Tanith Lee - The Isle Is Full Of Noises
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2024-12-20
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
The Isle Is Full of Noises
Tanith Lee
TANITH LEE, the internationally renowned, award-winning fantasist, makes her home
on the southern seacoast of England. Her many superb novels and short-story collections
include The Birthgrave, Companions on the Road, Dark Dance, Drinking Sapphire Wine,
East of Midnight, Red as Blood, and many other books and tales. Her fantasies appear
regularly in my anthologies, the most recent being a specially commissioned new story,
"The Pandora Heart," in Don't Open This Book! (Doubleday Direct, 1998). "The Isle Is
Full of Noises," whose title derives from Shakespeare's The Tempest, features a vampire
the likes of which—trust me!—you have never before encountered.
… and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—NIETZSCHE
IT IS AN island here, now.
At the clearest moments of the day—usually late in the morning, occasionally after noon, and at night
when the lights come on—a distant coastline is sometimes discernible. This coast is the higher area of
the city, that part which still remains intact above water.
The city was flooded a decade ago. The Sound possessed it. The facts had been predicted some while,
and various things were done in readiness, mostly comprising a mass desertion.
They say the lower levels of those buildings which now form the island will begin to give way in five
years. But they were saying that, too, five years back.
Also there are the sunsets. (Something stirred up in the atmosphere apparently, by the influx of water,
some generation of heat or cold or vapour.) They start, or appear to do so, the sunsets, about three
o'clock in the afternoon, and continue until the sun actually goes under the horizon, which in summer
can be as late as seven forty-five.
For hours the roof terraces, towerettes, and glass lofts of the island catch a deepening blood-and-copper
light, turning to new bronze, raw amber, cubes of hot pink ice.
Yse lives on West Ridge, in a glass loft. She has, like most of the island residents, only one level, but
there's plenty of space. (Below, if anyone remembers, lies a great warehouse, with fish, even sometimes
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
barracuda, gliding between the girders.)
Beyond her glass west wall, a freak tree has rooted in the terrace. Now nine years old, it towers up over
the loft, and the surrounding towers and lofts, while its serpentine branches dip down into the water.
Trees are unusual here. This tree, which Yse calls Snake (for the branches), seems unfazed by the salt
content of the water. It may be a sort of willow, a willow crossed with a snake.
Sometimes Yse watches fish glimmering through the tree's long hair, that floats just under the surface.
This appeals to her, as the whole notion of the island does. Then one morning she comes out and finds,
caught in the coils of her snake-willow, a piano.
Best to describe Yse, at this point, which is not easy.
She might well have said herself (being a writer by trade but also by desire) that she doesn't want you to
be disappointed, that you should hold on to the idea that what you get at first, here, may not be what is to
be offered later.
Then again, there is a disparity between what Yse seems to be, or is, and what Yse also seems to be, or
is.
Her name, however, as she has often had to explain, is pronounced to rhyme with "please"—more
correctly, pleezp. Eeze. Is it French? Or some sport from Latin-Spanish? God knows.
Yse is in her middle years, not tall, rather heavy, dumpy. Her fair, greying hair is too fine, and so she
cuts it very short. Yse is also slender, taller, and her long hair (still fair, still greying) hangs in thick
silken hanks down her back. One constant, grey eyes.
She keeps only a single mirror, in the bathroom above the wash basin. Looking in it is always a surprise
for Yse: Who on earth is that? But she never lingers, soon she is away from it and back to herself. And
in this way, too, she deals with Per Laszd, the lover she has never had.
Yse had brought the coffeepot and some peaches onto the terrace. It is a fine morning, and she is
considering walking along the bridgeway to the boat stop, and going over to the cafes cm East Heights.
There are always things on at the cafes, psychic fairs, ait shows, theatre. And she needs some more lamp
oil.
Having placed the coffee and fruit, Yse looks up and sees the piano.
"Oh," says Yse, aloud.
She is very, very startled, and there are good reasons for this, beyond the obvious oddity itself.
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
She goes to the edge of the terrace and leans over, where the tree leans over, and looks at the snake arms
which hold the piano fast, tilted only slightly, and fringed by rippling leaves.
The piano is old, huge, a type of pianoforte, its two lids fast shut, concealing both the keys and its inner
parts.
Water swirls round it idly. It is intensely black, scarcely marked by its swim.
And has it been swimming? Probably it was jettisoned from some apartment on the mainland (the upper
city). Then, stretching out its three strong legs, it set off savagely for the island, determined not to go
down.
Yse has reasons, too, for thinking in this way.
She reaches out, but cannot quite touch the piano.
There are tides about the island, variable, sometimes rough.
If she leaves the piano where it is, the evening tide may be a rough one, and lift it away, and she will
lose it.
She knows it must have swum here.
Yse goes to the table and sits, drinking coffee, looking at the piano. As she does this a breeze comes in
off the Sound, and stirs her phantom long heavy soft hair, so it brushes her face and neck and the sides
of her arms. And the piano makes a faint twanging, she thinks perhaps it does, up through its shut lids
that are like closed eyes and lips together.
"What makes a vampire seductive?" Yse asks Lucius, at the Cafe Blonde. "I mean, irresistible?"
"His beauty," says Lucius. He laughs, showing his teeth. "I knew a vampire once. No, make that twice. I
met him twice."
"Yes?" asks Yse cautiously. Lucius has met them all, ghosts, demons, angels. She partly believes it to be
so, yet knows he mixes lies with the truths; a kind of test, or trap, for the listener. "Well, what
happened?"
"We walk, talk, drink, make love. He bites me. Here, see?" Lucius moves aside his long locks
(luxurious, but greying, as are her own). On his coal-dark neck, no longer young, but strong as a column,
an old scar.
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
"You told me once before," says Yse, "a shark did that."
"To reassure you. But it was a vampire."
"What did you do?"
"I say to him, Watch out, monsieur."
"And then?"
"He watched out. Next night, I met him again. He had yellow eyes, like a cat."
"He was undead?"
"The undeadest thing I ever laid."
He laughs. Yse laughs, thoughtfully. "A piano's caught in my terrace tree."
"Oh yeah," says Lucius, the perhaps arch liar.
"You don't believe me."
"What is your thing about vampires?"
"I'm writing about a vampire."
"Let me read your book."
"Someday. But Lucius—it isn't their charisma. Not their beauty that makes them irresistible—"
"No?"
"Think what they must be like skin in rags, dead but walking. Stinking of the grave—"
"They use their hudja-magica to take all that away."
"It's how they make us feel."
"Yeah, Yse. You got it."
"What they can do to us?"
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
"Dance all night," says Lucius, reminiscent. He watches a handsome youth across the cafe, juggling
mirrors that flash un-nervingly, his skin the colour of an island twilight
"Lucius, will you help me shift die piano into my loft?"
"Sure thing."
"Not tomorrow, or next month. I mean, could we do it today, before sunset starts?"
"I love you, Yse. Because of you, I shall go to heaven."
"Thanks."
"Shit piano," he says. "I could have slept in my boat. I could have paddled over to Venezule. I could
have watched the thought of Venus rise through the grey brain of the sky. Piano huh, piano. Who shall I
bring to help me? That boy, he looks strong, look at those minors go."
The beast had swum to shore, to the beach, through the pale, transparent urges of the waves, when die
star Venus was in the brain-grey sky. But not here.
There.
In the dark before star rise and dawn, more than two centuries ago. First the rifts, the hits of the dark sea,
and in them these mysterious thrusts and pushes, die limbs like those of some huge swimmer, part man
and part lion and part crab— but also, a manta ray.
Then, the lid breaks for a second through the fans of water, under the dawn star's piercing steel. Wet as
black mirror, the closed lid of the piano, as it strives, on three powerful beast legs, for me beach.
This Island is an island of sands, then of trees, the sombre sullen palms that sweep the shore. Inland,
heights, vegetation, plantations, some of coffee and sugar and rubber, and one of imported kayar. An
invented island, a composite.
Does it crawl onto the sand, the legs still moving, crouching low like a beast? Does it rest on the sand,
under the sway of die palm trees, as a sun rises?
The Island has a name, like the house which is up there, unseen, on the inner heights. Bleumaneer.
(Notes: Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth…)
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
The piano crouched stilly at the edge of the beach, the sea retreating from it, and the dark of night falling
away…
It's sunset.
Lucius, in the bloody light, with two men from the Cafe Blonde (neither the juggler), juggle the black
piano from the possessive tentacles of the snake-willow.
With a rattle, a shattering of sounds (like slung cutlery), it fetches up on the terrace. The men stand
perplexed, looking at it. Yse watches from her glass wall.
"Broke the cock thing."
"No way to move it. Shoulda tooka crane."
They prowl about the piano, while the red light blooms across its shade.
Lucius tries delicately to raise the lid from the keys. The lid does not move. The other two, they wrench
at the other lid, the piano's top (pate, shell). This, too, is fastened stuck. (Yse had made half a move, as if
to stop them. Then her arm fell lax.)
"Damn ol' thing. What she wan' this ol' thing for?"
They back away. One makes a kicking movement. Lucius shakes his head; his long locks jangle across
the flaming sky.
"Do you want this, girl?" Lucius asks Yse by her glass.
"Yes." Shortly. "I said I did."
" 'S all broke up. Won't play you none," sings the light-eyed man, Carr, who wants to kick the piano,
even now his loose leg pawing in its jeans.
Trails of water slip away from the piano, over the terrace, like chains.
Yse opens her wide glass doors. The men carry the piano in and set it on her bare wooden floor.
Yse brings them, now docile as their maid, white rum, while Lucius shares out the bills.
"Hurt my back," whines Carr the kicker.
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
"Piano," says Lucius, drinking, "pian-o—O pain!"
He says to her at the doors (as the men scramble back into their boat), "That vampire I danced with.
Where he bit me. Still feel him there, biting me, some nights. Like a piece of broken bottle in my neck. I
followed him, did I say to you? I followed him and saw him climb in under his grave just before the sun
came up. A marble marker up on top. It shifted easy as breath, settles back like a sigh. But he was
beautiful, that boy with yellow eyes. Made me feel like a king, with him. Young as a lion, with him. Old
as him, too. A thousand years in a skin of smoothest suede."
Yse nods.
She watches Lucius away into the sunset, of which three hours are still left.
Yse scatters two bags of porous litter-chips, which are used all over the Island, to absorb the spillages
and seepages of the Sound, to mop up the wet that slowly showers from the piano. She does not touch it.
Except with her right hand, for a second, flat on the top of it.
The wood feels ancient and hollow, and she thinks it hasn't, perhaps, a metal frame.
As the redness folds over deeper and deeper, Yse lights the oil lamp on her worktable, and sits there,
looking forty feet across the loft, at the piano on the sunset. Under her right hand now, the pages she has
already written, in her fast untidy scrawl.
Pian-o. O pain.
Shush, says the Sound tide, flooding the city, pulsing through the walls, struts, and girders below.
Yse thinks distinctly, suddenly—it is always this way— about Per Laszd. But then another man's
memory taps at her mind.
Yse picks up her pen, almost absently. She writes:
"Like those hallucinations which sometimes come at the edge of sleep, so that you wake, thinking two or
three words have been spoken close to your ear, or that a tall figure stands in the corner… like this, the
image now and then appears before him.
"Then he sees her, the woman, sitting on the rock, her white dress and her ivory-coloured hair, hard-
gleaming in a post-storm sunlight. Impossible to tell her age. A desiccated young girl, or unlined old
woman. And the transparent sea lapping in across the sand…
"But he has said, the Island is quite deserted now."
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
. Antoinelle's Courtship
Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth.
In this way, she knew nothing about them, the grave losses to come, but then they had been married only
a few months. She knew little enough about him, either.
Antoinelle was raised among staunch and secretive people. Until she was fourteen, she had thought
herself ugly, and after that, beautiful. A sunset revelation had put her right, the westering glow pouring
in sideways to paint the face in her mirror, on its slim, long throat. She found, too, she had shoulders,
and cheekbones. Hands, whose tendons flexed in fans. With the knowledge of beauty, Antoinelle began
to hope for something. Armed with her beauty she began to fall madly in love—with young officers in
the army, with figures encountered in dreams.
One evening at a parochial ball, the two situations became confused.
The glamorous young man led Antoinelle out into a summer garden. It was a garden of Europe, with tall
dense trees of twisted trunks, foliage massed on a lilac northern sky.
Antoinelle gave herself. That is, not only was she prepared to give of herself sexually, but to give herself
up to this male person, of whom she knew no more than that he was beautiful.
Some scruple—solely for himself, the possible consequences—made him check at last.
"No—no—" she cried softly, as he forcibly released her and stood back, angrily panting.
The beautiful young man concluded (officially to himself) that Antoinelle was "loose," and therefore
valueless. She was not rich enough to marry, and besides, he despised her family.
Presently he told his brother officers all about this girl, and her "looseness."
"She would have done anything," he said.
"She's a whore," said another, and smiled.
Fastidiously, Antoinelle's lover remarked, "No, worse than a whore. A whore does it honestly, for
money. It's her work. This one simply does it."
Antoinelle's reputation was soon in tatters, which blew about that little town of trees and societal pillars,
like the torn flag of a destroyed regiment.
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She was sent in disgrace to her aunt's house in the country.
No one spoke to Antoinelle in that house. Literally, no one. The aunt would not, and she had instructed
her servants, who were afraid of her. Even the maid who attended Antoinelle would not speak, in the
privacy of the evening chamber, preparing the girl for the silent evening supper below, or the lumpy
three-mattressed bed.
The aunt's rather unpleasant lapdog, when Antoinelle had attempted, unwatched, to feed it a marzipan
fruit, had only turned its ratlike head away. (At everyone else, save the aunt, it growled.)
Antoinelle, when alone, sobbed. At first in shame—her family had already seen to that, very ably, in the
town. Next in frustrated rage. At last out of sheer despair.
She was like a lunatic in a cruel, cool asylum. They fed her, made her observe all the proper rituals. She
had shelter and a place to sleep, and people to relieve some of her physical wants. There were even
books in the library, and a garden to walk in on sunny days. But language—sound—they took away
from her. And language is one of the six senses. It was as bad perhaps as blindfolding her. Additionally,
they did not even speak to each other, beyond the absolute minimum, when she was by—coarse-aproned
girls on the stair stifled their giggles, and passed with mask faces. And in much the same way, too,
Antoinelle was not permitted to play the aunt's piano.
Three months of this, hard, polished months, like stone mirrors which reflected nothing.
Antoinelle grew thinner, more pale. Her young eyes had hollows under them. She was like a nun.
The name of the aunt who did all this was Clemence— which means, of course, clemency—mild,
merciful. (And the name of the young man hi the town who had almost fucked Antoinelle, forced
himself not to for his own sake, and then fucked instead her reputation, which was to say, her life … his
name was Justus.)
On a morning early in the fourth month, a new thing happened.
Antoinelle opened her eyes, and saw the aunt sailing into her room. And the aunt, glittering with rings
like knives, spoke to Antoinelle.
"Very well, there's been enough of all this. Yes, yes. You may get up quickly and come down to
breakfast, Patice will see to your dress and hair. Make sure you look your best."
Antoinelle lay there, on her back in the horrible bed, staring like the dead newly awakened.
"Come along," said Aunt Clemence, holding the awful little dog untidily scrunched, "make haste now.
What a child!" As if Antoinelle were the strange creature, the curiosity.
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The Isle Is Full of Noises
While, as the aunt swept out, the dog craned back and chattered its dirty teeth at Antoinelle.
And then, the third wonder, Patice was chattering, breaking like a happy stream at thaw, and shaking out
a dress.
Antoinelle got up, and let Patice see to her, all the paraphernalia of the toilette, finishing with a light
pollen of powder, even a fingertip of rouge for the matte pale lips, making them moist and rosy.
"Why?" asked Antoinelle at last, in a whisper.
"There is a visitor," chattered Patice, brimming with joy.
Antoinelle took two steps, then caught her breath and dropped as if dead on the carpet.
But Patice was also brisk; she brought Antoinelle round, crushing a vicious clove of lemon oil under her
nostrils, slapping the young face lightly. Exactly as one would expect in this efficiently cruel lunatic
asylum.
Presently Antoinelle drifted down the stairs, light-headed, rose-lipped and shadow-eyed. She had never
looked more lovely or known it less.
The breakfast was a ghastly provincial show-off thing. There were dishes and dishes, hot and cold, of
kidneys, eggs, of cheeses and hams, hot breads in napkins, brioches, and chocolate. (It was a wonder
Antoinelle was not sick at once.) All this set on crisp linen with flashing silver, and the fine china
normally kept in a cupboard.
The servants flurried round in their awful, stupid (secondhand) joy. The aunt sat in her chair and
Antoinelle in hers, and the man in his, across the round table.
Antoinelle had been afraid it was going to be Justus. She did not know why he would be there—to
castigate her again, to apologise—either way, such a boiling of fear—or something—had gone through
Antoinelle that she had fainted.
But it was not Justus. This was someone she did not know.
He had stood up as she came into the room. The morning was clear and well lit, and Antoinelle had seen,
with a dreary sagging of relief, that he was old. Quite old. She went on thinking this as he took her hand
in his large one and shook it as if carelessly playing with something, very delicately. But his hand was
manicured, the nails clean and white-edged. There was one ring, with a dull colourless stone in it.
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TheIsleIsFullofNoisesTheIsleIsFullofNoisesTanithLeeTANITHLEE,theinternationallyrenowned,award-winningfantasist,makesherhomeonthesouthernseacoastofEngland.Hermanysuperbnovelsandshort-storycollectionsincludeTheBirthgrave,CompanionsontheRoad,DarkDance,DrinkingSapphireWine,EastofMidnight,RedasBlood,an...
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