Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“How can we?” said Hāna.

It was true. They were immovable, fixed. One to the man, his life. The other to a place. They did not properly see this, how they had been warped to fit and nailed home. And yet escape was closed by a deep invisible wall.

Ysabelle thought, Perhaps he’ll die. An accident, thrown from the trap as the pony bolts at a flash of lightning, clap of moistureless thunder from the mountains. Or too much drink, a haemorrhage.

But Hāna kisses her breasts and Ysabelle melts like wax, and flows down into the rose-red fire.

Their clothes thrown away, murmuring in the stillness, cries choked back, not even a nightingale to shield them with her noisy song.

Hinges. Unhinged.

A locket? A door? Madness?

The story, told locally, clandestinely, was that Ernst returned unexpectedly, after all, that night – perhaps a quarrel with his friend? The house was in darkness and silence, and so he went up quietly to bed, which does not seem very like him, one would imagine actually he would make a disturbance, rouse everyone up, want things done. Or could he have been suspicious?

Passing – on tiptoe? Surely not – the door to Hāna’s room, he heard them whispering, and the creak of the wooden bed.

He flung the door wide on its hinges and found them naked, hair down, uncorsetted, undone – his sister Hāna and Madame Ysabelle.

This is not the case.

Ernst rode home in the trap at about nine in the morning, from his country breakfast with Le Rue. There had been no quarrel, for Ernst and Le Rue enjoyed a perfect mutual respect and approbation, tinctured pleasantly for each by a wisp of well-concealed tolerance; he for Ernst’s slight blindness to the essentials of science, since Ernst was so bound up in theory, nature and the world; Ernst for Le Rue’s slight blindness to theory, nature and the world, since Le Rue was absorbed utterly by science.

Ernst was not in an ill mood. Only the idea of Ysabelle’s having stayed with his sister that night was a small but tart irritant, that had begun to work on him directly he brought the trap on to the rough road, and saw her house before him under the mountains.

Ysabelle was a tease, or a fool. He was beginning, frankly, to notice the failings she had pointed out to him in herself, the elements that made her, she said, unworthy of him. Her “fear” of him he was not, now, so certain of. For fear, to women, was of course a powerful aphrodisiac. It had seemed to him, some four days previously, that this might be the real fount of her desires – to be physically mastered. And so, entering her home on the pretext of requiring eggs from Mireio’s hens, he had ended by pressing Ysabelle harshly to the wall of her white wooden sitting room, brutally kissing her mouth, penetrating it with his tongue, while with his free hand he mounded her skirt and squeezed, through layers of clothing, her most interesting feature.

She had somehow got away from him, and stood panting, her face as white as a china plate, her eyes inflamed. This might be arousal, and he approached her again, at which she hoarsely said, “I won’t be responsible for any harm.” And pulled a fire-iron up from the stone hearth.

“If you keep on like this,” he said, “you’ll put me off.”

“Get away from me,” she cried, like a peasant. But then she shook herself and said, putting down the nasty-looking implement, “Excuse me, Ernst. But I’m not for you. I can’t – expose myself to the tragedy of losing you, once you tire of me. You know how women are. This sort of liaison – will mean so much more to me.”

“I’d think, from another woman, this was a demand for a bourgeois marriage.”

Ysabelle threw back her head and laughed. She was hysterical and unappealing. Women were unhinged, one knew this, at certain times more so, and she was approaching that age when they were at their worst.

Why had he fancied her? Well, this was a barren spot.

He himself laughed shortly. “Then, good morning.”

Outside, Mireio came sidling with a basket of eggs. It seemed to him she leered at his reddened mouth. Doubtless that other bitch thought she could get more out of him by frustrating him, but he was not of that sort. Besides, if ever he were to marry, he would want youth, for sons, and some money, too.

His annoyance with Ysabelle did not abate as, mentally, he cast her off. He supposed this was a sexual matter. She had led him on, now would not accomodate him as she had hinted she would.

He did not like her. No. He would rather she did not come any more into his house. And Hāna must be warned. Hāna was too trusting, and such women as Ysabelle were not to be trusted. Particularly by their own sex, for women were faithless, and nowhere more so than with each other, filling each other’s heads with idiocy, always jealous, treacherous.

Seeing presently his own country house from the trap, Ernst thought that perhaps they might go back to the city. Le Rue could be invited to stay there, in a proper flat, say, with amenities, and efficient servants. Or perhaps not, for Hāna might well make eyes at him, as she had done before with their few male visitors, afterwards making out they had frightened her – familiar tale!

Some way still from Ernst’s house, the pony, unsatisfactorily also his property, cast a shoe.

Ernst got out, and stood cursing, damning the beast. Then he left it there, and went on foot towards his home, where Gittel must be sent to fetch a man for the horse from the village.

So, he approached, walking, in a morning loud with bird song – even the nightgales that, here, had not used their voices through the night. A church bell was tolling too, in the next valley. This was for a burial.

He saw them in a little nook, between the wall and a leaning wild cedar. Hāna’s hair was partly unpinned, but Ysabelle was dressed for her journey home along the upper valley. She wore her dark gown, as usual. She looked quite conventional, and conceivably, if he had met her like this, returning from the visit, as he would have done, a minute later, he would have thought her in fact very plain, of very little importance to himself.

But now she moved to his sister Hāna, and concealed yet not concealed, down on the road, unannounced by the wheels of the trap and the pony’s homecoming trot, he watched them. He saw how they grew together, breast to breast, their arms around each other’s necks, thigh to thigh, lip to lip. They were an image and an image in a mirror, clasped.

Really, it was not much. Women kissed. Friends might kiss. And yet, this passion. Smoke rose from their skins, the air about them trembled as later in the day the heat of the drought would make it do.

Ernst ran. He ran straight at them. They heard him then, his gallop over the track, his blundering rush across the little scattered stones, and the dust rose round him. He was a whirlwind. He thrust them apart as they were themselves thrusting apart. Ysabelle fell back into the bole of the tree, slipped down it, sat in the dust, staring. Hāna he slapped, once, twice, across her face.

He was roaring, like a lion, like a bull—

His words – were there any words? Oh yes, jargon of streets and alleys, epithets old as humankind. But words? Were there any? Are there any, for such rage?

Hāna attempted to speak. He raised his hand to strike her again and Ysabelle, staggering up, caught his arm, hung on it, and so he flung her off, sprawling again, and this time heard her thin quick cry of pain.

Now language assembled itself. Not whores – madwomen. They were mad. Their brains – diseased.

He swept up Hāna and bore her off. Suddenly, it was so very visible, the differences in their size and strength, as if he and she were beings of two unlike species.