Tanith Lee - Paradys 3 - The Book of the Dead

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TANITH LEE

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

The Secret Books of Paradys 3

First published in 1991 by The Overlook Press Lewis Hollow Road Woodstock, New York 12498

means, electronic or mechanical, including phototcopy, recording, or any information storage and

retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by

a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a

magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Tanith

The Book of the Dead: the secret books of Paradys III / Tanith Lee p. cm.

1. Fantastic fiction, English. I. Title. II. Series: Lee, Tanith. PR6062.E4163B67 1991 823'.914—dc20

91-33186 ISBN 0-87951 -440-X CIP

Contents

The Weasel Bride

The Nightmare's Tale

Beautiful Lady

Morcara's Room

The Marble Web

Lost in the World

The Glass Dagger

The Moon Is a Mask

Le Livre Blanc Et Noir

Paradys too has its cemeteries, its little graveyards tucked out of sight, its greater yards of death that hug

the churches, the cathedral that is called a Temple. It has its places of graves, between the houses in

sudden alleys. Between the paving stones, here and there you may look down and see a name that paves

the way, a date of beginning and the other of surcease. Even under the house floors now and then they

will raise a carpet and a board and point you a grave: Sylvie sleeps here, or Marcelin. Paradys is a city

of the dead as she is a city of the live, the half-live, the undead, and perhaps the deathless.

And here, on this hill, shrouded by the pretty park they have made where once the scholars bored out

their eyes (but shells have burst there since), overlooking the coils of the river, is a great necropolis of

Paradys.

And here I have brought you, on this windy, colorless grave-gray afternoon. To walk about, to look and

see. If you wish.

We have come at an opportune moment, too. For over there, where you note that line of carriages going

up, the funeral is taking place of Baubon the clown.

Baubon was immensely popular. To him of an evening, after their fancy suppers, went the women in

spangles and pointed heels and the men in their capes, and white shirt fronts, like cats.

The hearse is huge, scrolled like an urn and hung with black drapes. The black horses labor beneath the

black plumes and blacker tassels. No motor cars spoil the effect. Even the mourners have had to hire

chariots.

Surprisingly, there are very few mourners (and no crowds rim the ground, held off by policemen). The

chief mourner is a thin and white-haired man with the face of an elderly imp, enough like the mask of

Baubon, publicly always seen in garish paint, to imply a brother or close cousin.

The black coffin, ebony with silver handles, is unloaded—an enormous wreath of flowers balances white

upon it—and the service begins.

Everyone stands in silence as the priest speaks over the black (blacker even than the horses) hole in the

ground. He has a pompous theatrical look, and the boy swinging the censer so adroitly, why he might

even be that favorite of Baubon's among the acrobats.

A few women weep a few crystal tears. They are the ones able to cry without help in the theater. The

men stand solemn. There are three eulogies spoken perfectly over the hole. We are not near enough to

catch all the words—Genius, Unique, Mourned, Never-to-Be-Emulated. Then the coffin is lowered into

the space. Earth and flowers rain down. A white rose…

The celebrants shift from the grave in an exact ring, like circling black moths.

The chief mourner shakes the priest by the hand.

"Bravo, Jacques. It couldn't have been bettered. No, not at The Tragedy herself."

And the old imp strokes the censer boy.

A woman laughs.

"Take off the lid, then," says the brother of Baubon the clown.

Two men scramble carelessly into the grave and haul off the coffin top, flinging away the exquisite floral

tributes.

In the coffin lies Baubon, in his patchwork and all his paint. As so many have seen him, laughing then, or

crying, turning enormous cartwheels, falling from high towers.

"Lid back on," cries the brother of Baubon gaily. "That's enough. No respect."

And there is much amusement, back goes the lid, and the flowers are slung on any how.

Two gravediggers approach, and start to shovel in the black, moist soil.

"Are you satisfied, Baubon?"

"Quite satisfied."

"When we do it in reality, will you be watching then, Baubon?"

"Who knows? That's why I had my funeral now, to be sure."

Baubon is the imp. The priest an actor from the Comedy Theatre. The boy is… the boy.

Staged, the funeral. And now the grave almost filled in. The black chariots roister away to some great

restaurant where they will hold the wake of Baubon the clown and chief mourner.

In five years, or ten, or more (or less), they will come again to do this thing. Then the crowds will press

at the fences and the policemen hold them off. Then perhaps some of the tears will be real, and the single

white rose, if it falls, will not give its life for nothing, only a game. Or is it a game? Is the real funeral not to

be a game?

And will Baubon watch then, as today?

Perhaps the dead are always watching, and we should tread carefully and speak low.

There will be no skulls in the grass. Though the recent storm shifted a tomb or two from its moorings, the

staff of the necropolis came out like beetles in the rain and tidied everything. Even the shell that burst here

was tidied. The necropolis has stood some while, two or three centuries. Always neat, even during the

days of Liberty and Revolution.

(The last carriages career down into the park. There an old gentleman and his lady are shocked to

behold the hearse go by filled with laughing actresses.)

In places there are great houses of death, you see. And in other places tiny markers half hidden in the

grass and ivy, commemorative plaques for those who have gone down elsewhere into the dark that lies

below, if not exactly beneath, everything.

Are they truly there, under our feet? Walk softly, talk quietly.

I will show you their shadows.

Here is a grave, now…

The Weasel Bride

In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,

The bride is carried to the bridegroom's chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;

I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

—Yeats

There are stories in the country told today as though they happened only a week ago. In many ways

customs have not altered very much, and every village is its own empire. It is possible to imagine such

things still occur, in lonely woods, under the stare of a silver moon.

A young trapper, walking home one evening across the water meadows, stopped in startlement, seeing a

girl dancing on a hill in the moonlight. She was very beautiful, with long pale hair, but as she danced she

wept and lamented. Pausing to watch, he also overheard her complaint. "Alas," said she, "that I may only

keep this human form in the full ray of the moon. No sooner does she set, than I must return to my

loathsome other shape, from which only the true love of a man can rescue me, although that forever. But

what hope is there of it, seeing he must court and wed me in my other form, before his kin, and in the

church. I am lost." Fascinated, the young man continued to spy on this strange maiden until at length the

moon began to go down. The sky lightened, then grew black. The stars stung bright as the lunar orb sank

under the hill. It was gone. At that moment, the maiden disappeared like the moon, as if into the ground.

The young man ran up the hill and searched about, and as he did so he glimpsed something that flashed

away into the bushes. It was a white weasel.

Now the trapper had made up his mind that he would be the one to have this girl, no matter what the

cost. Therefore he laid his most cunning trap, and baited it, and went down to his village. Here he started

hasty arrangements for a wedding, telling all sorts of lies, and bribing the priest and the mayor to obtain

consent. The following night, which happened to be a night of no moon, he hurried to the spot where he

had left his trap. And sure enough, what should he find in it but the white weasel, caught fast and crying

piteously. "Fear nothing," said the suitor, "I shall befriend you, poor creature. Come, be my sweetheart,

love me a little, and I shall wed you, before my kin and in the church, tomorrow morning."

Then he carried the weasel in a cage down to the village, ignoring her cheeps and struggles, which he

guessed to be a part of the spell on her.

In his father's house, he had his mother and sisters put on the weasel a veil made from a lace

handkerchief, and a garland made from a baby's pearl bracelet. He was the head of his own household,

his father being dead, and the three women were obliged to obey him, but they did so in terror, thinking

he had gone mad. The weasel, however, was most gentle now, and bore with everything that was done.

Only at her lover did she hiss and bare her sharp teeth.

At sunrise, out they went, the trapper, his mother and sisters, and the bridal weasel in her cage. The

whole village was about and crowding to the church, and the priest was there in his habit, with his

prayerbook, waiting. But when they all saw what went on, there was a great to-do.

"Holy father," said the trapper, "you must humor me in this. For I insist this creature shall be my wife, and

nobody will gainsay me. Remember," he added in a low voice to the priest, "my father's coins which I

have given you."

"God moves in His own way," said the priest, and brought the young man and the weasel into the church

and up to the altar. There, in the sight of the village and of the trapper's sobbing womenfolk, the priest

wed the young man to the weasel.

Thereafter they repaired home for the wedding breakfast, and about noon, the young man took his bride

away to the nuptial chamber, above.

The husband removed his wife from her cage and placed her on the pillows. "Dear wife," said he, "I will

be patient." And there he sat quietly, as the daylight streamed in at the casement and the weasel ran about

the bed and climbed the curtains, and below the wedding guests, in fear and amazement, grew drunk on

his father's wine.

At length, the afternoon waned, the dusk came, and at long last, the moon rose in the east and pointed

her white finger straight through the window.

"Now let us see," said the young man, and he put his hand on the weasel and stroked her snowy back.

But as soon as the moon's ray touched her, she turned and bit him, under the base of the thumb, so his

blood poured.

No sooner was this done than her coat of fur peeled off her, she sprang upright on the bed, and there

before him in the moonlight was the lovely girl from the hill, clad only in her long, pale hair.

"You have freed me," she exclaimed.

"But at great cost," he answered.

And this was so, for despite her tender care of him, and the equally tender care of his astounded mother

and sisters, the young man sickened of the bite. Within seven days he was dead and put to rest in the

churchyard. And as for the weasel widow, she slunk away in the sunrise, and none saw her again, in any

shape, although in those parts it was the tradition ever after to kill any weasel that they came on, if it

should be a female.

The two families, the Covilles and the Desbouchamps, had ruled together over their great sprawling

village for a pair of hundred years. And as each century turned, the village grew larger, fair set on being a

town. The Covilles' tailored house at least had business connections with the City. Theirs was the trade of

wool. The Desbouchamps' low-beamed manor, its milk churns and dove-cotes, stables and wild

orchards, drowsed comfortably in the meadows. The Days of Liberty had not yet swept through

Paradys, changing all the world. There seemed no need to hurry, or to provision for any future that did

not resemble the past.

It was to be a country wedding then, between Roland Coville and Marie-Mai Desbouchamps. It started

at sunup, with the banging of lucky pots and pans down the village streets, and went on with the girls and

their autumn roses taken to the manor, and the silver coin given to each as she bore her flowers into the

cavern of the kitchen.

Then out came the lint-haired bride, crowned with the roses, in the embroidered bodice her grandmother

had worn, and the little pearly shoes that just fitted her. She was piped and drummed to the church and

met her bridegroom in the gate, a dark northern youth, and who did not know or could not see how

eager he was? For it was not only a marriage arranged but a marriage arranged from desires. They had

played together as children, Roland and Marie. He had pretended to wed her in the pear orchard when

she was ten and he thirteen years of age. Seven years had passed. He had been sent to school in the

City, and was no longer pure; he had known philosophy, mathematics, Latin, and three harlots. But

unscathed he still was. And the girl, she was like a ripe, sweet fruit misleading in its paleness: She was

quite ready.

And how he loved her. It was obvious to all. Not only lust, as was proper, but veneration. He will treat

her too well, they said, she will get the upper hand. But she was docile, was she not, Marie-Mai?

Never had anyone heard of anything but her tractability, her gentleness. She will make a good wife.

For Roland himself, it might be said that he had always known she must be his. At first she had reminded

him of the Virgin, so fresh and white, so clean. But then the stirrings of adult want had found in her the

other virgin, the goddess of the pastoral earth that was his in the holidays, the smooth curving forms of

hills and breasts, shining of pools and eyes, after the chapped walls and hands, the hard brisk hearts of

Paradys. She allowed him little lapses. To kiss her fingers, then her lips, to touch fleetingly the

swansdown upper swell above her bodice. When he said to his father, "I will have Marie-Mai," his father

smiled and said, "Of course. We'll drink to it." So easy. And why not, why must all love be fraught and

tragic, gurning and yearning, unfulfilled or snatched on the wing of the storm?

And for Marie-Mai, what could be said for her? She had answered correctly all the searching lover's

questions. Her responses were perfect, and if she offered nothing unasked, that was surely her modesty,

her womanly decorum. Could anyone say they knew her? Of course. They all did. She was biddable,

and loving in mild, undisturbing ways. She was not complex or rebellious. There was nothing to know.

Who probes the flawless lily? It is the blighted bloom that gets attention.

A country wedding, then, and in the church Roland thought his bride like an angel, except he would not

have planned for an angel what he planned to do to her. And the church over, outside in the viny

afternoon, they had their feast on the square, under the sky. These were the days once sacred to the wine

god. The girls had wreathed the clay jugs with myrtle; the great sunny roses crowded the tables like the

guests. And when the humped western clouds banked up, and the faint daylight moon appeared in a

dimming glow, they bore the bride and groom to the smart stone house behind the wall and the iron gate

decorated with peacocks. They let them in with laughter and rough sorties. They let them go to the

laundered bedroom whose windows were shuttered, whose candles were lit. They closed the doors and

shouted a word or two, and left the lovers alone for their night. And in the square a band played and

Madame Coville danced with Monsieur Desbouchamps, and Madame Desbouchamps was too shy to

do more than flirt with Monsieur Coville. The moon rose high, and owls called from the woods. The

roses bloomed in the dark over the old walls, as if winter would never come.

In the morning, an autumn country morning that began about half past six, Roland's manservant knocked

on the bedroom door, and the maid waited behind him with the pot of chocolate. In the old days—not

twenty years before—the elderly women of the house would have arrived, to strip the bed and view the

blood of the maidenhead. This was no longer done in such sophisticated villages. When the first knock

went unanswered, the manservant knocked again, and grinned at the maid, and called out, "Shall I return

a little later, 'sieur Roland?"

Then, and what follows now comes directly from the evidence given later in the courtrooms of Paradys,

the voice of Roland was raised clearly behind the door. It was not an embarrassed or pleasured voice. It

cried in terrible despair: "Oh God, what shall I do?" And then, very loudly and without any expression,

"Come in and see. But leave the girl outside."

The young manservant raised his brows. More sympathetic than he, the maid was already trembling and

biting her lip. The man opened to door and went into his master's bedroom. There he beheld at once, as

he said, some vestiges of a slight tussle, but perhaps these might not have been unnatural. Then he saw

that the bride lay half out of the bed, in her ribboned nightgown. There were bruises on her throat, her

face was engorged and nearly black, and her eyes had extruded from their sockets. She had been

strangled, had been dead some while. The manservant exclaimed something like, "My God, who has

done this?" To which the young husband replied quietly, "I did it. I killed her." And at this point it was

noticed how two of the fingers of his right hand were very savagely bitten, doubtless by the dying girl in

her struggle for life.

The subsequent commotion that next boiled through the house is easily imagined. It passed into every

chamber, every cranny, like a noxious odor. There was screaming, and every sort of human outcry, male

and female. Roland was led down into the lower rooms, where an interrogation took place, his mother on

her knees, his aunts fainting, his father bellowing in tears. And all this was soon augmented by the frenzied

arrival of the family Desbouchamps.

To each kind and type of entreaty or demand, Roland Coville would say substantially the same thing, as

various testimony later showed. What he said was this: "I killed Marie. I strangled her. She's dead."

But to the eternally repeated question Why? he would answer, white-faced and wooden, "I have nothing

to say on that."

In those parts, the unchastity of a bride might have furnished a reason. There were historic tales, to be

sure, of girls slain on the wedding night, having been discovered unvirgin. The father challenged his son,

but Roland shook his head. He even gave a grim and white-faced smile. No, he replied, she was intact.

"What, then—what? Did she slight you?" No, he had not been slighted. Marie was a virgin and she had

not insulted him. She had given no provocation. She had encouraged his advances.

"Why, then, in the name of God—"

"I won't say, Father. Nothing on this earth will induce me to do so."

It was the father of Marie, of course, who impugned the manhood of Roland. The husband had been

unable to fulfill his duties, and had strangled the innocent maiden for fear she would betray him. There

were a couple of girls in the city who could give the lie to this. Nevertheless, the fathers ended fighting in

the cobbled yard of the Coville house, under the peacocks.

In their turn, the police came. They had little to add but the uniform and threat of the law.

The village had fallen apart like a broken garden. Stones rattled by night on the shutters of the Coville

house, on the embrasures of the village jail to which Roland had been removed. They wanted his death.

He was taken to the City in the dead of night, unpublicized, in a covered carriage, like an escape. The

Coville house was locked up like a box. They had gone too into the darkness, to the City. Like all cities,

it reeked of Hell. This had a rightness then, the flight toward Paradys, as, not too many years in the

future, others would flee away from the drums and blades of Revolution, into the outer night of the world.

The trial of Roland Coville caused no stir in Paradys, City of Damnations. It was not unusual enough. A

man had killed a girl, his lover and wife. So what? It happened twice a day. That the case had been

explosive enough it was removed from village to City was nothing. A cough out of season was a wonder

in the provinces.

The young man stood bravely, deadly, and composed before his judges. He was courteous and exact,

and he refused them nothing except what he refused all others, the motive for the murder. He was

defended with great difficulty.

"It is plain to me, and to those who sit in judgment on you, that you are no murderer. Let alone of a

defenseless girl at your mercy in the dark, your young wife, looking to you for love and protection,

receiving death at your hands. Clearly, monsieur, there is a momentous reason. Tell us."

"No," said Roland Coville. "I can tell you nothing at all."

"But it may save your life, monsieur."

Roland shook his head. He looked only sad and very young.

"But monsieur, for God's sake. This will end in your hanging. Don't you prefer to live?"

Roland looked surprised, as if he were unsure. "Perhaps not."

"His face," said the lawyer after, considerably shaken, "was like, I think, that of a woman I once heard of.

She had been shown the mechanism of the human body, its heart, viscera, intestines, all the tubes and

organs that support life. And having seen, she was so disgusted at the method whereby she lived that,

when she got home, she cut her wrists and died. To be rid of it all. Just so, he looked, my Roland

Coville. He isn't reluctant to die."

Once, during the examination at Paradys, Roland was asked about the lacerations on the fingers of his

right hand. He answered that his wife, Marie, had indeed bitten him.

"And this was during her final moments, as she fought for her life?"

"No. It happened earlier."

"Then your wife behaved violently toward you?"

"No," said Roland.

"But you say that she bit you without any act on your part that would have invited her so to do."

"No, I did not say this."

"Monsieur Coville, we must be precise. When was it that these bites occurred?"

Roland hesitated. "When I touched the lips of Marie."

"But this, then, was an extreme and unloving response."

"Perhaps."

"Did you kill her because of this? Because of her attack on you?"

Roland Coville thought for a moment, and then said, "Would it be deemed a suitable defense, to kill a

woman because she had bitten me?"

"No, monsieur, of course it would not."

"I did not," said Roland, "kill Marie because of the bite."

"Why, then? You are bound to speak. The weight of this assembly, and of the law itself, insist."

"I can and will say nothing," said Roland Coville. "It is beyond me to say it." And then in a sudden and

conclusive passion he screamed, so the room echoed and dinned, the spectators and the judges recoiled,

"It would be as if you tore out my heart, to say it. It would be as if you cut out my tongue. Nothing.

Nothing! I will say nothing."

And so he was judged a murderer. He was condemned. In a small gray yard at sunrise he would be

hanged.

But in the cell, before that, he must confront the confessor, the priest who was to hear his final

statements, and who must, of them all, get the truth from him.

"I can't tell you," said Roland Coville to the priest who angrily confronted him.

"You have forfeited your life," said the priest. "Is this not enough? You have spat upon the robe of God,

and upon the gift he gave you."

"No, father," said Roland. "God knows, and understands, what I have done. And why."

And his face was then so pitifully pared, trusting, and desperate, so positive of the pity of God after all,

that the angry priest was softened.

"Come, then," he said, "make what confession you can. I will absolve you, and God must do the rest."

Roland then knelt down, and unburdened himself of all his crimes, which were none of them terrible, but

for that one. And then he spoke of that too, quietly and stilly. "I strangled my young wife, she was only

seventeen, and I loved her. It was on her wedding night, in our bed. She was a virgin and died so. I killed

her with no compunction, and would do it again." And then, head bowed under the hands of the priest,

he added softly, "For my reasons, I believe such things can't be spoken of. This would be like showing

the face of the Devil. How can I be responsible for that?"

The priest was in the end very sorry for him. He was a handsome and a good young man, guilty of

nothing but the one appalling and senseless act. The priest absolved Roland Coville, and went away to

watch all through the night before the execution, in the little church on a slanting street of the City. And

when through the narrow window a nail of light pierced in and fell on the crucifix and the white flowers,

the priest knew the rope in the gray yard had performed its office, and one more benighted soul had

struggled forth into the Infinite, toward long anguish or the life eternal, or toward oblivion, for he was a

wise priest, faithful and doubting, a man like men.

Two days after the execution of Roland Coville, the priest was brought a letter. It was on the paper

obtained in the prison, and came from the dead man, written in the last hour of his life. As such it had

extraordinary weight. But on opening it anxiously, the priest read these words: "I cannot after all go into

the night without passing on this burden that has consumed me. Forgive me, father, that I turn to you.

Who else can I rely on? Who else can bear it?"

And after that the priest read on, and the scales fell from his eyes, the dark glass was clear before him.

He did not believe, then he believed. And he locked the letter from Roland Coville away in a place where

none could come at it, not even he himself. And there it stayed for seven years, burning slowly through

the wall of the safe and of his mind.

One spring, when the roads were muddy, a priest came to the village by means of the coach that stopped

there once a month, and he inquired for the domicile of the family Desbouchamps. On being directed, he

took himself off toward the manor house in the meadows. The lanes were spare and washed with rain,

the tall poplars swept the sky. The manor had lost its roselike abundance and seemed now decaying, the

shutters half off, the lofts rotting. No doves flew from the cotes. A dog barked only sullenly in the

courtyard.

To his inquiry at the kitchen door, the housekeeper shook her head. "Mistress sees no one." The priest

indicated his habit. "What does she want with another priest? She's had enough of you, burying the

master."

But he won through, because he had set his mind to it. He stood with his habit and his bag and would not

go. Finally a thin old woman of no more than forty years came down to the cold parlor, where drapes

were on the furnishings, and she made no pretense at removing them or lighting the fire. The hearth gaped

black, and cold whistled down the chimney. She leaned to it and rubbed her hands.

"We are unfortunate," said Madame Desbouchamps. "In a year, everything must be sold. Those men,

those men in their holy day coats!" (She presumably meant the lawyers.)

"I'm very sorry to hear it."

"It's been a great loss. Ever since monsieur died. It was the tragedy killed him. He always loved her so."

And over her worn and discarded face there crossed a slinking jealousy, out in the open now, having no

need any more to hide. Marie-Mai was dead, and her loving father was as dead as she, why dissemble?

"Your daughter, do you mean?" asked the priest with some care. "But she was very young to die."

"Murdered," said madame, "in her bridal bed."

The priest said what was inevitable.

"You will have heard," said Madame Desbouchamps. "It was the talk of the City. They made up songs

about it, the filthy wretches."

The priest had never heard one, and was glad. He said, "I believe I caught a rumor of the case. The

bridegroom had no motive for his action. The girl was innocent and chaste."

Madame Desbouchamps compressed her lips like withered leaves. She sat a long while in utter silence,

and he intuitively allowed this. At length, the blossom came.

"She was a sly girl," said the mother. "She hid things, was secretive. She was no daughter to me. I knew

no better then. But it was never affection she gave me. She saved that for her father, a clever pass. I

remember, her courses came early. She wasn't nine years, she was crying and there was blood, and I

said, Let me see, Marie, what's the matter with you? But she ran away. And the blood stopped, and then

there was no more till the proper time. She was eleven years then. She wasn't fearful when it happened,

only asked me for a napkin."

The priest might have been astonished and shocked at being awarded such information. Even in country

people madame's reminiscence was forthright. But in fact he was not thinking of this. He had gone very

pale. And she, she had a crafty look, as if she had meant to tell him something, and saw that she had.

"Poor young girl," said the priest after a few moments. "What a loss to you, the daughter, then the

husband. Where are they buried?"

"And the house," interjected the woman brutishly. Then she said, "On the land. The Desbouchamps bury

their dead close. Now what shall I do? The land's no longer mine."

"Their graves must be moved, madame," said the priest.

"I'll show you," she said. And again there was the flash of malign conspiracy. As if she knew what he was

at, liked it, although that could hardly be.

It was a little mausoleum, like a Roman tomb, not unusual among wealthy country families. Through the

grille he glimpsed the shape of coffins. He would need a pick to smash the lock, but the place was up the

hill, hidden by trees and deserted. They chained the three last dogs by night, and there were only a pair of

old men now on the estate.

So, at two in the morning, he duly returned, with his pickax and his lantern.

The incongruity of what he did had ceased to irk him. He was beyond that. The letter burning through the

safe had gradually seared out his ethics. He struck the lock and broke it with four blows, each of which

echoed away along the valley, but no light fluttered up in the manor house, no one rushed from the

buildings, not even the owls hooted.

The stench and awfulness of the mausoleum did not check him either, for he had been expecting them,

and once or twice he had stood over an opened grave, the stink of it worse than excrement or sewers in

its omen of mortality.

Her box, the coffin of Marie-Mai, he located without difficulty, knowing what to look for. He dredged up

the cobwebs and saw the tracks of a squirrel over the lid—it must have come in at the broken grille.

What had attracted it to this one case alone? For it had ignored the others. Shuddering, the priest levered

up the planks. He saw what he had reckoned to see, the bones of a young girl whose young girl's skin

had gone to mummy and fallen away, some strands and traces of hair, the crumbled wedding garments in

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TANITHLEETHEBOOKOFTHEDEADTheSecretBooksofParadys3Firstpublishedin1991byTheOverlookPressLewisHollowRoadWoodstock,NewYork12498Copyright©1991byTanithLeeAllRightsReserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproducedortransmittedinanyformorbyanymeans,electronicormechanical,includingphototcopy,recording,oranyin...

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Tanith Lee - Paradys 3 - The Book of the Dead

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