Black Spring

  “One day I’ll shoot that damned bitch,” he said. “By the gods I swear I’ll string her up —”

  At this, he caught sight of me, and stopped short, turning to Damek with a wordless question.

  “My tenant, Hammel,” said Damek indifferently. “Hammel, this is my manservant, Kush.”

  Kush favored me with a sour look and returned to his grumbling as he removed his dripping outer garments and drew close to the fire. “I told you, Master Damek, there’s a storm coming. But did you listen? Did you care? Not you. I could have been blown to the four quarters or frizzled up in a bolt of lightning. It’s not a night fit for man nor beast out there. But no, nothing would suit you but —”

  “Shut your whining, man,” said Damek testily. “You’re home now. Did you see the king?”

  The old man reached inside his breast pocket and threw a fat leather purse onto the table. “There, and much good may it do you,” he said.

  I was startled by the expression of lust that flickered over Damek’s face. He swept the purse so swiftly into his pocket that I scarcely saw the movement, and then, suddenly aware of my observation, gave me a hostile stare. I averted my eyes; I had no wish to know what nefarious business concerned him. Our new companion gave me a sidelong suspicious look and helped himself to the remains of the soup, which he ate with disgusting slurps and sucking noises.

  By now I was heartily sick of my situation. I have never wanted so passionately to leave a place in my life; if the rain had eased even a little, I might have risked getting lost in the darkness, just to escape. At last I told my host that I wished to sleep. He irritably ordered Kush to show me to a room, and the old man took up a candle and, grumbling all the way, led me along an unlit passage and up some narrow stairs. On a landing he opened a door to a room furnished with a narrow bed, a washstand with a mildewed mirror, and a wardrobe. The room had a fusty air, as if it hadn’t been opened for years, and smelled strongly of damp. It was also freezing cold. Kush had every intention of leaving me in pitch-darkness, but I had a protracted argument with him, insisting that he leave the candle for my use, and in the end he acceded grudgingly to my wishes and fumbled his way back downstairs.

  I nervously checked that the silver ring the wizard had given me was securely on my finger and wished that I had not left the phial behind when I had departed in the morning. I set the candle on the washstand and found my matches and placed them beside it — I did not feel at all at ease in this house and didn’t want to be left without light should anything strange happen. I anxiously inspected the wounds on my calf, which were still very painful, for signs of infection, but in that poor light could tell nothing: I would have to wait until I could find a doctor on the morrow. Then I climbed into bed with all my clothes on, laying my coat on top of me for warmth, and blew out the candle, thinking regretfully of my cozy feather mattress in the Red House. But at least I was alone.

  Although it was so cold that my feet felt like blocks of ice, and the bed was hard and lumpy, I fell asleep quickly, exhausted by the events of the day. I passed into a night of dreams, the most vivid and horrible that I have ever experienced.

  I was walking through a landscape very like the one I had walked in earlier that day, still sere with winter, but something was wrong with the perspective: things that should have been close appeared to be very far away, but the mountains in the distance seemed to press up against me oppressively. The sky was a strange bruised purple. All around me, as far as I could see, stretched rows and rows of graves, some marked with crosses, some with mounds of stone.

  I seemed to have been walking for hours without seeing a single soul, and the farther I walked, the more anxious I became. I was searching for something, although I didn’t know what it was — something dear to me, the loss of which afflicted me grievously. The farther I walked, the farther I was from the possibility of finding it, and yet I knew I could not turn back. My heart grew more and more oppressed.

  At last I saw a figure in the distance, walking toward me. Out of sheer relief, I started running, but then I saw it was Kush. He leered grotesquely when he saw me, in a parody of greeting, and held up his hands. From one dangled a leather bag, which I knew with a dreamer’s clairvoyance was full of gold pieces; the other hand was empty. But in the center of his palm was a wound, from which was falling a constant stream of blood. The blood fell to the ground and made a black puddle, in which was reflected my own face.

  On seeing this, I was overwhelmed by loathing and horror. Kush began to cackle and moved closer to me; I could smell his breath, an odor of decay. I wanted to run, but transfixed by terror, I could not move, and he reached out to touch my face with his bleeding hand. Just before his fingers touched me, I woke up.

  I lit the candle with trembling hands and looked about the room. Although it was so cold I could see the breath hanging in front of my face, I was lathered with sweat. I took a few deep inhalations and admonished myself for foolishness: it was no wonder that I was suffering nightmares, after the day I had had, and probably I was feverish, from the dog’s bites, maybe, or from catching a chill.

  I told myself that the dream’s dreadful realism stemmed from its echoes of my experiences earlier that night. I had sensed a dark tale behind that hastily hidden purse that my dreaming mind had transformed into deadly portents. So I comforted myself, noting that the storm wasn’t so violent now; I must have been asleep for some time. Only a few more hours, and I would be out of here. I settled myself down and once again fell rapidly asleep.

  I dreamed that I was in the room in which I now slept, standing on the floor between the bed and the wardrobe. The gray light of dawn filtered through the grimy window, lending every object in the room a faint luminosity. I knew that the door was locked and that I couldn’t get out. For reasons I couldn’t trace, I was filled with increasing apprehension, rising to panic: some dreadful event was to occur later that day, although I couldn’t remember what it was.

  Then, with the illogic of dream, I was in my own study at home in the city. With an intense sense of relief, I sat down at my desk and picked up my pen, a new one I had purchased just before I left for the North, and began to write a poem which had suddenly occurred to me. But the ink was a strange color, and kept clotting. I knocked the pen impatiently on the blotter and tried again to write, but a hemorrhage of ink spilled over the page, and I realized then that it was not ink, but blood. As I stared at the spoiled paper, the blood began to pour impossibly from the nib of the pen, an increasing stream that collected into a red puddle and began to drip onto the floor. The sound of its steady drip was, I remember, particularly dreadful. I lifted my hand to my eyes and saw that it was covered with blood; then I realized that it was my blood, and that I was bleeding to death.

  Again I woke in a sweat, all my limbs trembling. For a horrible moment I thought I was back in the nightmare: dawn-pale light was leaking through the shutters, giving the room the same ghastly luminosity that it had possessed in my dream. It was very quiet, a silence which seemed sinister until I understood that it was because the storm had blown itself out.

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat with my face in my hands until I stopped shaking. I feel incapable of conveying the peculiar horror these dreams invoked in me: my entire body felt chilled through, the hair crept on my scalp and neck, and nausea crawled in the pit of my stomach. This house, thought I, is infected with more than the sheer unpleasantness of its inhabitants: some sick wizardry was at hand here. I checked that my protective ring was still on my finger; it was. I wondered, with a shudder, what might have happened had I not protected myself in that way.

  My only thought was to get out of that place as soon as possible. I had had more than enough of it. Perhaps I had had enough of the North and should head back to the city . . . though even then, the image of Grosz’s mocking expression held me back from the thought of a humiliating return.

  I stood up as slowly as an old man — all my body ached as if with ague, and
my bitten calf felt more sore this morning than the night before. I put on my coat and then leaned toward the mirror on the washstand, to check the no doubt lamentable state of my person. And then I was plunged into nightmare again, because the reflection I saw was not my own.

  It was the face of a woman who was perhaps in her twenties. She bore a strong resemblance to Lina but was less conventionally beautiful. The same thick black locks tumbled over her face, and she had the same high, chiseled cheekbones, but her face was thinner, more asymmetrical, somehow more wild. In the mirror I could see that she was wearing a nightdress that fell immodestly off one shoulder and exposed almost the whole of one of her full breasts. Her mouth was luscious, preternaturally red, the color of blood, but it expressed a willfulness that lent its frank sensuality some other, thrilling quality. Aside from her lips, her skin was deathly white. But it was her eyes that captured my fascinated attention. They were the violet eyes of a witch, and they blazed with unassuageable longing, a bottomless, reckless hunger, and they stared unseeingly straight into mine.

  In those first moments I don’t know whether I was more possessed by desire or terror. The imprint of that wild, beautiful face has never left my memory. I have seen — have even embraced — women more handsome, but never have I seen a face so passionate and yet, despite its utter abandon, so wholly itself.

  Then it was as if something focused in that spellbinding gaze, and with a clutch of horror I comprehended that the apparition in the mirror was looking back at me. Her expression changed with astounding swiftness: now those extraordinary eyes blazed with anger. I was not what she had hoped and longed for, and even in my fright, I confess I felt a little shock of disappointment. Her gaze locked on mine, and I could see that she was speaking, although I could not hear what she said. I involuntarily flung up my hand in a gesture of helplessness. When I did that, she recoiled; I almost heard her hiss, as if she were in pain. I realized that she must have seen the ring on my finger. I tried then to turn and run away but found that I could not move my legs: my feet refused to obey me, whether because of sheer terror or because of some bewitchment I do not know.

  In a moment she was close again to the surface of the mirror, as if it were a glass window that imprisoned her, and began to beat it frantically with her hands. When I saw this, complete panic took hold of me: I no longer knew what I was doing. I cried out, screaming at her to leave me alone, and hit out blindly at the mirror. The thing exploded in a shower of glass shards, some of which cut my face and hands. But I didn’t care: now I could move. I ran out of the room, slammed shut the door, and stood in the dark hallway, leaning against the wall, panting, trying to regain my breath.

  My host, perhaps awoken by my cries if he was not awake already — if indeed anyone could sleep at all in that infernal house — came running down the hallway in shirt and trousers. When he saw me standing by the door, his face darkened with fury, but I was at such a pitch I swear that even the Devil himself was beyond frightening me further.

  “What were you doing in that room?”

  The unexpectedness of his question pulled me up short.

  “Why, you bastard,” I answered furiously, “you put me there!”

  “Not I,” he said. “Not I. No one goes in that room.”

  “Then your filthy manservant did,” I said, holding my bloody hand close to my chest. “Out of malice or mischief, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have chosen to sleep there for a million gold pieces. I’m going home, where that bitch of hell can’t get at me. Even if I have to crawl there . . .”

  I stumbled down the stairs, but I had not gone halfway before Damek caught up with me and, grabbing my shoulder, swung me around to face him. “What bitch of hell?” he snarled at me. “What are you talking about?”

  I attempted to tear myself free of his grasp. “A nice trick, putting me in a haunted room!” I shouted. “I swear, you’re the Devil himself, and that woman . . .”

  “Who?” he said to me with passionate urgency. “What woman?”

  “That unholy witch in the mirror,” said I. I looked up and met his eyes: they were blazing as intensely as the woman’s in the mirror, though whether with longing or despair or rage or grief, or all of those at once, I couldn’t tell. We gazed wordlessly at each other for a few seconds, both suddenly still.

  “Tell me,” he said, his chest heaving. “Tell me what you mean.”

  All of a sudden I pitied him, and I realized also that I was no longer afraid, although I hurt all over.

  “I saw a woman in the mirror,” I said. “A witch, sir! She tried to bewitch me, or come out of the mirror, or something — and so I smashed the mirror. . . .”

  Damek’s face tightened as I spoke, and then he thrust me violently away from him, so I fell down the remaining steps. He rushed upstairs, shouting his wife’s name in a voice that sounded thick and hoarse with tears. I was momentarily baffled: what kind of husband was this, who reviled his wife with blows and scorn at one moment and called for her with such passion the next? But all I knew was that I did not want to stay in that house with those people one minute longer. I ran down a wide passage to the front door, hastily unbolted it, and at last found myself outside, under a clear pale sky. Never has the dawn air smelled sweeter to me, and I swear that even with my wounded leg, I ran most of the way home.

  My return, limping and bloodstained, to the village of Elbasa created in its own small way a sensation. The proprietor of the shop even came out of his dingy premises to witness open-mouthed my exhausted stumble over the cobbled laneways toward the Red House, and a couple of the mangy dogs crept up and sniffed me. I saw several faces peering out of dark windows, and in the narrow street a woman grabbed a small boy nearby and whispered in his ear, whereupon he took off as fast as his fat legs could carry him, to bring the news of my reappearance — as I found when I arrived there — to Anna at the Red House.

  My absence had, it seemed, created much consternation. Most of the village had known of my intention within an hour of my departure and after much discussion had decided that I was doomed. Heads had been shaken and judgments pronounced on the foolish city dweller who so stubbornly had insisted on visiting the Devil himself. My survival must have been, therefore, a source of considerable disappointment, but I have no doubt that the sorry spectacle I presented would have been some compensation.

  I was past caring what anybody thought. When I shambled up the path to the Red House, Anna and her husband were already at the door. I have never been more grateful for simple kindness: they took me inside, and I found that Anna had prepared a hot bath and laid out fresh clothes, and there was a delicious-smelling breakfast already cooking. Anna inspected my leg, pursed her lips, and carefully cleaned it. I confess that I luxuriated in their fussing over me, although it was behavior which would normally have made me irritable.

  I bathed, ate, and then, exhausted, fell asleep in the chair in front of a fire in the pleasant front room as I was reading a book. When I awoke, I was feverish, and Anna, despite my protestations (I had no great confidence in the skills of the northern doctors), became anxious and sent for the doctor, who lived not far away in the village. He arrived late in the afternoon and proved to be a lugubrious man of about sixty who took my pulse and looked under my eyelids and then inspected the bites on my calf. My nervous inquiries elicited the fact that he was city-educated, and I relaxed a little. He pronounced that I was suffering from nervous shock and a chill, and that the wounds were slightly inflamed and likely to be infected, but with proper care should heal famously. He bled me and left a draft for me to take that evening, saying that I should be confined to bed for a week and that he would call the following day.

  I found myself feeling bored and peevish, but mostly I was consumed by curiosity. Who were those people in that house? I had been educated to expect rustic manners and primitive behaviors among the peoples of the Land of Death — or the Black Country, as they call it themselves — but I had also been told that they were, by their own
lights, people of strict propriety. They were bound by the Law of the Book, which governed their every interaction, from property rights to the Blood Laws. Damek, to the contrary, seemed utterly lawless, beholden to no rule but his own tyranny. Had I not been told he was a relation of the king? Did that mean that he held himself above the harsh laws of this place? What could explain his wild behavior before I left that cursed house? And, most teasingly, who was the witch in the mirror? If indeed I had not hallucinated her in a fever, as I was half inclined now to believe . . .

  Anna has at least solved the puzzle of Damek’s mad cries for his wife that ghastly night: it turns out that the Lina whom I met at the farmhouse is in fact the daughter of the woman for whom he was calling with such passion and who is now long dead. The confusion comes from the custom in the North of naming the oldest child after its mother or father, according to its sex. Moreover, Anna is convinced — a thought that chills me to the marrow — that the witch I saw in the mirror was no hallucination, as I have half convinced myself, but the spirit of the older Lina.

  Now that I am no longer in danger, the strongest sensation I feel is a powerful curiosity. I have determined to quiz Anna about Damek: she has lived all her life in this place and must know its stories. I remember how she turned my queries about my landlord when I suggested that I visit him, and I fear that a natural reticence might prevent her revealing this country’s secrets to an outsider like myself. On the other hand, she has been much more forthcoming since my return. I fancy she might believe that the wounds on my leg have earned me the right to satisfy my interest.

  Many people say that Lina was born evil. They wrong her: Lina was as innocent as any baby is when it first opens its eyes on the world, and there was a spark within her that remained innocent until the last. If she was wicked, it was this pitiless world that made her so. All the same, there’s no disputing that ill omen attended her birth. On the night she was born, the moon was in its dark phase, and a comet blazed its trail across the night sky. It was visible for a week, its brilliance weakening every night as the new mother sickened and died of the blood poison. She gave Lina her name and her first suckle, and after that she was too busy dying to take much interest in the infant, whose care fell to my mother, but lately lain in with me and with milk enough for the two of us. My mother, named Anna like me, was then newly married to my father, a stableman and farmhand in the household’s employ; after Lina’s birth, she was quickly elevated to chief housekeeper, which was a post she filled for the rest of her life.