its blonde hair.
Sid shivered and stared, unable to look away. Had she jumped or fallen? The splash he’d heard a few minutes ago must have been her plunging into the lake, and yet there had been no sounds of her trying to save herself. She must have struck her head on something as she fell. She couldn’t just have lain there willing herself to drown, Sid reassured himself, but if she had, how could anyone blame him? There was nobody to see him except her, and she couldn’t, not with eyes like those she had now. A spasm of horror and guilt set him staggering away from the lake.
The slippery grass almost sent him sprawling more than once. When he skidded onto the path the gravel ground like teeth, and yet he felt insubstantial, at the mercy of the blurred night, unable to control his thoughts. He fled panting through the gateway, willing himself not to slow down until he was safe in his rooms; he had to destroy the photographs before anyone saw them. But fog was gathering in his lungs, and he had a stitch in his side. He stumbled to a halt in front of the bookshop.
The light from the fluorescent tubes seemed to reach for him. He saw his face staring out from among the women bearing whips. If they or anyone else knew what he secretly imagined he’d caused… His buttocks clenched and unclenched at the thought he was struggling not to think. He gripped his knees and bent almost double to rid himself of the pain in his side so that he could catch his breath, and then he saw his face fit over the face of a bound victim.
It was only the stitch that had paralyzed him, he told himself, near to panic. It was only the fog which was making the photograph of the victim appear to stir, to align its position with his. “Please, please,” he said wildly, his voice rising, and at once tried to take the words back. They were echoing in his mind, they wouldn’t stop. He felt as if they were about to unlock a deeper aspect of himself, a power which would overwhelm him.
He didn’t want this, it was contrary to everything he knew about himself. “My name is—” he began, but his pleading thoughts were louder than his voice, almost as loud as the sharp swishing which filled his ears. He was falling forward helplessly, into himself or into the window, wherever the women and pain were waiting. For a moment he managed to cling to the knowledge that the images were nothing but the covers of magazines, and then he realized fully that they were more than that, far more. They were euphemisms for what waited beyond them.
CHINA ROSE
by Ron Weighell
It was the French detective Vidocq, I think, who used to say that every act of evil had its own distinctive odor; that in a crowd of a thousand persons he could tell transgressors of the moral law by the sense of smell alone. What would a man of such singular olfactory accomplishments have made of Nicholas Hallam and Rose Seaford, I wonder? Nothing redolent of brimstone or corruption: rather a subtle whiff of something clinical masked by a sweet incense. And about Rose, of course, always the troubling fragrance of hibiscus.
It began one golden autumn morning in 1923, when I, young, poor and happier than I knew, walked over Parliament Hill Fields to deliver a belated birthday present to my cousin, Diane Harewood. An attack of asthma had prevented me from attending her fancy-dress party the night before, robbing me of the chance to appear as a swashbuckling pirate. The Theda Baras and Nell Gwynns would never know what they had missed. I remember worrying as I rang the bell in case I woke Diane, which shows how little I knew then of her riotous life style. Coming from the poorer side of the family, I had no experience of life among the Hampstead set. So I was surprised to find the door answered by Napoleon Bonaparte, who let me into a scene of chaos.
It appeared that some colossus had lifted the lid off the house and buried the floor under a ton of streamers, balloons and unconscious bodies. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, the lounge curtains still drawn, so all was seen in an unearthly half-light. The clouds of noxious smoke and the notorious historical figures lying around in postures of pain and despair made it all a bit like Hades, but at the far end of the room a Lalique lamp cast a golden glow across armchairs drawn up around a coffee table laden with empty bottles. There sat Diane, transformed by white silk pajamas, bathing cap and greasepaint into a fetchingly malevolent Pierrot. She was deep in conversation with a 90s dandy in the
I edged past two exhausted females shuffling together beside a gramophone. The rasping voice was exhorting them to “Charleston, Charleston!” but I could see they didn’t have it in them.
Diane accepted my carefully chosen gift with no interest whatsoever and after a kiss and a gushing greeting, proceeded to ignore me. The dandy was telling her of an encounter he had had on a plateau in the Himalayas with a two-hundred-year-old man who lived in an underground chamber, guarding an enormous book with clasps of horn. He claimed to have won the old man’s confidence by some yogic trick of sitting naked in the ice fields and melting the snow by generating bodily heat. (I commented that two-hundred-year-old men were notoriously easy to impress, but no one took any notice of me.) He learned that the book contained the whole history of the human race, and the old man had inherited the job of turning over a page each day until his successor should come. The dandy had had a devil of a job convincing the old sage that he was not the man, but he
It was while I was listening to this account that I first saw the strange couple seated in a corner of the room. One was a tousle-headed, handsome and athletic youth with the look of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sinister satyrs. It seemed the trousers and shoes he wore were only there to hide his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. The other was the most unhealthy-looking woman I have ever seen. The wrist of the hand that supported her chin looked so thin, so horribly fragile, that it seemed the grip of anger or an accidental blow would have broken it like a twig. She drew on a cigarette held lightly between the first and second fingers of the other hand, flapping the wrist back limply after each inhalation and pouting a lazy gray cloud toward the ceiling. I noticed a curious silver ring on her index finger. It showed a homed serpent coiling back and forth inside the oval collet.
Her features were angular and ordinary, her skin was positively yellow, like old ivory jaundiced by years. Her teeth, which would become visible as she pouted out the smoke, were finely shaped but faintly tinged with blue and jagged along the edges.
She had about her a strange, sickly charm such as Poe might have delighted in, or Rossetti taken for an image of deathly elegance; another Beatrice. As I looked at her wide, dead eyes shadowed beneath the lower lashes by restless nights, I could almost see a ghostly pillow hovering behind her head. That was the first of two very perceptive fancies.
The most disturbing thing about her was her absolute lack of human response. She was not listening to the young man who sat beside her, she was watching him talk to her, observing him like some peculiar and only vaguely interesting phenomenon. The only sign of emotion I could discern was a fleeting twist to the corners of her mouth which suggested sarcastic amusement. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that she was too withdrawn to find direct humor in her surroundings. The real source, I felt, must be more secret than that. The second fancy came to me then, of an unseen companion, a familiar as it were, crouching at her shoulder, its mouth to her ear. It was this creature, and not she, who thought human beings were all bloody fools, and who twisted her mouth, despite herself, with a stream of evil, whispered observations.
My attention was drawn back at that moment to the dandy, who had taken Diane to the window and drawn back the curtain. A wave of sunshine flooded the room, edging their forms in a shared aura of gold.
“Awake!” he cried melodiously. “For Morning in the Bowl of Night has flung the stone that put the stars to flight, and lo! the Hunter of the East has caught St Pancras Station in a noose of light!”
Diane turned her grotesquely made-up face to his and laughingly called him a fool, and something in the tone of her voice made me sorry that no woman had ever spoken to me in such a way.
I found myself rising to join them, so we stood close together peering out into the bright world. Close to, the dandy smelled strongly of some musky perfume. Diane introduced us and I learned that his name was Nicholas Hallam. When he learned that I was a clerk, he looked at me with sympathy.
“You’re always telling me that my life is too selfish, Diane”—the sarcastic twist that came to her mouth suggested that she had said no such thing—“I have decided to make Thomas my good cause. I will save this poor wretch from himself. If he’s still a clerk in one month, there is no hope for him. Be honest, young man. Do you really
