Joanne Harris - Sleep, Pale Sister

It was at that moment, of course, that I knew I was dreaming. The absurd symbolism, the wholly unsubtle reference to Baudelaire and the baroque imagery of death…the artist in me knew it at once, in spite of the oddly tactile nature of the dream: the smooth coldness of the polished wood beneath my fingertips; the wet patch on my trouser-leg where the brandy had spilled; the sudden chill in the air. It was so cold that my nostrils stung with it and my breath was a nimbus around my face. I looked at the table once more and saw that the spilled brandy had frozen, a spiderweb glaze across the dark oak, and the empty glass was misted with frost. I began to shiver in spite of my knowledge that this was only a dream-it was probably cold in my prison cell, I thought reasonably, and my sleeping mind had created this tableau (macabre enough to fill Henry Chester with enthusiasm) to entertain itself. Its title: Le Remors or The Phantom’s Patience ; all it needed to make it a Gothic masterpiece was the Pre-Raphaelite lady, pale from her long sleep but deathly beautiful, the baneful damozel with blood on her lips and vengeance in her eyes…

The thought was so absurd that I laughed aloud. Haunted by my own fiction, by God! Fanny would appreciate that. And yet I remembered Effie’s face, her pale lips, the bleak hatred in her voice as she said: ‘There is no Effie.’

Only Marta.

Damn that bitch.

‘There is no Marta!’ I said it aloud-in dreams I can do as I please-and felt a small release in tension. I said it again. ‘There is no Marta.’

Silence absorbed my words.

Uneasy silence.

Then suddenly she was there, sitting in front of me at the table with a glass of milky absinthe in her hand. Her hair was loose, falling over the chair-back to the floor in a cascade of heavy ringlets which gleamed rich as claret in the crimson light. She was wearing the dress she had worn for The Card Players , a dark red velvet cut low over the bodice so that her skin seemed luminous. Her eyes were immense and fathomless; her smile, so different to Effie’s sweet and open smile, was like a slit throat.

‘Effie…’ I kept my voice light and level; there was no reason for my throat to tighten, my lips to parch; no reason for the trickle of heat to sting my armpits. No reason…

‘No, not Effie.’ It wasn’t Effie’s voice; it was that hoarse, scratched-silver whisper which was peculiarly Marta’s.

‘Marta?’ In spite of myself, I was fascinated.

‘Yes, Marta.’ She lifted her glass and drank; I watched as the clear crystal misted over and froze where she had touched it. A nice detail, I thought. I would have to use it in a painting one day.

‘But there is no Marta,’ I said again. In my dream it suddenly seemed very important to prove to her that I was telling the truth. ‘I saw you invent Marta. You made her out of paint and dye and perfume. She’s just another part you had to play, like the Little Beggar Girl or Sleeping Beauty. She doesn’t exist!’

‘She does now.’ That was Effie; that childish assertion. For a moment I even glimpsed her-or the ghost of her-then the dark eyes clouded over once again and she was all Marta. ‘And she’s very angry with you, Mose.’ She paused to drink again and I sensed her cold hate, her fury, like a draught of winter. ‘Very angry,’ she repeated softly.

‘This is ridiculous!’ I said. ‘There is no Marta. There never has been a Marta.’

She ignored me. ‘Effie loved you, Mose. She trusted you. But she warned you, didn’t she? She said she’d never let you leave her.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ In spite of my detachment I sounded defensive-and felt it. ‘I thought it would be for-’

‘You were tired of her. You found other women who asked less of you. You bought them with Henry’s money.’ She paused. ‘You really wanted her dead. It was neater that way.’

‘That’s ridiculous! I never promised-’

‘But you did, Mose. You did. You promised.’

I lost my temper. ‘All right, all right! I promised!’ My anger drove a spike of migraine into my forehead. ‘But I promised Effie .

I never said anything to Marta.’ My head had begun to spin like a child’s top and I was light-headed with fury and something like terror. I was shouting, unable to stop as the words spilled out of me. ‘I hate Marta! I hate the bitch. I hate the way she looks at me, the way she seems to see everything, know everything. Effie used to trust me, to need me; Marta doesn’t need anyone. She’s cold. Cold! I’d never have left you if it hadn’t been for her.’ It was almost true. I stopped, panting, the ragged headache pounding in my temples. I forced myself to breathe deeply: ridiculous, to lose control in a dream. ‘I never made any bargain with Marta,’ I said quietly.

She was silent for a moment. ‘You should have listened to Fanny,’ she said at last.

‘What has Fanny to say to anything?’ I snapped.

‘She warned you not to stand in our way. She liked you,’ she said simply. ‘Now it’s too late.’

Don’t laugh if I tell you that, for a moment, as I looked into her sorrowful eyes I felt a kind of fearful regret, a despair like Dante’s cold hell. For a moment I saw myself spiralling downwards in darkness for a dizzying eternity, like a snowflake blown down a bottomless well. Suddenly the beating of my heart seemed a terribly fragile thing; nothingness yawned below me and, in a flash of ridiculous association, I remembered that night in Oxford when a voice from the dead had spoken from the card-table: ‘ I’m so cold .’

So cold…

In that instant it occurred to me that my certainty that I was dreaming was a little absurd; when had a dream been so clear, so intense, so real? When had I been able to smell the absinthe in her glass, to touch the table-top, still sticky with spilled brandy? To feel the hairs rise on my shivering arms? I sprang to my feet, grasping her hand across the table; it was cold, a blue-veined hand of marble.

‘Effie…’ Suddenly I knew that I had to say something to her, something of terrible urgency. ‘ Marta . Where is Effie?’ Her face was impassive.

‘You killed her, Mose,’ she said softly. ‘You left her in the vault and she died, just as you told Henry. You know you did.’

It was the wrong question. I could feel my time spiralling away.

‘Then who are you ?’ I cried in desperation.

She smiled at me, a tiny, cold smile like a hunter’s moon.

‘You know , Mose,’ she said.

‘I don’t damned well know!’

‘You will,’ she whispered, and when I awoke in the dark, clammy with sweat and aching all over, her smile remained with me like a tiny, tugging fish-hook in the nape of my neck; it remains with me even now as I fall into the inconceivable emptiness of a world without Moses Harper…I see it gleaming through silent space like a bright scythe. ‘Ni vue, ni connue…’ Between blindness, ignorance and the relentless momentum of annihilation a man could fall in love.

And when they told me that morning that a woman’s body had been found in the Isherwood vault in Highgate cemetery I was hardly at all surprised.

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I can smell that hunger on you like sweat, hot and sour. Oh, you’d like to know all right. But I won’t tell you where I am-you’d never find me if I did-and anyway, all places look the same to the travelling folk: the farms, the towns, the little houses…all the same. I’m with the gypsies, now. It’s an honest life for the most part, and it’s safer to be always on the move. No-one asks any questions. We all have our secrets here, and our magic.