THE WATERS OF SORROW

The dead live in the trees. But in winter, when the trees are bare, the dead go down after the fallen leaves, into the waters, and hide there, in the glowing dark.

The dead are cruel. They have reasons to be.

And they dance.

* * * *

Back in the old days, when some of us were children, and some, of course, not yet born, the only boats on the River were the kind with paddle and sail. But for a while now we have had the levisteamers, which travel two or three feet above the River’s surface, with only their steel ‘sippers’ trailing down in it to suck up wet fuel for the fired pod. And the long trails of white steam go fluffing out behind them, like the feathers of a swan in moult.

When the first few of these craft appeared they were a marvel. Folk would take a special journey to the shore to watch them go by. Some still swear the wide River grew wider, and its water grew darker green because of the constant churning. Others tell you they have eaten fresh hot steam-cooked fish straight from the water. Certainly, the birds that use the riverbank roost higher up. But in half a dozen years anyway, we had a handful of steam-chariots too on the inland tracks, and now and then a pretty coloured balloon-pod would sail across the sky.

It was about then that the levisteam showboat came down the River.

She was a lovely sight, the boat, green and gold and polished up like a medal. No matter she had an unlucky name. The Vilya she was called. After all those girls that die of broken hearts when their lovers betray or abandon them, those dead girls who live in the trees or the waters, and come out on certain nights of the year to catch men - any man - since to any vilya, by that hour of their living hating death, any man may have been a traitor to all or any woman. And they lure him, with their weird dead beauty, to dance, until his own heart, or his lungs, go out and he dies. Or else they cast him under the River. There was and are stories even now of a particular lady, daughter of a rich businessman in the steam-power trade. Her name was Myrra, for that Biblical ointment of mourning. He gave her the name at an ignorant fancy, it would seem, but it turned out a prophecy too, because her lover jilted her two days before their wedding, and she broke her own heart - by driving a dagger through it. Five or fifteen years after, depending on who tells the tale, the wrongdoer strayed back to his former haunts. And one midnight, as he smoked his cigar in the woods, she found him, Myrra. Beautiful and unhuman and terrible she must have seemed to him, with her long, uncombed hair and flimsy garment, and her skin, white as the live-dead ancient moon, staring at him from them. She made him dance too, dance till he fell into the River, where she and her fellow vilyas drowned him, but very slowly, they say, very, very slowly.

Even today you can find entirely blameless men who will refuse to leave their homes, be they mansion or hut; they will not set one foot out of doors on such nights when the moon is full. But nowadays they are generally old men, who remember when the River was empty of steam traffic, and only horse-carts and carriages on the roads, and birds to cross the sky.

* * * *

It was becoming respectable for women to go to the theatre without male escort, providing they did not go singly. So Ghisla slipped on to the showboat with a bevy of other young women, as if she were part of their group. They were strangers though and she quite alone. She was nervous, yet eager. She had heard of the play from her mother’s customers at the haberdashery shop in the town. Due to the shop as well, Ghisla had been able to kit herself out quite nicely, in a plain white gown, hair combs and proper gloves. It was a warm night, and all along the track to the River, the crickets were tuning up like tiny violins. Set up by the Vilya’s stage hands, coloured lanterns lit the trees.

“Such an exotic name for the boat,” the gossips had cried. “Vilya! My goodness. But he is exotic, everyone knows that, the Prince.”

As she wrapped their ribbons and stockings, Ghisla had listened. She was sixteen, quite tall, and slender as a reed, graceful too, which she somehow realized without naming it to herself, let alone ever having had anyone tell her. Her mother certainly never told Ghisla such things. What Ghisla must aim for, her mother always said, was to be virtuous, polite, modest, and hardworking. She must help her mother, who herself had toiled so ceaselessly she had aged in looks, voice and personality to an embittered crone of sixty by the time she was thirty-three. But the mother’s husband had died of coughing fits when Ghisla was only seven years old. Another betrayer, Ghisla’s father, heartlessly running off with death like that, and leaving the pair of them to cope as best they could.

Ghisla’s hair was very black and silky. She had put it up on her head with the four green combs to support it. Her eyes were that kind of brown that looks like jet at dusk or by moonlight, but under sun or a lamp go the colour of Amontillado sherry with a dash of gold in it.

The exhausted mother was already in her bed by the time Ghisla left their little apartment behind the shop. But light lingered in the sky, it was not yet nine o’clock and the show began late. When Ghisla reached the River and went up the broad gang-plank just behind the other girls, the air and the water were like pale amber. But on the boat, and seated in the gilded gallery’s front row, only the steam lamps shone, and outside darkness fell swiftly. It was like being in a cradle too. The boat, now grounded on water, rocked softly at her moorings. Which made Ghisla a little giddy, but she did not mind.

Then the lights went down, and the stage burned up, and out he came, to great applause, the actor-manager they called the ‘Prince’. His name in fact was Lutz Alvarek. His hair was long, ice-blond-white, and his eyes were of a clear gleaming glacial blue, like a blue topaz. Tanned by the summer, and accented by his stage make-up, he was fit to knock anyone else’s eyes quite out. He stood there in his elegant costume and welcomed his audience, and they clapped and cheered, and the women sighed. The drama was to be a play known as To Hunt the Hidden Sword. But the showboat had brought to it one further startling element. The main female character, a femme fatal of enormous beauty and treachery, Bithida, was played in this version by a steam mannequin, a life-size doll run on fire, water and clockwork. It was able to move and to make a variety of gesturings, although an actress must supply the voice from the wings.

The novelty of the doll was what had brought Ghisla to the boat. She was yet child enough, you see, and had possessed no doll since her father’s death. For the past week she had offered extra assistance to customers - sewing on lace, replacing buttons - and kept back the payment for her ticket. True, she had felt guilty about this, but only in a vague and childish way which now she put aside. She had had great practice in doing so, since her mother had always made a point of ensuring Ghisla would suffer guilt whenever possible.

When Prince Lutz appeared and then went away again, Ghisla still longed to see the moving doll. But also, with a peremptory and sore desire, to see again Prince Lutz. Unlike guilt, in her deprived existence she had never before experienced such a feeling.

Perhaps you will believe that, even when he instantly appeared once more in the thick of the play, and her heart leapt up as if it had caught fire, even then she did not realize she had fallen in love at first sight with him. She had never seen a man like him, obviously, had no chance to. And he was very wonderful to behold, Prince Lutz Alvarek, anyone will tell you that.

The play went on, with some intervals, quite a time. But it was full of sensation—poisonings, stabbings, the lurid uncovering of secrets—only its high moral tone had made permissable giving it a public airing at all.

Perhaps Ghisla was bemused. Or did she properly notice the dramatic events? Bithida the doll was herself very captivating, though in the end rather disappointing. Not least because clouds of steam tended to furl out of her whenever movement was required. Beyond the doll’s initial entrance, and one subsequent exit, her motion was soon limited to slow turns of the head, wafting gestures of the hands, and the occasional blink of two cobalt eyes.

The audience thrilled to everything, however. The atmos­phere buzzed and sparkled, cheers, groans and involuntary oaths scorched to the roof, and echoed out into the riverine night, where the lanterns by now guttered and only golden and crimson fireflies spangled the trees.

But in the end the play finished, as all plays, and all things, eventually do.

By then, you might imagine, Ghisla was wrung out, in a sort of trance or dream. Not wanting the play ended, of course, for then he too would vanish from the stage and from the world. Without thought even, she grew aware that then—now—this inexplicable joy somehow caused only by him, would leave her with him. Surely, surely she did now grasp that what she felt was love—or was this fact unavailable to her, poor girl? Had it not seemed to her that, during the concluding act, he had looked up into her eyes very often, held her gaze which, in any case, could not look away from his, even if his eyes were blue lightning, or shards of silver glass—But all her usual dreary and meaningless existence was crowding back to her, smoking over her heart and mind, as she sat alone on the gilt gallery, and the mass of other theatre-goers ebbed, like the dry ice and steam, away into the bar, and so into the firefly dark, returning to all their own realities, arduous or horrible or sweet. And when the last of them had gone, and the last internal lamp was fading, as if fading too, still Ghisla sat there. She must have forgotten how to stand up and independently move. Or, like steam-driven Bithida, was restricted from anything more than the slow turn of her head, meaningless flick of her hand, the infrequent blinking of her eyes.

* * * *

Prince Lutz turned himself to find Heine in the doorway of the dressing-cabin.

“They say there’s a young woman sitting up in the gallery still.”

To Heine’s curiosity Lutz Alvarek, who had sloughed his make-up, paled.

“Where on the gallery?”

“At the very front . . . that pretty one with dark hair and the white dress. Maybe you noted her. Oh, no doubt you did, Lutz, knowing you.”

“You know nothing about me, Heine,” said Lutz, in the cold and arrogant manner he could suddenly adopt, often taking his fellow actors by surprise. Though they failed to like these turns in him, they checked at the signal, for he was not only their star but their banker, and mostly they had no wish to anger him.

“I meant no offence, Prince.”

“Good. Then tell me why she’s there.”

“Ermelind says she thinks the girl may be unwell—”

“In God’s name—” said Lutz. Next moment he was out of the cabin and running up the ladder to the higher decks. Doing that he heard the low thrum of the boat’s pod, and too the whispery drinking of its sipper-tube, working now in the black River below. But reaching the upper levels where such noises were less, they were with him still. He knew then it was the tension in him. For he had indeed noted the girl on the gallery. Once or twice during the performance he had looked steadily straight into her eyes. It was not the first, naturally, he had ever done such a thing. Maybe seldom with such purpose. But she was so young. So fragile. What had befallen her?

* * * *

By now it was well after midnight, nearer one in the morning. The smoke-cloud of her mean life had completed its re-conquest of Ghisla.

She had stood up, bemused and uncertain still, but able to move, able to leave the boat with the strange unlucky name, to pick her way back along the black wooded bank, to reach the town streets and the loveless apartment behind her mother’s shop, slip into her cramped and loveless bed, into her loveless and unlovely place in the real world.

As she went up the gallery towards the exit, a man’s tall figure abruptly filled the doorway.

Ghisla stopped. She felt a little sad twinge of fear.

She had stayed too long, was in the wrong as always, and would now be scolded and abused. Perhaps even she had broken the law—

“My God,” he said, “in this dark you seem—Are you a ghost?”

For a second she did not know who spoke to her. Or she did, surely? Yes, she must have done, that marvellous voice of his that had filled her ears for three hours and more.

She became less fearful. More terrified. She said nothing. Was afraid to speak.

And then he stood directly in front of her, so much taller than she, and still in the flamboyant clothes he had worn for the play. He carried a scent too of the stage—the steamy footlights, the metal doll, the grease-paint and candlewax, sawdust and fire.

She looked up into his face and his pale gem-stone eyes burned out of it as they had from the flamelit stage.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” Mundane words, such as might be spoken by handmaidens when a dead god rose and appeared before them, and was known.

“Yes. And it is you. Are you well?”

“Oh, yes . . . no—”

And what indeed was she, this young girl that no one had ever spoken to in such a caressive, meaning-filled way, that nobody ever asked of whether she was well or not, or if she was a ghost, that nobody had ever greeted with such evident ardour: It is you. You.

Prince Lutz led her quietly out, across the darkened and vacant bar. Elsewhere the other actors, the stage-hands and boatmen, held their own follies, a dim rumble of noises, chink of bottles; while the sipper sipped the River and the River rocked the boat gently, so he caught the girl’s arm to steady her. And as they moved on across the scene-shifting half-light, under the beam of a single lamp on deck he saw her face, her neck and shoulders, her piled-up hair with its River-green combs, her eyes now cool black, now the warm of copper and bronze. He halted her there, in that soft beam, and said, so softly to her, “How beautiful you are. More beautiful even than I thought you from the stage. I’ve been waiting for you a long while. Did you know that? No? Well, my love, now you do.” And now she did.

* * * *

The dead live in the trees, or in the waters. No doubt they watch the final scene of this First Act.

It occurs about three in the morning, there in the darkness of the wooded bank, some way upstream from where the golden showboat Vilya is anchored.

There is a rustling and snapping to begin with, a sound of torn cloth and small tearing branches, undergrowth that is trampled, however lightly. And breathing, fast respiratory stabs.

And then the white figure appears, with a flurry of combless undone hair like new tearings from the material of the night. Straight to the brink of the bank, the brink of the River she runs, the young woman in her torn white dress. And then she stands quite motionless as if, all over again, she has forgotten movement, even—now—how to flex her wrists or turn her head.

Tears stream from her eyes.

She stands there on the brink, holding her hands like frozen steel against her breasts, weeping, her emotion so colossal it seems she smiles or laughs. And then a spasm of movement after all quakes all through her, and her eyes shut. Weightless as a swan’s feather she drifts over from the bank and falls floatingly into the dark below. Which opens like many pale arms, unearthly out of the black, receiving her, drawing her in and down to sanctuary and oblivion.

They know. Those ones who have dropped down here before. The girls betrayed, the girls like Myrra, they know how the heart breaks, and the taste of deep water.

Only ripples then, only silence then. It never changes, in the end, the way we mislay things in the dark.

* * * *

Lutz Alvarek came back to the town and to the River five years later. He travelled firstly down to the city in his big steamwheeler car, that had once been painted and trimmed, green and gold, like the Vilya, but which by now was plain black and chrome. At the city he stabled the ‘wheeler and, with just twenty others, boarded the steambus, that old panting rattler only some of us anymore remember; she was nicknamed Puffing Pankra.

Alvarek did all that to avoid too much notice in the town. Then it was a small place still, and quiet.

Probably some of us did recall Prince Lutz. No doubt a number of the women did, would you say, those that watched him on the showboat. But by then too Vilya was long gone with Alvarek’s former employee, Heine. Some people said that Heine was gifted the Vilya by Lutz, to keep Heine dumb about something or other, though this gossip had never come so far as the town. In any event, even without his boat, Lutz had kept his career all glowing bright. He had stayed a success, a great actor many claimed, and he was as handsome as he ever had been, they said too, even the ones who reckoned he had committed some crime. But we need to remember anyway, he was only twenty-two years of age on his earlier visit. And now he was only twenty-seven.

It seemed he went first of all to the registrar’s office, but why and for what nobody guessed. And then, very oddly, he turned down one of the town’s curling streets and fetched up by, of all unlikely spots, a haberdashery.

“I was never so astonished,” said the lady who now ruled the shop. She had had to explain to Prince Lutz also that the former owner had sold up and gone away five years before. “I said, it was after her daughter died so young, poor little Ghisla who fell in the River and was drowned.” But Prince Lutz had brushed that aside, rather callously, the present shop owner decided: “which was peculiar, since until then he was the perfect gentleman. A lovely handsome man he was, though,” she added. “And he was nicer again presently, and asked me a question or two. I confess, I watched him as he strode off up the street.”

It was a fact Ghisla’s mother had sold this woman the shop. Ghisla’s mother had been mourning the loss of her bondslave Ghisla, without whom she could not, she said repeatedly and bitterly, manage. No one knew where Ghisla’s mother had since taken herself, and perhaps nobody cared.

Lutz spent little more time in the town. He went off into the country land beyond. The ones who had identified him wondered why he had come back, and hoped he might be going to stage another drama there. But he never did that. It was the last any of them saw of him.

* * * *

There had been a scene with Heine, however, all those long short five years before.

It happened on the night following the night already described—that night when Prince Lutz and Ghisla met in the theatrical afterdark.

The next evening’s performance was once more done, but it had ended earlier on this second night, around eleven, owing to a mechanical failure of the steam doll Bithida, which had needed improvising over.

Everything settled, and the patrons having left, most of them not realizing they had missed anything much—the actors sat about the public bar to toast their genius on pulling the occasion through. And it was then that Ermelind gave up her news. Did they know, she asked, a town girl had gone missing, that very pretty one who had lingered on the gallery after yesterday night’s show? It seemed her name was Ghisla. At which another of the players cried did Ermelind not know the poor girl’s body had been found this evening, in the River farther upstream. She was drowned dead as a stone.

Possibly Heine glanced round at that point, to see if the Prince reacted at all. If so, Heine was rewarded. For Lutz, even under his make-up now, had gone white as a cleaned bone. Then, getting up without a word, Lutz walked quickly from the bar.

Until then he had been his usual self, better than ever maybe. But most of them were trained to his sudden moods, as mentioned. Heine as well, but this time he too rose, and went to see where the Prince was heading, and what the Prince might do there.

Heine found him soon enough. Lutz had reached the ladder to the underdecks but not got on to it. Instead he lay, slumped against the inner ribs of the boat. He was, Heine said, out cold, in a faint like death.

It seemed Heine waited, but next Ermelind bustled up, and perhaps at that Lutz stirred, and uttered some moaning noise, and then sat up, his eyes half-shuttered and swimming still, staring at them as if he had no idea in the world who they were, or who he himself was, come to that.

Well, Heine could not resist, he later reportedly said. He bent down and murmured like a lover into Lutz’s ear. “Must have been a shock to you, Prince,” murmured Heine, “her being found so soon after you had her, and then killed her and threw her in the River.”

But it was Heine who got the proper shock. For instantly, like one more doll set going by clockwork and steam, the recumbent Lutz sprang off the deck, and getting hold of Heine, shook him. “His eyes had gone red as rubies,” Heine reportedly said. But they were the last things Heine saw for a while, because Lutz then clouted Heine such a blow on the jaw it knocked him clear across the space and down the ladder to the deck beneath. Unlike the Prince, Heine did not recover his wits for forty minutes, and beside bruises he had three teeth loose for a week.

* * * *

She was not in the cemetery. Five years on the registrar had informed Lutz of that. There had been—how should he say?—some slight difficulty about her death. It appeared she must have gone mad, wandering alone about the woods by the night River, in clothes purloined from her own mother’s shop. One drew the reluctant conclusion she threw herself at length into the water to drown. Suicide. What a waste of a young working life, of a body fit to bear children. It seemed some doctor had protested, but nobody took any notice of his ramblings. He had attended the young woman’s father apparently, and was now entirely out of touch with modern life. The mother? Oh, the registrar could not recollect, but the haberdashery was still there, a silly little shop, catering to the vanities of women . . .

The registrar afterwards, when gossiping about this, said that the man who had wanted to know these matters had seemed eccentric. Although the registrar had initially credited the fellow’s tale that he was a relative, subsequently the registrar thought he might have been lying. At no juncture did the registrar mention the generous tip Lutz had bribed him with. Also the registrar never detected who Lutz might really be. Famous actors of quality were beneath the interest of the registrar.

But the woman in the shop helped Lutz. She had heard the girl was buried on a hillside above the River, about a mile from the town. This was a vernal and mostly unvisited place, rising up in the midst of the trees. It had not cost much to have a grave dug there. A stone had been set on the grave, but marked only with the young girl’s given name, though written in full: Ghisella. “I said I couldn’t swear to it, of course. But he thanked me again, in such a gentlemanly way. It was like talking to royalty. But then, didn’t they call him ‘the Prince’?”

No one, aside from the creatures of the woods, the birds, the trees themselves, the wide River below and sky above, saw him climb up to her grave. By then it was far on in the afternoon, and the sun over to the west. Shadows divided the ground with their long, dark rulings. It was a glade artificially and incidentally fashioned by men, for many of the trees there had been lopped for timber. Those that remained stood forlornly, as if in unease. When would death come back for them?

Without some attention it must have been easy to miss the spot. Lutz Alvarek took care not to. He parted the tall grasses with their spurs of hard dying flowers. The mound was overgrown by briars and tufts, and a young birch had rooted in it, speckled yet ivory white, with thin sprays of greenery that glittered against the sinking day.

Lutz knelt down by the grave.

He put his right hand on the stone, and then, leaning forward, laid his head against it. The angle and the gathering mass of shadows hid his face. He made no sound and did not again move.

All light drained from the sky. The birch turned grey then wan, the sky wan then deepest grey. A star, pink as watered blood, soaked slowly through the darkness.

Lutz had not, did not, move. He too might have been shaped from stone.

What did the trees think of it? Perhaps only that the most horrible guilt can take the strangest forms.

But it was too as if he were waiting. For what?

* * * *

Other than vilyas, sometimes they are known as rusalki, those ones who inhabit the trees or the water. They may be beautiful to see, or vile as the nightmare, but they bring retribution always; there is, the stories tell us, no alternative subject between them, these long-haired female shades, and human men, their partners in that dance of death. They are cruel as the moon, which on nights of its fullness is itself like a deathly marble stone, rounded yet incised with skull-like cavities, lit by a transient golden sheen which allows it, thing of night and underworld that it is, to pass for a shining lamp.

On these nights that are given to them, the dead girls rise from their living tombs of bark or water, they stretch out their long pale arms, and the skull-moon gilds them also, making their skin gleam silk-bright, and their eyes dark emerald as leaves and rivers, and the knotted wildwood of their hair into spiderwebs of spun silver.

Fair or hideous, they are irresistible, the rusalki, the vilyas, and they glide weightless over the earth with their arms holding up the air, and the hungry tides of black fire already dancing in their eyes.

* * * *

Very probably it was the blinding moonlight that roused Lutz.

It was not that he had been sleeping, but he had been in a sort of hypnotized state. He wanted nothing else but to lean his body and his head against the stone marker, his eyes shut, lost in the slow, dull, black dungeon-vault of some inner room that might have been his brain.

But the moon now would not allow this.

It speared in through his eyelids. The rays stuck and stayed like javelins, bisecting his interior prison.

He had no choice but to look, and to come out.

An actor, even in everyday life, it would often be quite difficult to tell what really he thought or felt. Even the old fool of a registrar was mostly reacting to Lutz’s wealth, manner, good clothes and powerful, graceful bearing, when deeming this stranger ‘eccentric’. Jealousy can nearly always brush up its syntax.

Besides, Prince Lutz was accustomed to an audience.

Standing up with the ease of a trained and still quite youthful physique, he glanced around. Did he smile or bow? Perhaps not. Conceivably he judged at once this audience would be hard to win. He raised his brows in a voiceless question, that was all.

None answered.

But the one he faced when he did this seemed to be their leader. Yes, without doubt, she was the feline ruler of the she-pack. All were women, were girls, some extremely young, fourteen or thirteen years he might have guessed, while certain others were much older—that one there a mature woman in her forties . . . But they were, everyone, most beautiful. And each of them—his blood ran colder. Again he turned around and looked about the circle of female beings that enclosed him. How long their hair in every case, some all frosted over silver, all tangled with reeds and weeds—hair like steam and cobwebs—They were white as the best paper otherwise, both their skins and their indecipherable garments. And their eyes were after all not dark, but like pale green pearls. Looking at them he began to see too that while dissimilar, they were each alike, and the most alike of all was the one who led them. There was a green moss in her hair, he saw now, and a flicker of black in her cream-green eyes. But next they all had this moss, this black sparkle, taking their cue from her. He had heard the legends of the riverbank, of course he had. He had named his showboat for them, Vilya.

Therefore Lutz did give a short little bow to their queen. “Ill-met by moonlight,” drawled Lutz, “proud Myrra.”

But Myrra, if so it was her, and like enough it was, gave no answer again.

Then he shrugged. “Since you exist, do what you want. It seems to me, even if I never believed in you for a single minute, I may still have come back to find you. No doubt it’s the only method for me now. I’ve never been free of it, of her. I never will be free of her. All the brilliant moves I’ve made for myself, all the cunning escapes I’ve tried to effect—giving the boat and the business to Heine, running off to the theatre-temples of the cities, hiding in those roles of other men—Ulysses, Doctor Mirabilis, Hamlet—all useless to hide me from myself. My life ended five years ago. So then. Here I am, and you exist. Better do what they say you do. I won’t deny you. Exit. Curtain. No applause necessary, no encore.”

They do not require his permission to begin. Does he feel he has to do it, to be sure they are properly riled, sufficiently aggravated to attack him at once? Or does he, educated, urban sophisticate, yet partly believe he imagines or is dreaming them?

And does he wonder anyway why Ghisla—or Ghisella, as her tomb has it—is not with them, the horde of vilyas. Should she not be here?

Above the glade, a smoky cloud shawls up the moon. There is a low quivering susurrous, a dry crepitation sounding like crickets where no crickets are; also there is a vague persistent rumble under the earth, thunder underground, continuous—drums, where drums too are not.

The vilyas have begun their dance.

Slow and rhythmic as the winding of a serpent, they moved about him, anti-clockwise it goes nearly without saying, as they tell us the dead must, opposite always when passing in again
through the mirror of life. They were so beautiful as they danced they dazzled him, even in his hell of misery they seduced him, but now and then, like a sudden flash of lightning on a dark pool, he saw straight through the shimmer of their charms, and beheld plainly they were also foul, things like decaying carrion, with long yellowish hooked teeth and nails, and their eyes only holes, gleaming up opaque white or hollowing to black, with nothing behind or inside, but a malice so mindless it was an idiocy, yet a killing one nonetheless.

He had started to feel how they touched him, on the face, on the body. Each tiny small little touch went straight through like pins. He felt his skeleton twist, and his muscles displace and cramp, and his blood, so cold, went thin as ice-water.

He began after that to turn irresistibly with them, round and round, but not now of his own volition. He turned like a wine cork in a tidal pool. Slow even so, slow as slow can be. But his entire framework had commenced to resist, as he did not, to crank and to lock and to hurt. Yes, he hurt, like an old man with aching bones. But very much worse.

And then inevitably the tempo of the dance, and the turning, increased. He was drifting, then walking, then trotting, and now he ran. He was sprinting, spinning, he had no say in any of it, could not have stopped himself, could not try.

They were laughing, he thought distractedly. Either they laughed—or uncontrollably wept—faces in a rictus of anguish or overwhelming pleasure, either or both, resembling the throes of physical love—

Overhead, over the tree tops, the moon spun too, bowling along like a smoky mechanical wheel.

And now Lutz became the moon’s marionette. It had somehow attached to him invisible wires, and jerked irregularly and brutally at his arms and legs, feet and hands, his neck and head and spine.

All of his body, outside and in, was spasming, jumping, leaping. His arms and fists made the violent gestures of a drunken prize-fighter, his legs thrashed as if to kick at objects or lurch him over fences. His head darted and shook, snapping on its cord.

Lutz was in sheer agony now. As the seizures of the wild dance convulsed him he cried out at the excruciation, the tearing and pulling of sinews, his vertebrae crushed and crunching.

He thought the moon above him changed to black-green, like a malachite.

Lutz Alvarek soon lay on the ground. Still striking out and kicking as the convulsions dictated, he had stopped screaming, no longer able to make much sound.

This, the true nature of the “dance” the vilyas award to men. The dance of death.

But they themselves, with an odd feral innocence, went on, effortlessly twining and circling. Where they dance, the stories stress, the grass grows up rich and deep, corn or barley rise thick, trees put on ripe fruit. Or else, the other stories warn, the ground there goes black and the grass perishes and the trees fall down.

Lutz stayed conscious. The dance did not permit full loss of awareness. He lay contorted and insanely writhing, and above him, against the malachite moon, he could just make out the crown of the birch tree that grew from Ghisla’s grave.

In that way, senselessly, he noticed that something was rising up from the tree, like pale steam. It was meaningless in his pain, only pain had meaning. Yet the paleness gained shape, the paleness had become a girl—a galvanic wrench of his torso flung him over on his face. For that reason he could not witness how next the girl stood in the top of the tree, and then stepped off on to the air, and came walking quietly and simply down it, as if on a stairway.

She had finally come out to view the evening’s drama, a neighbour woken by noise in the street. Ghisla, still sixteen years old, her black hair loose and pouring round her, her white dress torn, her drinkable sherry eyes stern and intent.

And some ten feet from the earth, above all the measures of the dance, she paused immobile on the air, and gazed down at her lover, at Prince Lutz, as he grew ready to die.

* * * *

How much was left of Myrra, ruler of the vilyas? Maybe only an impulse still clad in partially human form. Why anyway was she queen of these revenants? Could it be only she had made herself so because, when alive, she had had status, the richman’s daughter?

We must never doubt this, they never ‘speak’, these creatures. Even so, like other elements that appear not to converse, yet do, the earthly-lingering dead have a language, and use it.

Myrra demanded of Ghisla why she stood by, balanced on darkness.

Come down, said Myrra. Join us at our game. Watch him snuffed out like a match.

Ghisla spoke.

She said softly, “I’m here to say you must leave him alone.”

Did she absolutely say that, that shy and ill-treated girl, and only a ghost now? In life she had been unable—taught in her first years by that harsh mother—to stand up for the rights of anything, let alone herself. And now she stands up on the air, you see, and tells the ghoul-queen of the damned and murderous dead that they must let go.

Never, presumably Myrra replies.

“At once,” says Ghisla, with a peculiar glint of asperity, obviously ironically learned too from her mother.

The drums and rattling whispering of the dance-music have gone. The night is deaf with noiselessness. Not a leaf stirs, or dares to.

Ghisla speaks again, “He isn’t for you. You have nothing to do with him. You must let him live, and I will heal him.”

You! Myrra will be amazed—does so much intelligence remain to her undead state?—You died through him and what he did to you.

“Yes,” Ghisla responds, “but you know nothing about it. You have no power to harm him. Only I have power over him. You must give way.”

In the deaf and awful noiselessness, Ghisla, fragile as a moth, undoes one page of darkness and of time, as is the talent of ghosts. This is like that contemporary phenomenon we have seen so recently, the moving steam-flickers, those cinematic images that can be thrown on a screen, and then perform there a drama. And from the tunnel of the past, this living movie glides out, reborn on the screen of darkness: that night five years before, when Lutz had met her on the gallery of the showboat, and said to her, “I have been waiting for you . . . did you know? . . . My love, now you do.”

* * * *

Leaving the showboat, they had walked out into the woods that overhung the River.

His arm had been about her. She could feel nothing else, but also strangely was aware of everything else, every leaf that brushed another, the grass under their feet growing, the flavour of the dark. No night had ever been so liquid black, but the River shone jade. Fireflies or stars sometimes washed through the trees. Somewhere he turned her to him, and kissed her, mildly, then deeply. And Ghisla had become all the night, full of a power like flight. She had held him, and taken his kisses like the feast they were, a banquet after starvation, and also familiar, known to her, as if they had kissed like this forever—somewhere, in some other region or condition, and as if now, here again they came home to each other, he and she.

After a while he spoke to her very seriously.

“You won’t believe me; please try, my darling. Listen. I’m older than you, and no boy. I’ve had—forgive me—many love affairs.” At this gently she shook her head, smiling. Of course what else, for a man so beautiful and fine? It did not matter. He held her closer, he said, “There was never one like you. This is a cliché, and very trite, but I’ve no other phrase to explain it. The instant I saw you—did you feel this too?” “Yes,” she answered. “Then you’ll understand me,” he said. “I want you and will have you,” he said, “providing always that you’ll agree—not to be my sudden companion as suddenly given up. I want you with me, my love. I want you with me until I die, which event I intend not to let happen less than a hundred years in the future.” She laughed at this, not in silly amusement or mockery. She laughed because she thought, that moment, it was possible, and that she too, now he had found her, would also live another hundred years. “So,” he said, “our best course is to marry. Do you think so?” he asked. She had gained such confidence. She had become another person, or perhaps become herself opening like a flower. But she only nodded again. He, trained in words and their delivery, was the one who said, “We are already married, I think, elsewhere. We’ve only to formalize the state. Oh, Ghisla—” by then he knew her name—“We will be so happy.”

And after that they had made their plans, or he had outlined his plan, which was both bold and sensible enough. He explained that he had noted something was going awry with the mechanical doll from the play, and so tomorrow he would need to get that taken care of, and, should the doll be beyond help, coach the rest of the company on how to nurse the play to its end without overly disappointing their audience. After the performance it would be too late to go calling. But the day after tomorrow he would arrive at her mother’s shop at noon. He would sweep the mother off her feet, being able, too, financially to sort out her overworked situation. He was completely confident the mother would not stand in their way. He had always been lucky, he said, and tonight was the proof of that for he had found Ghisla, had he not?

So they were to part, and one whole night, and then another day and night must go by until that third day, the noon when he would come to claim her. Would she wait for him, he asked her, smiling. She said she would. Otherwise Ghisla’s Prince did nothing to endanger or offend. His passionate and prolonged kisses, which had so thrilled and reformed Ghisla, had not in any way infringed what her mother might have called Ghisla’s ‘chastity’. There had been no rabid seduction, no betrayal. And there would never have been any betrayal, not by him, her lover, Prince Lutz Alvarek. When he spoke of loving her he spoke sincerely and from the deep of a heart and mind equally clever, sly and genuine. Every word uttered to her was truth. He had “loved” often, hut never loved. Now he did. And maybe it might even have lasted a lifetime, even a lifetime of one hundred and twenty-two years. Maybe, as he had felt also, blindly, sublimely, their love had begun in another time, on another planet perhaps, an elsewhere as real or more real than mortal life.

He intended to escort her home, but Ghisla refused this. She assured him the woods thereabouts were safe and she had only a brief journey. She told him too she would need to compose herself, and although by now the spectre of her mother had shrunk very small, Ghisla did not want to alarm or shock her. Ghisla had, during this magical interlude, learned to pity her mother greatly.

Their last embrace, meant only to be a promise, continued for hours and was over in a split second. But she took down her hair for him so he could kiss that too, and gave him her green combs to keep, when he asked for them.

She went away through the trees like the white ghost she already seemed. He watched until she vanished, then walked back to the boat. The Vilya. As in all his endeavours, or most of them, Lutz had known success. Only his professionalism had made him prepared to organize the business of the faulty doll. Otherwise he would never have wasted a single day.

He woke and slept and woke that night, in the inebriation of new love. And saw to business all the next day, and in the second night, lounging vainglorious with the other actors, after they had—by sheer ingenuity, and most of that his—saved the play despite failed Bithida, the doll, he had drunk his fill in a sweet, blurred triumph of anticipation. Thinking of the day after, of noon, of claiming her, his love. And then he heard about the drowned girl, the pretty one in the white dress who had lingered on the gallery. Ghisla. Ghisla drowned. Ghisla dead and lost and gone, and his life with her, all the burning one hundred years of it.

* * * *

What then, in God’s good name, had happened?

That Lutz had not, at the time, tried to discover the true cause of her death—well, who can say why not. The shock had assailed him too terribly, perhaps. And perhaps too, despite the vaunted luck of most of his life, in the past had there been other strokes, which robbed and hurt him, as if to balance the rest? That he went at once away is strange, yet imaginable. That he remained haunted, also.

But she—what, in the name of Hell—what, what?

She had felt, the young girl, so filled by rushing delight, remade, reborn, she knew she could not yet go back to the cramped stale little apartment. So she ran, childlike, to the River’s edge, and her dress was torn, but without fear she thought: He’ll pay for it, he’s so kind, and she won’t be cross.

Her head sang and her heart beat crazily, and she stood there on the brink of the dark and she began to weep—not from pain or horror or fright—from pure joy. Joy infused her, set her alight, joy brimmed her over, not knowing, as how could such a lambent thing as joy ever know, that though Ghisla’s soul was well able to encompass it, her young, fragile body—could not. Her father’s doctor had guessed and tried to tell them, you will recall, what might have killed her, other than insanity and water. For Ghisla’s father had died, not of a cough, but since his weak heart could not withstand the barrage of coughing. This weakness in the heart had passed, unknown, to Ghisla. And never before had it been so taxed. The joy, the bliss of love, the wonder to come, the rescue—they filled her physical heart, and her heart—broke. It broke, like the clockwork of the doll. And being human, Ghisla was not reparable. A single moment, as if the earth cracked end to end, and then the unfelt drifting fall, like a dying leaf, down into the waters of sorrow, the River made of tears. She was dead before the leaf of her body clove its surface.

* * * *

The flicker-movie is over. They have watched and seen all, the vilya horde. And Ghisla they see too, her phantom, seated now on the ground beside Lutz, passing her quiet compassionate ghost hands through and through him, healing, as she said she could, every injury the dance of the damned has caused. And as she does this, also, she has found her four green combs, wrapped up in a piece of clean linen, and lying over his heart. His heart that is strong. He will live.

When she lifts her head at last, the finishing shreds of the vilyas, Myrra with them, are fluttering, like skeletal butterflies, away into an eternal shadow. What happens here is, and has been proven, none of their concern. And now they are gone.

Near sunrise he wakes up, battered and sore, as if he has been beaten, but not so very badly, and he sees her looking down at him, his lover, the true love of his life. Her face, framed by the dark river of her hair, her soft breasts that he has never, Prince that he is, ever touched, her mouth that he has kissed and longs to kiss again, but which he knows cannot any more be kissed. He is dreaming her, naturally. Ghosts, superstitious though he may be, are only for the plays.

Nevertheless, he says, “No chance for us, then.”

“No, my love,” she answers, or something lays the words inside his mind.

“Next time we meet, perhaps,” he says. But he is aware it was a miracle they had met here. Why should they have the fortune to manage that miracle again when, with all things seemingly on their side, they had failed to capitalize upon it now?

Yet, “Oh, yes,” she answers. And she smiles. “One day it will happen.”

The dawn is coming, that must be the unforgiveable glare that blazes along the hem of the earth, its rays smoking through her, pink as pearl, cruel as knives.

“I believe it will,” he staunchly says. “Till then, my darling girl.”

Already in front of him he beholds himself, trudging off from the River, avoiding the town. The steambus met at some other halt, the return to the cities and the glass-paste theatres and the unreal acted lives. And the dawn smoke turns black and clouds him through.

Despite the fact of impossibility, she leans to him and kisses him on the lips. He feels nothing of the kiss.

He says again, “Until then, my love.”

And as she fades into the light, she answers, “Till then.”