The Secret Book of Paradys by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

ahead. Her habitual black was augmented by a strange dramatic black veil, like a mantilla, raised on a pearl comb, covering her hair and also most of her face.
    When they were gone, when they and the rest of the funeral had quite vanished into the Chapel, I went after. The usher was shutting the door as I stayed him to get in.
    A full house. I did not look for anyone, but stood at the back, alone.
    The windows had closed with the afternoon’s darkness. When the wind clawed at the building, the candles flounced. Quickly, quickly, let it be over with. I rested my head a moment on the stone of a pillar, wondering how many others, overcome by this insidious faintness, might have done so. I must think. But why, and of what?
    For example, had that running man come up the very path we had taken, had he reached this place? I considered. Not the Church, certainly, with its sacred altar of sanctuary, not that, for then how could Satan have claimed him. Where, among the angels and gargoyles, the marble praying children and stone wreaths, had the black hounds pulled him down? I had trodden in the face of his ghost. Or imagined the whole episode. Did I find the red ring in a drain?
    The Chapel was mumbling now with spoken responses, the words of the priest in a magpie gown of white and black stripe. Everything swung to and fro, like a ship in a sluggish storm. Rain pummelled the windows. The shut doors shook. Another latecomer was wanting to get in. What was out there? What rider on what long-maned mare of the daytime night? Of the endless night, inescapable night, washing round us, which would have us all. Antonina, save me from this dark, this precipice into which I, with all the world, must fall –
    Thank God, it was finished. I drew aside again, and let the porters and the cigar-box go out, and the tide of flesh and crêpe, the aunts twittering and sniffling now. And caught in the tide, the cameo of a face under the water of its veil –
    The graveyard had become a desert sailed by cloud.
    It was an old mausoleum, and it leaned. Through the tilted doorway they took him, and left him behind there. Some of the aunts were now being assisted. The smell of aqua-vitae travelled up the slope to me. His friends broke and ran, waving their arms. They must hold a wake now, what else was to be done? Drink the man down.
    As the crowd thinned, separated, dissolved, some of it toiling or hurrying past me, I realised the rain had begun.
    I stood in the rain, indifferently trembling, and watched the banker talking quietly to the priest. The door to the vault stayed open. She was inside. Did no one think that strange?
    Of course, none of them mattered. Props, strawboard things, not real at all.
    I walked down the slope in great strides, and went past them and by them, as probably they gazed at me distractedly, and up to the narrow, lopsided door of the darkness, and through.
    There was an array of stone boxes, the family of Philippe already foregathered, but the coffin, being brand-new, was shining on its slab in the light of the white candles.
    She was poised on the slab’s other side, her veil off her face, her naked hand lying on the coffin top, with a crimson rose between the fingers. As I entered, she let the flower go. She let it lie there, a drop of reckless colour on the dark. It might only have been her excuse for coming in, but was not even that – what had she said to me? –
rather improper
? To drop the bloody tear of a flower on the coffin of one’s salon’s mere occasional visitor. A cliché, too, madame, of the worst, and you waited, static as a doll, for me, or someone, to come in and see you do it.
    I said, “But you do not like red. Are you insulting him then, madame, his poor helpless body?”
    She said, “My husband is just outside.”
    “Don’t be afraid,” I said, “the extensive branches of his horns would never let him through the doorway.”
    “You are so very insolent. Arrogant and rude. You were from the very