Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

How odd. What a curious thing to say. Had Ysabelle, who seemed to have gone mad, never supposed anyone, not even Eve, had cut open an apple before?

Then I read, “The red apples all white inside. The leaves are dead, too hot, shrivelling the blooms, too passionate a heat. Bells toll in the next valley. Seeds and tears, poppy dreams. Summer, hot, heat, the stifling heat. I dream of clouds. This brightness hurts me. The silver that the locket is made of – where from? Taken from earth, like black-berries, cherry trees, grapes, peeling birch. Everything will burn. It is holding its last breath, blooming with the threat of death. Foxgloves.”

I put the diary down. It had felt hot in my hands. Smoke rose from it in my imagination.

Walking across to my trunk, I rummaged inside, and pulled out the other thing they had given me, the buckled, shapeless mass of the locket.

Why foxgloves, Ysabelle? It must be the old country superstition, not the poison which also gives life, but the black fox – cipher for Satan – who leaves his mark there, because he is the ghost of a lover.

Was her secret here in this diary, then, and did they all know it, all these walnut-brown people of the valleys and slopes, who rose with the sun and slept when it fell, and would tell me nothing, and not even drink a glass of wine with me?

I opened the diary in another place and read, “I saw them today. They were on the road in their little trap with the pony. He sits upright like a stupid rock. She leans, looking this way, that way. Burning hair. Her hair is the sun, but only if the sun is pale as the moon. I waved. And she saw me, and waved too. He stared, then nodded, a king. Ernst and Hāna. She had a purple ribbon in her chignon, but her hair is so massive, it drooped on her slender neck, shoulders. Purple like a wound in all that blonde.”

Under this, Ysabelle, dimly related to me by the wedlock of an unknown aunt, had drawn a line of vine leaves, rather well, in her brown ink that perhaps had been dark when she used it.

Beneath, she writes: “Hāna, Ariadne, Dionysos. Holy.”

And then: “Ernst. What a boring statue of shit.”

This startles me, and I laugh. Ysabelk , such unfeminine language. But it is her private book.

Even so, I suddenly think her modern, ahead of her time. This boldness in an old unmarried woman. And she is so coarse about Ernst . . . does she secretly like him?

The next paragraph only says, “I shall send Jean to advise him about the horse.”

I put the diary by my bed. Then, in the furtive manner of this place, pushed it under the mattress. I should read more in bed that night.

Arriving back in my room quite early, for they lower their lamps at nine o’clock, and yawn, and shuffle, and frown at you – I sat perversely with the diary, leafing through it, so reluctant to start at the beginning. Surely I shall be bored. What is there here to read? The reflections of an unbalanced, lonely woman, possibly obsessed by her new foreign neighbours, this exciting Ernst made of shit and the woman, his sister, with all that pale hair . . . Then something, no, let me be honest, I know precisely what, and it is prurient, ghoulish, makes me turn to the last page. Beyond this page lies the drama of death. The fact that the house of white wood burned, leaving only its hearths and stone floors, and two tall stone chimneys, and Ysabelle’s bones, and her diary safe under the hearth stone. Bones and stones. Her neighbours were gone by then, Ernst, Hāna, to their separate places. And by the time of the fire, those who would speak of it, had thought Ysabelle mad. The hot weather was not kind to women. The horrible wind that blew from the mountains. The roar of light from their flanks, that had been visible too from the house, and still is from its ground. She had set fire to the house in her craziness, Ysabelle. It was only the kindness of the priest that allowed her Christian burial. She might, after all, have knocked over a lamp. And everything was so dry, flaring up at once—

Was there even a lock on the diary, which the heat from above caused to melt?

Who else has read this book? Who else began by reading the last page first?

“I have a lock of your hair. I cut it from you as you slept. I kissed you there, where the scissors met. You never noticed it had gone. It is all I have of you, your hair. Blonde spirals in a silver locket.

“The locket is cold between my breasts. Cold in the heat. Perhaps it is the heat of the locket which feels cold, as they say witches screamed, when they were burning alive, of the agony of the great terrible freezing coldness. I sweat silver. Your curled hair next to my heart.

“But we are monkeys, not angels.

“Yesterday, when I returned to the old white house, I saw it freshly, as if I had never lived here, or had been away some years. Whose house is that one? Ysabelle’s. She lives alone. Truly alone now, for in the town I saw the lawyers, and settled a sum of money on Jean and Mireio. At dawn today, I dismissed them. She was sulky and angry, and he accused me of sending them away because he had tried to shoot the nightingale. Secretly, they were pleased, talking together when they thought I did not hear, of the tobacconist’s shop they plan to start together in the next town. Here, a cooking pot and broom are all that remain of them, all they deigned to leave me.

“My new, empty house. I have always liked it. Liked it too well to leave. Nothing has changed since the days of childhood. The peeling painted wooden walls, ivy in the cherry trees – now and then cut back, always returning – the well of broken stone. Such pretty neglect. But yes, the view has changed, the land shrunk and the sky grown. There are no clouds, now.

“I dream of clouds, as indeed I dream of you. Great black clouds to cover the sun, stormy skies to quell this heat. There has been no rain for many months, and I have heard a rumour too, of a goat sacrificed in the woods – killing to bring rain, blood for water.

“I have a lock of your hair. And this. I have this, but this is not you. No. How well I remember when it was. For it was the very same height as you, and broader perhaps, than your delicate, slender frame, like a spilling of your soul in silver. How we sat, night after night, brushing your hair, this entity of you, combing it out, both of us marvelling, for I made you marvel at the wonder of it that you had never seen it was. Combing, braiding, playing, plaiting with ribbons, silks, the nights you wore it loose, for me, around you like – a shroud. Oh, Hāna. Your hair.

“I have made it into a noose, threaded, sewn with faded mauve. A noose is all now it is worthy to be, this, that was your wedding train. Life, that will be death.

“They call the asylum also the Valley of Wolves – St Stones, St Cailloux. A sort of pun. And this is, too, for I shall put it under the stone of the hearth, and who knows who will ever find it, my Book. But I hope they will, for I want them to know, yes, even if they rage and curse, I want them to know of you. And that my last thought will be of you, dying on a kiss. Good night, Hāna.”

For weeks, the valley and the village were alive with gossip concerning the strangers, who were strange in all ways – educated, and not badly off, from another planet – that is, another country – and unrelated even in the faintest sense, to anyone of the locality.

The village people spied on the newcomers, and presently told each other that here was Madame Ysabelle’s chance. For the foreign householder, Monsieur Ernst, was unwed, not poor, nor very young, and of the same social class as Madame Ysabelle, who after all, was not bad-looking, and had her land, if only she would bother to see it worked. The single potential stumbling block might be Monsieur Ernst’s sister, also unmarried, who lived with and looked after her scholarly brother, in just the same way as Ysabelle had looked after her scholarly father until his death, three years before. The sister was old, so the spies decided, who had only seen her from a distance. She had white hair. These females were often the very worst, and the evidence suggested she must have kept him from union before.