Read Online The Secret Book of Paradys by Tanith Lee - Free Book Online

the caverns of the night, where sometimes, far away, I heard myself groan, or her murmuring voice like a feather drifting – Her mouth was fire and her body was snow and the cradling night held both of us. The long endless resonant spasms came and went and came and went like the throb of strings, like the circling wake of the slender boat. She was the ferryman. It seemed to me I had not ceased to look at her. That never once, meeting mine, her burning eyes had closed.
    It was almost morning, and all the stars had died … Whose face was this,peeking into mine so dolefully? And these damned hands, fiddling with me,worrying at me.
    I struck him off. He recoiled.
    “Oh monsieur. Christ knows, I thought you were a dead man.”
    I was lying flung across the volumes and the old carpets of the attics. Above me towered a hill of carven chest, and over there the wooden horsewith its mad and pitiless eye. Between, miles up above me, the carter with a candle, and the bloom of false dawn on him from the window.
    “I waited for you, monsieur. And then, I confess, I went and got myself a drink or two. A cold study it was, waiting out there. But I thought, Well, he knows what he’s about I suppose. But then, having come back, and nothing in the cart, the bell goes for midnight. I knock on the door. No answer. So then I curl up, in my cart, see, and I take a mite of sleep. No trouble. Once some woman passes. I think to myself, Did she come out of the house, now? Is
that
it? But then she vanishes away and I forget her. Then I’m blowing on my fingers for the cold, wishing I could do the service for my toes, and finally I hear five o’clock. Up to the door again, and now it’s open. So I think then you meant me to come up, and up I come. What a house, monsieur. Horrible, so dark, and empty. They said in that drinking-place, it’s haunted by the young man that died here. Vicious murder. But you know that. Then I can hear a noise. I nearly perish of fear I don’t mind admitting.”
    Through all this I had lain on my back, smiling, my eyes taking in the beams in the pointing ceiling, watching the light begin to return from the dead, the sky deciding if it would put on pinkness or only paleness. What sound could he possibly have heard? Some moan from me, perhaps, sprawled here with my shirt open and my breeches unbuttoned, a ludicrous shambles of some dream I had been having of a woman I wanted to possess.
    “It was that rocking-horse,” said the carter, “creaking and bucking away. No one on it, unless it was you, monsieur, and you fell off. Well, then, here you are. I reckoned you’d been set on. Blood-stains on your shirt. But there’s a bite there, on your neck. That will be a rat, no doubt of it. The house is full of them, all rustling away behind the walls. Now if you’ll listen to me, you should go straight to a doctor with that bite. Nor you shouldn’t have brought a lady here.”
    Still on my back, I took out some money, and tossed it to him. He caught it, but looked at me reproachfully.
    As he watched me, I sat up and put my clothes to rights. The blood that spotted my shirt had dried to the colour of rotten plums in the half-light. It was the way Philippe’s blood had appeared to me. When I tried to rise, I fell.
    The carter aided me down all the stairs.
    It was true then. Not a dream. Not, not a dream. Antonina –
    “And you have a fever, you’re burning,” the lugubrious carter congratulated me.
    I had not collected my bequest. The carter, not I, closed the door of Philippe’s house with a senechal’s attention. Then, strong-armed, he put me into his cart, where I lay semi-conscious, euphoric. In this manner I was trundled home, to my landlady’s dismay.
    I threw myself on my bed, clothed and stupid. Let them have the day, any who wanted it. Sleep, let me sleep. Tonight I would go back to her. And she would come to me.
    Thinking of her, as she had been for me, all of it rushed up and overpowered me. Down I fell,