Joanne Harris - Sleep, Pale Sister

Her eyes snap open.

I feel the line of her mouth tauten beneath my lips.

‘Mother…’ Helplessly, I curl away, stomach a fist of ice.

Her eyes are cruelly sharp; I know that she sees everything. Everything. Years fall from me; a moment ago I felt old, now I am falling backwards into my childhood; thirteen, twelve, eleven, and as I shrink she grows, monstrous…eight, seven…I see her mouth open, hear the distorted syllables: ‘Henry? What are you…’

Six, five. Her teeth are pointed, impossibly savage. Blood hammers in my temples. A scream breaks from my lungs; her rage is enormous. Worse still is her contempt, her hatred, like a tidal wave filled with the floating dead. I can barely hear her voice above the rushing in my ears; there is something soft in my hands, something which struggles with monstrous strength against me. The tide tosses me to and fro like jetsam; I tighten my eyes into knuckles so that I do not have to see…

A sudden, miraculous silence.

I lie on the black sand as the tide retreats, its breath like heartbeats in my eardrums; the return to consciousness is like a million pinpoints of light on my retina, my mouth full of blood from a bitten tongue. I crawl to my knees on the spinning carpet, a rope of bloody spittle dragging to the floor, the pillow still in my convulsed hands.

‘Mother?’

Her glazed eyes stare at me, still hard, as if outraged by the indignity of her posture.

‘Mo-other?’ I feel my thumb creep up to find the corner of my mouth, my knees curling to join my elbows. In some part of my mind I understand that if I can curl up into a tiny enough ball I will be able to go back into that half-remembered place of safety, the salty place of darkness and warmth. Smaller…smaller. Three, two, one…

Silence.

Far above me the sound of laughter, the huge troll-like bellow of God. The black angel picks up her scythe and the Furies fly screaming up out of the pit to find their new plaything; and I know all their faces. The whorechild, with a smear of chocolate on her cheek…Effie’s seawater eyes and foaming hair…my mother, so long forgotten in the merciful blindness but now recalled for ever, dragged back on to her dark pedestal, her fingers like blades. Closer now, the voice of the enchantress, Scheherazade, her wolves at her feet…her unearthly laughter. From my half-sleep, struggling, I try to call her, to invoke her name against the coming nightmare.

‘Marta!’

I open bloodshot eyes, feel the firelight against my frozen limbs. The rogue muscle in my cheek pins my eye closed in a series of fluttering spasms too rapid to calculate. The memory, newly recalled by Marta’s story, is a marble sepulchre from some grotesque fairy-tale, reaching higher than the clouds. I reach out for her comfort…

The light is suddenly, mercilessly bright. I raise my hands to shield my eyes, and I see her, Scheherazade, my golden nemesis, laughing.

‘Marta?’ The voice is barely a whisper, but even as I speak I know that she is not Marta. She is Effie, pale and triumphant; she is my mother, lewd and venomous; she is the ghostchild. All three speak as one, stretching out their hungry arms to me and as I fall backwards, striking my back against the bedrail and hardly feeling the pain as my vertebrae crunch against the angle of the post, I realize at last what she is, what they are. Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto. Avengers of matricide. The Furies!

A tremendous bolt of agony drives through my body; razors sever my spine and a tremor grips me all down my left side.

As I pass into friendly oblivion I hear her voice, their voice, bright with venom and mockery: ‘What about my story, Henry? What about my story?’ And, in the far distance, the savage laughter of God.

The snow began to fall as I left Henry’s studio. By the time I reached Crook Street the night had an ethereal clarity which illuminated my steps and touched my clothes with powdery phosphorescence. As I glimpsed Fanny’s house from the corner I noticed that the lantern which usually hung from the door was dark. Moving forwards I saw that the windows, too, were dark, the curtains drawn, with not a chink of light shining through the heavy folds. I noticed that the snow was scuffled at the doorstep, though no light shone from the stained-glass of the porch. Thinking that maybe there would be someone in one of the back parlours of the house, I went up to the door and knocked. No answer. I tried the door: predictably, it was locked. I knocked again, shouted through the letter-box…but no answer came.

Puzzled, I tried the side door, with as little success, and I was about to leave, shaking my head in bewilderment, when I saw something dark and bulky lying in the shadow by the side of the house, half covered by the rapidly falling snow. At first I thought it was a discarded coal-sack; then I saw the heel of a man’s boot poking out of the snow. A vagrant, I thought, looking for a place to shelter and caught by the cold, poor devil. I had a flask of brandy in my pocket and, pulling it out, I waded through the drifting snow and reached for the body-maybe there was still life in him, I thought. I dragged him from his hollow by the wall and as I brushed away the frozen mask from the twisted, petrified face, I recognized Henry Chester.

One eye was open, staring; the other drooped oddly. The muscles in his left cheek and temple were strangely distorted, like melted wax, and his left hand was a claw, his shoulder hunched grotesquely, his hip dislocated, the leg thrown out at a gruesome angle. Until he moved, I could have sworn he was dead.

A sound escaped his lips; a long, guttural moan.

‘Aaa-daa. Aah-a.’

I pushed the brandy flask between his clenched teeth. ‘Drink it, Henry. Don’t try to say anything.’

Brandy trickled down both sides of his mouth and a rictus seized him as again he tried to form syllables. The intensity of his need to speak was agonizing.

‘It’s all right,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘Don’t talk. I’ll get help.’ There were lights in the windows of nearby houses; surely someone would take care of him while I called for a doctor. Besides, the last thing I wanted was to stay alone with Henry.

‘Ma-a. Maaah…’ The right hand clenched against my sleeve; the head lolled, drooling. ‘Ma-ahh.’

‘Marta,’ I said softly.

‘Ahh.’ His nod was convulsive.

‘You came here to see Marta?’ I coaxed.

‘Ahh.’

‘But she wasn’t in, so you waited. Is that right?’

Another spasm; the head lolled again, obscenely, his one open eye turned up to the white. ‘Nnn-ah. Mm-aah-a. Ahhh. Aahh…’ His right arm flailed helplessly and tears trickled from his right eye, though the other stayed frozen, a knuckle of stupid flesh.

Unbearable, sick pity jerked me to my feet.

‘Can’t stay, Henry,’ I said, trying to avert my eyes. ‘I’m getting help. You’ll be all right.’

An animal moan, in which I could still distinguish the chilling accents of the human voice; words struggling through dying flesh. Words? One word. One name. I couldn’t bear the sound, the dying sound of his obsession. Cursing myself, I turned and ran.

It was easy enough to find someone to help; a woman from a nearby house accepted a guinea to call for a doctor and give shelter to the stricken man: two hours later the doctor arrived and Henry was transported back to Cromwell Square. It was a stroke, the doctor had said; a massive seizure of the heart. The patient must be kept quiet if there was to be a chance of recovery, and a dose of chloral mixed with water, patiently forced drop by drop between the patient’s rigid lips, served to calm him. When I finally left them, certain that I could do no more, Henry had subsided into a thick stupor, his breathing almost imperceptible, his eyes glazed. That was enough, I decided; I was no sick-nurse. I had saved the man’s life, most likely; what more could anyone expect? When no-one was paying attention I left, quietly, by the back door and disappeared into the deserted streets.