Joanne Harris - Sleep, Pale Sister

‘Go on, please; go on.’ I could feel sweat trickling down my cheeks at the thought that even now she might withhold it. ‘Marta, please …’

‘Shh, close your eyes,’ she whispered. ‘Close your eyes and you’ll see. Sleep, and I’ll show you.’

‘What did he see?’

‘Shh…’

‘What did I…’

‘Sleep.’

Imagine the sea-bed under a fathom of brown ooze.

Imagine the peace…

‘The Prince rubbed his eyes: for a moment he saw nothing in the box but a dark blur, like smoke, but as he strained to see what was there he was finally able to make out a wand of hazel wood wrapped in a stained black cloak. “How strange,” said the Prince, “to keep such old and ugly things so secret,” and because he was young and curious, he lifted the two objects out of the box. Now what the Prince didn’t know-what no-one knew-was that the Queen was a witch who had come from a far Northern land beyond the sea, a long, long time ago. By enchantments she had made the King love her, and by enchantments she kept her nature secret. The cloak was magic, and so was the wand, and only the Queen could control them. But the Prince was her son, and the witch’s blood was in his veins. When he put on the magic cloak and held the wand in his right hand he felt a sudden upsurge of power. He lifted the wand and power glowed in him like a sun…but the spirits of the wand, seeing that the invoker was only a boy, saw their chance to rebel and escape bondage. They tore free, screaming with triumph, raking the Prince’s face with their claws and breathing their vile breath in his face so that he fell to the ground in a dead faint.

‘When the Prince awoke, the spirits were gone and the wand lay broken beside him. When he saw this, the Prince was afraid. He replaced the wand and cloak in the casket and fled from the room. When the Queen returned she saw at once that her wand had been tampered with, but she could not mention it because no-one knew she was a witch. So she waited for the night of the dark moon and set a curse on the meddler, a terrible curse; for in breaking her wand he had broken her power, and from now on she would be fated to grow old even as mortal women. She put all her hate into the curse and waited, knowing that soon it would begin to take effect.

‘That very night, the Prince awoke screaming in the aftermath of a terrible dream, and in the days and weeks which followed he grew pale and ill, sleeping little at night, unable to rest or to eat by day. Months passed. The King ordered all the greatest physicians in the land to see his beloved son, but no-one could find a cure for his slow and dreadful malady. To add to the King’s despair, his wife too fell ill, growing weaker and more wan day by day. The whole country was ordered to pray for their recovery.

‘Now one day an old Hermit came by the palace, a very holy man, and demanded to see the King. “I think I may be able to find what ails your son and your wife,” he said, “if only I may see them.” The King, mad with grief, agreed, and the Hermit made his way first to the Queen’s room, then to the Prince. Without a word he looked into the Prince’s eyes. Then he dismissed the guards and spoke severely to the Prince.

“‘You have been cursed, my son,” he said, “by the witch Queen, your mother. If you do not act soon then you will die and she will recover.”

‘The Prince wept, for he loved his mother dearly.

“‘What must I do?” he asked at last.

“‘You must go to her room and kill her,” said the Hermit. “Nothing else can lift the curse.”

‘The Prince shook his head and wept again, but the Hermit was cold as ice. “The Queen has no other children,” he said grimly, “and your father is an old man. Would you see a witch in command of your country for ever?”

‘So the Prince agreed, with a heavy heart, and that night he rose from his bed and made his way softly down the long passageways of the palace to his mother’s chamber.’

The door was open, I know. I see it from my bed of salt slime: the knotholes in the white wood, the blue-and-white china doorknob-how easily all this comes back to me! There is a notch in the side of the second panel where once I accidentally struck it with a cricket stump. The house is dark and somewhere far behind me I can hear Father in his toy workshop, a few bright notes from the mechanism of the dancing Columbine scattered in the dark. I am carrying a stump of candle in a flowered dish; the scent of tallow sharp in my flared nostrils. A thick white tear crawls down the side of the candle and on to the china, pooling across one of the blue flowers. My breathing seems very loud in the thick air.

The carpet is soft and yielding beneath my feet but in spite of this I can hear the sounds of my footsteps. Around me the candlelight catches the glass of her bottles and jars, throwing a thousand prisms against the mirror and the wall. For a moment I am not certain whether or not the baby is in the room with her; but the crib is empty-Nurse has taken it in case its cries awake my mother. Raising the candle behind the glowing red shield of my hand I look at her face in the rosy light with a rapture all the more precious for being forbidden. A laudanum vial glitters on the bedstand beside her: she will not wake.

A sudden wrenching tenderness overwhelms me as I watch her face: her thin blue eyelids, the perfect curve of her cheekbones, her cascade of dark hair covering the pillow and spilling down the folds of the coverlet on to the floor…she is so beautiful. Even so wasted, so pale, even now she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and my heart aches with a desperate, hurt love, poignant beyond my fourteen years. My child’s heart feels as if it will burst with the strain of all these adult emotions; the tearing jealousy, the loneliness, the sick need to touch her, to be touched by her, as if her touch might erode the cancerous invasion of the serpent in my stomach, her arms ward away the night. Asleep, she is approachable and I almost dare to stretch out my hand to her hair, her face; I might even brush her pale lips with mine…she would never know.

Asleep, she is nearly smiling; her eyes blurred and softened beneath the violet eyelids, the mauve shadow of her collarbone a perfect Chinese brush-stroke against the pallor of her skin…her breasts a scarcely perceptible swelling through the linen of her nightdress. My hand moves almost by itself, a disembodied starfish in the dim brown night. I watch it, mesmerized, as the fingers touch her face, very gently, with miraculous daring slipping to her throat…I pull away, blushing, all my skin tingling with guilt and excitement. But it is the hand moving all on its own, drifting down the coverlet with languid purpose, now twitching the coverlet aside to reveal her sleeping form, the nightdress drawn up to her knees, showing her taut calves, the soft curve of a thigh.

There is a bruise there, just above the knee, and I feel my eyes drawn to its mauve delicacy. My hand stretches out to touch, and she is powdered satin beneath my fingertips, she is endless mystery, endless softness, drowning softness like undersea sand…Her jasmine scent hides another scent, like salt biscuit, and without even knowing it I bring my face against her, burying my face in the warmth and sweetness of her, taut with yearning and excitement. My hand finds her breast with a leap of savage joy; my arms curl around her, my lips suddenly ravenous for hers…Her breath is faintly sharp, like sickness, but now my body is a single tendon taut as a harp-string, filling the atmosphere with a resonance of unendurable purity which rises and rises in pitch to the point of insanity and beyond…I have no body; I see my soul drawn out like a fine silver wire, vibrating shrilly to the spheres’ ringing…I hear laughter and realize it is my own…