Dark Dance (6 page)

She felt a terrible affinity. She
believed
she was related to them, had somehow come to acknowledge it in the few weird hours she had spent here.

Alice said, faultlessly, ‘She will see the library.’

Anna gave a little laugh like broken scales.

‘The library!’

‘Sylvian was busy today,’ said Stephan.

They sighed, each of them, almost as one.

The large house teemed with these creatures, but they were one thing, facets of a whole, an entity.

And she, Rachaela, where did she fit?

Was she to be absorbed, devoured?

‘Anna,’ she said, forcing herself to utter the name, as if to name them was sorcerous. ‘I’m awfully tired. Would you excuse me if I went up to bed?’

‘You must do exactly as you want, Rachaela. There’s a bell in your room by the fireplace. If you should wish for anything, Michael or Maria or Cheta will see to it. Did Carlo take up your bags?’

‘Someone did.’

‘Yes, that will have been Carlo. He is our strong one.’

Rachaela rose. She was taller than all of them: Anna and Stephan seated at the table, Cheta and Michael, Alice and Sasha facing her across its glowing length set only with three places. The candles shone and gave heat. Above, sprinkled with reflected light, the second chandelier dropped its mutilated beauty.

‘How many are you?’ said Rachaela, stemming the alarm of her voice. The sea sounded very loud in her ears.

Stephan laughed. His laugh was the male formula of Anna’s. ‘Many, many.’

Anna said quietly, ‘Now we are twenty-one persons.’

Stephan said, ‘You forget—’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No.’

The dead mouse had been removed from the dressing-table, but the ribbon left there, neatly folded.

Rachaela sat brushing her hair. Her mother had been used to brush it. She was heavy-handed, seeming to think the thick prolifereration of the hair precluded any feeling at its roots. Rachaela had been a tangled child. Once the mane was lopped for convenience. Rachaela had wept. She walked in hatred until the mass of hair was regrown.

The house did not make her dwell on her mother. This brusque memory was used, briefly, as a shield between herself and the house. The Scarabae.

On the stairs as she returned to her room she had met another old man in a greenish jacket. He peered into her face with burning eyes.

‘I’m Rachaela,’ she said. ‘And you?’

But this old man scurried away, not frightened of her but unwilling to communicate. Was he Peter, or George, or Sylvian from the library? What did it matter? They were all one, and twenty-one in number.

There was a key in the lock of her door, and after visiting the bathroom, she used it. She had a vision, of course, of other keys which would open the way, and a troupe of them entering in a noiseless procession to observe her while she slept. Cobweb-ringed fingers over her things, her comb and brush, her powder and mirror, musty dresses shuffling by, the flick of an old man’s sleeve...

It was impractical to leave. There was no means. Besides, she had been doomed to stay. She had nowhere else. All the wide world could not afford her sufficient crannies to hide from them.

For she knew she belonged to them. It was in her bones. She shrank only from certainty.

Finally she undressed and put on one of the pair of nightdresses she saved for emergencies; normally she slept naked. But here she must be protected by an extra flimsy film of man-made silk.

The nightdress was black. She surveyed herself among the marsh of lilies, the sunburst, in the mirror. She had noticed two or three mirrors in the rooms below, each set with coloured glass, ornamented, obliterated. As if seeing oneself must be kept to a minimum.

An empty bookcase stood against the wall. She had already, to ease her nerves, unpacked and peopled it with books. She looked at them. They were hers, her own. How slight her possessions in the house of the Scarabae. How slight she herself against the rooms and corridors, the doors and annexes and inner chambers of this dense-built thing.

Twenty-one, the ancient beetles crept and slipped about their shadowy pursuits.

But she stood alone, compressed by architecture and unusual shapes.

Rachaela got into the white, white sheets and sat up on the clean white pillows, seeing the room framed now in bottle-green velvet.

The fire burned low.

Far away through the house she heard soft groanings of the wood, the breathing of its worn and living heart. The winter night was motionless beyond the window with the tree. The sea was faint.

Rachaela detected old footsteps brushing down her corridor. Then, presently, a woman’s round heels, slow and measured, not stopping.

The galloper had not come back.

How should she sleep?

She lay on her pillows, her body throbbing with tiredness. To sleep you must trust, let go. In this cradle she might lie awake a score of nights.

Rachaela heard a clock chiming walls and rooms away.

She had seen several clocks, none of which told the same time as another.

I can’t even read.
She was afraid to take her eyes off the bedroom, its fireplace, its locked door.

Watch then. Watch all night.

Eventually sleep would be irresistible.

She thought of her flat. It was not hers. Had never existed.

The cat would have liked this house. She would have prowled, scratching lightly at the doors to be let in or out.
She
would have slept, curled there on the indigo coverlet.

Rachaela saw the cat stalking the death of the firelight.

No, she had dreamed for an instant. Going to sleep then after all.

She was safe. They were insane, but so was she to have come here.

‘Have nothing to do with them,’ said Rachaela’s mother, stark in a misremembered room of the past.

‘No, Mummy,’ said Rachaela.

She closed her eyes and beheld a tall male figure, faceless, black of hair, suspended between floor and ceiling. Rachaela slept.

An incredible blitz of colour.

The woman in the bed opened her eyes and found herself drowned alive.

It was the window of stained glass, the light of day behind it now, casting down its panes.

Rachaela moved and a pool of blood and emerald slid along her body, turning the coverlet black and scarlet, dying her skin.

The room was splashed, dashed with dyes. A madness of green and red, magenta, gold and sapphire. Where the glass shone white it was opaque, and impenetrable. Nothing beyond the window showed through.

Rachaela saw the picture, hovering over her like a visitation. The tree clove the window, rising into a canopy of foliage from which blood-red apples scalded. Beneath the tree a man in golden armour with great wings tempted a naked woman to accept a fruit. From the extended apple a serpent coiled like a jewellery chain. Beyond the figures was a deep sky and the walks of a formal garden where animals, a gazelle, a lion, a unicorn, calmly reclined. In heaven a rayed sun looked on in rage.

Eve tempted in person by Lucifer?

It was stultifying to wake to it, this bomb-blast. The whole room was in its web. It gave no peace.

Why had they thought the tempting of Eve applicable to their guest? Or did the subject mean nothing? These pictured windows filled the house, she had noticed them in the drawing and dining rooms; outside another marked the turn of the passage.

She would have to live with Eve and Lucifer.

The clock at her bedside said ten o’clock. The black clock on the mantle told her it was eight-thirty. Which was correct she did not know, and even as she thought this, a clock chimed in the house far away. She counted: Five strokes.

Rachaela got out of her coloured bed, leaving the sheets awash. The face of Lucifer reflected on her pillow, eerie and exact. He had the pale and undefiled mask of a saint, this fallen angel.

In the dressing-table mirror among the lilies and the sun, she saw the tree behind her. She was sandwiched in by glass.

She walked to the bathroom. Its window was a sea with shells. She ran a bath.

As she bathed, brushed her teeth, she heard no sounds from the house beyond its continual soft croaks, its joists shifting, plaster cracking, tiles loosening. The house was filthy and in bad repair. Only its lunatic beauty and its twenty-one persons held it together.

As she came from the bathroom an old woman in a brown day dress of six previous decades hurried by, her head tucked in. She paid Rachaela no heed. They were not all interested then. To some she was a threat, maybe, a new varnished toy which might harm.

She dressed and rang the bell, a tail of frayed blue velvet, for Michael, Cheta, Maria or Carlo to come. It was Cheta who presented herself in her dark frock and without her brooch.

‘How can I help you, Miss Rachaela?’

‘I want breakfast,’ said Rachaela. ‘What must I do?’

‘I’ll bring you something, Miss Rachaela. Or you can breakfast with Mr Peter and Mr Dorian. They always take breakfast in the morning room.’

‘Bring me something here, please.’

It was a wonder they had not come en masse in the night to her room with knives and forks.

Toast it would seem was possible but not coffee. The family did not drink coffee. Tea, then.

‘How do you come by tea?’ Rachaela asked. ‘You don’t grow it?’

‘A van comes to the cottages, from the town. Carlo and I buy the groceries from the van.’

‘Are there cottages?’

Rachaela stumbled on an incoherent twist of hope, the world was not so far away. But the woman said, ‘Six miles off, Miss Rachaela. It’s a long rough walk, but we’re accustomed to it.’

Cheta’s eyes, if it were not inconceivable, would have assured Rachaela that the woman was blind. They were dark, like the eyes of all the people so far encountered in the house, but not sharp and bright; instead fixed, veiled-over, eyes that scarcely moved. Yet Cheta went from place to place with perfect precision. Coordinated, she manoeuvred through the panes of cracked syrupy window-light and went out.

The sound of the sea came and went in the house, vanishing at turns of the walls, behind pieces of furniture or long curtains. In places, conversely, the sea was suddenly loud, the crash of it on the rocks below. It was not to be seen from the house. Nothing was. Every window was of thick hectic glass. The panes were patterned, or they held still fifes: fruit, urns and trailing flowers and sides of crimson, saffron and salmon-pink, viridian and mauve like poisoned ivies, heaven-blue and smouldering red. The rooms were jigsawed with their interrupted reflections. Several of the larger windows contained pictures. Rachaela recognized uncanny and seemingly blasphemous parodies of the Bible: Cain killed by Abel perhaps, over his offering of grapes and wheat, and the slain deer hung around Abel’s hunter shoulders, the neck wound like cornelian. And other cornelians in a round window above the stairs where a prince at a wedding changed the yellow wine into blood.

Rachaela was coldly amused by the bad taste of these eccentric scenes, presumably designed to please the family at its inception in the house. Yet she longed for a chink, some square inch of clear ordinary glass, looking out. The house was a box, a church, shutting in. The awful colours submerged the rooms, making them liverish. Gems of fire hung in mid-air, rainbows caught on the dust.

There were carvings on all the wood.

The old woman Anna had assured Rachaela she must do as she wanted. Lacking anything better, Rachaela moved about the building, losing herself in its corridors, finding locked doors, and opening others which gave.

She saw into lavish bedchambers, but presently she discovered in this way two old men playing chess, beneath a window with an angel in white and blue. The tines of their blue hands petrified on the board. The two old mummy faces moved about like rusty clockwork.

‘It’s her,’ said one old face.

‘Look at her hair,’ said the other.

She was not an intruder but an exhibit. She left them and shut their door.

In other places she came on the Scarabae, or their traces.

Some acknowledged her politely, their sharp eyes eating her up, one or two ignored her, pottering on some crazy mission through the house.

She had become used to these meetings, passings. Their names did not matter—though one stole up to her and said, ‘I am Miranda, and you are Rachaela.’ Being elements of a whole, the collective name, Scarabae, would do.

They reminded her now of insects, their skinny uprightness and bony quick hands.

It was no worse than being in a fantastic old people’s home. Better, for they were all independent and capable of individual governance.

One of them, an interested one, was following her, she became sure of that. Creeping behind her, scraping aside into some empty room should she retrace her steps.

She did not like to be followed, but what else could one expect?

The plan of the house eluded her. It was a shifting kaleidoscope of stained-glass and shadows. The rooms were far darker by day than by night.

Every clock she came on or heard told her of a different time.

Every mirror was choked and occluded. In one corridor a mirror of plain glass was being painted with a skilful if pedantic scene of groves and fountains, meadows and hills. Stacked neatly by the lost mirror were the artist’s impedimenta: the tray of paints, palette, brushes and turpentine, rags.