UNCOLLECTED STORIES-The Scarlet House-1
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I remember, Id been watg a hawk. There was an immense sky of the most i blue, blue of a bowl from which a child might just have drunk its m milk a behind a few whitish traces of cloud around the rim, and, imprinted on this sky, a single point of perfect stillness -- a hawk over the ruins. A hawk so still he seemed the tral node of the sky and the source of the heavy silence which fell down on the ruins like invisible rain; an immobile hawk so high above the turning world that I was sure he would see a half rotating hemisphere below him; and, over this hemisphere, scampered the plump vole or delicious bunny that did not know it had been pinioned already by the eyebeam of its feathered, taloned fate immi in the air. M, silence, a hawk, his prey and ruins. If I try very hard, I also add to this landscape with my little tent, my half-trad, piece by piece, all my naturalists equipment. . . I must have go to collect samples of the desolate flora of this empty place. Above the green abando of the deserted city, where the little foxes played, a rapt hawk gathered to himself all its hauillness.Hawk plummets. Hes unpremeditated and precise as Zen swordsmen, his fall subsumed to the aerial whizz of the rope that traps me.
I am sure of it -- beat me as much as you like; I remember it perfectly. Dont I?
The t sits in a hall hung with embroideries depig all the hierarchy of hell, a place, he claims, not uhe Scarlet House. Soon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House. Chaos is ing, says the t, and giggles; the t ends all his letters "yours entropically" and signs them with the peacocks quill dipped in the blood of a human sacrifice. Why did you e to these abandoned regions, my dear, surely youd heard rumours that I and my fabulous retinue had already installed ourselves in the ruins, preparing chaos with the aid of a Tarot pack?
But I had no notion who the t was when his bodyguard captured me. They stood around me as I writhed on the ground and they showed their fangs at me; they all file their es to a point, it is a sign of machismo among them. They wore jackets of black leather brightly studded with cabbalistic patterns; tall boots; snug leggings of black leather; and slick black helmets that fitted closely over the head and over the mouth, too, leaving only their pale eyes visible. Their eyes glittered like pebbles in a brook. They were armed with hand-guns and their belts bristled with knives. Each carried a coil of rope. A silence so perfect that it might never have been broken resumed itself after the hawk fell.
They hauled me off at the end of the rope they tied to the back of one of their motorcycles and made me run, tumble, bounce behind them on my way to the Scarlet House, though I must admit they drove quite slowly, so I was not mujured. The Scarlet House was built of white crete and looked to me very much like a hospital, a large terminal ward. A few days ihere, and the gravel rash, the grazes and bruises healed.
I remember everything perfectly. I know the rui; at nights, I hear the foxes barking in New Bond Street. That sound firms the existence of the ruins though, of course, I see nothing from the windows.
Meanwhile, in this blind place, the t sults maps of the stars with the aid of his adviser, whose general efficy is hindered by the epileptic fits with which he is afflicted. Though at the best of times his wits are out of order; he drools, too. His star-spangled robes are dabbled with spittle and spilled food and other randomly spattered bodily effluvia, for hes quite shameless in his odd little lusts and pleasures and the t lets him indulge them all. Hes the lised fool and may even pull out his prid play with it at mealtimes, and woe betide you if you flinch from one of his random displays of sl affe, for thats a sure sign you arent in tuh chaos. But Im not sure if hes a fool all the time; sometimes his eyes foe with the assessing glint of a used-car dealer. Then I am afraid he may be w what I remember.
When hes been a good fool and made the t chuckle, the t tells Madame Schreck to give him access to one of the you of the girls. There are girls as young as twelve or thirteen and Fool likes his women just out of the shell. The Fool takes his present down to the dungeons. We wont see her again.
But was she not almost as good as dead the moment she set foot ihe Scarlet House? The moment of capture had sealed her fate.
As for myself, I am sure I was captured by the bikers, in the ruins. I am perfectly fident that is how I came to the Scarlet House. Yet the t assures me, with equal, if not superior fidehat I am mistaken, so that I am not sure which of us to believe.
The t is dedicated to the obliteration of memory.
Memory, says the t, is the main differeween man and the beasts; the beasts were born to live but man was born to remember. Out of his memory, he made abstract patterns of signifit forms. Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time -- it is the clue, like Ariadnes, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which ture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. The t grimaces when he says that because he hates music even more that he hates mathematics but he loves to listen to screaming. "The entropic rhetoric of the scream", he calls it. Madame Schreck screeches for him sometimes at night, to augment his pleasure if we girls have screamed ourselves hoarse and ake any more noise.
Memory, in of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spiders web to catch as much world in it as I . In the midst of my self-spuhere I sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.
Because my memory is undergoing a sea-ge. Though I am certain I remember, I am no longer sure what it is I remember nor, ihe reason why I should remember it.
Everyday, the t attempts to erase the tapes from my memory. He has perfected a plex system of fetting. Although I passionately assert how I was seized by the bikers in the ruins of New Bond Street, I know this assertion is no more than my last, paltry line of defence against the obliterations of the t. He has already implanted in me a set of pseudo-memories, all of whietimes play in my head together, throwio a dreadful fusion so that, though I remember everything, I have no means of ascertaining the actuality of those memories, which all return to me with shimmering vividness and a sense of lived and quantified experience. All of them.
Dear god, all of them.
Remembering is the first stage of absolute fetfulness, says the occult t, who goes by traries. So I have been precipitated into a fugue of all the memories of all the women in the Scarlet House, where I live, now. This is his harem. We are left in the cruel care of Madame Schreck, who eats small birds such as fig-peckers and thrushes; she puts a whole one, spit-grilled, inte, red mouth as lusciously as if it were a liqueur chocolate and then she spits the bones out like the skin and pips of a grape. And shes got other, extravagant tastes as well; she likes te upon the unborn young of rabbits. She acquires the foetuses from laboratories; she has them cooked for her in a cream sauriched with the addition of the yolk of an egg. Shes a messy eater, she spills sau her bare belly and one of us must lick it off for her. She throws open her legs and shows us her hole; the way down and out, she says.
The t es personally to the Scarlet House to give us our lessons. He always brings with him a brace of pigs on silken leashes which we girls must caress. The t believes the pig is the prime example of perfected evolution, the multivorous beast that lives in shit, most entropic of substances, and es its own farrow, if it gets half the ce.
Like time, says the t; like time.
Time, which is the enemy of memory.
The past is <samp>.</samp>very much like the future.
I desded at dusk from a train on which I had been the only passenger in a dank, chill partment lit only by one greenish, meagre gas mas pair, oher side of a mirror so scratched and defaced I could not see my own refle in it, was broken. A mess of sandwich ings and e peel littered the grimy floor. It had been a gloomy journey, across a fen shrouded in mist of autumn, an unpeopled landscape, flat, waterlogged, dotted here and there with pollarded willows with their melancholy look of men whose arms have been lopped off or mutilated women with whips upon their heads. I desded from the train at that lonely halt as night was falling; a man with a seamed, shuttered face came to take my ticket and, without a single word, humped my little tin trunk for me out of the ramshackle, wooden station to a shabby carriage in the laside, a shabby carriage with, between its shafts, a starveling pony whose ribs poked out us drab, glossless coat. On the drivi sat a thin, dark man in black livery who, to my shocked horror, I perceived possessed no mouth at all. I started back; but the station master grabbed my hand and all but forced me into the carriage, then slammed the door on me.
As the poor beast began painfully t the carriage forward, I glimpsed the last of the world in which, until that aghast moment, Id spent twenty-two years of girlhood; into the darkness before me I took the grinning face of the station master, pressed in farewell at the smeared window, transformed by a sudden rush of malevolent glee to a mask of pure evil.
I knew I must try to escape and tussled weakly with the door but it was locked fast. The inexorable carriage, lurg, ponderous, took me into the deepening shadows of the night, which seemed to be moving across the fen to engulf me. I lay back upon the leather seat and gave way to helpless tears.
At last we entered a dark courtyard virtually enclosed by tall, black trees; the gates shut immediately after we were inside. When the pony halted, the macabre an came to let me out. He reached for my hand to help me down with a certain courtesy and I had no choice but to touch him. His flesh felt as dank as the wet, night air of the fens which surrounded us.
Yet when I brought myself to look at his ghastly fa order to thank him, I saw his eyes speak though he had no mouth nor none of the necessary appendages of lips, teeth and toh which to do so, his grave eyes, the colour of the inside of the o, told me I was a young girl much to be pitied and, in luminous depths, I perceived the most dreadful intimation of my fate. At the door of the rambling, brick-built, red-tiled place, half farmhouse, half try mansion and now, had I but known it, wholly dedicated to the ts experiments, Madame Schreck waited to greet me in the scarlet splendour of her satihat laid open to the view of her breasts and the unimaginable wound of her sex -- Madame Schreck, whom I would learn to fear far more thah itself, since death is finite.
Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation.
Yet this version of my capture, in which despair settles slowly like a fall of grey snow upon the landscape through which I travelled towards the moment when hope vanished, sometimes seems to me to have altogether too literary a flavour -- too much of a eenth-tury quality, with its railway trains, its advertisment in the personal n of The Times foverhat drew me, like a Bronte heroine, on a spool of fate over the bleak flat-lands. Theres the inky, over-written smell of pseudo-memory about the gas lights and the mute an, though my skin still shudder<mark></mark>s from the remembered touch of his skin and I will never be able tet his eyes.
But the t, the Morpholytic Kid who presides over the death of forms, assures me that now the process of fetting is well under way so that I remember both the past and the future with equal facility, sih are illusory. Ive made up a past out of some e once read on a train, perhaps; and Ive guessed at a future. For there are no foxes in New Bond Street. Nor will they froli New Bond Street until the cards fall in such a way that the foxes will bound out, barking, from beh them. Time past and time future bio distort my memory.
But I have one memory I sometimes think must be the most authentic, si is by far the most ghastly.
My beloved father has a straight bad a gait in spite of the seventy summers that have turned his hair to a spume of white foam. We sit at a rouable with a red plush cover in our pleasant apartment, the windows open on to a baly where a little breeze stirs the heavy heads of my fine show of geraniums, white, salmon pink and scarlet, all baogether, exuding a delicious, spicy odour.
How I loved that room. . . the slippery horsehair sofa with the paisley shawl throw and the piles of cushions my mother had embroidered with all manner htly coloured butterflies and flowers; the rosewood et filled with a shepherdesses and bird-catchers, all covered with a fine bloom of dust -- Im not the best of housekeepers; there is a stain on the Persian carpet which marks the spot where I spilled a bowl of hot chocolate when I was six years old. There is a a bowl filled with pot pourri on the mantlepiece.
My mother used to make pot pourri every summer; she would bring back the flowers from our house in the try. Now she is dead but she still presides over our tea-table; there on the wall she smiles at us from a birds-eye maple frame, a tinted photograph taken shortly after she and my father were married. Shes still very young, not much older than I am now; she wears a wide straw hat decorated with pink ribbon and a bunch of daisies. Its brim gently shades her eyes, of which the long lashes are so dark they look like the fringed tres of anemones. Her eyes are a mysterious, darkish green.
They say I have her eyes.
Some women take their eyes out, says the t; he is alarticularly angry if when he is engaged in erasing the tapes of memory, I begin -- as I sometimes, quite helplessly, do -- to repeat, over and ain, as if oape were stuck: "They say I have my mothers eyes, they say I have my mothers eyes." Then he beats me with a knotted whip until my shoulders bleed; when visiting his women, he never fets a whip. Then he hands me over to Madame Schreck for a spell in the sensory deprivation unit, I must crawl into the oblivion of her hole for a while.
My father and I sit under my mothers photograph in an old-fashioned room in which everything is loved because it is familiar. Twenty-two years of my life have unfurled in this room like a slow, quiet fan. I pour tea for my father from a silver pot with a spout like the neck of a swan. The cups have narrow stems and are made of fine, white porcelain with scrolls of faded gold around the rims. My own cup cracked us weight of years long ago; I remember how my father carefully riveted it toget<cite>藏书网</cite>her again, until it was as good as here is a glass saucer taining a sliced lemon oable, its sharp, st refreshes this sultry July afternoon. The light falls in regular parallelograms through our slatted blinds so we know we are in trol of the weather. In the park outside, a few birds cheep the exhausted songs of high summer.
The staccato click of bootheels. The peremptory barrage of gloved fists on the panels of the door. When the old man reaches for the revolver he always wears in the holster under his armpit, they gun him down. His white hair floods with blood as red as the painted house of Madame Schreck, who is waiting for me in the subterraorture-chamber deep at the heart of the maze of my brain, the Minotaur with the head of a woman and the orifice of a sow.
My father tumbles across the tea-table. Cups, saucers fly apart in shards as he crashes down. His fingers grasp at the empty air to cate last, lost handful of world between them before it slips away from him for ever.
Then they seized me, stripped me, raped me on the silk birds of the Persian carpet under my mothers picture, threw a coat over me, thrust a gun in my bad forced me down the eg staircase to the armoured car waiting outside. I had been a virgin. I was i pain.
Madame Schreck, in a smart uniform of drab olive, with sheer black stogs and those six-inch heels of hers that stab the linoleum as she walks, took my particulars at the mahogany desk. When I refused to tell her where my brother was, she made me lie down on the camp-bed in the er of the room, under a propaganda poster of the t riding upon a winged snake and, with judicious impassivity, she applied the lighted end of her cigarette to the interior membrane of my labia minor. Through the open window, I remember, I saw a hawk immobile at the tral node of the blue sky of the midsummer. From his spread wings dropped a silehat stunned me more than the pain she inflicted.
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