Personal Darkness (14 page)

"Who the hell are you?"

Ruth did not answer.

Violet said, "She's the opar." She seemed to be making a concentrated effort to speak in an odd, cute way.

"She's ugly," said Dominic, "and she's stinky. Stinky Ruth."

Ruth looked down at Dominic.

Dominic held her gaze for perhaps ten seconds and gradually his own flattened out. Then he turned away and punched Violet briskly on the arm. Violet fell at Ruth's feet. "He hid me." She took hold of Ruth's leg. "I wan Mommy. Mommy pud me terbed. I wan my doll. My doll's called Penny she's god real hairan she widdles bud he pulled haheadov."

Dominic went to the window and Violet sobbed but without tears, looking up to see if Ruth would respond. Ruth did not respond.

At the window Dominic tensed.

"There it is." He glanced at Ruth. "It's a fox. Mommy says the council men will come and poison it."

Violet said, "Smelly old fogs. It goes in the dudspin."

"Mommy put out some poison," said Dominic, "but the old fox didn't eat it."

"Kill the fogs," said Violet.

Ruth walked over to the window and Violet let go of her jeans perforce and sprawled on the floor.

Dominic had eased open the window and was leaning out.

Like a premature autumn leaf, the fox was in the garden. It had jumped catlike over the wall, and now doglike it nosed about a tub of geraniums. Its tail had a white blaze. It was young and whole, vital and mysterious. Dominic went over to a child-sized chair and raised the seat. He took out a catapult and some small sharp stones.

"Mommy says," said Violet, "you musson have a cadapull."

"Be quiet or I'll kick you. I'm going to hit the fox."

"Hid it," said Violet. "Hid it in the eye."

She too came to the window. Violet and Dominic stood there, he in his Lilliputian trousers and shirt and she in her violet clothes, and the little boy took aim with his catapult, and the little girl squeaked excitedly, so he had to tell her again to be quiet.

The catapult was homemade from a strong twig and a strong elastic band. As the elastic tautened, Ruth leaned across and drew it further back, past the child's ear, so the band snapped. The whiplash caught Dominic on the cheek and he yelped with pain and amazement.

Violet screamed
and
Ruth slapped her face.

There was, finally, true silence.

And out on the lawn the fox, perhaps sensing some feral current more intense than poison and stones, sprang away over the fence and into the adjoining row of gardens.

"I'll tell Mommy," said Dominic, "what you did."

"And I'll tell my father," said Ruth, "about you. My father only comes out at night. He's tall and pale and his eyes glow in the dark. He's dead. He can do anything. He can walk up walls. He'll walk up this one. He'll break the window without a sound. He'll come in and drink your blood."

Both children stared now. Violet whimpered, and was motionless. Tremulously Dominic said, "You're a bloody old liar."

"Wait and see," said Ruth.

Dominic said nothing more.

A minute later, Ruth came out of the playroom and went down to the second floor. She could hear Pamela talking animatedly on the phone in the first floor hall.

Ruth went into the studio. She passed the gaudy, unmagical canvas of mountains and winged horse. She unerringly went to one of the tables where, bright as silver, a scalpel blade lay shining like a star.

Trevor Bellingham worried all the way home, about how Pamela would go on. He had forgotten to keep after the agency and probably that would mean another week without an au pair. They never stayed anyway, daunted by the stacks of boring domestic chores Pamela left them, the snack meals, the troublesome children…

Trevor worried all through the late-afternoon traffic, which presently became complicated by fire engines.

Then he reached his street and could not get through.

Standing irate by his car, he soon discovered that his chore-filled house, Pamela, Dominic and Violet, had all ceased to be a worry.

A DAY LATER, THE IVORY TELEPHONE rang. The notes of it passed through the house like awls.

Presumably it called in answer to the use Eric and Michael had made of it. Presumably one of them lifted the receiver and spoke.

Rachaela did not go to see. She did not ask.

And a day after that, two days after the Scarabae had used their telephone, Malach came.

The sunset had been hot and threatening, fires, blood. The Scarabae kept to their rooms, and if they watched the news there Rachaela did not know. From the upper apartment leaked the dim organ wash of Camillo's new music, but perhaps only Lou or Tray was playing it.

After the sunset came the night.

Rachaela sat in her window, and watched the common alter. It became a stage set for
Swan Lake
, which once she had seen danced. The great trees were stroked with platinum by the early moon. Only the lake was missing; instead the clearing, the glade, lay down the slope where by day dogs were walked and bicycles wheeled. Camillo had come from this direction, northwest.

A swan did not fly over to alight upon the lake of glade.

It was a helicopter.

The stammering drone of it pressed up over the house, growing too large, as the noise of Camillo's trike had done.

Then the peeled lights tore down. The moon was eclipsed.

Without complications, a preposterous insect, the helicopter landed in the glade.

The wind from its aerial blades poured back against the house. Rachaela felt it on her face, a dry chemical simoom.

She stood up.

A tracery of colored streaks still glimmered on the slope, reflections of the windows of the house. Michael moved out among them, and went down toward the powerhouse of the helicopter. The wind pushed at him, but he moved upright and unwavering.

She imagined all the Scarabae, all that were left, up at their lit casements, watching. Eric, Sasha, and Miranda. Perhaps Cheta. And herself.

The lights of the helicopter glared between the trees, and the blades rotated. Then it was lifted again, straight up, over the pines into the night. And was gone.

The moon came back.

They moved out from the glade between the trees. Four figures. There were two men, Michael and another, carrying four dark bags. And then two more, fantastic.

Black and white.

Rachaela thought,
Camillo again
.

But this was not Camillo.

He was tall, straight as a creature of black iron, and the moon found out the pale angles of face and hands, and the ghost-shadows of two whitish dogs that padded up the slope ahead of him. They wore black collars with silver spikes, and went unleashed, not looking back, not straying, warrior dogs marching to a drum. The drum must beat in his brain, to hold them like that.

Adamus…

Not Adamus, either.

As he passed between the trees, the moon took, and became, his hair. It was a mane that fell to his waist. It was white as a nuclear explosion, the blind white of a thousand suns.

Behind him walked, nonchalantly, a black-haired woman in a black velvet coat. Not Lou, nor Tray. She was not a handmaiden, so much was obvious. Nearly as tall as he, striding on her high and inky heels.

They were thirty feet from the house when the owl cried in the oak.

The man with white hair checked, and at his back the black-haired woman halted.

He answered the owl, softly and persuasively. His mimicry was passionlessly exact. Then he raised his arm.

The owl floated from the tree top like a demon on silken sails. It came to him, and settled on his wrist, a falcon.

This scene burned through Rachaela's eyes like hurt or fire. It was so curious, so beautiful, so bizarre, unsuit—able and marvelous.

For perhaps one minute he stood there, the white-haired man, the owl resting on him, its wings outspread. Then it lifted up, as the helicopter had done, and soared away into the common woods.

He laughed. She heard him. It was an arid sound.

One of the dogs barked. He spoke then.

"Quiet, Oskar. You are not yet introduced."

His voice was musical, as the voice of Adamus had been, yet not the same. This voice was the color of a white spirit, some brandy distilled in the dark. It had too the faintest trace of accent, or maybe only a different rhythm.

As they moved into the reflections of the windows, he glanced up and noticed her, but that was all. She could not see him well for shadow and shine. The woman, however, smiled, raising her face which caught a pane of daf-fodil light. She was beautiful, extraordinary. They walked around the wall.

Then the house received them.

Rachaela came down the stairs, and, rather to her surprise, Miranda was coming down after her. They stood together on the third step up, and through the open door, out of the night, Michael had come, and the other man, carrying the bags.

Sasha and Eric were already in the hall, and Cheta, to one side.

The great rosy oil lamps, which were also lighted at the same time as the electricity, fluttered against the pillars like pink moths.

The woman entered first. Her beauty was astonishing, for it improved with proximity. Her black hair was like Rachaela's, very long and slightly curling. She was very tall, perhaps six foot in her high heels.

She stood aside like a royal herald, and the man came in with the two dogs.

"Malach," said Eric.

"Eric," said the man. He came forward and held out his hand. Eric clasped it. They stayed quite still, looking at each other.

The man was tall and spare, as Rachaela had already seen, and framed in the flood of wintry hair his face was that of an adventurer, a commander, one who fought. High cheekbones and thin muscular jaw, nose aquiline but not thin, lips inclined to refinement but perhaps of cruelty. The eyes were the pale blue of aquamarines. Not black. She had expected black, like those of the Scarabae. (But then, her own eyes were pale.)

On his left hand were four large rings of tarnished silver. He took his right hand from Eric's as Eric let him go. Turning to Sasha, this man called Malach raised her fingers and brushed them with his mouth. He indicated the woman gracefully. "Althene." And then the man who stood with Michael. "Kei." And lastly the two dogs. "Os-kar, Enki." He added, "The dogs behave well in the house. I shouldn't have brought them otherwise."

"Enki howled in the helicopter," said the woman, Althene. She had a deep voice, velvet like the coat. Also the trace of accent.

"Yes. Enki howled." Malach ruffled the head of the paler dog. Both were albinos, wolfhounds tinted by a strain of something else, and both vast as lions, with long curved tails and oddly bluish amber eyes.

"You are all welcome," said Eric.

"And the dogs," said Sasha. She smiled. "We've missed animals."

Miranda took Rachaela's arm and drew her down the stairs. Rachaela had not expected this. It was a medieval scene, or something from a Renaissance film. She was led to Malach by Miranda in the lamplight.

"Miranda," said Malach. He kissed Miranda's hand lightly, courteously. Rachaela looked up at him, steeling herself. But when his blue eyes came to her, she flinched.

"This is Rachaela, the daughter of Adamus."

"Yes," he said. "And the mother of Ruth."

"And who are you?" said Rachaela.

He did not take her hand.

"Malach. Didn't you listen?"

"You're Scarabae."

"Of course," he said. "All of us. Why else are we here?"

"And why
are
you here?"

"Rachaela," said Eric, "this isn't the time for questions. It has been a long journey, over the sea."

"You told me," Rachaela said, "
they
told me. You're all the Scarabae there were. The last."

"We are the last," said Eric, "here."

"Rachaela is confused," said Malach. "I—we—are Scarabae of another branch. Still Scarabae."

Out of the lamplight, Althene said smoothly, "There are many Scarabae."

"And in necessity," said Sasha, "where else should we turn?"

Rachaela moved back a step. She was afraid of Malach. Was it the same fear she had felt of Adamus, terror of male beauty and power, the dominance of a man and all it implied, the pitfall, the trap?

But Malach was also frightening in another way. Adamus had been a priest, but Malach was a warrior.

Rachaela stood aside, and let them all move on into the gold and white drawing room from which the broken television had been removed. The dogs followed decorously.

Michael and Cheta and the new one, Kei, were serving drinks, cups of greeting. Kei set down a large water bowl into which he poured a measure from a tankard of beer. The dogs went to it and began to drink loudly and couthly. Kei took the tankard next to Malach.

Malach wore black. Black trousers inside black boots, a black shirt and long black coat.

But Althene took off her velvet wrap to reveal a dress folded about her like two leaves against a stem, the color of green Han jade. Her pale throat was bare and her long fingers, but on her left wrist was a huge sunflower of dull antique gold held on a golden band. Her oval nails were painted the same shade. Her face was exquisitely made up, her black eyes in a coffee mask, lips tawny, the hint of tawny blusher on her cheeks. Her lashes were long as those of a leopardess.