The Lady of the House of Love-1

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    At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abahe village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who maheir presences by shadows that fall almost inperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, their shadows that have no sour anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of uhat will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stu a stone lions mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her aral crimes.

    Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house uhe eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious aors, eae of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she ts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly struing a stellation of possibilities as if the ran99lｉb.dom fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into the try of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

    Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. " a bird sing only the song it knows or  it learn a new song?" She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plawang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

    The castle is mostly giveo ghostly octs but she herself has her own suite of drawing room and bedroom. Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her iable Tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpied the dark red figured aper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the ed roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit delier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes, industrious spiders have woven opies in the ers of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpie soft grey s. But the mistress of all this disiion notiothing.

    She sits in a chair covered in med burgundy velvet at the low, round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the tess will wake it for a brief za by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it ot escape.

    She rises when the sus and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patieil she grows hungry, until she bees ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those toug imperfes that recile us to the imperfes of the human dition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.

    The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are lohan those of the mandarins of a a and each is pared to a fine point. These ah as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the ara; her claws ah have been sharpened ouries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poisohat sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who piicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.

    The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four ers are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pu fumes of inse. In the tre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long dles in enormous silver dlesticks. In a white laegligee stained a little with blood, the tess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each m and lies down in an open coffin.

    A oned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk teeth grew. Just as they staked him out, the fatal t cried: "u is dead; long live u!" Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his vast domain; she is the hereditary andant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chateau, who pee the woods in the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and butter refuse to e, who ride the horses all night in a wild hunt so they are sacks of skin and bone in the m, who milk the cows dry and, especially, torment pubest girls with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination.

    But the tess herself is indifferent to her own weird au<mark></mark>thority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same figuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.

    On moonless nights, her keeper lets her out into the garden. This garden, an exceedingly sombre place, bears a strong resemblao a burial ground and all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her in the castle of her iance. When the back door opens, the tess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Croug, quivering, she catches 1 the st of her prey. Delicious ch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bedroom into the bowl, she washes her face with the wing, fastidious gestures of a cat.

    The voraargin of huntresss nights in the gloomy garden, croud pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her life or imitation of life. The eyes of this noal creature enlarge and glow. All claws ah, she strikes, she ges, but nothing  sole her for the ghastliness of her dition, nothing. She resorts to the magifort of the Tarot pad shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, stantly strug hypotheses about a future which is irreversible.

    An old mute looks after her, to make sure she never sees the sun, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her -- in short, to perform all the funs of the servants of vampires. Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror -- except her horrible reluce for the role.

    heless, if an unwise adventurer pauses in the square of the deserted village to refresh himself at the fountain, a e in a black dress and white aproly emerges from a house. She will invite you with smiles aures; you will follow her. The tess wants fresh meat. When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and tented herself entirely with baby rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a ed voluptuousness, with voles and fieldmice that palpitated for a bare momeween her embroidresss fingers. But now she is a woman, she must have men. If you stop too long beside the giggling fountain, you will be led by the hand to the tesss larder.

    All day, she lies in her coffin in her negligee of bloodstained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mothers wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them ouce, pet them and make them a  in her red-and-black oiserie escritoire, but hunger always overes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust. And it is the same with the shepherd boys and gypsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, e to wash the dust from their feet ier of the fountain; the tesss governess brings them into the drawing room where the cards oable always show the Grim Reaper. The tess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, precious cups, and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit iher, gaping at the tess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is insolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. Wheakes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they  scarcely believe their luck.

    Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a  pile and  it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the tesss cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bohat have lodged there.

    Fee fie fo fum

    I smell the blood of an Englishman.

    O, ripe summer in the pubest years of the preseury, a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, visiting friends in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough expl the little-known uplands of Romania. When he quixotically decided to travel the rutted cart-tracks by bicycle, he saw all the humour of it: &quot;on two wheels in the land of the vampires&quot;. So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure.

    He has the special quality of virginity, most a ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows -- and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that geion for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate irenches of Frahis being, rooted in ge and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern.

    Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some prote against superstitious fear, sihe bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motiory at the servian! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I  take them. Voltaire himself might have ied the bicycle, si tributes muans welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes as only the most decorous speeds. How  a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

    A single kiss woke up the Sleepiy in the Wood.

    The waxen fingers of the tess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called Les Amoureux. Never, never before. . . never before has the tess cast herself a fate involving love. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beh her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovely ancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love ah.

    Be he alive or be he dead

    Ill grind his boo make my bread.

    At the mauvish beginnings of evening, the English msieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a great way off; he must dismount and push his bicycle before him, the path too steep to ride, He hopes to find a friendly inn to rest the night; hes hot, hungry,?hirsty, weary, dusty. . . At first, such disappoi, to discover the roofs of all the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters hanging dissolately from their hinges, airely uninhabited place. And the raation whispers, as if foul secrets, here, where, if one were suffitly imaginative, one could almost imagiwisted faces appearing momentarily beh the crumbling eaves. . . but the adventure of it all, and the solation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming su, all these siderations soon overcame his disappoi, even assuaged the faint unease hed felt. And the fountaihe village womeo wash their clothes still gushed out bright, clear water; he gratefully washed his feet and hands, applied his mouth to the faucet, thehe icy stream run over his face.

    When he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lions mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the square, an old woman who smiled eagerly, almost ciliatorily at him. She wore a bla<big>..</big>ck dress and a white apron, with a housekeepers key ring at her waist; her grey hair was ly coiled in a oh the white linen headdress worn by elderly women of that region. She bobbed a curtsy at the young man and beed him to follow her. When he hesitated, she poiowards the great bulk of the mansion above them, whose fagade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, poio her mouth, rubbed her stomach again, clearly miming an invitation to supper. Then she beed him again, this time turnierminedly upon her heel as though she would brook no opposition.

    A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy st of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, indug a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough, almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lihe path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge gregations of plush petals somehow obse in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores eous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle. In the subtle and haunting light of the setting sun, that golden light rich with nostalgia for the day that was just past, the sombre visage of the place, part manor house, part fortified farmhouse, immense, rambling, a dilapidated eagles  atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of childhood tales on winter evenings, when he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves half out of their wits with ghost stories set in just such places and then had to have dles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to bed. He could almost have regretted accepting the es unspoken invitation; but now, standing before the door of time -- eroded oak while she selected a huge iron key from the king ringful at her waist, he k was too late to turn bad brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.

    The old lady unlocked the door, which swung baelodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took charge of his bicycle, in spite of his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse where they would not oil or check its tyres. But, in for a penny, in for a pound -- in his youth and strength and bloy, in the invisible, even unaowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of us castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.

    The e took him to a little chamber where there was a black oak table spread with a  white cloth and this cloth was carefully laid with heavy silverware, a little tarnished, as if someoh foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one plaly. Curiouser and curiouser; io the castle for dinner, now he must dine alone. All the same, he sat down as she had bid him. Although it was not yet dark outside, the curtains were closely drawn and only the sparing light trig from a single oil lamp showed him how dismal his surroundings were. The e bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a glass from an a et of wormy oak; while he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared but soourned bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He was hungry after his long days ride, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse food was hardly the eai hed expected from the gentry and he uzzled by the assessing glint in the dumb womans eyes as she watched him eating.

    But she darted off to get him a sed helping as soon as hed fihe first one and seemed so friendly and helpful, besides, that he knew he could t on a bed for the night in the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish lack of enthusiasm for the eerie silehe clammy chill of the place.

    When hed put away the sed plateful, the old woman came aured he should leave the table and follow her once again. She made a pantomine of drinking; he deduced he was now io take after-dinner coffee in another room with some more elevated member of the household who had not wished to dih him but, all the same, wao make his acquaintance. An honour, no doubt; in defereo his hosts opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.

    He was surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the house was -- cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; but the mute e resolutely wound him on the reel of her lantern down endless corridors, up winding staircases, through the galleries where the painted eyes of family portraits briefly flickered as they passed, eyes that belonged, he noticed to faces, one and all, of a quite memorable beastliness. At last she paused and, behind the door where theyd halted, he heard a faint, metallic twang as of, perhaps, a chord stru a harpsichord. And then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the song of a lark, bringing to him, in the heart -- had he but known it -- of Juliets tomb, all the freshness of m.

    The e rapped with her knuckles on the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his life softl藏书网y called out, in heavily ated French, the adopted language of the Romanian aristocracy: &quot;Entrez.&quot;

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