That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (5 page)

Seaming had always had a slight horror of dolls and automata. Even as a child he had associated them with fetches, the undead, the diabolical. Now he felt suddenly terrified that whatever had been done to her might also be done to him.
He thought of the other woman’s mask. Perhaps there was a plague here that destroyed bodily tissues. He imagined his face and throat rotting, caves opening in his flesh and filling with dust and spiders.

She bent and repeated the phrase a third time.

Embarrassed, Seaming fumbled in a pocket and presented his card. ‘The lady of the house is expecting me,’ he said.

The dwarf turned her head to the right. Her voice box grated,
‘Come this way.’

Seaming followed her
. He avoided looking at her by studying the hall. It was papered in red flock and lit with weak brass lamps, which together created an ugly, heavy atmosphere, aggravated by a smell of dampness and animals, with a chemical note of furniture polish. She turned left into another passage, which ended at a flight of stairs. She pointed up to the next floor. Seaming found himself imagining a past for her. He could only think of sad and sordid things, and again his thoughts embarrassed him.

He wanted both to run from her and to say something civil and friendly. He managed to thank her.

She turned her head to the left. ‘You’re welcome.’

He thought she smirked a little; then she left him.

The
woman was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. She was wearing another old, out-of-repair gown, this one of dark gold velvet with panels of seed pearls. Her mask glittered like a glimpse of metal in a mine.

She undid the ribbon securing the mask and removed it
.

Seaming held his breath, steeling himself for whatever aberration or scarring might be revealed.

When the mask was gone, he forgot to breathe entirely.

Hers was the very face of loveliness.

No odalisque, no great lady, no madonna, no serene and enigmatic muse upon any pedestal had a face to compare.

‘
Welcome, Mr Seaming,’ she said. ‘My name is Beauty.’

Seaming felt the urge to kneel. Standing, as he was, on the stairs, he managed a sort of half
-curtsy.

‘
I have worshipped you,’ he whispered. ‘I have sought you all my life.’

‘
You and thousands of others, Mr Seaming,’ she said in a dry tone that he found painful to hear coming from such a face. ‘The mask allows me to live a life of my own; to seek rather than be sought, and to find rather than be found.’ She re-attached the mask. ‘I believe you should be able to look at me from a rational perspective again now.’

‘
You cannot be mortal,’ Seaming faltered.

He sensed that she smiled
.

‘
There are few things more mortal than I.’

Seaming swallowed.
‘Why did you show me?’ His senses and emotions had in no way stopped reeling.

‘
Because to understand my husband, as you must, you should see what he has seen and feel what he has felt. It is he whom you are to paint.’

‘
He must be a god, then. No mortal man could look at you and live as a man. He would be a slave.’

Now she laughed.
‘My husband is very far from being a god, though I have seen pictures of ancient gods whom he somewhat resembles, in his present state. But that is only a coincidence. He is not a man either, however, though he has taken to living more like a man than anything else.’

‘
I’m afraid I don’t understand you.’

‘
Are your eyes the only sense you use, Mr Seaming? His presence pervades this house. Scent the air.’

At first he
did not know what she meant, but he soon noted how markedly more potent and acrid the animal smell became upstairs. It was an odour of hide, musk and gamey meat. It grew even stiffer as Beauty led him along the corridor.

Seaming
’s reason told him that the conclusion he drew was the only logical one. It gave his system another severe shock. ‘You keep company with a beast,’ he murmured. Then he turned red, as forbidden perverse images flocked into his mind. Women with swans. Women with serpents. Pubescent witches rutting with jaguars and hogs.

‘
I see you understand,’ she said, as if he had made some completely ordinary comment. ‘The subject of maidens and monsters has a long and varied history. Not all stories end in the popular fashion, with the maiden rescued. Some of them have more elaborate outcomes. Our tale is such a one.’

With a dry throat Seaming stammered,
‘The old woman downstairs… her injuries… did your husband cause…?’

‘
He has nothing to do with her condition. But the damaged have a sense by which they seek each other out, Mr Seaming.’ Beauty stopped in front of the door at the corridor’s end. ‘My beast is potentially dangerous, but only if you get too close to him. Otherwise, you may be certain that you will be quite safe.’

‘
He is chained?’

‘
He is confined.’ She produced a key and turned it in the lock. ‘You know, I think you may like him.’

Seaming doubted that, but he kept silent.

She led him into a dark parlour. By the light from without, Seaming saw old, elegant furniture and paintings in gilded frames. The opulence of the decoration vaguely surprised him, but he had little attention to spare for it, as Beauty unlocked a further door.

The stink in the next room was part kennel, part sickroom, part abattoir.

The room felt large, but its corners were smoothed in darkness, leaving its dimensions indistinct. It was given only a dim and unpleasant illumination by a ceiling lamp of emerald-green glass. The slimy colour of the light, and the degraded lustre of the metallic upholsteries, gave the room the ambience of a sideshow tent.

On a daybed in the green and dark centre of this room lay a gigantic black wolf
.

The beast
’s head was four or five times the size of a large dog’s. The skull was angular and long, the fur thick and coarse, the ears tall like a jackal’s. The eyes were as large as billiard balls and as yellow as dandelions.

For the space of a few moments Seaming was aware of nothing but the animal
’s presence. The beast was splendid. He exuded enormous vitality. If his physical impression had none of the elevating effect of the sublime, it nonetheless had the force of some great mountain or cruel storm. He was perhaps, after all, a more equal match for Beauty than any man could have been.

Seaming might have remained mesmerised, but certain details broke the spell. The wolf did not lie like an animal, but like a man, sitting straight with pillows behind his back and a brocade cover over his legs. A velvet blanket draped the massive shoulders and chest. A portable games table rested on
his lap. A heavy paw extended and nudged a turquoise rook forward.

‘
Check.’

The voice was deep and damp and it stretched and chewed the word. But it was not unintelligible. Somehow the animal mouth made a human sound. The wolf was only half
beast. The shape of the legs under the cover was human. In proportion to the giant torso they were narrow and short.

Beauty leaned over the board, studied it, and moved a coral bishop.

The huge eyes widened a little, and the wolf’s face looked eager. Then the black brow furrowed. ‘But I will be able to take that. Promise you are not letting me win?’

‘
I promise,’ Beauty said.

The eyes narrowed.
‘Then you are setting a trap. But I cannot see it.’

Beauty scratched behind his ears.
‘Let’s leave the game for a while. We have a guest. This is Mr Seaming, the artist who is going to paint your portrait.’

The wolf
’s nose wrinkled. The lips drew back, displaying plentiful rough teeth, and curled up at the corners in an approximation of a smile.

‘
I can see you are asking the same question I ask myself every day, Mr Seaming. What am I – man?’ – the paw lifted up a pawn, then one of the horse-shaped knights – ‘or beast? We all belong to the animal kingdom, but there is a question of degree, is there not? At least, there is the question of species.’

‘
You speak like a man,’ Seaming said faintly.

T
he wolf howled, to shattering effect on Seaming’s ears, then growled, to the same effect on his already racked nerves: thunder had never rumbled deeper, brute had never so threatened. He felt the fear of being eaten alive. He had to force himself to stand where he was.

‘
Could a man make such a sound?’ the wolf purred in his throat.

‘
If a man were in rage or pain enough–’

‘
Enough, you mean, to lose his faculties and move closer to the nature of a beast?’

Seaming gathered his own faculties.
‘Your intelligence is a man’s, not a beast’s.’

The wolf
leaned forward and exhaled with might. His breath was putrid. Seaming involuntarily stepped back.

‘
You smell me, but I smell you far better.’ The wolf snuffled loudly. ‘You ate semolina pudding for breakfast this morning. Last night you ate fish and drank wine so bad that it was almost vinegar. You slept alone in sheets you have not washed for two months. Your cloak is not your own. It was recently worn by a man who suffered from a cancer of the kidneys. You know nothing of a beast’s intelligence, Mr Seaming, any more than you know how limited your own intelligence is.’

Looking satisfied, the wolf leaned back again. He licked his jowls with the tip of a grey tongue.
‘I was a man once. I wronged a woman. I thought myself ensorcelled by her loveliness, but the only spell was the spell of my own lust. To punish me she enchanted me in truth. She turned me into a beast in body and mind. The one thing I retained of my human nature was my desire for beauty. The woman was not only an accomplished witch, but a great ironist.’

Beauty spoke:
‘In the second half of our history, I became the protagonist. Circumstances threw me into the beast’s company. I loved him, Mr Seaming. You are looking judgemental. Are you appointed to decide where love should be given and where it should not? I loved him, and uncovered the final subtlety of the spell: if a woman could love the beast he would become the thing she most desired. He would always be at her mercy. His substance would be hers to mould. I desired the beast, but I also desired a man that I could love as a man. At the instant I proved my love, the change occurred.’

‘
I had no human speech to tell Beauty of the curse,’ the wolf rumbled. His jaw gnashed from side to side. ‘I am neither man nor beast now, Mr Seaming. I have human shame, but if you must see the rest of my body, you may.’

At this, Seaming realised the obvious. He berated himself for not having understood sooner
– the human-sized legs beneath the covers could not possibly support the massive body above. The beast’s power was a sham. Seaming was suddenly overwhelmed with a compassion that negated all fear and judgement.

‘
I had always hoped,’ he was moved to say, ‘that beyond the mundane world there was another and better one. I had not thought there could be one worse. I was wrong. You are from that worse world.’

The wolf nodded and showed his teeth.
‘The laws of nature, also known as the laws of desire, are different for us, Mr Seaming. In this room, your talents can serve a far more important purpose than any to which you have previously applied them.’ There was a bullying humour in the yellow eyes. ‘I smell your confusion, even under the reek of your pity. Tell us this, then, artist: what is art?’