The Mammoth Book of Terror

TANITH LEE BEGAN WRITING at the age of nine and she published three children’s books with Macmillan in the early 1970s. She became a full-time author in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave and followed it with twenty-six other titles.

She has now written and published around seventy novels, nine collections and more than 200 short stories. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages and she also had four radio plays broadcast during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blake’s 7. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master. In 1998 she was short-listed for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction for her novel Law of the Wolf Tower, the first volume in the “Claidi Journal” series.

Her more recent books include Piratica, a pirate novel for young adults, and its forthcoming sequel Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Lionwolf Cast a Bright Shadow and Here in Cold Hell are the first two volumes in an adult fantasy series set in a world ruled by magic and mysticism, while Metallic Love is a sequel to her 1981 novel The Silver Metal Lover.

Two works of lesbian fiction, Fatal Women and Thirty-Four are published by Egerton House, as is the detective novel, Death of the Day. She has also contributed a creepy, contemporary romance novella to When Darkness Falls, published by Harlequin.

Tanith Lee lives with her husband, the writer and artist John Kaiine, on the south-east coast of England.

“John and I haven’t written many stories actually together,” explains Lee. “We wrote our first, however, a macabre and colourful piece called ‘Iron City’ in 1987, although this has since been mysteriously misplaced . . .

“Anyone who has seen much of my work knows I often acknowledge plot or story ideas from John. In the instance of ‘Unlocked’, it began with John’s writing of the journal and grew further from my own abiding fascination with France, plus our mutual obsession with madness and/or asylums – see my Book oj the Mad and John’s metaphysical thriller Fossil Circus.”

I kissed thee ere I kill’d thee, no way but this,

Killing myself to die upon a kiss.

—Shakespeare: Othello

THE TOWER AND TURRETS of St Cailloux, so thin and dark against the terrible sky – I only saw them once. It was not possible to make out the bars, nor to hear the cries. The lawns were shaven, and the trees had the controlled shapes into which they had been carefully cut, restrained by wire. Behind, far off, the mountains, broken and unruly.

Some old chateau, so it looks to be, and must have been, once. No longer.

Now it houses the ones who scream and are kept in by bindings and bars and bolts.

I only saw it once. And that was in a photograph.

When they took me to see the land, they explained all over again, as the lawyer had in the town, that the house was “lost”. The land was a shambles too, under that bone-dry sun. Tares and weeds, as in the Bible. And the magnificent old cherry trees, all swarmed with serpents of ivy, although the little apple orchard had no snakes. There could be real snakes underfoot. They warned me. In the black ruin of the house, a glimmer of motion, sun catching something – pale, shimmering.

What a dreadful place. I want only to sell it, although I doubt it will bring in any money.

At the inn or hotel or whatever it thinks itself to be, an old man brought me a parcel, like a peculiar present.

“What’s this?” I tried to be pleasant, though he had suspiciously refused to sit down and ignored my offer of a glass of wine.

“Her book.”

“I see. Whose book?”

“Hers. Madame Ysabelle.”

“Ah – that’s the diary, then.”

“Her book,” he said, put it on the table, nodded angrily – they are all angry with me, the foreigner from the city who has inherited a piece of their landscape, which is the whole world. The two old servants had been sent away before her death. That is a blessing. I can imagine how they would have been with me.

“It was found under a stone?” I asked. “By the hearth.”

“What kept it,” he said.

After he had gone, I unwrapped the paper and took out the diary. It is black and stained, the binding flaking away. But the stone had protected it, as he said. Something ironic in that, almost a pun—

I opened the cover and saw, in a brownish ink, the characters of my distant relative, Ysabelle, the ornate handwriting so encouraged in her youth. But she had only been thirty-two when she died. No doubt a great age here in the country. An old maid. But I had seen her picture. Quite tall, full-figured, with tight corsetted waist. Hair very dark. Long-fingered hands, and an oval face on a long smooth throat. Dark eyes that gave nothing away, by which I mean gave nothing, pushed it toward one.

The writing said, My Book. Private, in the manner of a young girl. She had never married, “Madame” the rude courtesy of this primitive area, never allowed courtship, which was blamed on her father. After his death, alone in her white house, all wood, as they do it here, with only the thinnest veneer of dropping plaster. A grape vine growing over the terrace, and the cherry trees raising their gnarled hag’s arms, that in spring are clothed in blossom like a young girl’s skin.

By local standards too old then, Ysabelle, for wooing. At twenty, here, they gave up such hopes, unless she was a widow and wealthy, and really, despite the land, the two servants, there was no money in her family.

I flicked through the pages. I did not particularly want to know her. Although her diary had survived, and insistently they had awarded it to me.

Here and there a sentence: “Nightingale in cherry tree. It kept me awake all night. Exquisite song, save when it stops to imitate an owl it has heard in the woods.” Or, “Mireio says there are no eggs today.” Or, “The wind has been blowing. Has made my head ache and my eyes.” Then, this sentence: “I cut open an apple, seeds, the white flesh inside, the juices, white as wine, nobody has witnessed this before.”

How odd. What a curious thing to say. Had Ysabelle, who seemed to have gone mad, never supposed anyone, not even Eve, had cut open an apple before?

Then I read, “The red apples all white inside. The leaves are dead, too hot, shrivelling the blooms, too passionate a heat. Bells toll in the next valley. Seeds and tears, poppy dreams. Summer, hot, heat, the stifling heat. I dream of clouds. This brightness hurts me. The silver that the locket is made of – where from? Taken from earth, like black-berries, cherry trees, grapes, peeling birch. Everything will burn. It is holding its last breath, blooming with the threat of death. Foxgloves.”

I put the diary down. It had felt hot in my hands. Smoke rose from it in my imagination.

Walking across to my trunk, I rummaged inside, and pulled out the other thing they had given me, the buckled, shapeless mass of the locket.

Why foxgloves, Ysabelle? It must be the old country superstition, not the poison which also gives life, but the black fox – cipher for Satan – who leaves his mark there, because he is the ghost of a lover.

Was her secret here in this diary, then, and did they all know it, all these walnut-brown people of the valleys and slopes, who rose with the sun and slept when it fell, and would tell me nothing, and not even drink a glass of wine with me?

I opened the diary in another place and read, “I saw them today. They were on the road in their little trap with the pony. He sits upright like a stupid rock. She leans, looking this way, that way. Burning hair. Her hair is the sun, but only if the sun is pale as the moon. I waved. And she saw me, and waved too. He stared, then nodded, a king. Ernst and Hāna. She had a purple ribbon in her chignon, but her hair is so massive, it drooped on her slender neck, shoulders. Purple like a wound in all that blonde.”

Under this, Ysabelle, dimly related to me by the wedlock of an unknown aunt, had drawn a line of vine leaves, rather well, in her brown ink that perhaps had been dark when she used it.

Beneath, she writes: “Hāna, Ariadne, Dionysos. Holy.”

And then: “Ernst. What a boring statue of shit.”

This startles me, and I laugh. Ysabelk, such unfeminine language. But it is her private book.

Even so, I suddenly think her modern, ahead of her time. This boldness in an old unmarried woman. And she is so coarse about Ernst . . . does she secretly like him?

The next paragraph only says, “I shall send Jean to advise him about the horse.”

I put the diary by my bed. Then, in the furtive manner of this place, pushed it under the mattress. I should read more in bed that night.

Arriving back in my room quite early, for they lower their lamps at nine o’clock, and yawn, and shuffle, and frown at you – I sat perversely with the diary, leafing through it, so reluctant to start at the beginning. Surely I shall be bored. What is there here to read? The reflections of an unbalanced, lonely woman, possibly obsessed by her new foreign neighbours, this exciting Ernst made of shit and the woman, his sister, with all that pale hair . . . Then something, no, let me be honest, I know precisely what, and it is prurient, ghoulish, makes me turn to the last page. Beyond this page lies the drama of death. The fact that the house of white wood burned, leaving only its hearths and stone floors, and two tall stone chimneys, and Ysabelle’s bones, and her diary safe under the hearth stone. Bones and stones. Her neighbours were gone by then, Ernst, Hāna, to their separate places. And by the time of the fire, those who would speak of it, had thought Ysabelle mad. The hot weather was not kind to women. The horrible wind that blew from the mountains. The roar of light from their flanks, that had been visible too from the house, and still is from its ground. She had set fire to the house in her craziness, Ysabelle. It was only the kindness of the priest that allowed her Christian burial. She might, after all, have knocked over a lamp. And everything was so dry, flaring up at once—

Was there even a lock on the diary, which the heat from above caused to melt?

Who else has read this book? Who else began by reading the last page first?

“I have a lock of your hair. I cut it from you as you slept. I kissed you there, where the scissors met. You never noticed it had gone. It is all I have of you, your hair. Blonde spirals in a silver locket.

“The locket is cold between my breasts. Cold in the heat. Perhaps it is the heat of the locket which feels cold, as they say witches screamed, when they were burning alive, of the agony of the great terrible freezing coldness. I sweat silver. Your curled hair next to my heart.

“But we are monkeys, not angels.

“Yesterday, when I returned to the old white house, I saw it freshly, as if I had never lived here, or had been away some years. Whose house is that one? Ysabelle’s. She lives alone. Truly alone now, for in the town I saw the lawyers, and settled a sum of money on Jean and Mireio. At dawn today, I dismissed them. She was sulky and angry, and he accused me of sending them away because he had tried to shoot the nightingale. Secretly, they were pleased, talking together when they thought I did not hear, of the tobacconist’s shop they plan to start together in the next town. Here, a cooking pot and broom are all that remain of them, all they deigned to leave me.

“My new, empty house. I have always liked it. Liked it too well to leave. Nothing has changed since the days of childhood. The peeling painted wooden walls, ivy in the cherry trees – now and then cut back, always returning – the well of broken stone. Such pretty neglect. But yes, the view has changed, the land shrunk and the sky grown. There are no clouds, now.

“I dream of clouds, as indeed I dream of you. Great black clouds to cover the sun, stormy skies to quell this heat. There has been no rain for many months, and I have heard a rumour too, of a goat sacrificed in the woods – killing to bring rain, blood for water.

“I have a lock of your hair. And this. I have this, but this is not you. No. How well I remember when it was. For it was the very same height as you, and broader perhaps, than your delicate, slender frame, like a spilling of your soul in silver. How we sat, night after night, brushing your hair, this entity of you, combing it out, both of us marvelling, for I made you marvel at the wonder of it that you had never seen it was. Combing, braiding, playing, plaiting with ribbons, silks, the nights you wore it loose, for me, around you like – a shroud. Oh, Hāna. Your hair.

“I have made it into a noose, threaded, sewn with faded mauve. A noose is all now it is worthy to be, this, that was your wedding train. Life, that will be death.

“They call the asylum also the Valley of Wolves – St Stones, St Cailloux. A sort of pun. And this is, too, for I shall put it under the stone of the hearth, and who knows who will ever find it, my Book. But I hope they will, for I want them to know, yes, even if they rage and curse, I want them to know of you. And that my last thought will be of you, dying on a kiss. Good night, Hāna.”

For weeks, the valley and the village were alive with gossip concerning the strangers, who were strange in all ways – educated, and not badly off, from another planet – that is, another country – and unrelated even in the faintest sense, to anyone of the locality.

The village people spied on the newcomers, and presently told each other that here was Madame Ysabelle’s chance. For the foreign householder, Monsieur Ernst, was unwed, not poor, nor very young, and of the same social class as Madame Ysabelle, who after all, was not bad-looking, and had her land, if only she would bother to see it worked. The single potential stumbling block might be Monsieur Ernst’s sister, also unmarried, who lived with and looked after her scholarly brother, in just the same way as Ysabelle had looked after her scholarly father until his death, three years before. The sister was old, so the spies decided, who had only seen her from a distance. She had white hair. These females were often the very worst, and the evidence suggested she must have kept him from union before.

The two houses, though, were only half an hour’s walk from each other. One day or another, the man and the woman must meet.

It was a fact, there were dual elements in the village, indeed in all the villages and farms of the region. A sort of peasant bourgeoisie existed, gossipy, religious, caste-conscious, exacting. But, too, there was the more feral peasant blood, which had other values, and was considered little better than a pack of wild beasts. These latter had actually troubled properly to see Mademoiselle Hāna – she was yet young enough for that, twenty-four years, which to them looked nineteen. Two men had carried boxes to the house of Monsieur Ernst. A woman had brought eggs, and later come to see to the washing. These people knew quite soon that it was the brother who was the stiff one. If he had not married, it was because he had never seen a woman he liked sufficiently. And his sister gave him the best of care – she was what the middle shelf of the region would have termed devoted. To the “wild beasts”, perhaps, she was dutiful, and this while she was not the sort of girl who would be naturally constrained. She too had vestiges of the wild woods, where once witches had danced with flowers in their hair, just as they had ridden from the mountains on their broomsticks not thirteen years before.

Of Ysabelle also this wild quality might have been noted, in her girlhood. They had seen her, wandering the fields with blood-red poppies in her basket. Or watching the moon from her window while her clever father pored over his books.

To the Wild Beasts, Hāna did not represent an obstacle nor Ernst a rescue. Although they were not insensible to ideas of rescue and obstacle in the arrival of the foreign couple.

Ysabelle met Ernst one morning. He was riding along the lane, or road, that ran by the wall of the garden at the front of her house, and she was standing there with Mireio, over the scattered feathers of a chicken some fox had taken in the night.

Mireio was cursing the fox, and promising that Jean would set a trap, and Ysabelle impatiently was desiring that rather than do this, the house of the chickens should be repaired.

They argued in the way old servant women did with mistresses they had known as children, and youngish mistresses with old servant women who had almost been their mothers but were not.

Ernst stopped the trap, and frankly watched, in cool amusement.

When Ysabelle looked, he raised his hat and introduced himself.

Doubtless he could see the old servant eyeing him, evaluating him, but with Ysabelle there was none of that. As he had heard, she was educated and well-bred, and he liked the look of her, her coal-black hair softly but neatly dressed, her dark dress, still in part-mourning apparently, for an adored, respected father. Her lush figure, too, her graceful features, her sensitive, noble hands.

She answered him politely.

Ernst said, with his perfect command of language and dialect, “I hope my sister may come over and visit you? Of course, there’s no one else suitable for her to see, for miles. She’s an absolute angel to me. I want her to be happy, but how can a woman be happy with no other women sometimes to chatter to?”

Ysabelle dipped her raven-coloured eyes. She did not smile. As she was doing this, Mireio said, aggressively, “There is the duck, Madame. I said it was too much for us. But for a proper supper for three, it would be perfect.”

Ernst let out a roar of laughter. This was as good as a comedy at the theatre, and really he had no objection to sitting over a good country meal, and looking at Ysabelle, and watching her come around to him.

“Well, I should be honoured,” he said, “but Madame hasn’t yet asked me.”

Ysabelle glanced at him. No smile. Quiet as silence. She said, however, “Mireio has decided you must taste her cooking. Please come and taste it.”

They agreed an evening, and Ernst rattled away to the town, whistling, and that night told his sister they were to meet a true witch of a woman, who, he was sure, had already laid a spell on him, because he was going to take with them a bottle of his best wine.

“When I first saw you tonight, with the sun just down and the moon just risen, I was so angry and nervous. The stupid supper. Not since my father had I had to suffer in that way. When he died, the freedom gave me wings. And now, I should be trapped, as Jean wished to trap the poor fox, gnawing through my paws to get away. Seeing you, I hated you. You. One entire second, that I will never forget or forgive. I hated your freshness, your glow, your light-coloured hair, your face, eager to be liked, and nervous too, I am sure. Hated you. I punished myself later, when you were gone. I went upstairs and said to myself in the mirror, you hated her. And I slapped my own face, hard, and left a red mark that lasted two hours. I know, I was awake so long.”

Ernst made the meal “go”, talking all the while, a sort of lecture. He was studying many things, philosophical, medical, and had also an interest in fossils, many examples of which he would find, he said, in the local countryside, for it was rich in them. Hāna, of course, did not understand these interests. “She calls me to task, and says I march about all day, obsessed by stones. Stones, Madame Ysabelle. I ask you.”

Ysabelle looked at Hāna, and Hāna said, softly, with her slight accent, her slight always half-stumbling in the new language, “Oh, but I know they’re – wonderful, Ernst. I do. I only wish I could have seen them – when they were alive. The big animals like dragons, and the little insects.”

“She is a tyrant. She also insists archeology is tomb robbery,” said Ernst.

Ysabelle said, “Mademoiselle Hāna would prefer to travel in time.”

“Yes,” said Hāna, “to go back and see it as it was.”

“She reads that sort of nonsense,” he said.

Ysabelle said, “But monsieur, you know what we women are. Creatures of feeling, not intellect.”

“That takes a clever woman to say,” gallantly declared Ernst. He added, “Of course, I’ve heard of your father. I read a book of his. An excellent mind.”

“Thank you. He was much admired.”

“You must miss him.”

“Yes,” she said, “every day.”

And turning, as Ernst applied himself again to the duck, Ysabelle saw Hāna stare at her almost with a look of fear.

Later Ysabelle took Hāna to inspect the garden, to show her womanly things, domestic herbs, the husbandry of the grapevine, the moon above a certain tree.

Hāna said abruptly, “You take a risk, Madame.”

“Oh? In what way?”

“Making fun of him. He has a horrible temper.”

“Yes, I’m sure that he does.”

“He doesn’t see it now, what you’re doing—”

“I’ll be more careful.”

“Please. Because I’d hate there to be a rift.”

“Since you have no other female companions.”

“Of course I do,” said Hāna. “There are lots of woman here I like very well. He’s often away on his business, things to do with his money, and clever papers he’s written. Then I sit on the wall of the court with the servant girl, shelling peas, giggling. We takeoff our shoes.”

“I’m sure that is a risk, too.”

Hāna said nothing.

Then she said, “We’ve been to many places. I like this valley.” Though her delivery was still hesitant, it was now a fluent, unafraid hesitancy.

The moon stood in the top of the birch, which held it like a white mask upon feathers.

Hāna lifted her face. She was so pale, her white skin and lightly-tinted mouth. Her eyes were dark, although not so dark as Ysabelle’s. As Hāna tipped back her head, Ysabelle, who had drunk Ernst’s very strong wine, had a momentary irrational fear that the incredible weight of Hāna’s chignon would pull back and dislocate her slender neck. And throwing out one hand, she caught the back of Hāna’s head in her palm, as a woman does with a young child or baby.

Hāna said nothing, resting her head, so heavy, the massy cushion of silken hair, on Ysabelle’s hand.

They gazed up at the moon, at the mask which hid the moon, which might itself in reality be a thing of darkness, concealing itself for ever from the earth.

“I’ve never seen so much hair,” said Ysabelle presently.

“Yes, it makes my head ache sometimes. I wanted to cut some of it once. But Ernst told me that was unfeminine.”

“What nonsense. Your brother’s a fool. I’m sorry. Even so, you shouldn’t – no, you should never cut your hair. Your hair isn’t like any other hair. Your hair is – you.”

Hāna laughed.

Ysabelle in turn felt frightened. She said, “What nonsense I’m talking.” And took the girl back into the house, which Ernst was filling, as the father had done, with the headachy lustre of cigars.

They left at midnight, a city hour, not valued in the country.

Exhausted, Ysabelle went upstairs, and Mireio, hearing her pace about, nodded sagely, rightly believing her mistress was disturbed by new and awful terrors, tinglings, awakenings, amazements.

Ernst was delighted when Hāna began to spend time with Ysabelle at the white wooden house, among the cherries. She was always returned early enough to greet him, if he had been absent in the town. She made sure as ever that the servants saw to his comforts. When once or twice he slyly said to Hāna, “What do you talk about, you two women, all those hours? Daydreams, and those books of yours, I expect.” Hāna replied seriously, “Sometimes we talk about you.” “Me? What place can a humble male have in your games?” But he needed no answer and was gratified, not surprised, by Hāna’s lie. She had learned to be careful of him from an immature age, upbraiding him only in the proper, respectful, foolish, feminine way, desisting at once when chided. She was used to extolling his virtues, praising his achievements and being in awe of them. Even her perhaps-feigned loyalty she had learned to temper, for once, when a rival at his university had, he said, stolen a passage from his paper, and Hāna had asserted that the man should be whipped, Ernst had replied sharply that this might be so, but he did not expect her to say it. Hāna had been taught that men were not to be questioned, save by other men. For though some men were base, a woman could not grasp what drove them to it.

All this Hāna had relayed to Ysabelle, it was true. And so, in a way, they had spoken of Ernst.

“My mother died when I was four,” said Hāna, “but I had a kind nurse. I miss my mother still, do you know, I dream of her even now. She’d come in from some ball or dinner and her skirts would rustle, and she smelled of perfume and there was powder on her cheek, as on the wings of the butterflies that Ernst kills.”

“I killed my mother,” said Ysabelle. Hāna gazed, and Ysabelle added, “I mean, when I was born. Of course, as I grew, I had to take her place in many ways, for my father. For other consolations, he went to the town.”

Hāna lowered her eyes. They were a deep shadowy brown, like pools in the wood where animals stole to slake their thirst.

They walked about the countryside, the two women. They picked flowers and wild herbs, and later, mushrooms. They talked the sort of talk that Ernst would have predicted. Of memory and thought and feeling and incoherent longings. They sometimes laughed until their waists, held firm in the bones of dead whales, ached. They read books together aloud. Even, they shelled peas and chopped onions on the broad table, Mireio scolding them as if they were children. She would spoil it soon enough, saying, “Monsieur must come tomorrow or next day. This pork will just suit him.” She was ready always with her invitations to Ernst, was Mireio, and he eager to accept them. Ysabelk, he remarked to himself, has that woman very well primed. He did not mind a little connivance, though, aimed at himself. YsabeUe herself would not be too forward, and she would not anticipate, daughter of a free-thinking intellectual as she was, anything he did not want to give.

But too, she must be parched, surrounded by the local males, such swinish illiterates. How she must look forward to the sound of his step, his voice, after all that girlish twittering. And she had a lovely bosom, he had seen the white upper curves of it in her once-fashionable country evening gown, and her firm white arms. Her hair smelled of the rose-essence with which she rinsed it. And there was the smell of cherries always in the house now, somehow inciting. He would like to take a bite, there was no denying it.

“He’ll be gone – oh, two nights, three. He said, I might ask you to stay with me.”

“Did he.”

“Have I offended – I hoped – you see, when he’s not there, you’ve no idea, YsabeUe, our maid, Gittel, is so funny—”

“I prefer not to leave my house. But you’re welcome to stay with me. I’m afraid—” YsabeUe hesitated. She paled, which, in the candlelight, hardly showed, “We would have to share the bed. The other rooms aren’t properly cared for. But this bed is very large. It was my mother’s when my father – you understand. A large, ample couch. It’s strange. My servants are going away too. A visit I promised them. Gone for two nights. But we would manage, wouldn’t we?”

Hāna’s face. An angel announcing peace to all the world. “But I wouldn’t – annoy you?”

Now YsabeUe, stumbling with a familiar language, her own. “Annoy – I – enjoy your company so much.”

“I remember my mother,” Hāna said, “before she died. Late, she’d wake me. She used to give me sweets, and play with me, all sorts of silly games, how we laughed. And she’d hold me in her arms. She said, We are two little mice, my love. When the cat’s from home, the mice will dance.”

“Wine and opium. A dream of pearls. Hidden things. Clasp. Hinges. Unhinged. Open. The quiet shout, my cherry blossom. How we sat, that night. And you loosed your hair. My pearl, shut away, the hair in the locket – your little river – my river in the time of drought. The making of your sweet rain. My souvenir. A wedding train, it swept to the floor. Tread on my heart and break it. Your arms – flung up in abandon, your impatient body, waiting. You had fallen asleep, your face hidden in hair, your legs pale, ghostly in the candlelight. I drew nearer, and the candle with me, flickering, threw shadows dancing between your thighs. I grew jealous of light. I inhaled you there, breathed you in. Kissed you and kissed you again, bathed in the little rivers of you. The heat of the candle was stifling, agonising. We blew the flame away with our mouths. We embraced darkness, drank the night. Oh, Hāna. Hāna, Hāna.”

Hāna was at the door in the stillness of the hot evening. The nightingale was already singing, and the sun hung low, the sky a choked pastel blue, as in a faded painting.

On the terrace, Hāna paused.

“May I step over?”

Ysabelle laughed. She was unsettled, vivid and anxious. “Like the ghost? If I ask you in, will you haunt me?”

“No, I shall be circumspect.”

“Come in. Haunt my house.”

The rooms smelled of the absence of things. The absence of the servants, gone to their family of a hundred nieces and grandsons in the town. The absence of cooking. It was very hot, and the wooden parts of the building creaked. Ysabelle had lit a lamp in her sitting room, and another in the kitchen, and the strings of onions glowed like red metal. In a vase stood three white flowers. She poured from the bottle of wine. They drank. And Hāna came and kissed her, a fleeting little trustful kiss, at the corner of the mouth.

“Such fun,” said Hāna.

“Oh, my child,” said Ysabelle, and a well of sadness was filled.

“No. We’re sisters. My mother is your mother. And Ernst—”

“Ernst,” said Ysabelle, looking into her glass.

“Ernst never was born,” said Hāna. And her face was wicked, pitiless. “It was you. We two. You can be the clever one. And I’ll look after you.”

“I’m not clever.”

“Yes.”

The light was darkness. The sky a blue jewel in every narrow window. The nightingale sang a thousand and one songs, like Scheherazade, never repeating itself.

They made an omelette with fresh herbs and mushrooms, and ate two loaves of the coarse good bread. They opened another bottle, and made the coffee which had come from the town, seething it like soup, and adding cream and cognac.

They talked. Whatever do women talk of? Such non-sense. Of life and death, of the soul, of the worlds hidden behind the woods, the mountains, the sky, the ground. Of God, of- love.

“Did you never love anyone?” asked Hāna.

“No.”

“Your – father.”

“How could I love him? He simply always inexorably was, like the year, the day. An hour. An hour without end. Do you love your brother?”

“I – feel sorry for him.”

Ysabelle – laughed. A new laugh. Bitter? Stern?

“But he can do anything,” said Ysabelle.

“He – does not – see,” said Hāna. “He breaks the stone and the fossil is there. But he sees only this. Not what it was. Its life. And medicine – experiments – he has done things with small animals – and there is a horrible man he consorts with, a sort of doctor. And the butterflies on pins. Their patterns. But not – not what they are. He doesn’t see God.”

“Do you?”

“Oh yes,” said Hāna, simply, quiet, a truthful child.

“Then what does God seem to be?”

“Everything. All things.”

“A man. A king. A lord.”

“No,” said Hāna. She smiled. “Nothing like that.”

When they went up to bed, dousing the lamps, carrying the fat white candle, their bodies moved up the stairs as if all matter had been freshly invented. Night, for example. The stars between the shutters. The cry of the fox from far away. The far shapes of the mountains on the sark. The sark. The furniture. Clothes. Bodies. Skin.

“Will you take down your hair?”

“Yes. Then I’ll plait it. There’s such a lot. I’ll tie it up close so it won’t trouble you.”

Ysabelle said, “May I watch you?”

In the candlelight Hāna, a portrait, pale as alabaster, and gems of gold in her eyes. “Oh yes. I used to watch my mother.”

In the old story, the basket issues ropes of silver, and the silver flows on. Or the silver water leaps from the rock, and never stops.

Pins came out, and combs. The two ribbons were undone. Hāna, unwinding from her head the streams of the moon. On and on. Flowing. Never stopping.

The hair poured, and fell, and fell, and hung against the floor, just curling over there. A heavenly veil.

“Oh Hāna,” said Ysabelle. “Your hair.”

“Too much.”

“No. Don’t plait it – don’t. Haven’t you ever known?”

Under the sheath of hair, so simple to undress unseen. The train of an empress, when seated, spreading in folds. Standing again, veiled in the moon, she climbs into the wide bed. But lying back, the sea of moonlight parts.

“I’m so sleepy,” says Hāna. She yawns. She starts to speak, and sleeps.

Her upturned breast. What is it like? So soft, so kind, like a white bird, sleeping. And her hollow belly, and her thighs. And the mass of her silver hair, even in her groin, thick and rich and pale as fleece. The scent of her which is thyme and lilies – and – something which lives, and is warm.

Ysabelle stands. Locked. Her clasped hands under her chin. The voiceless weeping runs down her face as hot as blood.

But where the candle falls. Is it possible that you can steal a kiss, and not wake Beauty?

“Please – forgive me—”

“But it’s so lovely. Don’t stop—”

“I can’t—”

The nightingale sings. Hāna – sings.

“I never—”

“But you must have—”

“No. What is it? Oh – so wonderful—”

“You don’t hate me—”

“I love you. Is it possible – could it happen again?”

“Yes.”

“And for you?”

“Oh, yes, for me. Touch – there. Can you tell?”

“But – it’s like the fountain in the Bible, springing forth. I used to think that must be tears. But it’s this—”

“Hāna—”

“You’re so dark. Oh I love you. I can see you in the dark. Blow out the light.”

Blow out the light . . . Put out the light . . . I kiss’d thee erelkill’d thee.

He was pleased that evidently they had had a nice time together. He liked them to get on. He questioned his sister, trying to elicit some news of what had been said – of him. Hāna hinted a little, only that. Sly thing. He could picture it, these women, and Ysabelle sighing over him, and Hāna telling foolish stories admiringly, secretively, the way women did. His university glories, his boyish foibles, his favourite toy – they had that look now, of confidences exchanged.

It was afternoon, and Ysabelle and Hāna sat in the sitting room of Ernst’s house on the slope.

They were rather stiff and upright, as Ernst was. They drank a tisane, and looked at the view, for soon he would arrive home from his fossil hunt along the edge of the mountains.

The mountains loomed here. At the white house, on such a hot day, they were more a presence of burning light in the windows. Mireio had, as she always did in summer, moved two or three pictures in glass away from the reflection – some superstition that Ysabelle had never questioned, in all her thirty-two years.

But the mountains were oppressive, in this other spot. They turned the sun off in one direction, and cast a sort of shade.

Ysabelle said softly, “If I had you alone, heaven knows what I’d do to you.”

“How startled I should be.”

“I’d nibble at you like a lettuce.”

“If only you could.”

They saw him on the path, dwarfed by distance, tiny, big and towering, sunburnt, carrying some trophy.

They turned into two whale bones, corsetted tight, dead and hard and upright.

He entered. The door slammed, and the servant girl, Gittel, ran up, noise, fluster, and then he was in the room, enormous, and he must be welcomed and begged to tell his wishes, and send to heat the kettle, the coffee must be prepared. And look,

here were the almond cakes bought especially, as he liked them, and some pâté that had been kept untouched and cool in the stone larder.

Would he sit? No. Was he tired? No. But surely, he must be tired a little, after so long an excursion? No. One saw how he watched, amused, the fuss. How strong and brave he was, to have walked so long and still be walking about, and to have broken this rock which now he put down on the table there. How astonishing. How erudite he was, to have found it. To have known where.

He spread the broken halves and showed the fossil, the little images, turned to stones, curling and perfect, ammonites, molluscs, from a sea long gone, in this afternoon of drought.

“Look here.” They clustered for the lesson. So impressed by him, gasping. “Nobody has witnessed this before,” he said.

It was true. They could not argue with him.

Later, alone a moment, she cut the apple, showed it to Hāna. “Nobody,” said Ysabelle, “has witnessed this before.”

“But, it’s only an apple. Many people—”

“Not this apple. Nobody, save you and I, have witnessed the inside of this apple, before.”

“Oh Ysabelle. You’re too clever – I’m afraid—”

“Yes, yes, my darling. So am I.”

This is Ernst’s house. Against the shadow mountains.

In the evening, after the thick soup and the cheese and wine, his cigars, and looking at the brown mass settling on the sides of the heights. Darkness will come. Cannot be held back. Nobody has witnessed this before, not this night.

“Oh, my good friend, yes, Le Rue. Of course, he has his life’s work at St Cailloux. A genius,” said Ernst, who had made the evening ‘go’, speaking, entertaining them, and even, in the case of Ysabelle, perhaps able to teach her somewhat. She was promising, Ysabelle. She might write up his notes for the paper on ammonites of the region. A fine clear hand. Her father was to be congratulated posthumously. “I’ve mentioned, he’s fascinated, Le Rue, by the surgical procedures of Ancient Egypt. But also of course by the most modern inventions. The X-ray now, what a wonder.”

“Seeing inside,” Hāna said after, another moment alone, “Nothing is to be private.”

But Ernst said, “We can’t pretend to be delicate. We’re monkeys, not angels. Descended from the apes. Not even you are an angel, Ysabelle.” He raised his glass, “So your appearance must be deceptive.”

“Ernst telling us,” Ysabelle, writing later, in her clear hand, “with such costive glee, of a machine which can see the very bones inside a body. Nothing is left secret. And the fossils, asleep for centuries. What a pillager he is, raping his way over the foothills.”

Taken home, in the trap. Ernst had insisted. Hāna left behind. Ernst. The moon high. They have sacrificed a goat in the woods for rain. The blood has splashed the moon. There are marks on it.

“Ysabelle.”

She sits silent, listening. At last she says, “Ernst – you flatter me. But – you frighten me, Ernst. I’ve never known a man so – powerful – so very wise. Even my father.”

“Ysabelle, don’t be afraid of me. What has my intellect to do with this? You inflame me, Ysabelle.”

“No, Ernst. I’m unworthy of you. I couldn’t bring myself-you’d be disappointed – how could I bear that? You would come to despise me. Oh, ten years ago, perhaps. Not now.”

“Don’t suppose, Ysabelle, I’m done with you. I shan’t give up.”

“Please. My dear friend. You must.”

“One kiss.”

“No, Ernst. I must be firm. What would you think if I had no honour?”

In the house of white-painted wood, retching into the iron sink, spitting the bitter bile, his wine.

He is tickled now. Soon he will be disillusioned.

“Hāna, can’t we fly away on the white angel wings of your hair?”

Ernst’s house stands there, at the top of the valley. It is well-maintained and there are many rooms. In the courtyard, the well has sweet water, which has almost run dry. It was once, this house, the domicile of a rich aristocrat. But that was long ago, before men learned they were descended from monkeys.

Shutters hang by the windows, the colour the mountains become in the sinking heat of evening.

Ysabelle looks at this house. Now she is often here. He has insisted. She must stay here, tonight, ftmust be the dominant one, not Ysabelle, who is a woman. There are more comforts here. And Hāna need not travel.

Ysabelle does not like the house. It seems to her, everything is held inside this building, confined. Just as the land confines the valley. The clouds confine the rain.

But they – can make rain.

In the midst of arid dry compression, the spring leaps forth. Oh, yes, even once when he was below, doing one of the things he does, something with knives or pins, pushing him from thought, in the upper room, clinging, and that enough—

But tonight, in the hot-brown, baked-closed-shutness of the house. For the cat is away. The cat is away again for one more night.

Let us dance. I walked here, dancing. Never before has anyone witnessed the cream of your thighs, the fleece of silver-gold – I cut a curl, two, three, from this sacred place, as you slept, and the god slept inside you. I – robbed you – did I? Did I? No, not robbery. Only too shy to say. One day I will confess, show you. Ysabelle that you call clever. I clipped the little curls and put them in this locket of silver, snapping shut the face of it upon my souvenir. Its hinges . . . Unhinged.

I have a lock of your hair in my locket, cold between my breasts, or is it boiling hot? I cut the curls so carefully I did not even wake you. Your gardens – your sweet breasts, small as a girl’s, your perfect face in its wreathes of angel wings. The centre of your life, your womb, behind its treasury silver-golden gate, soft as ermine.

The house is watching, as Ysabelle climbs towards it, but she thinks that is only Hāna, watching from the upstairs window, where she has strewn perfume in the bed.

Night after night, you loosed your hair. That greater river – dry, yet feeling wet to my thirst. But here there is no smell of cherries ripening. This house of his smells masculine, except for the sanctuary of your room, with the wild flowers in the vase, and the chocolate standing in its pot. You are my cherry-fruit.

“He went to that awful – to the asylum.”

“St Cailloux? St Stones . . .”

“That man – Le Rue – Ernst is intrigued by the – what does he say? – the so-interesting patients. By the operations Le Rue discusses with him and wants to carry out. These disgusting things he says the physicians of the pharoahs did—”

“Why are you talking of him?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s because we are here. Tomorrow, after he comes back – make some excuse . . . I know, I shall forget my basket. Then you must bring it to me. Such a womanly thing. How can I manage without it.”

“He’ll say I should send Gittel.”

“Bring Gittel. She and Mireio love gossiping.”

“Perhaps. He’s irritable. He calls you Juno. What is that?”

“The wife of the king of the gods in Ancient Rome. She was frosty, sour. A nag – that dreadful thing women do because men won’t listen.”

“Then he’s asked you for favours?”

“Oh—”

“And you put him off. Ysabelle!”

“What? Do you want me to say yes?”

“No – no – but he’s so proud—”

“He’s a monster. He’ll grow tired of hunting me.”

“He has begun to dislike you. Tonight he said to me, Be careful what you say to her.”

“Then – I must flatter him more. Oh God,” said Ysabelle, “I’d even accept his caresses, if it were the only way.”

They sat in silence. Why was the silence so strange? Of course, here there was no nightingale.

“Perhaps,” said Ysabelle, “I can contrive to put some stupid pretty woman in his way, one that won’t recoil.”

“Sometimes . . .” said Hāna, “when I was only ten, I had little breasts, and he tried and tried to see them. When I wouldn’t, he made up a story about me to our father. I don’t know what Ernst said, but my father had my nurse tie my hands together every night for three months. She used to cry as she did it. But she’d never explain.”

Ysabelle got up. Before she could prevent herself, she retched violently. Hāna rushed to her. At the touch of Hāna the sickness was gone.

“Dionysos,” said Ysabelle, “the god of wine and madness, the breaker of chains – do you see sometimes, in the woods, the pine cones piled up together into the form of another cone, the drawing of an eye on a tree or rock – that’s the Eye of the Mother, whom Dionysos sometimes represents. And they killed two goats, and they poured wine. Let’s run away, Hāna.”

“How can we?” said Hāna.

It was true. They were immovable, fixed. One to the man, his life. The other to a place. They did not properly see this, how they had been warped to fit and nailed home. And yet escape was closed by a deep invisible wall.

Ysabelle thought, Perhaps he’ll die. An accident, thrown from the trap as the pony bolts at a flash of lightning, clap of moistureless thunder from the mountains. Or too much drink, a haemorrhage.

But Hāna kisses her breasts and Ysabelle melts like wax, and flows down into the rose-red fire.

Their clothes thrown away, murmuring in the stillness, cries choked back, not even a nightingale to shield them with her noisy song.

Hinges. Unhinged.

A locket? A door? Madness?

The story, told locally, clandestinely, was that Ernst returned unexpectedly, after all, that night – perhaps a quarrel with his friend? The house was in darkness and silence, and so he went up quietly to bed, which does not seem very like him, one would imagine actually he would make a disturbance, rouse everyone up, want things done. Or could he have been suspicious?

Passing – on tiptoe? Surely not – the door to Hāna’s room, he heard them whispering, and the creak of the wooden bed.

He flung the door wide on its hinges and found them naked, hair down, uncorsetted, undone – his sister Hāna and Madame Ysabelle.

This is not the case.

Ernst rode home in the trap at about nine in the morning, from his country breakfast with Le Rue. There had been no quarrel, for Ernst and Le Rue enjoyed a perfect mutual respect and approbation, tinctured pleasantly for each by a wisp of well-concealed tolerance; he for Ernst’s slight blindness to the essentials of science, since Ernst was so bound up in theory, nature and the world; Ernst for Le Rue’s slight blindness to theory, nature and the world, since Le Rue was absorbed utterly by science.

Ernst was not in an ill mood. Only the idea of Ysabelle’s having stayed with his sister that night was a small but tart irritant, that had begun to work on him directly he brought the trap on to the rough road, and saw her house before him under the mountains.

Ysabelle was a tease, or a fool. He was beginning, frankly, to notice the failings she had pointed out to him in herself, the elements that made her, she said, unworthy of him. Her “fear” of him he was not, now, so certain of. For fear, to women, was of course a powerful aphrodisiac. It had seemed to him, some four days previously, that this might be the real fount of her desires – to be physically mastered. And so, entering her home on the pretext of requiring eggs from Mireio’s hens, he had ended by pressing Ysabelle harshly to the wall of her white wooden sitting room, brutally kissing her mouth, penetrating it with his tongue, while with his free hand he mounded her skirt and squeezed, through layers of clothing, her most interesting feature.

She had somehow got away from him, and stood panting, her face as white as a china plate, her eyes inflamed. This might be arousal, and he approached her again, at which she hoarsely said, “I won’t be responsible for any harm.” And pulled a fire-iron up from the stone hearth.

“If you keep on like this,” he said, “you’ll put me off.”

“Get away from me,” she cried, like a peasant. But then she shook herself and said, putting down the nasty-looking implement, “Excuse me, Ernst. But I’m not for you. I can’t – expose myself to the tragedy of losing you, once you tire of me. You know how women are. This sort of liaison – will mean so much more to me.”

“I’d think, from another woman, this was a demand for a bourgeois marriage.”

Ysabelle threw back her head and laughed. She was hysterical and unappealing. Women were unhinged, one knew this, at certain times more so, and she was approaching that age when they were at their worst.

Why had he fancied her? Well, this was a barren spot.

He himself laughed shortly. “Then, good morning.”

Outside, Mireio came sidling with a basket of eggs. It seemed to him she leered at his reddened mouth. Doubtless that other bitch thought she could get more out of him by frustrating him, but he was not of that sort. Besides, if ever he were to marry, he would want youth, for sons, and some money, too.

His annoyance with Ysabelle did not abate as, mentally, he cast her off. He supposed this was a sexual matter. She had led him on, now would not accomodate him as she had hinted she would.

He did not like her. No. He would rather she did not come any more into his house. And Hāna must be warned. Hāna was too trusting, and such women as Ysabelle were not to be trusted. Particularly by their own sex, for women were faithless, and nowhere more so than with each other, filling each other’s heads with idiocy, always jealous, treacherous.

Seeing presently his own country house from the trap, Ernst thought that perhaps they might go back to the city. Le Rue could be invited to stay there, in a proper flat, say, with amenities, and efficient servants. Or perhaps not, for Hāna might well make eyes at him, as she had done before with their few male visitors, afterwards making out they had frightened her – familiar tale!

Some way still from Ernst’s house, the pony, unsatisfactorily also his property, cast a shoe.

Ernst got out, and stood cursing, damning the beast. Then he left it there, and went on foot towards his home, where Gittel must be sent to fetch a man for the horse from the village.

So, he approached, walking, in a morning loud with bird song – even the nightgales that, here, had not used their voices through the night. A church bell was tolling too, in the next valley. This was for a burial.

He saw them in a little nook, between the wall and a leaning wild cedar. Hāna’s hair was partly unpinned, but Ysabelle was dressed for her journey home along the upper valley. She wore her dark gown, as usual. She looked quite conventional, and conceivably, if he had met her like this, returning from the visit, as he would have done, a minute later, he would have thought her in fact very plain, of very little importance to himself.

But now she moved to his sister Hāna, and concealed yet not concealed, down on the road, unannounced by the wheels of the trap and the pony’s homecoming trot, he watched them. He saw how they grew together, breast to breast, their arms around each other’s necks, thigh to thigh, lip to lip. They were an image and an image in a mirror, clasped.

Really, it was not much. Women kissed. Friends might kiss. And yet, this passion. Smoke rose from their skins, the air about them trembled as later in the day the heat of the drought would make it do.

Ernst ran. He ran straight at them. They heard him then, his gallop over the track, his blundering rush across the little scattered stones, and the dust rose round him. He was a whirlwind. He thrust them apart as they were themselves thrusting apart. Ysabelle fell back into the bole of the tree, slipped down it, sat in the dust, staring. Hāna he slapped, once, twice, across her face.

He was roaring, like a lion, like a bull—

His words – were there any words? Oh yes, jargon of streets and alleys, epithets old as humankind. But words? Were there any? Are there any, for such rage?

Hāna attempted to speak. He raised his hand to strike her again and Ysabelle, staggering up, caught his arm, hung on it, and so he flung her off, sprawling again, and this time heard her thin quick cry of pain.

Now language assembled itself. Not whores – madwomen. They were mad. Their brains – diseased.

He swept up Hāna and bore her off. Suddenly, it was so very visible, the differences in their size and strength, as if he and she were beings of two unlike species.

Her arms outstretched, she called to Ysabelle – “No, don’t try to stop him—” And Ysabelle, her knee twisted by the violence of her fall to boneless water, could only lie on her side, as if indolent, observing this, observing Hāna borne along in a cloud of dust and hair, into the brown masculine house that smelled of maleness and cigars. While another cloud, purple as Hāna’s ribbons, covered the screech of the sun.

Ysabelle walked home. That is, she limped, crawled. She fainted three times, the pain was so great. Finally she dropped on the road before her own house, and Mireio, who saw it, brought Jean, who carried Ysabelle inside. Thus, both women were carried into a house by a man, and helpless.

“I fell, and twisted my leg.”

This was exact, if not decorous. Or true.

As she lay on her bed, her knee packed with the poultices of herbs, tightly bound, and beating like a drum, sometimes leaning to vomit in a chamber-pot, Ysabelle turned over in her mind what she should do. But she was feverish, and could not be sure what had happened. How could Ernst have deduced, from their parting embrace, so much? Yet he had. Indeed, it could not be denied. Of course, any woman who rejected him must be – unnatural. Already condemned. Hopeless.

She would have gone to his door, limping, crawling, but the girl, Gittel, had run out. Gittel, terrified, heaving Ysabelle up and bending under her weight like a young willow. Her thick accent: “Go – go, Madame. She’ll calm him. She always does, the four years I’m with them.”

And Gittel had pushed Ysabelle away. And from the male house, no sound issued. The birds sang on. The clouds passed intermittantly across the sun. Eclipses.

It was Ysabelle he would condemn. She was a witch who had seduced—

Hāna, so ignorant, naive, unable to judge, to see the deadly snare—

He would reprimand and instruct. He might be cruel. He might strike her again, and lock her up in her room. Then he would come here. Ysabelle, her brain white with the lights that splashed over her eyes, formulated what she must do. “Oh Ernst – Ernst – after our last time together – I thought you loathed me. Don’t you know how women sometimes pretend – so foolish – she let me, out of pity – she let me make-believe – that she was you!”

And then, stroking him, begging him to take her, his stinking filthy body, his disgusting tongue, and worse, the rest – the rest. But Ysabelle would have it all, she would do anything. For that way, she could protect – she would even take his member, as she had heard tell a prostitute – a mad prostitute presumably – would do, take it into her mouth – and choking down her revulsion, moaning as if with joy, become his utter slave.

She would die for him, if she must.

Hāna . . .

Mireio said to Jean that she thought that bad man, Monsieur Ernst, had led Ysabelle a dance, and cast her off. No matter. If there was a pregnancy, it could be dealt with . . . Mireio was skilled. But after all the good food they had wasted on him – the devil.

Jean shrugged. None of this concerned him. A little over a hundred years before, these rich people would have been put under a honed blade. That would have settled their minds wonderfully.

Ysabelle tossed between oblivion and awareness. She thought the pillow was Hāna, because some of Hāna’s sweet scent had been left there. She thought the acid voluptuous aroma of the cherries, plucked by Mireio, or bleeding in the grass, was the sharp catch of Hāna’s personal perfume in the moments of her ecstasy.

In her fever, Ysabelle spasmed in a deathly pleasure.

When the fever broke, pale and shuddering, Ysabelle sat by the window.

The nightingale still sang. She heard it all night long, as the swelling of her leg waned with the moon.

“No rain,” said Mireio.

Seven days passed, and then, Ysabelle went to her writing table, and began to try to compose a letter to Ernst. It was to be a love letter, confessing she could not bear not to see him. That his disapproval broke her heart. He had witnessed her ultimate foolishness, kissing his sister, locked in a female fantasy that Hāna was himself. Would he forgive her, come to her? She did not want marriage, never had, but to lose his regard – it burnt her away, like the summer leaves.

As she was writing this letter, over and over, attempting to make it right, Ernst’s letter to Ysabelle arrived, along with a package, its contents also wrapped over and over, in expensive paper from the city.

“My dear Friend,” he began, “Ysabelle: I know what worry you must have endured, and as soon as the burden upon me was eased, I sat down to write to you. We both of us care for Hāna so deeply. Let me assure you at once that now the terrible insanity which overwhelmed her has been alleviated. Could you see her, as I did, two days ago, look into her face, clear of all shadow and every frightful thing, you would know, as I do, that this was for the best.

“You will understand, that morning I calmed her as well as I might. Luckily, I keep some opiates by me, for use in certain of my experiments. These rendered Hāna her first peace, and after that I was able to convey her to St Cailloux. Here my friend, Le Rue, took charge of her at once.

“She had by now awoken, and on feeling her pulse, which was so rapid, he declared immediately this was enough to inform him such a passionate heart was unnatural, and could do her only harm. He confided to me that, in the Dark Ages, she would have been supposed possessed by the Devil. But he is a man of science. The ‘Devil’ is merely in her mind, its disorder. He acted before nightfall.

“I will not describe to you the operation, the details might alarm you, and besides you would not understand it. It involves certain nerve fibres in the frontal portion of the brain. A delicate pruning away. My magnificent friend, he made the tender incision. He is adept, and although Hāna was his very first subject, the success with her has made him sanguine for the help of others.

“It was a practice in Ancient Egypt, studied by him closely. Curious to think, that when they lay Hāna in the tomb at last, she too will bear this same scar upon her forehead and her skull, as did those persons in that land of pyramids.

“Ah, Ysabelle. Dear sister. If you could see her. She is like a little child again. Everything is new to her. The flight of a bird startles, even that. She does not move from her chair. A picture of repose, her drooping head, her folded hands. Le Rue says she does not quite know me – I fear she would not know you at all. But when I ask her to smile for me, she does. She will be well cared for, there. And though I must soon be gone from this country, Le Rue will take thought for her like his own. As indeed, he does for all his charges in that place.

“A note on my gift, which accompanies this letter. You will have realized, it is her hair, which of course, for such medical attention, had to be cut off entirely. All the shining locks. It seemed to me you might value them, dear Ysabelle, as you did when you were to her her closest and most intimate friend.

“Beyond this, my kindest wishes for your continued good health and the ending of your local drought.

“Your brother, if so I may call myself:

“Ernst.”

In her diary, her Book, Ysabelle wrote, “I sent for the old man, the charcoal burner they call Doggy. Having given him some coins, he went for me to the place, which he names Wolf Valley. He was the only one I could trust. He, and his kind, keep away from the village. He has under his shirt an amulet, dried sticks twisted in a knot. Near dawn, he came back. He had said there he was an old servant, and asked for her. Expectedly, they would not let him in, but said she was in the care of Dr Le Rue, and he need have no fears. When Doggy said, as I told him to, that he hoped she was better, they laughed. He caught a glimpse of others, at some windows. Their heads were shaved. One was wrapped up tight, and seemed to have no arms. The old man was brave. They hate that place.”

Under this Ysabelle, or something, has scrawled in a running jagged line:

Heart burst stifle and drown in blood

Perhaps a curse, or a wish for self.

There are records from the asylum. One may see them, if the tactic is carried out properly. There is a note on a woman, called only by her Christian name, to “protect” her. “Hāna, the prey of uncontrollable, obscene and perverse desires, a danger to herself and others.” The operation, “The last possible resort” and “practised among the ancients”, was a “success”.

Before the final page, Ysabelle sets out for herself some instructions on how best to hang herself. The strong beam in the lower room that faces the afternoon glare of the mountains, and will hold her weight, which, she admits, is much less, as she cannot eat. Mireio and Jean will be sent away with a settlement of money, as the last page also explains. The hair, a dead thing, still with its stranded mauve ribbons that she herself had helped, that morning of the ending, to tie there, is to be strongly plaited, not as before, woven, not with silk, but some coarse twine, to make it sure. And she will be naked, lest the rigidity of her clothes impedes her.

Ysabelle understands, from her reading, that few people die quickly when hanged. They are choked and strangle. In this way, the hair will throttle her, and as she kicks and gags in instinctive physical panic, her soul will remember that it is Hāna who is killing her, as she has killed Hāna. She affirms she will wear the silver locket with Hāna’s sexual hair. She has polished the metal.

She says, as if she has forgotten it was mentioned before, and as she says again, too, on the last page, that she has heard of a goat being sacrificed to bring rain.

After that, she says the nightingale has flown away.

Then she says she has finished.

After which, there is the last page.

There are some further pages after that, blank, obviously.

Inevitably, one fills them with the mind – the presumed hanging, the woman choking and kicking, rocked violently from side to side in the white vacant empty house, then only turning, slowing, still, a pendant, while the mountains and the sun stare in. After which, as it seems almost supernaturally, fire catches the house, and burns it to the ground, leaving only the puns – St Cailloux – of the lower stone floors and stone chimneys and the stone hearths, and the stone under which the book is, until the old man, maybe Doggy, fetches it out and brings it here, to me.

In a year’s time, a peasant, travelling up the lane on foot, will pause by the ruin of the house. The land by then will have been sold off, but no one, as yet, come to restore or change it. The untended cherry trees will be leafy yet, although one or two will have succumbed to the ivy, with here and there a green young fruit hard among the foliage.

The man, a stranger, will not be troubled by any stories of the region, and going into the ruin, will poke about, since sometimes, in this way, he has found useful things others have overlooked. He will find, however, nothing, and so sit down by a stone, part of one, now collapsed, chimney. He will eat his olives and bread. Then he will fall asleep, for the sun will be again very hot.

When he wakes it will be to great alarm. Across from him, in the wild grass, a small fire will have started. He must leap up to put it out, and do so quickly. For in this weather, another summer drought, fire is the fiercest enemy.

This man is canny. When once he has dealt with the danger, he will find a soreness at his chest, and looking down, where hangs the little silver cross given him as a boy, he will come to see at once what has happened, for he has heard of it before.

An hour after, in the village, he will tell his tale over his wine, and so unravel the mystery of Madame Ysabelle’s house. The truth will not make any difference to her burial place, in fact, will only consolidate her rights to holy ground, since no one has generally told the plan of suicide written in her diary.

Now they will say without compunction, that some object- a glass, or mirror, carelessly left by the departing servants – caught the harsh light from the mountains, and cast it off in a ray against the wooden wall. The concentration of this burning-glass presently sent the tinder of the drought-dry house up in a conflagration.

Most of that will be true. Not quite all. For it was no picture or glass that caused the focus of an incendiary ray, the lighting of a death pyre. It was the polished silver locket that lay pendant on the breast of Ysabelle’s hanged corpse, once she had stopped moving, once she hung quite still, a pendant herself, naked silver on a silver chain of hair, from the beam above.

I have a lock of your hair.

I cut

It from you as you slept.

I kissed you there,

Where

The scissors met.

You never noticed it had gone.

It is all I have of you,

Your hair.

Blonde spirals in

A silver locket.