Joanne Harris - Sleep, Pale Sister

Stupidly I fingered the brooch, trying to slow the vertiginous fall of my thoughts. Below my left eye a banner fluttered a signal of uncontrolled panic.

(what about my what aboutmy whataboutmy story)

If I had heard her say it I know I would have lost my mind, but I was aware that she spoke only in my thoughts.

(whatabout my whatabout whataboutmy)

I used the only magic I knew. To silence the pitiless voice in my mind I spoke aloud the one magic word: I summoned the enchantress with all the yearning intensity of which I was capable.

‘Marta.’

Silence.

That, and something almost like hope. Almost like quiescence.

I waited in that undersea silence for what seemed like hours. Then at ten o’clock I rose from my chair and washed in cold water, dressing carefully and meticulously. I crept, unseen, out of the house and into the breathless night. The snow had stopped falling and a dreamlike stillness crept over the town; with it came fog so thick that even the gaslamps were eclipsed, their greenish globes lost in an endless haze of white. Beneath the fog, the snow seemed to have a radiance of its own, a kind of unearthly cat’s-eye luminescence which made walking corpses of the rare passers-by. But chloral and the proximity to Crook Street had subdued my ghosts; no little Beggar Girl followed me, holding out her thin bare arms in frozen entreaty; the ghosts-if there were ghosts-dared not leave Cromwell Square.

As I made my way through the snow, bracketed from the fog by the light of my lantern, I began to feel strong again, confident in the certainty that she was waiting; Marta, my Marta. I had brought her a present, tucked underneath my coat: the peach silk wrap I had bought on Oxford Street, repackaged in bright red paper and tied with gold ribbon…As I walked, my hand crept almost furtively to the package, testing its weight, imagining how the peach silk would look against her skin, how provocatively it would slip from her shoulders, its fine, translucent grain sliding against the rougher grain of her hair…

It was almost midnight when I reached Crook Street, and the flare of excitement and anticipation at knowing her to be so close was such that I was at the door before I realized what was wrong: the house was dark, no windows lit, not even a lantern at the door. Puzzled, I stopped in the snow and listened…but there was no sound from Fanny’s house, not the faintest tinkle of music or laughter; nothing but that dreadful, buzzing silence which engulfed everything.

My knock echoed dully through the house and suddenly I was convinced that they had gone, Marta and Fanny and all of them, that they had simply packed their belongings and disappeared like gypsies into the uncertain snow, leaving nothing but regrets and a whiff of magic on the air. The conviction was so great that I cried out aloud and beat against the door with my fists…and the door swung open silently, like a smile, as from inside the house I heard the hall clock begin to strike the passage of day to night.

I paused on the doorstep, a faint smell of spices and old incense in my nostrils. There was no light from the hall, but the snow’s luminous reflections were enough to cast a faint, ethereal glow on to polished floorboards and shining brasses, so that my shadow was startlingly clear in the moonlight, falling crookedly across the threshold and down the passageway. A tepid exhalation of scented air touched my face, like breath.

‘Fanny?’ My voice was intrusive, too shrill in the muted intricacies of the house: at last, after so many years of visiting, I realized its immensity, passage after passage of carpeted labyrinth, doors I never remembered passing before, pictures of languid nymphs and satyrs with ravaged, knowing faces; screaming Bacchantes with thighs like pillars, pursued by grinning dwarves and leering goblins; demure mediaeval handmaidens of Pandaemonium with narrow hips and cryptic, penetrating eyes…As I passed through dim galleries of explicit, gilt-framed lechery, the dark robbed me of all perspective. I speeded my step, hating the dull and somehow menacing pounding of my stockinged feet against the deep pile of the carpets. I tried to locate the stairs but managed only to turn into another passage, and turned handles only to find the doors locked and whispering as if some mystery crouched half-awakened behind.

‘Fanny! Marta!’ By now my disorientation was complete: the house seemed to stretch out for immeasurable distances in all directions; I felt I had been running for miles.

‘Marta!’ The silence reverberated. A hundred miles away I thought I could hear a tinkling of music. After a moment I recognized it.

‘Marta!’ My voice cracked on a high note of panic and I began to run blindly down the passageway, striking the walls with my hands as I went, calling her name in desperate invocation. I turned a corner and ran straight into a door which abruptly brought the passage to an end. The rush of panic dissipated as if it had never been and I felt my heartbeat slowing down almost to a normal rate as my hand closed around the porcelain doorknob and the door opened into the hall.

There were the stairs-I could not understand how I could have missed them the first time I passed that way-and I could see moonlight from a little stained-glass window casting reflections across the burnished wood. The light was so bright that I could even distinguish colours: here a splash of red across the banisters, a couple of green lozenges on the stairs, a blue triangle on the wall…and higher on the stairs a naked figure, the subtle line of her flank and thigh etched in purple and blue and indigo, the rippling fall of her hair a darker veil drawn against the night.

Moonlight caught one of her eyes from the shadowed face, coaxing the iris into opalescent brilliance. She was poised like a cat, ready to leap; I saw the tautness of her white throat, the muscles corded like a dancer’s, saw the arch of her foot on the stair, tension in every nerve of her body, and I was filled with an overwhelming awe for that unearthly beauty. For a moment I was too absorbed even to feel lust. Then, as I moved towards her, she sprang away from me with a soft laugh and fled up the stairs with me in pursuit. I almost touched her-I remember how the fronds of her hair brushed my fingers, flushing my whole body with a hot shiver of desire. She was quicker than I, evading my clumsy embraces as I pounded behind her. As I reached the topmost landing, I thought I could hear her laughter through the door, teasing me.

I gave a little moan of anticipation, the exquisite tension of the moment driving me to her door (the doorknob was blue-and-white porcelain, but there was no time for the fact to register). I had begun to shed my clothes even before I opened the door, leaving a trail of discarded skins (coat, shirt, neck-cloth) on the landing behind me. Indeed, when I opened the door I was absurdly half clad in socks, hat and one trouser-leg, and was almost too preoccupied with ridding myself of the rest of my clothes fully to take in the surroundings. With the benefit of hindsight I know that I had been there before: it was the room of my dreams, her room, my mother’s room, transported by some ironic magick to Crook Street; in the dim light of a shielded candle I could make out the details I remembered from that first, terrible day, diluted almost into insignificance by the nearness of Marta: here was her dressing-table, with the flotilla of little jars and bottles; there was her high-backed brocade chair, a green scarf draped carelessly over the back; on the floor another scarf lay discarded; across the bed dresses lay tumbled in a splash of lace and taffeta and damask and silk…

If I noticed any of this, it was with the eyes of desire alone. There was no sense of danger, no foreboding; simply a childish feeling of rightness and a joy which was purely physical as I leaped on to the bed, where Marta was already waiting for me. Together we rolled among the gowns and furs and cloaks, crushing antique lace and ravaging costly velvets in our silent struggle. Once my outflung arm struck a side-table, sweeping rings, necklaces and bracelets to the floor as I laughed madly, burying my face in the sweetness of her jasmine-scented flesh and kissing her as if I could not bear to leave an inch of her skin unconquered.