The Ghost Quartet, page 20
“Welcome to my world.” Ian gave my hand a reassuring pat, for him the equivalent of a bear hug.
“So here, lads,” said I, “is my notion of MacDonald’s recipe for haunted single malt. The barley was grown in Connecticut, but the peat came from abroad. He hedged about the water, but I’m sure that was also imported.”
Harry’s fingers drummed the tabletop. “Where from?”
“Think about it, Harry,” Ian suggested. “Think about it.…”
Yes. Think about the long harsh Highland winters, think about the deep roots of the forest. Think about generations of blossoms crimson in the short summer, wilting and mixing with the earth in winter. Think about the long mulch of centuries as they distill, convert and recycle old bones, sinew and blood.
O, cruel is the snow that sweeps Glencoe
And covers the grave o’ Donald.
The bartender approached us.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “in memory and honour of Mike, The Tron would like to serve you all a wee dram.”
For the first and only time in the history of the Jamesians, its denizens declined the offer of a round on the house.
TANITH LEE has a gift for mingling both the macabre and the beautiful in her award-winning fiction, which includes The Birth-grave, Companions on the Road, Dark Dance, East of Midnight, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Red as Blood and many other novels and stories, as well as shorter fiction contributed to H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror and other genre periodicals.
Like Orson Scott Card’s earlier ghost story, Tanith’s contribution derives from the literature of theatre, but instead of Shakespeare, Tanith’s story depends on one of August Strindberg’s oddest short plays. Its title is usually translated as The Ghost Sonata….
STRINDBERG’S GHOST SONATA
by TANITH LEE
Sonata: A composition for one instrument or two …
usually in several movements …
Oxford Concise English Dictionary
The Student
– ONE –
It was Christmas, and he was dying.
Blya Sovinen lay on the ice of the embankment. Above him, the grim stone statues of warriors, and—far below—the partly frozen belt of the River Vlova.
All around, others were occupied as he was, with death. Men, and several women, stretched out or seated quite decorously under the plinths of the damnable statues.
The night was freezingly cold. A white night of winter—the pale blue sky, bright as an early dusk, this effect caused by the icebergs floating offshore to the north and west. The moon hit them, and cast an umbrella of light back into the ether. But light scarcely mattered. It was so cold in the city, they said, fires froze in braziers. Oh yes, it was a night to die.
He himself was spread under the statue of Kurlinsay, the ancient king who had saved the city from invaders many centuries ago. Blya, when he had first looked up, had seen the icicles depending from Kurlinsay’s upraised spear and gauntlet. But that had been, surely, three hours before. Blya had heard the bells from the Gethsameen sound three times.
How long it took to die, he thought drearily. Even so long to lose consciousness. Others had been luckier. Their faces for an hour back were blue and empty already.
Something pressed like wetness against Blya’s cheek and eyelid. It was unwelcome, intrusive, and too alien even for the infernal night.
His eyes flew open.
Warm light scalded down.
He felt blinded and scorched, and writhed in an agony of rage and distress, his mittened hands pressed to his eyes. Generally the police did not intrude on the process of departure—
And a voice: “No, friend, we are not police. No, no. Let me look at you.”
“Let me alone!” Blya howled. But his voice was little more than a croak.
Then, a woman’s tone, soft as a feather, whispered by his ear. “Ssh, baby. There. Look, Oska—he can be the one.”
In a torpid horror, like that caused by some paralysing drug, Blya found himself staring into the face of the young woman who bent over him. She was smiling with a sort of joy. The man was only a shadow behind her, though he too had sounded quite young. Something clinked against Blya’s clenched teeth.
“Drink, dear friend. It’s only vodash. It will do you good.”
“Let me—be.”
“Never, friend.”
What were they? Were they insane? Or—had he passed unknowing into some limbo actually policed by demons?
Despite himself, a trickle of the fiery, water-coloured alcohol ran into Blya’s mouth. He swallowed it. Rather than cough or choke he lapsed back on the ground, feeling the base of the hero’s plinth grinding into his cap, his hair, his skull. He was crying. They took no notice.
They were devils with gentle hands. They drew him up, there among the other wreckage, the drunks with ice forming on their beards, the ice-white mother and her azure baby, she who alone watched with dying and contemptuous eyes.
“This way, friend. Not too far, Take some more vodash. That’s it. This is Zophi. All’s well, now.”
This city he had known for two years flowed by in a dream. The route was easy and familiar. They guided him—half carrying him like a large toy—off the Heroic Vlova Bridge. Then along North Vista, one of the city’s wider avenues. Blya’s feet trailed in the road, in snow that was slushy where the braziers burned (no, not all frozen after all), and slick as vitreous between. Torches like torn banners up on their poles. By the great houses, set back from the street, bloomed ranks of lamps. They soon passed the Cathedral-Church of the Gethsameen, whose opened doors gave on a golden cave. He had the impression of priests processing round and round, bearing the icons of saints in scarlet.
“Holy Mother, I was resigned to Hell. Why didn’t you let me die?”
“What’s he saying, Zophi?”
“Some foolish thing. Hush, baby. We’ll soon be home.”
Off the North Vista lay the city domicile of the old Tzaers, called the White Palace. Behind wrought-iron gates, garlanded with fir boughs and silver ribbon, was the little ice-lake. In the midst of this stood the palace, made also to resemble ice, in milk-glass and marble. It had been hollowed to a skeleton by its festive lights. Carriages were parked all along the lake shore, and on the causeway lanterns moved to and fro.
“Or is this Hell?”
“Ssh.”
Blya fainted—why not long before?—at the turning into Weavers Alley. He knew no more until he woke in the house. Their house. A tenement called Perfection.
– TWO –
Blya lay in a stupor for a long while, dimly aware only of warmth, which at first nearly hurt him, then made him burn with fever. Some strange part of himself monitored all this pedantically: He even experienced visions or hallucinations—perhaps fever dreams—of talking with professors at the University, who demanded a firm analysis of his condition from him, and chided him when apparently they thought his opinions too sketchy.
He had studied at the University for one year and eleven months before utter penury drove him out on the streets. He could by then no longer afford books or writing materials, was cast from his lodging on Smite Street, and sold his only coat for a loaf of bread. Most of the bread was stolen from him anyway by militant beggers in the Narzret District. (He had been significantly robbed before. To that their attack was minor.) Hunger stopped his concentration in the classes. One tutor, the always-angry Polinov, struck Blya on the side of the head as he sat drooping from famine on the bench. “Wake up, Sovinen! You’re not here to sleep but to learn the greatness of this world.” He had been too fuddled to reply. In his twenty-first year, Blya anyway would never have struck back at Polinov, an old man; a wonderful teacher with a heart of granite, and wit only for his subject.
Now Polinov, in Blya’s dream, did not hit out; he only declared in ringing tones: “Wait until she sees him.” And the other students laughed; only Blya did not know what Polinov meant.
External to his fever-exercised brain, Blya Sovinen was thin as a rail, pale as ashes, but beautiful to behold. Even his sufferings had not yet cancelled this beauty, for he was young, and, in the past, had not been badly nourished or cared for. Jet black curls poured about his face on the pillow. Black brows and lashes indelibly marked his eyes which, when they occasionally undid themselves, were the light blue-green of a spring river of the Stepi. His body, despite being so thin, was well made and strong enough, though slender in natural build. His hands were those of a musician or scholar.
“He’s like the picture of a young saint,” Timara exclaimed to Zophi, leaning over the delirious man. “Santus Yivan—or the Angel Mihaly—”
All of the girls and women, one by one or in groups, came to flutter or mutter over him. The men of the tenement—called Perfection in the days of the Tzaers—also came to view. They were generally more judgmental.
“Oska—is he good enough? Yes, handsome—exceedingly—but will he do?”
Or, more sternly, and not using a pet name, “Ossif—will he even live?”
Perhaps all this visitor activity was what infused Blya’s fever with scenes of interrogation. Perhaps not. Coming back to life when he had been so near the threshold was very difficult—worse in fact, because he was young and not unvigorous. His body pulled one way like a cart horse, his inclination, long ago disgusted by the world’s vicious surprises, the other.
But life won.
As a rule, given the right conditions, it does. In one form or another.…
At last Blya woke up fully, dazed and cool, his limbs like boneless lead, and saw a crowd of his saviours gathered there, looking at him like an audience.
It had been only two days and nights since his abduction from the Heroic Vlova Bridge. Since then, spooning soup between his lips, or water, or Vodash the Water of the Grain, they had become, all these people, nearly his parents.
He stared back at them in the candlelight, through the haze of the rich warmth of the stovepipe that angled up like a white worm in the corner.
“What is this place?”
They told him, almost in unison, like a speaking choir: “The Perfection Tenement.”
“On Copper Walk,” added one of the older men.
“Why am I here?”
“We brought you here.”
Blya’s eyes, not dazzled but foolishly clear from recovery, roamed over them. Some were young, and a few quite elderly. A little huddle of old women over there, grannies in head dresses from thirty years before, and two old men, one with a triangular popular guitar across his back.
But a girl came forward, not more than sixteen, a pretty, happy-looking girl, carrying broth in a cup.
“I’m Mariasha—and you are Blachi!”
The pet name for “Blya”. “How do you know my name?”
“Oh, we asked you. And you said.”
Probably it was true. In the delirium the professors had asked his name from him, over and over.
Now they propped him high on pillows. He found he could just manage the broth with both hands. It was good, and had meat-juice in it, even wine, he thought.
Yet they were not wealthy. And this was a tenement, some ancient mansion now carved up in apartments for the working-class. They had put Blya into one of the nicest rooms, a chamber where a pipe ran from the main stove below. They gave him broth and wine. They gazed at him with a sort of joy.
Were they crazy? Perhaps some mad sect dedicated to the Virgin, to Christ or some saint?
It was the season of Christmas, the Twenty Days of Light. Maybe they always went out at this time and rescued some poor unfortunate. A charitable act.
No sooner did the broth land in his guts, than sleep put its heavy soft hands down on him.
Someone took the cup.
Laughing quietly, congratulating him and each other, all the people were ambling from the room. Mariasha murmured, “Sleep well, dearest.”
He had no choice, the body again making its demands over heart and intellect. Blya slept.
It was morning when he woke again.
Outside, and through the house, he could hear human noises—arguments and calls, children crying or shouting, the clank of pans, feet running up and down stone stairs.
The air in the warm room smelled of flowers.
Blya saw that a pot of lush blue hyacinths had been placed on a small table across from the bed. Their scent was intense, nearly alcoholic. How had anyone grown this plant in winter? Perhaps, having a powerful stove, it had been possible to force the blooms—
He was not sure he really liked the perfume. It reminded him of something read in the previous months, read in another language, and finally watched on stage in his own. A peculiar and haunting work that, although it stirred now along the backrooms of his mind, was so muddied by other associations, he repressed it like a scream. He thought very clearly, however, A collection of persons trapped like suicidal spider-flies in a sticky and deserved web of their own making—which also snares evil things and innocent things, randomly perhaps, and without pity.
Then the door opened, and in came a huge woman, fat and majestic, who paused to look Blya over, with, curiously, both approval and disapproval.
“Here he is,” she said.
Where else was he supposed to be?
Behind her stood a youngish boy holding up the gurgling urn of a self-bubble. The aroma of black tea conquered the scent of the hyacinths.
“There now,” said the woman. She loomed over Blya as he struggled to sit up. “I am Olcha, the house-mother of the Perfection tenement. My word is law here.” She seemed quite playful. Playful as a cat is likely to be with a newly-caught mouse. Cruelty and opulence coexisted with great smugness in her round red face.
The tea was served him, and a cherry conserve, and a piece of dark bread only just cooling from the oven. Blya stared at the bread. The urge to weep stumbled behind his eyes and throat.
“Yes, this is for you, handsome little goblin. Eat up and get strong.”
Blya held the bread against his lips, kissing, not biting.
But the house-mother of Perfection swung off round the room, and with an awesome whisk of her fat arm, raised a cover from a rotund copper bath. “Koresh there will bring the hot water, soap, razor and towels. The bath will do you good, wash the last poisons of the fever from you, make you wholesome and pleasant.”
Blya thought of the house-mother of his own previous wretched tenement near the Smitings. She had been bleak and indifferent to all her charges, letting the house self-bubble go cold, refusing to see to rats or to keep other unwanted visitors out—nor did she like to let wanted ones in. Only those able to bribe her got any service from her, and any who reported her to the landlord she herself then accused of horrible crimes, and so had them thrown out.
“Why?” Blya said, as jolly Olcha pirouetted like a padded aproned elephant through the room.
“Why? To make you fit for society.”
“Why this kindness, Mother?”
“Oh, we are very kind here,” she threateningly said.
He had the sudden, unassailable notion they would feed him up, wash and groom him, in order to cook and devour him on Christmas Night.
He smiled at this sadly. At least it made some sense to him. Altruism always had its price. He had never met disinterested generosity in his life, save from his father and mother in boyhood. But even they had wanted him ultimately to bribe them, with unqualified affectionate respect, and by ceaselessly studying and passing examinations, and so becoming a scholar of whom they could boast.
Reassured by the macabre idea of providing a good dinner for the house, Blya began to eat the bread and drink the sweetened tea. Presently when the boy—Koresh—came back with hot water, Blya took a bath.
Clean clothes, a shirt and trousers, a jacket, even a waistcoat of old, darned silk, a scarf, a new cap, undergarments of once excellent material—all these were laid on the bed by Koresh. Of course, Blya thought dreamily, intoxicated by warmth, tea, and hyacinths, when they put me in the oven, they’ll redeem these clothes. That’s all right then.
But also he thought, If I grow well, then I’ll see the true danger and madness of all this. I’m not sane yet myself, but presumably it will come. God help me, then.
The Days of Light, the twenty days of Christmas, moved four steps further along the calendar of the city.
Blya Sovinen grew stronger. He got up and wandered about his alotted apartment and then, partly driven out by the scent of the hyacinths, about the tenement. He found cramped seeping passageways, stairs, side chambers and cupboards, and abrupt open rooms of great size, usually untenanted but always full of objects—elder caskets and chests, chairs and cabinets green with mildew, emptied wine crates, heaps of fusty curtains, and so on. Cornices traced the upper reaches of these areas, and whorls of carved leaves and roses indicated where once, years back, chandeliers had hung glittering with crystal and flame.
The shut rooms, the cells of the people who lived in Perfection, he did not naturally attempt to enter. But sometimes doors stood wide open, and seeing him the inhabitants always called out some greeting, bleary or cheery, depending on their condition. Some insisted he visit them. They played cards and often sang, if the old man with the guitar was present. Every one of them seemed to know who Blya Sovinen was, and that he was new among them, and extremely welcome.
Surely, for so many people, he would furnish only a small meal, a slice or so of meat?
There were also grand bathrooms in the house, three of them, with marble tubs. Two latrines existed, perched out sidelong from the walls about cesspit tubes that ran down into the paving of the yard to the sump. On the roof, looking east towards the Vlova, a single gargoyle reared, a sort of dragon, but its head was off, and snow had swamped it.
The snow had fallen again while Blya lay unconscious. The city was muffled in a thick white counterpane, from which black smokes rose to an ivory sky. At night the sky was silver, and slits of windows shone dull red and amber, but the bells blasted the atmosphere with ringing accolades to the forthcoming birth of the Christ.
