The Book of the Mad - Tanith Lee, ebook
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The Book of the
Damned
The Secret Book of Paradys IV
Tanith Lee
Le Livre Orange
Paradise
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.
Psalms
It was early afternoon, but as ever the daytime City was enveloped in
gray mist. The sun had been invisible for years. The architecture of the
City itself—decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns—was
visible in shifting patches, or regularly to a distance of seven meters. So
that, as Felion climbed the long stair of a hundred steps, his world sank
away into a sea of fog from which a few ghostly towers poked. And above,
the Terrace of Birds began to form around a single dot of light—which
would be Smara's lamp. That is, he doubted anyone else would have
climbed up here. The unhinged citizens of Paradise were also sluggish and
indifferent, obsessed with rituals and trivia.
Felion stepped off onto the terrace. Through the mist, the strange dim
 stone figures of bird-headed things perched on the balustrade, their long
beaks moistly shining. In their midst, the amber lamp floated obediently
in the air. Smara stood beneath it. Slim and blond as Felion, and wrapped
in a sleek, pale dress, she stared at him with essential recognition. They
were twins.
"I haven't seen you for a week," he said. "How are you?"
"Sane," said Smara. "And you?"
Felion laughed. "We two," he said.
He went over to her, took her hand, and laid it against his face. He loved
her, but in the wrong way. Brother and sister, they were expected by their
society to be incestuous, it was the custom. But then the customs of
Paradise were wild and sometimes uncouth. The polluted chemical
saturation of the atmosphere, which produced the eternal mists of
Paradise and eroded the buildings, had influenced the minds that lived
there. For some reason, Felion and Smara were not mad, at least not in
the accepted manner. They had therefore no friends, no lovers. They had
had an uncle, but he was gone. Nevertheless, he was their reason for
meeting at this place, for climbing up the hundred steps to his tilted
mansion on the City tops.
"Do you remember when he brought us here?" asked Felion of Smara.
"These bird statues frightened you."
"That was your fault," said Smara, "and you made it worse."
"So I did. But you were the only one I had power over. We were just
children."
"I know why you wanted to come here," she said. "But I'm not really
willing. Don't you think, after all, it would be an act of madness?"
"Perhaps. Isn't that good?"
Smara looked away, down across the City. From the denser lower levels
of the fog, the decayed towers of the cathedral rose. "Today it's quite easy
to see, the Temple-Church."
"Yes. But tomorrow it may be hidden."
"Don't you think," she said, "our uncle might have lied? We were
children, as you said. I barely recollect what we saw."
"I've never forgotten. I've dreamed of it for years. That wall of smoking
whiteness
—"
"No," she said. "No, don't."
 "You must help me," he said.
"Why? If it is a labyrinth, it's simple. One hand always on the left side
wall, and it will bring you to the center. And the right side wall to return."
"Then you don't want to come with me to see—"
"Maybe it goes nowhere. Why should it go anywhere? He was mad, too."
Felion gazed up at the bird things. He said slowly, "He named us as his
heirs. That was straightforward enough. So we inherit this pile of stone,
and we inherit the labyrinth, if it exists—and it does. And then there's that
rambling letter he wrote to us. The
rest
of the inheritance."
"Suppose," she said, "you and I are insane, like all of them. But we
haven't realized."
He shrugged. She did not look alarmed—even, possibly, hopeful.
"We've done our best to act out madness," he said. "What else can we
do?" He took her hand again. "Let's go in. Let's see what the house is like,
at least."
They went over the terrace to the big door, and Felion spoke to it the
numbers written in their uncle's parting letter. The door opened, and a
long dark hall stretched out, lined with marble abstracts, ending in a
broad stair. High up, a round window let in the sinister light. Mist hung
on the air.
They walked in, and for two hours they went over the mansion their
uncle had willed to them. It was like everywhere else, no better, no worse,
one with the other grand and rotting buildings of the City, bulging with
furniture, art objects, defaced books, and technological gadgets, which,
usually, had ceased to function.
Finally they came down into the basement, and there they found the
narrow door that neither of them, in fact, had forgotten.
"Shall we see if it's still there? Perhaps it's vanished."
He told off the other set of numbers to the door, and when it swung
away, he moved down the sloping floor beyond. After a moment, Smara
followed him.
At the bottom, in blackness but for the glow of Smara's floating lamp,
was the odd little railway track and the carriage that ran along it. But the
car refused to work. So then they walked along the track, between the
blank walls, and so out into a kind of cavern, which must lie somewhere
inside the hill, behind the hundred steps, and under the foundations of
deserted houses.
 At the far end of the cavern rose a white gleaming wetness.
It was another wall, but it seemed made, of all things, from ice. An
arched entry led into it Inside, only more of the whiteness was to be seen.
"Of course," he said, "it would have scared you. You were afraid of
winter, even though there never is a winter anymore."
"It was the picture you showed me on that screen. The snowfields, and
the frozen water."
"But this," he said, "how can it be ice?"
"It could be anything," she said quietly. "
He
made it."
Their gnarled uncle had claimed to be a scientist, a physicist and
mathematician. That one day in childhood when he had brought them to
his house, he had explained to them so many things that they had
understood nothing at all. And then he showed them this.
It was a labyrinth, he said, built by him, that formed a connection
between two worlds: the world of Paradise and the world of another city,
similar but also different. In this other city the atmosphere was clear, a
sun and a moon and stars shone down. Technologically, its society was not
so advanced, but neither had it atrophied. And while an aspect of madness
prevailed there, it was not the rooted insanity of Paradise.
"I believe," said Felion, "that he did what he said. He reached the
second city and he lived there. And as he approached death, he decided to
offer us, too, the chance of freedom."
"How spiteful of him," she said, "to make us wait so long."
"But time is changeable in the labyrinth, didn't he say so? We could
penetrate this world at any point in time, past, future—I don't grasp the
ethic of it. It must be random, uncontrollable."
"Or a lie," she said again.
"But he was gone for years," said Felion. "Where did he go?"
"Oh, he concealed himself."
The white wall remained there before them, empty, menacing;
unavoidable?
Smara moved away, and began to return along the track in the floor.
Presently Felion went after her.
They negotiated the slope and emerged from the door, which shut, back
into the basement.
 "Did you," she said, "kill this week?"
"Oh, twice," he said. "An old woman on the river bank, and a painter
near the cathedral. I saved you his brushes."
"I haven't killed," she said. "So I must. I'll do it tonight."
"Shall I come with you?" he asked, solicitously, gently.
"I prefer to work alone when I can. But thank you. Shall we meet at the
bar beside the third broken bridge? I'll kill someone with rings, and bring
you one, Felion."
ONE
Paradis
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.
—
Longfellow
After the storm the wrecked ship lay on the beach, against the bright
broken gray of the sea. From the ship's side spilled her cargo of smashed
glass and oranges, like blood from a wound. Her sail hung, a snapped
wing. In the sky, great white clouds massed.
Leocadia stepped back from the painting and put down her brush. She
rubbed her hands on a rag.
Was the picture finished? Yes. Surely. And yet…
Perhaps there should be a figure, hanged, depending from the ruined
mast, with long black curling hair.
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