore it free, and collapsed into the boat, crying for mercy to the darkness.

Somehow he made the oars work, and somehow the man did not come after him. Yet it was with the utmost fear that Viktor thrashed his way toward the midst of the lake. There, sobbing for breath, he lay still on the oars, and the great night grew still about him.

It seemed to be a long while afterward that he began to row for the château. And by then he seemed, too, to be quite sober, but perhaps he was not, his feelings a slow chilled turmoil where nothing anymore made sense.
My little dog does tricks—Ah what a clever fellow
—
better, m’mselle, better
— And in the middle of it all, something came over the last stretch of water from the shore, from the lawns where the château stood, serene and dislocated from reality.

It was a white something, and for a demented moment he thought the girl had jumped into the lake and swum out ahead of him. But no, it was a swan.

Feeling ill, he leaned on the oars, drifting, watching the swan come toward him. He became aware he must have disturbed it. It did not move like a ship but ran at him standing up on the water, flapping its wings which suddenly seemed enormous, like two white sheets. And abruptly the swan was beside him, hissing like a snake, smiting the boat, the air, his flesh—

He tried frantically to beat it off, to make for shore. This second nightmare sequence had no logic and afterward he did not properly remember it. All at once the boat slewed and he was in the water. It was colder than before, and an agonizing something had happened to his arm. He no longer had any control at all.

The first time he sank into the lake he shouted in terror, but the water was so very cold he could not shout again. And then he was falling down through it, knowing he was about to die, in absolute horror and despair, unable to save himself.

* * * *

A month later he learned a servant, smoking a cigarette on the lawn near to the water, had seen the swan attack and the accident with the boat. The man had leapt heroically into the lake and saved Viktor, while the swan faded away into the dark.

The broken arm and the fever had debilitated Viktor, and as soon as he was well enough his mother returned them all to the city.

“A terrible thing,” Ilena said. “You might well have been drowned. I remember a story of a boy drowned in that lake. Whatever possessed you?”

“I don’t know,” Viktor said listlessly, propped up in bed, surrounded by the depressing medicines, the dreary novels.

Ilena said nothing at all, but weeks after, apropos another matter, Janov mentioned a man who had kept his mistress on one of the islands, a young girl reckoned to be simple. It seemed they had packed up suddenly and gone away, and the house was in a nasty state, full of damp and mice.

* * * *

It was half a year before any of them thought Viktor fully recovered. He had begun to play cards with Uncle Janov, and next, billiards. Viktor had stopped drinking beyond the merest glass at dinner; he had taken a dislike for light and noise, painting and discussion. And so Ilena sent him to Paris, when he no longer wanted to go.

* * * *

It was more than fifteen years later that he saw the girl again.

In the winter of the northern city, the ice lay in blue rifts upon the sea, and a copper sun bled seven degrees above the horizon. He had been to visit his mother, cranky and bemused, in the house on Stork Street. Such visits, as the years went by, had become increasingly bizarre. Something was happening to Ilena. Arthritis, for one thing, had crippled her, twisting her elegant figure like the stem of a slender blasted tree. Betrayed by her bones, her sensibilities gave way. She made demands on Viktor and on everyone, calling the servants constantly: Bring me that pomander, that box of cigarettes. I want tea. I want my book of cuttings. She drove them mad, and she drove Viktor mad, also. Uncle Janov was dead. He had died ten months before, sitting bolt upright at the card table, without a sound. No one realized he had absented himself until he refused to play his hand.

There had been a war, too, setting the whole world on its ear. Somehow, some had escaped the worst of that.

To Viktor himself, time had offered a few patronizing gifts. He had published four novels with reasonable success. More than anything, writing, which he performed indifferently now, and no longer with any pleasure, gave him an excuse for doing nothing else. He had become, he was afraid, the perfect archetype of what the masses reckoned an author to be: one too lazy to attempt anything more valuable. The family meanwhile remained wealthy; he really had no need to do anything at all, except, possibly, to marry, which he had idly been considering. A much-removed cousin had been presented as a candidate, a lushly attractive young woman, with indeed some look of Viktor himself. She was a nice girl, quite intelligent and entertaining, and maternally adequate, being ten years his junior. An ideal match. It would soothe Ilena, giving her the sense that the family continued, giving her, too, something fresh to criticize. For himself, the proposed liaison was rather like his “work.” Something to give him an excuse to attempt nothing else. His libido, having reached a peak in his early twenties, was already diminishing. Sex had already lost all its alluring novelty. He had ceased to fall in love, and beyond a very occasional evening with one of the city’s hetaeras, he had put all that away, as it were, in some cabinet of his physical emotions.

And then, he saw the girl again.

It would not have been true to say he had often thought of her. He had scarcely thought of her at all as the years went by. And despite a fleeting reference to the peculiar events on the island inserted into his first book, he had never really reexamined the case. It had seemed to him very quickly that nothing much had happened at all. It had been merely a series of coincidental occurrences, made dramatic only by his state of mind and the ultimate plunge into the lake. The fact that he had never returned to the château did not strike him as particularly ominous. He had been bored there. Just as he had mostly been bored in Paris and was now bored almost all the time and almost everywhere. The only difference was that his fear of boredom had gone away. He was accustomed to it now and expected nothing else. It had come to fit him, suit him quite comfortably, like a well-worn dressing gown.

He was walking through one of the sets of gardens that bordered the museum and art gallery, on his way to a luncheon engagement at the literary club. And suddenly he saw a small black shape, rather like an animated sausage, trotting across the whiteness of the snow. It was a little dog, seemingly impervious to the cold, a very black, very purposeful little dog, that he followed with his eyes intuitively. And then a woman came out between the white trees, against an oval of brown sky. She was fashionably dressed, at the height of fashion indeed, and maybe not warmly enough for the season. Yet like the dog, which was obviously hers, she seemed untroubled by the cold. Like the dog too, she wore black—jet black—save for the tall scarlet feather in her hat and a pair of blinding scarlet gloves, and the scarlet of her lips.

Perhaps it was the maquillage on her face that prevented his immediately knowing her, or maybe only the fifteen years that had separated those three brief glimpses he had formerly had of her from this. Then something, the turn of her head, her gesture to the dog as it bounced up to her, jogged his memory.

For a full minute he stared at her, unable to say a word. She did not seem to see him at all, and yet something in her manner told him she knew quite well a man stood watching her, as she picked up and petted the dog. And then, irresistibly, he found he had gone over.

And he heard himself saying, as if by rote, for all at once he remembered the words: “Good day, m’mselle.”

And aloofly she replied, “Good day,” just as on the island, through the window.

“Forgive me for disturbing you. But
I
was intrigued
by
your little dog.”

“Oh yes. I am training him to do tricks, to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Look at him! He’s trying to attract your attention.”

And Viktor found himself pulling off one glove and extending his hand to take the icy little paw, shaking it.

“How clever he is,” said Viktor.

“Thank you.” The smiling face, pretty in its makeup, lowered mascaraed lids. No wonder she looked different. The dark lashes, the black eyebrows. “I should be very lonely without him.”

Viktor almost choked, but he managed the words: “I find it hard to believe you’re alone.”

“Quite alone,” she said. She sighed, petting the black little dog with scarlet fingers.

“Your uncle is often away from home,” said Viktor, between sneering and joking and embarrassment,

“Why yes,” she said. She looked at him wonderingly. “Do you know my uncle?”