The Secret Book of Paradys (40 page)

From a pedestal the nymph raised a large cup of white ceramic. She held it out before them.

Joseph reached in a hand, and plucked something forth.

“Take a counter,” he said to Raoulin. “That’s how you select your girl.”

“What? Unseen? Suppose she’s not to my taste –”

The nymph said to him smoothly, flirtatiously, “Every one of our damsels is beautiful.”

“Whose word do I have?” (Joseph wriggled uneasily.) “What if,” said Raoulin, primed still by the one strong goblet, “I prefer you?”

But just then he became aware of a man stirring in the shadow of a curtain beyond the paintings. Big and black he looked, like the smith off the tavern sign. So Raoulin shrugged, paid as Joseph did what he was asked, and took a small square counter like a die from the cup.

The nymph, while she had not responded to his sally, did not seem to dislike him for it. She said to Joseph, “You know the way, sieur. I’ll guide your friend.”

Then the curtain was drawn aside (the bully had effaced himself) and they entered a corridor. It appeared to run back a long way, and its sides were made mostly of high wooden screens which creaked mysteriously and emitted driblets of light. Although the screens were occlusive, weird shadows had been flung up on the low uneven ceiling, tangles of writhing knots, like serpents. And there were sounds too, perhaps like the noises in Hell, gasps and grunts, squeals and moans, and now and then a cry, a blasphemy, a prayer.

Raoulin was filled by apprehension as by lust. They had long since become, these two emotions, mutually conducive.

Suddenly Joseph slunk aside. He went through one of the screens and was consumed into the abyss.

The door-keeper had not looked at the counter Raoulin selected, perhaps it made no difference. She led him unerringly, and all at once the corridor was crossed by a pair of aisles. These were both of them in darkness. The nymph halted, and pointed to the left-hand way.

“Yes?” said Raoulin uncertainly.

“Yes, m’sieur,” said the door-keeper. And reaching up, she kissed him on the lips with a little snake’s flicker of the tongue. “The very last of the doors. It’s marked with the same mark as on the counter. For you, something special.”

Then she was gone, leaving him alight with the thirst of the house.

He went into the corridor and saw that it did indeed have doors rather than screens. The last of these, blundered on in the gloom, was marked with – what was it? A sort of mask … He did not wait for more, but pushed at the barrier. It swung open with a lubricious croak.

Again, Raoulin had pause.

There was a pale-washed room with an Eastern carpet on one wall, the floor very clean, and lightly strewn with colourless flower-heads picked for their scent, as in a lady’s chamber. One felt one had stumbled into the wrong house. Against another wall stood a couch, perhaps too wide for virginity; yet otherwise this was all the stuff of a well-to-do and pure girl’s bedroom – even to the straightbacked chair and the little footstool. These, turned a fraction away from the door, were occupied.

Raoulin’s heart, ready engorged like his loins, took a leap. Was it all some jest – some mischief – but how would Joseph have known –?

Raoulin closed the door with stealth, and began to walk silently forward, his heart noisy, and prepared for anything –

As he circled like a fox, the posed picture came visible, the chair and the girl seated in it, her blonde head slightly bent, her face dippered into shadow …

She wore a black gown, but its lacing, at the bosom not the back, had been loosed, and under it there was no modest “breast-plate” of embroidered linen or silk, only the silken pressure of two breasts. Her feet were bare upon the stool, and nearly all one leg, the skirt of the gown caught up as if through negligence. Her left hand lay idly at her throat, just above the portion of white flesh that rose, swelled and tugged at the laces of the bosom, and sank down, leaving them slackened. The right hand rested upon an object which nestled at her belly. It was a skull.

Here was a maiden discovered alone and untrammelled, her hem carelessly raised, but in the most solemn act of contemplation advocated by the church: dwelling upon the martyrdom of the saints, and on the personal death.
To this shall you come
.

But her face – whose face was it?

At that instant, as if quietly wakening from a dream, she lifted her head.

Despite the blondness, and the skull, she was not Helise d’Uscaret.

Raoulin shuddered. He was dreadfully relieved and sorry.

It was a pretty face, too innocent, with a weak kissable mouth, and cool weasel eyes that knew everything.

She had seen him shudder, and she said in a whisper, “Thinking of death makes me remember life.”

And she took his hands and put one upon the skull and the other upon her left breast.

So warm one, and beating itself with a heart, and the other as cold and hard as a stone.

“We’re only mortal,” said the girl. “How constricting are these laces –”

For a moment he could not unclamp his hands, from the icy apple of corruption, the hot fluttering apple of quickness.

But she released him and drew his fingers to her laces.

Then, the skull had rolled down into the flowers and he knelt between the bared limb and the covered one, his hands sliding on the treasures of Eve, and her hands, not those of a maiden, everywhere upon him, so he could hardly bear it.

She showed him how he might have her in the chair, if he wished, and he could not wait another second.

As he united with her, the whole room seemed to thunder. He had not had a girl for half a year.

She urged him on with wild cries that, in his tumult, he believed. As the spasm shook him, he kicked the damnable skull, and it rattled away across the floor.

“Have I pleased you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then … will you give me a little gift –?”

Raoulin frowned. He had paid at the door and reckoned this unsuitable. But then again, perhaps they robbed their girls here, and it had been very good. If he tipped her, she might let him have her again, although she had already gone behind a curtain to wash, and she came back with her laces tied, and he supposed his time with her was up.

He put a coin between her breasts, and leaned to kiss her. She allowed it. But then she said, “I regret. The Mother’s strict.”

“
Mother
– what, of your nunnery?”

The blonde whore lowered her eyes. But she removed his hands.

“Unkindness,” he said. “No charity.”

“It isn’t my choice. In a minute I shall be wanted.”

“And if I protest, that hulk of a door-fellow will throw me out.”

She said nothing.

Raoulin straightened his clothes and did up his points with surly tardiness. “This is a churlish place. I won’t come back. Even the old hag’s more friendly at d’Uscaret.”

No sooner had he uttered this than he was puzzled at having done so. To name his lodging to a chance harlot would not, even in the nicest circumstances, have seemed sensible to him. But there, too late, it was said.

He expected no response. Perhaps she would have the grace to be deaf.

But then she asked, in a peculiar tone, “How is it called?”

“What?”

“Your lodging is it?
There?
”

“Where?” And now he looked up with a merry smile – and met the eyes of a terrified animal in a trap. “Why – what’s up with you?”

“D’Uscaret?” she said. “Is it
there
?”

“Possibly I may have –”

“You lodge
there
?”

She was so insistent she seemed to drive him.

“Very well, I do. But don’t try to make anything of it –”

Before he had even finished, she began to scream.

He stood astounded, without a thought in his head. It seemed to be occurring in another room, this appalling outcry and madness – for while she screamed she ran about, threw herself at the walls, tore at herself with her nails in the most horrible way – dragged down the costly carpet from the plaster and writhed with it on the ground.

As had to happen next, the door burst open. Two roughs, one with drawn dagger, came shouldering through. The larger, unarmed, man seized Raoulin, while his companion laid the dagger under Raoulin’s ear.

Raoulin kept quite still. He said firmly, “I did nothing to her that wasn’t natural. We were talking after – and then this!” He had to raise his voice, for she went on shrieking, though now her vocal chords cracked. The doorway filled with clusters of frightened or curious male and female faces. A girl, clad only in a shift, pushed by and ran to the blonde harlot, tried to take hold of her and quieten her. It was beyond her powers. Two others hastened to join the struggle, calling the blonde pet names as they ripped her ripping hands from her hair and breasts –

Then the proprietress, the “Mother,” was in the room, a pockmarked frump one would not turn to regard once on the street.

“Explain this hubbub.”

Her presence bore such authority, even the demented creature on the floor grew abruptly mute, and then began to weep. The three other girls cradled her.

The Mother turned her unadorable gaze on Raoulin.

“Well?”

Raoulin thought quickly. Only the bizarre truth would do. He reluctantly rendered it. “– And when I told her d’Uscaret –”

“
D’Uscaret!
” exclaimed the woman. Her face had altered. She did not look afraid, but a wily sort of blankness was stealing over her, the appearance she would put on for the confessional.

Raoulin took heart. He said boldly, “This isn’t what I called
here
for.”

“No, no doubt not. There’s some superstition, concerning that house. An old curse. I’m surprised my girl knows of it.”

Abruptly the blonde harlot raised her raw voice in another spewing of screams.

“Be silent!” cried the Mother. And the screams went to weeping again.

“Let him be,” she added to her roughs. And to Raoulin himself, with all the casualness of cunning unease, “And you, sieur, had best get off.”

As the slabby hands released him, Raoulin caught in the doorway now the wink of Joseph’s humiliated and resentful spectacles.

Crossing the bridge in the torchlight, between one dark bank and the other, Joseph lamented, “I can never go back there now.”

“Do you want to? We find it’s a hospital for lunatics not a bawdy,” said Raoulin, obscurely embarrassed.

“Frightening a silly trollop with your foul story –”

“I
told
no story. I said that name – d’Uscaret – and all the hordes of Hell broke loose. I can tell you, any fun I had wasn’t worth
that
.”

They parted unaffectionately on the upper bank. Laude was ringing softly from Our Lady of Ashes. The river flexed its gleaming muscles. Raoulin was
sorry to have lost Joseph’s regard. Probably tomorrow, or in a few days, they would laugh about the affair.

Yet somewhere inside his head as he climbed the hills, the awful screams of the harlot rang on and on. One believed she might have seen and heard and done a thing or two. Whatever had made her afraid was something proportionally horrible.

Going under the Sacrifice, beneath the winged cliffs of its buttresses, he considered his lodging. He considered the ghost he might only have dreamed. Was it that?

Some late revellers from a tavern roiled by with lanterns. They seemed to have come from another world than the darkness in which he moved, through which he climbed, and to which he went.

And then, as he entered the twisting alley that led up to the back walls of the house, he saw the black tower-tops, and the one black turreted tower with a faint greenish firefly-light flickering in it.

Raoulin stopped as if he had met the Medusa’s petrifying head. For a moment he could not breathe.

The tower was that which looked north, towards the Temple-Church – the tower into which he had penetrated the first day, trying its one door that would not open. The tower whose stair gave on the weedy garden and the tomb.

How ominous the light looked there, dim and shifting behind its pane of corrupt glass. Did someone move in the room, up and down?

Had he the spirit now to go in and seek the chamber, to push wide the door and maybe find there a young woman in a chair, her hand upon a skull …

Raoulin broke into a chill sweat. To his dismay he realised he too was frightened. He remembered the porcelain face of his dream and the cat’s-eyes of perfect emerald hovering above him – and marked himself with the sign of the cross. “The Lord is my keeper. The sun shall not smite me by day, nor the moon by night –” And, at the side door, unlocking it, whispered: “Be not afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth …”

To the kitchen he went, and lit there two of the candles and stuck them on the spikes of a branch. This he carried before him. Somewhere the hag and the groom snored in aged sleep. They were not juicy enough for demons to chew –

He crowded such ideas from him, and crept like a scared child up through thick night to his apartment. And there he locked the door, and there, by the shine of many extravagant wicks, he opened the reliquary his pious mother had sent with him, and took out the bones and the nails of the saint, and kissed them.

And in bed he recalled that to go with a whore was a sin and if he died tonight, the Devil would get him.

So at length he slept and had nightmares, but nothing else of the quick or the dead approached.

In the morning came summer sunlight, and the now familiar sounds and stenches of the summer city. Birds chimed past the window. Raoulin lay in the warm brightness of the reborn earth and called himself a dunce.

Too timid to go to the tower by night. Well, he would go there presently and smash in the door if he must.

It was even a Holy Day, God watchful.

In the kitchen, where he broke his fast, the hag pottered about. An evil grey cat, thin as a string and kept for the mice, hissed at him from the hearth like an adder.

“Well, puss,” said Raoulin to the cat, “I’m off to watch the priests and processions. Is it a fact, granny,” he added for the hag’s full benefit, “they carry a Christ out of the Sacrifice made all of alabaster and silver, with wounds of malachite?”