The Secret Book of Paradys (31 page)

As I started across that room dyed cobalt, something peculiar happened to me. I have said I disliked the room, and the study, though for varying reasons, neither quite deciphered. But in the blue room now a wave of dizziness and emotion came over me. I say emotion, but what was it? It was like a sort of smiling fury, a sort of sensuous silent
howling
– it was bestial and beastly. I began to run towards the doorway, and in that instant the double doors, with no one by them, swung in and closed with a bang. The room seemed to rock. The floor tilted, like the floor of a balloon up in the air, caught by lightning.

I was terrified. The hair bristled on my scalp and I moaned aloud. And something insisted to me that I turn, and look at the four windows, the windows of cobalt glass.

So, in the trap, I did turn, and I ran towards them, not knowing why.

I was about three metres away from the two central windows when abruptly one of these displayed a pattern all over itself, an intricate but abstract pattern drawn fine in black ink. I stared at the pattern, stopped in my running. Then I seemed to understand all the glass in that window had fissured. Next second it fell to bits. It exploded – not inward but outward, with a sound as if a huge tap had been turned on.

The glass of the window flared like a bomb of violets, violet and blue confetti, jettisoned into blue space beyond.

After half a minute, I went forward, and looked out of the vertical where the window had been.

The view was perfectly normal. Some house-backs and dormer lights, trees and walls, on the right hand the descent of the City to the river, gracious in the morning. Below, the glass lay glittering all across a small enclosed garden. Between the window and the sky, suspended in air, a rope that seemed to flicker and smoulder, coming down from above. A man’s body hung from it, the dark head lying towards one shoulder.

I started to cry, from shock and grief. The blue room had now no feeling in it. Then something made me lean straight out and crane upwards, and I saw two men, the foremost the one who had let me in, and another, vague at his back, both looking down. We stared at each other, they and I, a few seconds.

Then I turned and ran from the room and down the stairs and out of the house. They did not seem to pursue me.

I got as far as the cafés along the embankment, where I had to go in and ask for cognac.

At first I was simply frightened. Pretending to have the spring influenza, I concealed myself in my flat, putting on a hoarse doubtful voice when Thissot called me by means of the telephone in my landlady’s parlour.

Gradually I concluded the men at Louis’ house could not have known who I was, or my whereabouts. They would not be able to run me to earth. I wondered if they were themselves the agents of his death, but did not really think so. I was haunted by a dull distress and sense of loss. My sleep was peaceful and free of the nightmares that filled my conscious hours. I had locked the diary and documents into a drawer of my bureau.

At last, one afternoon, the city veiled in rain, I lit the gas-lamps and the fire, then went firmly and unlocked the drawer, and extracted the diary.

Even so, I hesitated. I decided I would look at the papers to begin with. They were many. I took them forth and laid them out. Some I saw at a glance had to do with the rental of the house. Others I could make nothing of (or would not), but they were randomly numbered, and since the pages of the diary were also numbered, presumably they were notes or additions to these. Then again there were scribblings in another hand I could not read, except, here and there, for a large black letter T. One sheet in Louis’ writing bore what seemed to be a line of poetry, which said only:
Kingdoms of the sky-blue universe
.

In fact, I was daunted, was afraid to delve. My visit to the house (blue room, breaking window, hanged man), that had been enough.

Then a small notice fell from among the rest. It had a business heading, the name of a shop in one of the by-ways of Sacrifice Hill. I skimmed that, for beneath was a typed message. It seemed the firm were pleased to inform Monsieur de Jenier that a picture was ready for his collection.

I looked at my clock. It was not yet five. If I went out I should be in plenty of time to reach the place before it shut.

Something had galvanised me. Perhaps only the excuse that by doing this, I was investigating the diary – while completely avoiding it.

On the streets the rain attacked a hurrying umbrella world of wet black tortoise-backs. I hailed a taxi-cab, which shortly deposited me high on the south bank, under the shadow of the Temple-Church. The shop lay in a narrow sloping passage leading up towards the Church, roofed by dirty glass on which the rain beat, and with a carpet of peels and papers. The shop itself was a photographic salon. I had not read the bill properly, and had been anticipating art. Art there possibly was, in the dusk portraiture of young women lurking under a shrubbery of ferns within the windows.

The bell jangled as I entered, and from behind a curtain a man glided out to look askance at me. I was not the usual clientele, plainly.

I handed him the chit at once. He gazed on it, on me, and said, reproachfully, “This has been ready for some while, m’mselle.” I stared him out, but he next said, “I understood a gentleman was to collect the portrait.”

“Monsieur de Jenier has entrusted that task to me.”

“The work has been paid for,” said the accusatory man. “The money was sent round.”

Prepared to pay, this alerted me: Louis had bought the photograph but not taken possession of it. What could it be, this mystery? I recalled the phantom women on his study wall, Anette, Lucine.

“Just one moment,” said the man.

He slid behind his curtain, and I heard a faint rumble of conversation, the words: “Most odd. Something funny here.” And I was, in a manner of speaking, hand on sword-hilt preparing for battle, when back he came beaming, carrying in his arms an oblong item, already scrupulously wrapped. It was quite large, the “portrait.”

A chill went over me. The garish electric light, with which the shop was gifted, seemed to darken.

“Will it not,” he probed hopefully, “be awkward for you to carry, m’m-selle?”

A premonition of police – death’s revelation – “I live close,” I lied, and named an area to fool them all.

Then I took the wrapped thing from him. My second of prescience was done and the package felt perfectly mundane, weight, paper, string.

By the time he had cancelled his chit, and bowed to me, and opened the door and let me out in the covered alley, the cab-driver was from his cab, leaning in an arch at the entrance, smoking.

He aided me and my parcel back inside the vehicle.

“That’s got a bad name, that has,” he said, “that place.”

I wondered if he meant the shop only, or the alley entire. But I hardly wanted conversation and did not reply.

Returned home, I went directly upstairs. Again I lit the gas, and the oil-lamp on my desk, and stoked the fire. I propped the covered picture against an armchair.

Then, exactly as I had with his diary, I sat down and looked and looked at the hidden form, with terrific, immobile reluctance.

The clock chimed gently. It was midnight, I had fallen asleep. On my hearth the fire had perished, and the gas was bluely waning.

I got up in a dull trance, and tearing the wrapping off the photograph, revealed it.

She was not Anette, nor Lucine.

Her hair was modishly bleached, platinum blonde, but unfashionably cut in a kind of long, shining hood, that reached her shoulders, but framed forehead and cheeks with a high invert crescent of fringe. Her eyes had been inked in by kohl; that, and the gauffered sleeves of her dress, indicated it was all Garb-Egyptian, which had been something of a rage in Paradis, seven or eight years before. She wore a costume-jewellery collar, too, gilded and set with opaque gems. Strangely, only one earring, pendant from the right ear, a disc, with an odd design on it, perhaps a flower, having eight thin rays …

No, she was not Anette, or Lucine. She did not smile or provoke, as they had done, there on Louis de Jenier’s study wall. This creature looked filled by
darkness
. Her eyes, though they could have been any rich colour, were miles deep. Through the obligatory minute, as the photograph was taken, she had sat so still her soul might have gone from her body. Look into the eyes, and fall down the miles to nothing. To nothing but – nothing.

But she too had a label, a name. There on the photograph’s edge.
Timonie
.

She was portrayed, however, by the same being as had modelled the others. The bone-structure of the face, the set of the eyes and heavy brows; even the figure as far as one saw it, the small shallow breasts and flaunting shoulders – this one too belonged to the group. The three were one. Yet … Timonie – was so different.

The silver earring in the right ear had caught a weird high-light. Stared at, the dark flower seemed to wriggle on it, wanting to detach itself. A trick of tired vision. I recalled the large letter T on certain of the papers in the diary. The line of the poem, if it was, returned.
Kingdoms … sky-blue universe
. It struck an uncomfortable chord, but nothing more.

“You’re full of secrets, Timonie,” I said aloud, but softly. “I won’t like them, I think. I don’t care for any of it, this game of yours.”

And I turned her face to the wall before I made ready for bed. I would have to call Thissot, and it would have to wait now until tomorrow.

I did not sleep that night.

“It’s curious, I mean that you were asking about him, and then this. I take it you haven’t seen any of the journals yet?”

“No,” I said to Thissot, cautiously, as my landlady buzzed about her morning parlour, tweaking at furnishings, ears pricked and elongating visibly to a rabbit’s.

“He seems to have fallen down the staircase, and broken his neck. Not found for some days, I gather. This man, his agent, Rudolf Vlok – he discovered the body and ran out in hysterics on the street. Apparently it’s not the first death in that house. Some mayfly of a girl was murdered there seven years ago.”

“But the papers quote a profession?” I asked Thissot.

“Our own
Weathervane
does so. An entertainer, your de Jenier, sometime actor, acrobat, mime, mimic. Latterly much in demand at select nightclubs of the south. His speciality had come to be the impersonation of female beauties –” Thissot’s voice assumed a self-protective archness and aversion. “He dressed as
women
. Starry actresses, singers, and so on. Later quaint ladies of his own quaint invention.
Very
successful. To my way of thinking, that’s just –”

I heard what Thissot thought he thought, thanked him, and almost ended the conversation, when I decided to say, “One other thing – a quotation I came across that’s been bothering me. I’m sure I know the source, but can’t pin it down.”

“What’s that?”

“Kingdoms of the sky-blue universe.”

“Ah –” he began. Then, “No, I’m not sure at all. I thought I knew it too, but differently, somehow. Now why am I thinking of alchemy? No, I’m quite eluded, I’m afraid.”

Having placed my telephone coins in the landlady’s box, I hurriedly got my coat and hat and rushed out to purchase an armful of journals for myself.

Returned, I spread them everywhere and raked them through. Most carried a mention, and some made much of the sinister aspect, that this was the second violent death in a building barely a decade in age.

Depending on the type of paper, so its bias went. But very swiftly, nevertheless, the facts sprang out.

Here was a smudgy photo-image of Rudolf Vlok, and so I could identify him as the second man in the café, my subsequent guide and deserter at the house. He had been implicit, then, in the fakery of accidental death, along with another, still nameless, and unpictured. And now I could read for myself brief details of a career, and the retreat to this City, of one Louis de Jenier, the colour of whose eyes they did not even mention. There he was, in that almost new house under the Observatory, among the litter of duellists’ cemeteries. And next, I was reading of a wealthy young woman who, years earlier, had conducted orgies of grape and poppy and hemp in that house, until one sunrise found there in a bizarre upper room made blue-windowed for her pleasure. The body was “mutilated.” It took another journal (although I rightly guessed which one it would be) to inform me in what manner. The murderer had cut away ears, eyes, breasts, her hands and her feet, even her teeth and tongue, and capriciously distributed them about house and garden. That time, apart from the blood, the house showed no other signs of savagery, and not a bank-note or a curio had been stolen. While of all her quantity of jewels just one small piece was missed, an antique spider of sapphire, possible to sell anonymously only if broken up into its one large and thirty tiny corundas.
There were no other leads, the murderer was never apprehended, and for some months fears of a European “ripper” ran wild. Such a crime was not repeated, however. The fears died. The journal which itemised so much, gave the dead girl her name, but also a second name by which she had come to be known. That was, of course, Timonie. She was what they call a platinum blonde, with very blue eyes. There was no photograph. By then, I had begun to feel I did not need to see one. (But maybe what I know has bled back across my knowledge of that day, time at its eternal trickery.)

In the City, the bells began to ring for noon, the other side of midnight.

There was nothing left now but to put the journals away and take up the diary.

I did so.

I read straight through, referring, where the text so indicated, to the documents that had been in the cover. He had commenced only when events thickened about him. But he was, obviously, used to and adept at writing things down. His script was for the most part legible, and where sometimes it failed to be, the empathic wave of horror which now gripped me, bore me on to perfect understanding.

Outside, brilliant sunlight set Paradis in crystal. But in my rooms, darkness came and blossomed.