by Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee says: “Since my early teens, I was interested in Poe. At sixteen, a friend lent me a huge Collected Works. In this was ‘Berenice’. I read the story and couldn’t understand the basic, if horrifying, scenario. One night I read it again and thought, with darkest horror, so that’s it! My friend, an intelligent young woman, hadn’t got it at all. I’ve been haunted by the tale for years.”
* * * * *
Proprium humani ingenil est odisse quem laeseris.
It is part of human nature to abhor the one you harm.
—Tacitus
Only some while after the events I shall recount, did I learn of them, and only then, too, was I told — in that kind of secrecy, the seal of which demands, finally, to be broken — of the concluding scenes of the tragedy of the man known solely to me as Egaeus, and his cousin Berenice.
The Family was immensely rich, and not, in itself, unpowerful. But for their male relative, Egaeus, he was a scholar and a recluse. He had no interest, it seemed, in outer things. He dwelled within the House, among his books and personal fascinations. Something of an invalid, he appeared himself to have confessed that his observation and character were actually obsessive perhaps to the point of slight mania. An eccentric, then, yet he did no harm and caused his Family neither distress nor shame. Until, alas, the last acts of his life.
The Family records have it that some while before that time, he had become engaged to marry his cousin, who also lived in the House. Initially the arrangement had seemed to be completely to her liking, and to his, although his generally remote manner did not evince an especially passionate delight. She was however, a lovely young woman, gently vivacious, slender, pale and clear as a lily, seeming ideal in all forms. What else could such a sensitive aficionado of the Fine, indeed the Perfect, as Egaeus, tolerate. Dynastically, and in other ways, their match suited their House exactly.
Most unfortunately nevertheless, and with no warning, a malady of incalculable proportions then struck down Berenice, she who had been the hale and able-bodied partner of the cousins. Far more ill than Egaeus the misfortuned girl became, shocking all, and her ailment, both mysterious and intransigent, had, it turned out, no negotiable cure.
While Egaeus reportedly declared: “I knew her not— or knew her no longer as Berenice.”
The disease involved, additionally, a form of what is detailed as epilepsy, whose fits could induce a death-like trance. Although her recoveries from these attacks were ‘startlingly abrupt.’
Perhaps it might go without saying, in the atmosphere of this, Egaeus’s own sickness grew worse. Which brought on additionally an increase in his morbid exaggeration of attention to the most ordinary matters and objects. He would lose himself nights long in staring at the flame of a lamp, or whole days lost in the scent of some plant. He considered these obsessions ‘frivolous.’
Naturally, one may not be amazed by any of that, given what had fallen on Berenice.
Yet while feeling perhaps mostly aesthetic distress for his cousin, he began to be obsessive over the physical changes he noted in her—
Let it be said too, rather repellently, he now admitted to never having loved her, and indeed that he had already come to regret the inevitable tradition of marriage that would normally join them forever, and was like a shackle to him.
There arrived instead a period, then, during which, perhaps predictably, he saw Berenice in a fresh and feverishly repulsive light. It seemed to him her dark hair had gone yellow; had it so? Her unlustred eyes had lost both pupils and color. Last of all, he noted the teeth of Berenice. They, unlike the remainder of her vanquished frame, looked to have grown uniquely and flawlessly long, white and obdurate.
He dwelled then upon them, both when viewing them, and in subsequent reverie. They represented to him now a separate Power, and a very strong one, where Berenice was no longer humanly vital in the least. They seemed to him, as it were, independent beings in their own adamantine right.
Not so long after the revelation of her teeth to him, his cousin abruptly died, amid a terrible outcry that shook the House like an earthquake.
Her own destiny, her destination now, could only be the doors of the grave, and presently the burial was performed in the grounds of the House, and the doors of the Sarcophagus shut fast as the frozen lids of two dead eyes. Following which all else too certainly might have been expected desolately to calm and to decay.
But, for Egaeus at least, it did not.
* * * * *
On the exact evening of her interment, he awakened in the library, where he sat so very often.
He afterwards alluded to feelings both of wild excitement and vague horror. But he could, apparently, make nothing comprehensive of his own mood. Yet he seemed, even so, to hear the shrieking of a female voice on and on in his head. He had, he thought, ‘done a deed’— but what?
A small box lay on the table by him, rather oddly, and it made him shudder, if again in utter ignorance as to why.
This blissful ignorance was not to linger.
In another while, a servant crept into the room. The man was plainly in an agony of fear. It seemed a shrieking had indeed occurred, cracking wide the vaulted silence of the night. This had sent the entire Household, (aside, evidently, from the self-locked Egaeus himself) in the direction of the unholy noise: which, it transpired, was the now-violated tomb of Berenice.
The servant next, shivering and wan, pointed out to Egaeus that Egaeus’s clothes were filthy with damp earth and soil, and — far worse — thick with blood. The servant in sequence indicated a muddied spade left leaning on the library wall. Only at this did Egaeus reach out and grasp the strange little box on the table, then uncontrollably dropped it at once. Thus he beheld how it broke in bits. And from it, with a rattling note, there flew out the brutal and cruel instruments of dental surgery. Plus thirty-two ‘small, white and ivory-looking substances’ that were cast all about the floor.
It would appear that even at such a juncture, Egaeus did not immediately identify them as teeth; the perfect and vital teeth of his dead cousin, Berenice.
* * * * *
I have to confide here that what amazed me when initially informed of all this, was Egaeus’s total and continuing, likely genuine, unawareness and misunderstanding of what he had actually done— which was, evidently, to break into his cousin’s Sarcophagus and rip and cut, by means of the dental implements he had somehow acquired, every exquisite, long, white tooth from her head. He appeared to persist in believing he had effected this admittedly, at least, in a sort of trance, surely one as intense as any of her own during her sickness, solely because of his insane obsession with minute details. But it goes really without saying, does it not, why he was driven to carry out so vile and disgusting a deed? He had plainly become aware, in some annex even of his convoluted mind, that Berenice had become, although by what means he did not know, nor do any, it seems, a vampire. And in order to save others, not to mention the denizens of his ancestral House, he had gone at once to deprive her of her major weapon, her piercing fangs. That he brought them back with him, perhaps, is in itself curious and disturbing. But then, he would, that way, have them with him, a proof of her disarming. If any further proof of the fact — and the efficacy — of the action is demanded, the awful shrieking that resulted in the tomb unarguably furnished it. The truly dead do not shriek. That are dead. But Egaeus’s cousin was Un-dead. And by his peculiar and frankly alarming single-mindedness, he rendered, or attempted to, a great service to the rest of the area.
The history of this, then might end here. But it does not. For subsequent occurrences take the dreadful affair farther, unless one does not at all in any way credit the rest of the report which was rendered me. We are all the judges and arbitrators of our own opinions, or we should be. Each then must draw his conclusion, as it seems apt to him.
* * * * *
The House did not expose Egaeus to any external or public justice. They did not desire, no doubt, such an exposure themselves. Instead they kept him, as ever, a rare and useless flower, in his tropic case, and in addition, their own unofficial prisoner now. He kept his few favorite rooms and was denied meanwhile any access to the outer environs, including the remainder of the Mansion. Let alone did he retain any social unity with members of his Family Tribe. Servants, choicelessly selected, two particular men, exclusively waited on him, servitors and jailers. They seldom spoke to him beyond the barest phrase. Very likely he would not have minded this at all. He had never been garrulous, nor desirous of intimacy, when in the mode of his original life. He was fed, kept in clean linen, awarded minor comforts and all necessities. He was ‘forgotten’, erased from thought.
Some months passed through various dismal seasons towards a sunless summer. Beyond the gracious windows of the blinded, shadowy building, the park of trees hung thickly massed with heavy and leaden leaves, as if packs of whispering creatures had gathered on their boughs, to watch and monitor, savagely and mockingly, the goings on of human things.
Apparently it was a nocturnal of full moon, white rifts of glare flung like bolts of bleached flame across and over the grounds and the House, making distorted patchwork most deceptive to the clearest eye.
As usual, Egaeus was not abed, although it was well past the second hour of the morning. In the library he sat. At that same table. The spade and the fatal box, with its contents, had, naturally, seasons before, been removed. There was by then no physical clue to history, even for him.
* * * * *
In what he expressed later, it seems he said, first and foremost: “It was as formerly. Without preface or omen, she appeared again before me, in vacillating and indistinct outline. And, exactly as before, if now with entire astonishment, a freezing chill ran through me, sole to crown.”
The old ‘consuming curiosity’ he at once felt also, seemingly, if one would say most strangely, given such circumstances.
A vast exaggeration, nevertheless, had been added to the vision. If when yet, previously, she lived, the emaciation of her ruined body had attained for him so extreme and livid a pitch, she had at the time stayed as some vestige still of Berenice. Now not so. She was currently most like a skeleton, and clad only in part-translucent flakes of her shroud, and the thinnest, least textural gauze of a partly transparent skin. Through this inadequate veil her bones themselves, it seemed to him this night, or so he averred, were themselves half transparent, thin as milky and discolored water.
Her eyes, he said, were now as well entirely empty of any ocular feature. They were quite white, lacking, it would seem, all ability to see. And yet she did, for she advanced towards him, weightlessly as something blown, and stood on the opposite side of the table on which, so much earlier, her severed teeth had sat bleeding in their tiny prison-box.
Before, of course, he had noted primarily the presence of those teeth in her mouth. Now, in a ghastly parody of remembrance, Berenice, or whatever remnant of Berenice here remained, opened wide her colorless lips to reveal the colorless and shriveled vacant gums. Not one fang had been left embedded there. He had been scrupulous, after all.
And then, he said, and those that later wrote down his trembling and enfeebled words, agreed that he seemed to faint even as he voiced them, “And then my cousin spoke to me.”
She spoke some while. He made no try, during his recital, to describe her voice. Conceivably her vocality was now quite beyond analysis, or connection. She did not at first, nor at any point in her monologue, which I was not surprised he made no attempt to interrupt, either for a question or a mere exclamation, to outline how she had come to her vampiric Fate. Instead she set upon Egaeus, at once and completely, the razor edges of an awful and diabolically resentful wrath.
“I had loved you,” it seems she said. “You were to be my husband and my lord. For this I had waited patiently and for so very long. But when events befell me, you treated me with such an evil and Satanically indifferent cruelty, that I cannot comprehend it. Nor can or could I ever forgive it.”
Berenice told Egaeus that what he had done to her, in the matter of her dentition, was nothing less than the most sordid and granite-hearted injustice he might have coined. For, having become what then she was, how else was she to sustain her altered ‘life’— it would seem too, that ‘life’ was how she referred to the Un-dead fix in which she had found herself.
Dependent on her teeth, Egaeus had robbed her of them, and so left her in an abyss of remedyless pain and despair. This then, the final gift of her reluctant husband. Thereafter, toothless, she had persisted in a limbo of wilting, writhing desuetude, unable either to maintain herself or to cease to be. Dead, she could not die. She languished in Hell, in extremes of torture, those physical enough still, and highly cognitive, aside, of course, from her rage and suffering at his ineffable and indifferent malice and ‘spite’.
After these stanzas, a silence fell in the library, or so Egaeus afterwards recalled. He lay back, he said, barely conscious in his chair. But in those moments, once more startling and terrifying him, her skeletal wraith slid lightly up onto the table-top, with the ease of a swimming imp.
He found then, to his utmost dread, this too astounding him— since he thought he had reached the limit of his responsive endurance, she leaned forward to him, closer and ever closer, until her vile and barely viewable face had slipped near enough he feared indeed that she might place her shriveled lifeless lips on his. But no doing that, she arched up her frightful neck, like that of a grayish snake. And from this neck, once lovely and now outside every boundary of both the real and the describable, a phalanx of what appeared to him to be, for several frenzied nightmare moments, long, spiny teeth protruded after all, not from her lips, but out of her very throat.
Before he could do anything, even to cry aloud in terror, these fang-like protuberances elongated further, and with vast ease, or so it looked to him, in a moment or so more, they had gained and touched his own throat, and its vital vein.
He was aware instantly of a drawing, which he had, now and then previously experienced on being medically bled by a physician. But all about, the darkling room dimmed suddenly, as would a window in the stormy curtain-fall of deepest night. The very last words she spoke to him, or so he believed, were these: “But for my kind, dear husband, there are other ways. What an obscure slow numbskull you always were, and have remained.”
After which Egaeus knew no more, until he woke, late the morning after. By then it transpired, he was dying. He had been leached of most of his blood.
Through some massive intransigence of will, which very seldom before had he demonstrated, save maybe on the night he unwittingly drew the fangs of Berenice, he gave his final statements and avowals to the two cold, unwilling and, by now, frenziedly revolted servants. Others also, however, witnessed the testament. It is their report which has come into my possession.
Egaeus died writhing with an icy fever, screaming sometimes, not more than five hours following this. He left an ultimate menu of instructions, which one at least faithfully, or perhaps merely in pure fearfulness, had also, and conceivably inaccurately, written down. This read, when translated from the jumble of the dying, wrecked mind: “When deceased, every tooth in my head, every bone in my frame, must be smashed like broken bottle-glass. My heart must be pierced, my head, perhaps, disassociated from my neck. I must be burned, and the ashes interred in some deep vault.” There was no more after this, nor perhaps was any needed.
* * * * *
As I have stated, you, or any other, will believe my account, or not. For myself, I am uncertain even as to what, thereafter, was finally concluded upon by the great Family. Let alone any alternative authority. Besides, could any creature rest, if ever so dealt with?
The House has long since fallen, stone on stone. The trees are dead and lie in ranks. Those Sarcophagae remaining in the grounds have also lost their shape and meaning. Maybe, whatever Power may briefly oust him, and itself drive the chariot of poor, helpless Man, when once it lets go, this is always ultimately the result. Creatures of air and wind, we: vehicles, playthings of the gods.
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