Dark Dance (10 page)

‘All that bother of having a telephone installed,’ said Anna. ‘I’m afraid we’re set in our ways. We hate intrusion.’

‘But
I
have intruded.’

‘You? Rachaela, you’re one of our own.’

‘Suppose,’ Rachaela tried again, ‘one of you fell ill.’

‘We are never ill,’ said Anna. ‘Only old.’

‘Then that alone—’

‘No, Rachaela. The case would never arise. We care for ourselves.’

‘And me,’ said Rachaela, ‘if I wanted to phone anyone.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna. But she looked up. Her sharp eyes said,
You are alone. You have no one.

Rachaela said, ‘It disconcerts me. The way you live here. And if I stay, the way I must live with you.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Anna, ‘but we know something about you, Rachaela. Your lack of social contacts, your own way of living. Rather like a hermitess.’

‘I had a choice.’

‘Did you? Haven’t you besides made a choice now to be with us?’

‘No,’ said Rachaela. ‘I’ll be honest. The choice of coming here was forced on me. And you hunted me, didn’t you.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Anna, ‘we will admit to that.’

‘I asked you before, and I must ask you again. Why?’

‘You belong here, with us.’

‘I don’t agree,’ Rachaela lied. Anna smiled a little. To lie was useless. ‘I have no responsibilities. No autonomy here. I’m some kind of puppet. I sense this. That I’m being kept for something.’

‘For yourself,’ said Anna. ‘Don’t you understand your worth? We prize tradition. We value the ideal of the family. And you are the last of us. The very last flower on our tree.’

Rachaela thought of his words, in the dream:
The last, but for you.

She felt a constriction in her throat and spoke through it, crisply.

‘And the last before me was my father.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why,’ said Rachaela, ‘isn’t
he
with you?’

Anna said, ‘But Rachaela, he is. Of course he is.’

Rachaela thought of the old men of the house. Something sank inside her. Her mother had spoken of him as young.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Then I’ve met him.’

‘Your father is a hermit, Rachaela. As you are a hermitess. He lives here, but not readily among us.’ Anna let her embroidery lie. ‘When he was younger, your age, he ran away. He ran out into the world, and we let him go. It was the time for it. He made you, out in the world. Then he came back to us.’

‘Willingly?’

‘No, not willingly, but with resignation. There was nowhere else for him to go. You chafe at the confines of the house, the two of you. Yet you hate the open places of the outer world, the cities, the people. They offend you.
Life
offends you. You are Scarabae. Here, you’re safe.’

‘Where,’ said Rachaela, and her hands had clasped one another, ‘where is he?’

‘You’ve tried the locked door of the tower several times. There. I’m afraid you will have to leave it to your father, the hour of your meeting. You must be eager, perhaps angry.’

‘Angry, yes.’

That is something you must resolve with him. You and he are not like the rest of us. You and he are alike. He will come to you.’

‘Tell me his name,’ said Rachaela. Her mother had never named her father. He was only faceless darkness, rage.

‘Adamus,’ said Anna. ‘Adamus is his name. It’s very old. Traditional to the family.’

Rachaela did not accept the name. It rang on in her head like music in another room.

‘And he lives in the tower. Does he prowl the house in the darkness?’

‘What a perceptive question. Once he did. He is more rested now.’

Rachaela stared into the fire.

Had it been a dream, then? Had it been real? Or could it be—some vision, precognition, of the facts. The man in the dream was too young. Her father had ‘made her in the world’ when he was her age now. He would be almost sixty. Touched by age, by the markers of Stephan and Sylvian, Peter and Camillo.

Rachaela felt unable to ask anything more. The flurry of defiance had gone dead. The new flame burned in her.
Adamus.
The name of some saint or demon in a mystery play.

Walled up in the locked dark tower.

‘I’ll go to bed, Anna,’ Rachaela said.

Anna smiled again, and picking up her embroidery stitched in a flower like drops of blood.

In the night, Rachaela sat in the chair, where he had sat, sat in reality not dream. Her thoughts would not keep still. She saw him over and over. He was her
father.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, cry out at him. She would in his presence be dumb, surely, gagged by all these sentences and accusations.

Her fire burned low and she put more wood on to it from the brass scuttle. All day long Scarabae’s servants came in and out of this room, dusting it so the dust flew up off one surface and resettled on another, seeing to the bed, the lamps and candles, the fire, the supply of little logs.

But at night he had come and used a key, for the door was locked.

If she had not woken would he only have sat here a while, watching her? She would never have realized he had been in the room. Had he come back and she not known?

The far-away clock struck. Rachaela looked at the black clock on the mantel. Two—it was one in the morning.

Rachaela stood up. She took the oil lamp with the green base, and opened her door.

As she had foreseen it would be, the lamp in the passage was extinguished. The corridor was black and her own light swung across it, startling things, the pictures, the carved wood of grapes and apples, into glimpsing life.

The Scarabae patrolled the house after midnight, she had heard them often enough.

And he too, despite Anna’s denial, for Anna’s denials sometimes meant the truth had been hit upon.

The lamp shook a little in her hand. She steadied it. After all, he was what she had feared all along. Not the house, the family, but
him
.

Where to start... why not at the tower door, where he himself would emerge.

She went down the passage, and came to the head of the stair. For a moment she was daunted, the entire area of the hall was in blackness. Then she made out a faint soft nothing-light from the drawing room—a lamp or candles there, alight.

She began to descend the stairs carefully, letting her light fall on the treads. How red the carpet looked under the pool of the lamp.

The nymph sprang out, holding up her empty lantern.

As Rachaela reached the level floor of the lobby, the light in the adjacent room went out suddenly, A last candle left burning, now guttered. No one there, for she heard no shuffling or clicking step, no rustle of a dress or scrape of a sleeve.

In the black the hall about her seemed enormous, pouring away from her light to infinity.

But any watchers, crouching unseen in the shadows, could see Rachaela clearly in her spotlight.

It was not unlikely there were watchers.

Rachaela’s imagination tried to vault the bounds of her mind. The hall was peopled by things, formless yet sentient, the spirits of the house, hungry as the Scarabae.

And then something came from the corridor and out into the blackness of the hall. It came unseen and noiseless, yet she felt it there. The little hairs of her body lifted erect. This was not imagination.

. Rachaela raised her lamp and a wing of the hall appeared, tilted. Two flat green eyes gleamed on nothingness.

A cat. Too high up to be a cat’s eyes.

Rachaela heard a soft and slipping step, like a feather brushing the floor.

She went cold and thrust the lamp the length of her arm.

A creature stood with her in the hall. It had the form of a cat, but it was the height of a labrador. Its hair was long, bushy and black, glittering at the light on darkness. Its great cat-shaped head was turned to her, and the eyes shone topaz now, thoughtless and intent and terrible.

Rachaela did not move. She did not dare. Such a thing was not possible, but there it stood, seeing her, so still that its springing would be too swift for her brain to take in. She would merely find herself beneath it, the wide paws planted on her, talons tearing, its teeth at her throat.

‘Don’t be afraid of him, he won’t hurt you.’

The madness of the voice came disembodied, from nowhere.

She did not dare to speak or move.

‘He knows you,’ said the voice. And then a man walked from the black, bringing blackness with him. He placed his pale hand on the head of the enormous cat, scratching it gently between the ears. The cat made no sound but its eyes half closed. It suffered the attention.

The man was Adamus, her father. He must have come from the tower door, or else from the corridor which led to the kitchen, the direction from which the cat had come.

He wore black trousers, a black pullover, ordinary contemporary garments. No rings on the long hands. The blackness came in about his head, the hair a rim on the wide forehead, outlining the bones of the face.

‘He catches your supper, didn’t you know?’ he asked idly. ‘The Scarabae let him hunt for them, only then he hunts for himself. He disdains the mice. He kills them for a hobby.’

Rachaela’s body involuntarily relaxed, gave way. She almost dropped the lamp.

‘Careful,’ he said.

He left the cat and came across to her, and the flickering light cast giant shadows from his tall spare body. He took the lamp from her hand.

‘And I thought,’ he said, ‘you would accept all the surprises here with equanimity.’

The cat watched them, then it turned and padded noiselessly through into the drawing room.

Rachaela remembered all the opened doors. She saw the cat going in and out. She saw it leap upon the gull, the rabbits feeding in the twilight of dawn.

‘And you can’t speak,’ he said.

She said, ‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Whatever you like.’

The lamp blazed on his face. The two black eyes were alive and burning, not like the eyes of the Scarabae, nor as she had seen them last, those leaden tarns in the white structure of face. Now she could see the roughness of the male jaw: the mark of normal masculine shaving; the hair-fine lines about the eyes and lips; the individual black strokes of the heavy brows; the lashes beaded by light. The face was thirty years old, no more.

‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘But I told you, Rachaela.’

‘And I told
you
. Too young.’

‘The family tends to look younger than it is. How old do you think Anna is? Stephan? Add another hundred years, you might be right.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. She believed him. Anna, one hundred and eighty years. And Sylvian, older. ‘But,’ she said, ‘there’s still a discrepancy. If you are sixty years old and the rest of them two hundred, why the gap between you?’

‘There were others,’ he said, ‘they failed. They died.’

‘Leaving only you.’

‘And now you,’ he said. He put a hand on her arm. Her nerves jumped violently at his touch. ‘Shall we go into the room there,’ he said.

She let him guide her.

In the drawing room a dull red lay dormant in the fireplace. He set her lamp on a table. They sat down facing each other in this oasis, the black all around no longer counting for anything. He was here. And the cat, like his symbol, had passed on into the night.

He threw a log into the grate with the careless vehemence of a young man. And as he turned his head she saw that his hair was not very short but only scraped back from his face, caught at the base of his skull, and falling from there in a coarse black silk rope down his back. A young man’s hair.

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me,’ she said, ‘why I’m wanted here. Was it you who typed the letter?’

A drift of amusement changed his face, was gone. ‘They fear the typewriter. A useful machine.’

Rachaela said, ‘Then you wanted to bring me here.’

‘It was the time for it.’

‘Anna talks like that. The
time.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anna’s very crafty. You’ve no idea how beautiful she used to be. I must show you the photographs. Almost as good as you.’

A freezing heat went through her when he said this.

‘Strange,’ she said,’ a compliment from you.’

‘I don’t bother with compliments, Rachaela. A fact. The family is noted for its looks. At times it has been notorious for them.’

‘So you subscribe to it too, this tribal mystique.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Mad people and eccentrics, reckoning yourselves special.’

He said, ‘What did your mother tell you about me?’

Rachaela looked at the fire. Was she to betray her mother now, that bitter and frowning, heavy-handed woman.

‘Very little. You gave her little enough.’

‘Yes, little enough. I don’t know if she told you, Rachaela, I was only with her for three nights. Just three. Two in the beginning. One night three months later, when she was carrying you.’

‘Why did you go back?’

‘To see if she was pregnant, why else.’

‘And she was, and you left her.’

‘It was done. That was all there was to do.’

‘I think you’re saying,’ Rachaela stated, ‘that they let you go, your precious family, to sow your seed. And when you had, they summoned you back again.’

‘I came back. I could see by then the futility of anything else. This house is my prison, but I need it. The rest is rubbish. Haven’t you found it so?’

‘No,’ she lied again. ‘Actually I valued my freedom.’

He smiled. It was a cold and repellent smile, so that she wished she had not spoken. He intimidated her, but that was absurd. He was one with the Scarabae, a creature of the farce. Was there nothing she wanted to say, did she not want to tell him to be damned? But it was not feasible to think of him as her father. No, she did not credit it. This was some joke they played on her.

She was magnetized by his presence. She could not leave the fireside while he was there. She had never before confronted such an externalization of herself, terrifying and apt.

‘I agree,’ she said, ‘that the house is a sort of prison.’

‘Where,’ he said, ‘do you want to go instead? Who has prevented you? You’ve only to pack your bags and leave.’