THE GOLDEN ROPE

ONE

In the stone house amid the white wood, the woman sat and brooded on a power that only one might give her. She had wooed him long and diligently, and she had given her life over to learning and study that she might commune with him. But, like an unrequited love, so far she had been ignored.

All around the house the dead trees, a palisade, out-stared the moon. They were a constant reminder of her youth which she had given up, her vitality which had been drained. And yet, tonight, it seemed to her there was a strange stirring in the trees, and in her blood.

When loud knocking came on her gates, she was not amazed, nor quite calm. Very seldom did any seek admittance here. Those who knew of her—and she had not courted fame—understood her scholarship and disliked it. Others guessed her ambition, and feared her. Presently, her servant entered the room, a tall, dark-skinned man from the East, dressed in silken clothes, and tongueless. He bowed low, then indicated to her, in a gesture language she had taught him, and which none but she and he could comprehend, that a city fellow had sought her door. He was of the lowest urban class, a rogue requiring her aid for his wife who, it seemed, was sick to the death.

Her normal practice, in such a case, was to dismiss the petitioner without seeing him. Now she instructed her servant to bring the man in. She gave the order with a curious excitement, and took care to compose herself that nothing of her mood should be detectable.

The man appeared a moment later. By her trained instincts and intelligence the woman told instantly much about him. He was a thief, one of the dregs of the world. That he cared so for his wife’s health that he came seeking a witch implied no love, merely that his wife was some use to him. The woman noted, too, that her visitor was afraid of her. And that, under its filth, his hair was like new gold.

“So,” she said. “What do you want?”

“My wife is with child. The condition does not suit her. I dread she may die.”

The woman nodded coldly. He would never have known how her pulse had quickened.

“I understand. Your wife sells her body and brings you a fair wage from the enterprise. You suppose that when she grows big and cumbersome, her customers will dwindle.”

The man faltered, then smiled at her ingratiatingly.

“I see I was a fool to try hiding anything from you, my lady. As you say. I find it hard to come by honest work. If we starve, it will do none of us any good. But if you could give me some of your clever herbs, so the trouble goes away—”

“And this child is yours, you think, that you will be rid of it so freely.”

“I do not, alas, know.”

“I know. It is. You are aware,” she said, “I ask a price for any service.”

He grinned and panted like an eager dog.

“When she is well, her first month’s wages shall all be yours.” The woman watched him. He grew uneasy. “We would never cheat you.”

“Tell me, then, what that month’s wage would be.”

He shuffled, and named a sum.

The woman waited, concentrating, until she read from him the aura of thought which showed his wife. Though he had made a whore of her, this girl was beautiful.

The woman nodded again.

“I think you have halved the amount. No arguments, if you please. I shall be generous to you. I myself will double the coins, and you shall be given such a figure every twenty days. Providing your wife carries to term, and bears.”

The cutpurse gaped.

“A wonderful bargain for you,” she said. “You will benefit outrageously by it.”

“But why—”

“Once the child is fit to travel, you will bring it here to me.”

“But—”

“I will then settle upon you one last payment, to compensate your doleful loss.”

“But—”

“Do not dare,” she said, “to question me.”

He balked. Clearly he was unsure if he was in luck, or if she was simply a lunatic who might renege, then harm him.

“Or,” she said, “to doubt me.”

“Ah no, no, my lady.”

She rose; he cowered.

“Wait here, and touch nothing. There are safeguards on my property which prove injurious to meddlers. Do you believe me?” His pallor showed he did. “When I return, I will have for you your first payment. Also herbs and powders you must give your wife to strengthen her, so the child is robust.”

She went from the room and along a passageway. She unlocked, in an unusual manner, a black lacquer door, and passed down a long flight of steps to the vast underground chamber that was her study and her insularium. As her fingers busied themselves in the preparation of those medicines she had prescribed, they trembled slightly.

Infallibly, she knew a golden rope had been placed in her hands. She had only, with patience and wisdom, to draw it in.

* * * *

The child was born, and opened its unfocused eyes on dirt and squalor. Then, if it was even properly aware of such things, came an upheaval, a cessation of warmth, the dim wailing of a woman—someone was sorry to see it go after all. The child cried, then slept. Bundled in its covers it was taken to high gates, and given over to a pair of dark lean hands. Money rang inside a leather bag. As thin snow began to fall, a door thudded shut.

“A girl,” said the woman. “That is very well. This wisp of hair is dark now, but will change inside a year. She is whole and will be lovely.”

The world was altered.

* * * *

The earliest memory, the first impression, did not linger, was wiped away. Life was this: A beautiful apartment which opened on a large garden. The walls about the garden were very tall; on three sides the stone piles of the house leaned over it. On the fourth a few dead branches, like a handful of white bones, were all that might be glimpsed of any other place. The ceilings of the beautiful apartment were themselves extremely lofty, but they sank a little closer as the years passed, just as the childish bed and chairs and desk were taken away, and adult furniture replaced them. There came to be an exquisite harpsichord, two guitars of dark and blond wood, with ivory frets. Tapestries and paintings came, and hand-painted books, sweeping pleated dresses of pale lemon silk and cream satin and blanched-almond brocade where there had hung little-girl dresses of similar materials and tints. In a box lined in velvet lay some pieces of priceless flawless jewelry, several of an Eastern cast.

The child, too, had changed, was no longer a child. She was thirteen, the age at which many a damsel of good house might already be contracted if not married. The girl had, however, never seen a man, save in a painting, never heard of one save in a book. She knew they existed, just as lions, wolves, unicorns existed, far beyond the walls, another species in another country. Yet from this same outer wonderland her toys, her furnishings, her books somehow transpired. Everything was delivered as she slept, or taken away as she slept—like magic. Sometimes shocking, and sometimes delightful, yet she was used to it. Magic, as with the apartment, the garden, was an everyday matter.

And beyond the walls of the house and the garden which divided her from the far-off mythology of the earth? The bones of the trees gave evidence of a waste. No other evidence was awarded her.

The woman, whom she did not call “Mother” but “my lady,” was the only live thing the young girl saw, or had ever seen. It was a fact, as the ceilings drew lower, the woman became smaller, until she and the girl were almost of the same height. Otherwise, the woman seemed not to change at all. She wore plain clothes, dark and without ornament. Her face was colorless, expressionless. She offered neither love nor friendship, not even the shelter of another personality. Yet it was this woman who, without passion, without enthusiasm of any kind, taught the girl all she had come to know, and brought in to her, by those mysterious nocturnal means, the literature, the musical instruments, that were the accessories and gilding of knowledge; the elegant garments, and the jewels.

The young girl knew her origins, also. My lady had told her from the first. “You are not the child of my body. You are the child of a man and woman who did not want you. I wanted you, and so you were brought to me. You are named Jaspre, since I sent to your mother powders of jaspre to strengthen her while she carried you. Do not feel any regret or any betrayal. Your natural parents are nothing to you.” And the girl named Jaspre felt nothing. The ideas of parentage, of love, even, were unconvincing, alien to her. In her world, such things did not exist.

Sometimes, Jaspre would wander through the large garden, among its avenues, of which there were many, between its uncannily manicured box hedges, in and out of its grottoes where nymphs of mossy stone played statically with each other but never with her. Occasionally birds flew over the garden. In some naive manner, she understood they represented freedom, but freedom held no particular allure. Jaspre’s world was of the intellect and the spirit. Even her daydreams were contained within the garden. She had never seen a lion or a man or a forest or a mountain. She had never seen beyond the door of her apartment.

Nor, when she looked into her long mirrors, did she realize what looked back at her was the most beautiful thing in the beautiful room.

But the woman realized. She had nurtured Jaspre like a rare plant, its white stem, its bright petals. The woman, who had no lust for human flesh, who lusted only for one thing, had caught her breath, seeing the glowing creature drift toward her from the sunset shade of an ilex tree in the walled garden. The skin like pearl melting in the dress of pearl silk, scarcely any difference observable. The loosely plaited hair like a golden rope…

* * * *

“Do you recall how old you are, Jaspre?”

“Yes, my lady. I am thirteen years of age.”

“You have never,” said the woman, “asked me anything concerning the rest of the house.”

“It is,” said Jaspre, “the house.” To this non-questioning the woman had molded her in subtle, gentle ways. It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one’s existence.

And yet now, “I will show you, today, a door. It has remained hidden, Jaspre, but now we shall use it, you and I.” Jaspre nodded calmly.

“Yes, my lady.”

The door was concealed behind a section of the wall which moved. It gave on a stair. It was the stair to the insularium.

* * * *

To the world of the apartment and the garden then, was added this new continent of marvels. In ranks, the tall stoppered vials, from which a pinch of powder dropped into air might burn, another produce sweet perfume. Slim flattened statues of bronze stood in the shadows, a bronze bull with wings. While on a platform reached by several narrow steps, was a great instrument which, when tilted up at an extravagant angle, pierced some opening in the side of the house, and by means of mirrors and lenses captured the stars and planets in the green evening sky.

Jaspre wandered in the vast room, windowless and lamp-lit, sipping from it, tasting of it. She had been nurtured and lessoned to gain much from the appearances of things, the sensations of their umbras, less from their functions. Hers was an intellect which dreamed and fantasized upon, rather than inquired into. So, she touched the statues, the telescope, gazed on the constellations, inhaled the sweet aroma of powders, and did not ask their natures, nor require to be informed.

Presently, the woman led her to a narrow alcove, and drew aside a curtain of smoky samite, and then another behind it of black velvet. Beyond the curtains was a gate of horn scrolled by black iron, and with a gilded iron lock. This lock the woman negotiated without a key, using strange pressures of her hands. As the gate opened, a third curtain was disclosed, but this of a dull brazen chain mail.

Although she did not know, and had been told nothing of what lay in store, the suspenseful drawings of curtain upon curtain, the unlocking of the gate, the metallic mesh, the unsuspected depth of the alcove itself—all this had worked upon the young girl’s imagination. That some pinnacle of importance was about to be attained, and revealed to her, was apparent.

The woman paused, her hand resting on the drapery of brazen mail.

“That I took you in,” she said, “was for a purpose. I did not, as you have seen, bring you here to serve me. And yet, I did take you, raise you, keep you, in peerlessness and in innocence, that you might serve—another. And now you are fit to learn of him and to look upon his image.”

Jaspre’s heart beat quickly, instinctually, and she waited, her eyes fixed only on the curtain. Which, in another instant, the woman drew aside.

Jaspre had never seen a man before. Inside the alcove stood a man. Then, as the lamplight beat on him, she beheld he was made of stone, a pale stone finely planed, fantastically burnished, colored with all the most convincing nuances of life.

His long and thickly curling hair was black, and lay seemingly loosely against his forehead, cheeks and shoulders. His features were chiseled, of a faintly Eastern cast, singularly handsome even to the point of beauty. His flesh was pale, but not with the dead pallor of the stone, rather a curious dark whiteness flushed through with somber tinctures, as if ichors flowed directly under the skin. In the eyes, which most of all might display lifelessness in a statue, there had been set dark jewels that glimmered, that seemed possessed of actual sight.

The image was represented as garbed in a black outer mantle of the ancient Parsua, diagonally cut and fringed with silver, with a broad belt that flashed with large bloody gems. Gems of blood and ink and blue water also crusted the shoes carved on his feet and stared from his long fingers. One hand lay relaxedly at his side. The left hand was gracefully uplifted in an ambiguous gesture of offering or beckoning.

The statue’s feet rested upon a low plinth, and in the plinth some words had long ago been cut, their letters softened now by time that had, in no other form, impaired the freshness of the work. After a while, as if impelled, Jaspre looked at them and next leaned close.

Deo Arimanio, they read. Nox Invictus.

The woman spoke quietly at Jaspre’s side.

“You have deciphered the writing. Do you translate it?”

“He is,” said the girl, “a god, and this is his name. And here it says that night—”

The woman broke in, softly as before:

“Unconquerable Night, is what it says. It is a good wish for his future victory, against the god of fires.”

Jaspre’s eyes fell. Her heart beat so fast now the woman did not miss it.

“But that fight is far off. For now, he dwells in darkness and is at peace in his kingdom.”

“Does he then,” said Jaspre, “truly exist?”

“Yes. He is God. The King of the World, that is him. The Prince of Darkness, eternal adversary to the devil Lucifer, bringer of light and blinding. The Lord of Eternal Night. By some called Bel, and in the Roman tongue Arimanio, as it is carved here. But as you shall worship him now, he is named Angemal. Angel, demon and god.”

“And I am to serve him?”

“For this you were born.”

Slowly, the young girl’s cheeks stained red with blood. The lights in the eyes of the statue blazed and sang, as if he saw and smiled at it.

TWO

Into her world, then, of floral garden, of gracious room, of magical laboratory, a god had entered.

In miniature, a creation myth, Jaspre its feminine principle, her axis now fixed: A man who was also God. Who was also the Serpent. She was thirteen, and everything spread before her, a glittering sea clothed in phantasmal mists, tossed by mystic gradual lights. On this her mind embarked, into the perpetual dawn of knowledge. And now knowledge was enhanced by that best accessory of all—desire.

Jaspre did not know that, in the person of the remarkable and lifelike statue, her desire and her love had come to reside, to put down tenacious roots, to burn into red blossom. But her feelings, senses, yearnings, these did the work for her. She did not need to think, to know, to reason. Her pulse and her spirit were now her guides.

The woman had been not only generous in the gifts of learning she had poured in on Jaspre’s receptive intelligence; she had been also most selective. There from the first, always, was that which would enhance and increase this ultimate moment, the moments which succeeded it. Nothing to detract. Nothing to alarm, defame, erode.

Knowing nothing of this esoteric cult which now had been set shimmering before her, Jaspre knew no indecision and no doubt.

She had been born to magnify him. He had chosen her.

For a year then, she “served.”

She brought her offerings, fruits and flowers from the walled garden, and laid them at his jeweled feet. She brought him wine, and music. She began to dream of him. Her dreams were lapped in fires, which were dark, heatless, sable, laval fires, such as burned in his kingdom, far, far beneath the earth.

Lord of Demons, Prince of Darkness. She began to hunger for him, for those things which were his. Less and less did she sleep by night. She slept by day, drawing her shutters and her curtains against the sun. At dusk, as if to blue morning, she woke. She sat among the closed night flowers, and played upon her guitars to the rising of the moon. She made her hymns to him then. And her skin grew moon-burned, she supposed, as was his.

For she too altered. Her hair hung long, to her waist, to the backs of her knees. She was taller, more slender. An ambient night-vision enabled her to perceive the silver apples on the tree, the nocturnal moths flying on their paper wings from the surface of the moon.

Angemal. Arimanio. Lord of winged things, lord of the panther and the black wolf, lord of quietude, lord of the silver caves a hundred miles beneath the ground.

Fruit and flowers she brought, her hymns she brought, and next her tears.

He lived. She worshiped. Should he never come to her? Would they never meet? Her mind, her spirit dreamed; her flesh spoke also—dreams were not enough.

* * * *

“How old, Jaspre, are you now?”

“I am fourteen, my lady.”

“I seldom see you in the garden, now, by day.”

“I am there after dark, my lady. I abhor the sun. I love only the night.”

“And he that is the night. You love him.”

Jaspre’s face, lovely, savage, a storm.

“Yes! I would give him more than ever I gave.”

“You shall.”

The hidden door, the stair, the insularium.

There was a difference to the room.

At its every angle, aromatics burned, bittersweet, rose, terebinth, camfre, myrrh. The lamps were out. A single blue cloud burned high up on a massive chandelier of candles let down from the ceiling. On the floor there were marks: The Circle, the Star of the Five Points, the figures of an arcane zodiac—Fish, Serpent, Bull, Virgin… At various stations stood the symbols, the Chalice, the Sword, the Crown, the Veil and others.

The girl knew little of any of this. But what if her baroque world grew still more unfamiliar and bizarre? She checked at nothing.

“Now,” said the woman, “I will tell you what you must do.”

She did so, and Jaspre obeyed her.

Jaspre removed her gown of icy satin, her undergarments and her shoes. Unaware that nakedness meant shame and vulnerability, she went to the Circle naked, and naked she lay down in it, her hands and her feet extended to conform with four points of the five-pointed Star, her head conforming with the fifth, and her hair like pale golden snow frayed out about her everywhere.

The scents of the smokes made Jaspre drowsy and sad. Her heart beat in her very womb, and she lay listening to it.

The woman said to her out of a blue fire-cloud in the air: “You have brought many offerings to the Lord Angemal. Do you fear to give him of your blood?”

“No,” said Jaspre.

She did not know what she had said. Yet her soul knew and beat its wings within her, attempting, like the caged bird it was, to fly.

How beautiful she was. The woman, bending above her with the silver knife, comprehended without human lust this beauty. After all, had she not trained it, complimented it, nourished it, setting all things to inspire the enchantment of physical perfection? A child of golden light.

“Fix your thoughts,” the woman said, “upon him. Do you consent to be his?”

Jaspre breathed. “I do.”

She felt a flicker of pain. It did not trouble her, she rejoiced in it. Her pain, too, she would render him. Was it sufficient? She almost entreated to be hurt again.

The dream began subtly, first with a vague awareness, then with a still certainty, of where she was, and the reason and the logic of it.

Far down under the house, beneath the very surface of the ground, the insularium was a cellar. Only the telescope craned, and that merely by the means of a stone funnel and twisted lenses, upward into the sky. Now, however, some portion of the chamber, that magian centre at which Jaspre lay—the pivot of the Star—had become the head of a mighty tower.

The tower was stone. She could visualize it quite clearly, the roofed cup of its spire, which contained her, the perilous swooping descent of its sides. Slowly, Jaspre rose. She looked about. The room in the head of the tower was small, and, of course, pentagonal. In each of the five sides, a long window lacking glass framed an uncanny vaporous darkness, without form and void—indeed, as the first darkness of all, the dark of Chaos, had been described in the parchments of the Judaians.

Yet, Jaspre was not afraid of the void darkness, nor of the height of the tower. She went to the window before her, toward which formerly her own skull had pointed, and looked out of it.

The scentless, moistureless yet somber mists, disturbed a little, seemingly by human warmth, swirled and floated. Nothing else was visible before her, and so she turned her eyes to gaze downward.

The spire plummeted below her, it seemed, forever. She grasped at once, as if she had always been cognizant of the fact, that the sub-earth cellar of the insularium could be also the top of a tower because such a place thrust on, by sorcerous means, deep into the core of the world, to those nether regions, those buried caverns that had been named Hell, or Hades, or Tellus Occultus in explanatory, analogous legend. It seemed to fall miles below her, growing ever more slender as it fell, becoming eventually nothing larger or stronger than a needle, and on this the upper masonry balanced, and she within it, so she seemed to experience all at once a gentle swaying in the cup of the tower, rhythmic as that of a pendulum, mild as that of a flower-stalk in a breeze. And still, she was not afraid, either to sense this motion, or to stare downward into the formless abyss.

There were carvings in the sides of the tower, the magic symbols from the chamber as it had been, the zodiac, the Crown, the Sword, the Chalice—she knew such seals must hold the spire safely.

And then she became aware of the little fluttering at her left wrist. She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood. Jaspre watched them descend, and as she leaned there, strands of her unbound hair came streaming over her shoulder, and spilled away also, unfurling like a shining ribbon, down, down, down with the red ribbon of the butterflies, down, down into the dark below.

Jaspre was filled by wonder, but not by perplexity or questioning. The butterflies, which were born from her wrist, seemed spontaneous and natural. The way her hair trickled now from its fount, pouring over her, pouring down, a golden river, a silken rope, growing long and longer—as it had done in her life, but never so swiftly—this appeared also fitting, and right.

And then her very eyes, her very sight and spirit seemed to be freed of her body, and she herself, invisible, a thing of air, flowed down the tower.

She had no fear. She was exalted, glad.

Darkness before her, stone beside her, the falling of scarlet and gold. At length, she saw an ending to every descent: The base of the tower.

It was a doorless block of granite, high as the walls of the house had been. And cut in the stone in letters taller than Jaspre, when she had been in her body, the words NOX INVICTUS.

The butterflies played around these letters, blooming like garnets in the dullness. The golden hair touched them, and so the ground, and poured no more, a trembling fountain that ran away into a thread above, and thus into nothing. Up there, in that fresh, inverted abyss, Jaspre’s body leaned from its window, no longer to be seen.

About the base of the tower, a plain of smooth and empty rock glided away and away, also into an inchoate nothingness that was its only horizon.

Jaspre knew only gladness. Incorporeal and weightless as the winged creatures in their dance, she danced with them. Caught in a spiral of heatless laval fire, she beheld another thing, and paused transfixed.

On the horizon of nothingness, many days’ journey as it seemed from the tower, a flicker of blue luster had evolved. And, in a few seconds, drew nearer. And in a few seconds more, much nearer.

As the light began to swell, Jaspre saw that it was not light at all, but the essence of the dark given clarity, unlight, more sumptuous, more lambent than any luminence of the world’s.

From the brilliancy, bringing it, like great wings folded about him, a figure presently came.

He was like some picture from one of her books, animate, and imbued with all the qualities of life, and with some other thing which was not life at all, but more, perhaps, than life. He rode a horse blacker than the blackest material the earth was capable of, blacker than ebony, sable or jet. But its mane and tail were of an iridescent blueness, and it was accoutered in a blue and silver hail of sparkling stuffs, bells, gems. He, too, was garbed in the same black blackness as the flesh of the horse, as if he had stepped from some Avernal lake and its waters clung to him, becoming satin, and metal. His hair was the blackest thing of all. His face—but as he came closer, he turned his head. Some shadow then, the curling curtain of the hair, hid all his features from her. She did not need to see them. She knew they were the features of the statue in the insularium.

He had ridden now to the spot where the fountain of hair came down. The horse stopped at once. And he, the god-demon she was to call Angemal, stretched out one hand gloved in silvery mail and with one huge ring upon it, a fiery ring of an apricot color, the stone which was her name. He touched the golden rope of her hair with his fingers. And immediately Jaspre saw, without amazement, the hair twisted and refashioned itself. It became a ladder of silk—

She heard him laugh, then, a low sound, scarcely audible, musical as song and colder than frozen iron. Then, he was gone. It was not that he vanished. He was; he was not.

Jaspre felt a desolation and an agony, as if her psychic fibers tore and frayed at their insubstantial roots. Her spiritual sight went out, and in that fading, she glimpsed the butterflies raining like blood on the plain, while above her the golden hair was burning, shriveling, blowing away; black butterflies where there had been red. Even her soul, witnessing this, seemed to shrivel also, and to die.

* * * *

Jaspre opened her eyes. She lay on the floor of the insularium. The chandelier smoldered, the color of thunder, most of its candles extinguished, and the woman bent close. For the only time in all their acquaintance, Jaspre beheld a glaze of ghostly excitement on my lady’s face, but it was almost instantly spent, or hidden.

“And what did you see?”

“I saw—a tower,” Jaspre faltered. She was weak, and dazzled by the feeble light. Her left wrist, bound tightly with cloth, hurt her.

“Yes. A tower. What else?”

Jaspre’s eyes closed of themselves. The woman leaned nearer and she whispered, “Speak, or I shall be angry. What else?”

“I saw—red butterflies, and my hair falling to the rock like a shower of gold. I never knew my hair would shine and blaze.… Oh, my lady, I am so weary.”

“Speak. Or I shall strike you.”

Jaspre’s eyes opened wide. She was shocked and afraid. Never before had she been threatened—there had been no need.

“I—” Jaspre sought for words, found them, “I left my body and drifted down the tower to the plain beneath. There a man came, all in black, riding a black horse.”

“And was it he?”

“I think that it was. But he turned aside. And when he touched the rope of hair it became a silken ladder, and he laughed. Then my hair burnt and charred, and he was gone.”

Jaspre, barely conscious that she did so, raised her hands, the left with pain and stiffness, and discovered her hair and that it was not charred, but whole, lying in a long swath all about her. Though it was not so long as it had been when she dreamed of it, and maybe not so golden.

The woman had gone away from her. In the darkest corner of the room she sat, rigid, silent. And then she said, “You have lain there enough. Dress. Go to your apartment.” And her voice was like a frost.

Jaspre rose. Her sight clouded. She took up her clothes.

“Have I displeased you, my lady?”

“It is your master you have displeased, the princely lord Angemal. For he did not find you acceptable, it seems.”

Jaspre wept as she clad herself in the gleaming garments which no longer gleamed.

“Why?” she murmured. “What have I done?”

“I do not know. You were reared to please him. A child of light consenting to the shadow. It should have delighted him, master of ironies that he is. But the emblem of the vision is blatant. He rejected you, and therefore the way into the world whereby he might have manifested.”

Jaspre wept soundlessly, her heart, her spirit, breaking.

“Go,” hissed the woman.

Jaspre ran soundlessly away.

After a while, the woman came to her feet. She returned across the chamber and regarded the opened Pentacle, the bowl of blood.

“Do you deny me still?” she asked. “Or do you only make a test of me? You shall have more. You shall have all of her, as I vowed, the supreme gift, the willing sacrifice of a human life. She will die for you with ecstasy and joy, in all her beauty, virgin, innocent, and wise. As I have caused her to be, a matchless unplucked flower set down upon your altar. Have I not devoted the sum of my energies to your service? You know I hunger for the power that only you can deliver. You know. But you will bargain, as in the days of the First Earth. Yes, you shall have more, much more.”

THREE

The moon rose late upon the walled garden. It hollowed the sky above to a milky blueness, and touched the formal walks below with dainty traceries like lace, and in the wilder grottoes found out the pale limbs of nymph’s and the mirrors of water. Passing the sundial, making of it a moon-dial, the moon let fall a long veil on to a lawn hedged by the briers of a savage shrubbery, and so found Jaspre too. She sat upon the ground. Her hands, which had been dishes for her tears, now lay as if slain in her lap. Her eyes were dry, her heart a desert.

Her flight had brought her here, close to the outer wall, and she had glimpsed above it those claws of the blasted trees which were all she had ever seen of the outer world. A waste wilderness must lie beyond the wall. And now, her life was such a wilderness. She could not mourn. She could no longer weep. Not grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening.

It was unnecessary for her to search about herself. Even when the moon blushed through the garden, there was, for Jaspre’s desolation, nothing to gaze on. And then some dormant nerve, rousing in spite of her, caused her to glance, to see the lawn, the dense shrubbery, and, seated between the two, the still shape that was neither plant nor statue.

Jaspre’s hands revived and sprang together. She started up, young enough to experience terror even in her misery. But the shape ascended with her, steeped in moonlight. So she saw—not image, not dream—but an actual man, and scarcely seven paces away. His unknown features were handsome, even in the mezzotint of the moon, though drained by the moon as if seen through a fine gauze. His hair looked dark, his eyes brilliant. His clothes were quite alien to her, being classically functional—the wear of a woodsman or a hunter from one of her painted books.

She said nothing. Her sheer innocence did not provide for her the ready suspicion and the outcry of another. Yet she feared, feared till he spoke. And then his voice lulled her by its gentleness, by the curious words he offered.

“Sweet girl, your hair, which is like the sun by day, becomes the moon by night.”

“How do you know me?” Jaspre asked, wonder easing her anxiety as anxiety had eased her despair.

“I do not know you. The witch’s house is avoided. But once, I came through the wood, and heard melody and singing. It was not she. A creeper robes the wall. I climbed it. I saw you. I see you now. But know you I do not.”

Jaspre turned a little way, toward the distant house from which the wide length of the garden separated her. It was an intuitive response, to evade him. And yet it was the house she now wished to evade, and all remembered and familiar things, tainted by her failure, the harsh and hating phrases of the woman this man named “the witch.” She had flown here, and could not fly back into such dismal shelter. Entrapped, she shuddered. She had been kept from her own kind. She guessed this was a crime—to converse with a man. She had been offered to a god. Who had refused her. A fresh dawn of pain broke on her, a fresh river of tears.

“Why do you weep?” the man murmured. He had drawn closer and though she had turned from him, she did not move away. “Do you fear me so very greatly?”

“No,” she said. Her tears were once more ceaseless.

“Is it then that hag who mistreats you?”

“I am worthless,” said Jaspre. “I desire only to die.”

“You are lovely,” he said. “You must live.”

“I was born for one purpose, and cannot hope for it.”

“What strange purpose can that have been?”

Her tongue could not render all his titles, yet: “A lord,” she sobbed, snared by the unique and final easement of confession, confiding. “A prince of a prince—and he does not want me. I am vile to him.”

“He told you this?”

“My lady told me it was so.”

His voice was already murmuring at her ear, and now his arm slid around her. In her grief and wretchedness she leaned against him, aware this was some further sin, yet unable to deny herself the comfort of it.

“Silver maiden,” he said, and held her so she might rest “Say I am a prince. Will you take me as your lord instead?” But Jaspre, truthful in her naïveté, answered quietly,

“You are not a prince.”

“Yes,” he said, and laughed. His laugh was like warm music, and she recalled that other laughter in her dream, so terrible, so cold, and the destructive icy flame that leapt from it. “These are merely the clothes I wander in. Trust me, I have finery, I have horses flowered in metal and jewels. I have a kingdom, and rule there.”

“No,” she said, but she laid her head against his shoulder.

He smiled. His lips found her hair, her forehead, eyelids, lashes, and her tears ended.

“Will you take me, then, for myself alone?”

“Take you for yourself?” she whispered.

“As love, as lord. Your prince, if no other’s, gorgeous Jaspre?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I heard her call you, the hag in the house.”

Jaspre raised her eyes. She beheld him again, more sufficiently now. Remotely, the darkness of his hair calmed her, a reminiscence. And it seemed to her that, although he was not the statue, nor a god, yet he was more wonderful than the phantom she had been given to, his eyes like stars, his face like an angel’s—and though she had been allowed her life that she should serve one alone, and that the demon prince Angemal, yet it came to her all at once that to love him had been her error. Then, the man who stood with her, holding her in his strong arms, warming and soothing her with his nearness and his own human beauty, kissed her mouth. The kiss was like no other touch, no other sensation ever before felt, or looked for. It seemed to her indeed she slept and had passed thereby into some other world. Or that, for the very first, she had awakened.

From the depths of this extraordinary state, as if beneath water, she heard him say, “You are imprisoned here. Come with me, I will release you from your jail.”

Metaphysically she struggled then, with everything, and with herself. And was brought at last to say: “No. I may not leave this place.”

“Yes. You may, you shall.”

Jaspre hung her head, the comprehension of the wrong she did now awesome, almost pleasing, yet dreadful and to be dreaded.

And in that moment flame burst like lightning from the far-off shadow of the house. A lamp had been kindled in Jaspre’s apartment.

“She searches for you,” he said. “Go in to her. Tomorrow, at moonrise, return to this spot. You will find me here.”

“No, I shall not return.”

“It is a charm I set on you.”

“No. No.”

“I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.”

“No.”

A footstep clacked upon a path.

His arms let her free, and Jaspre moved toward the footstep like a clockwork thing. Deception was new to her, a sword which cut her hands. She did not look back, but beyond the clouded shrubbery, beyond a hedge, a walk, a tree with the moon like a white fruit in its branches, his voice stole once again to her ear, a moth of sound, no more, that replied only: Yes.

The woman stood, black on the lighted window, one foot on the paving which led into the garden, waiting. She spoke to Jaspre, toneless now, and cool, no longer harsh. There was in this mode a sort of forgiveness, a promise of leniency. Conjured before Jaspre’s dazzled eyes, the image of Angemal in his black garments formed, and faded. The unknown lover’s mortal kisses lingered on her skin.

* * * *

The world was round and moved upon its axis, so the young girl knew quite well from her studies. The stars were fixed, it was the Earth which traveled, save for those wandering errants, the planets, which came and went on their own invisible roads across the dusks of morning and of evening and the enormous night of the outer spaces, which held everything. And yet, how contrary perception, which knew as well, and better, that the sun, the moon, the stars arose and set. The earth was flat beneath a dome of ether which flooded with light or dark only as the fire of the sun illumined it or went out.

And so with Jaspre’s world, which had become two things: The impossible, which was reality, the reality which was impossible.

The witch’s servant and doll, pressed now into rituals of fast and trance, into kneelings upon stone, crystals told like a rosary in her hands, incantations hymned, a pilgrimage along the inner path to him, the god of shadows, the prince of darknesses. Perfection to be made more perfect, fineness to be refined, until acceptable, until irresistible. This, the world as it was. And in the garden, the other earth, the landscape of truth growing every second more actual, making all else a ghost, and yet never to be realized. This, the deception, the mirage.

They walked under the black leaves, the silver branches. They leaned together on pillows of moss, only their hands linked, now and then their lips brushing, but as the leaves brushed overhead, like children. His patience in all seduction was inexhaustible, this stranger from beyond the wall. He spoke of the world’s wonders, of seas and citadels, mountains, markets, the swarms of mankind, urging her to seek them with him. He mentioned a towered city and she knew he lied when he seemed to say that it was his. “I will not come away with you,” she said. “Tomorrow, do not wait for me here.” But always he returned, and Jaspre also. She came to gaze on him, to gaze and gaze, entranced by his features, the graceful gestures which he made. These trances were unlike the trances of the insularium. She fasted only in his absence. Like a certain flower, her love died in one area, sprang upward in another. To Jaspre now he was more handsome than the dream of Angemal. She worshiped at a human altar. The inspiration of the witch’s god—Ahriman, Asmodeus, Bel, Satan—fell from her like charcoaled petals, and seemed done.

She felt no danger. Nor it seemed did her lover. His constant pleas, disciplined and never actually pleading, that she should escape with him at once, always now this night, this, or this, it had no slightest savor of panic. It seemed he thought time ever on his side, eternity before them in which he might persuade, in which she could decide.

And she, trained like a vine to the surface of her passions, heights but not depths, beheld all as it was, developing upon it her longings and her theme. She never checked at the sweep of a bird’s wing over the moon, a shimmer of taloned briers, rustling among grasses. She had no guilt, no apprehension. She had a distant fear, but not of any subtle thing. She seemed to sense the abyss of the tower descending before her, and the great fall she must accomplish, and the ultimate rejection, no longer despair, but a terror past enduring. Yet, it was to come. It was the earth-turning sunset, moon-set. A fact that all evidence perceptible assured her was not so.

* * * *

“How old are you, Jaspre?” the woman asked.

“I am fifteen years of age, my lady.”

“You are pale and sullen. Do you mean to be?”

“No, my lady.”

“Give me your hand. Do you see this faint scar on your wrist? Do you remember how it came there?”

“I remember a binding. When the binding was taken away, I saw the mark.”

“Tonight you may not wander in the garden. In an hour, when the twilight is finished, you will enter the insularium.”

* * * *

The woman sat brooding in her stone house on fifteen years of power that had not yet come to her, on a statue with jeweled eyes, fingers, feet, until her servant advanced into the room, that tall man, the dark-skinned Eastern mute.

In his language of signs, which she had taught him and which only they knew, he spoke to her. He had watched the portico. It was ever the same. A young man would appear, slender, his movements catlike and elegant, his face in shadow, the moon at his back. And Jaspre would go to him. They would lie together, but not in carnality. She was a virgin yet, the pure child who was the price, the bargain, the golden rope into Hell the Underworld.

Demons had tempted maidens with apples. Peerless maidens, exquisite youths, these were the apples with which demons were tempted. Reared from birth to particular ways, definite forms, pliant, sweet, unblemished. Once bitten into, bruised, the spoiled fruit was useless and must be flung away.

Plucked then, but untasted. Perhaps only readied the more certainly…

But the woman saw suddenly with her inner eye, the scavenging father, the lustrous whore, mother to the child. And these devils of the mind, cringing before her also jeered. “Why,” the man said, filthy and golden, “he is one step from enjoying her, one minute away from getting her, maybe, full of a pair of twins—a son, a daughter. A powder then, a herb, to make the trouble go away—”

The woman dismissed him, this vision. Next, her flesh and blood servant was sent out. Only then was one darkened window opened upon the night-bloomed garden.

Black before moon-rise, it stretched its vistas out for her, a carpet, a maze. Nothing stirred, no white figure, the too-early moon of Jaspre. Not even the foliage of a forbidden tree rippled in the low wind.

Presently the woman passed from black night to a black lacquer door, and down into her sorcerous cellar.

FOUR

Jaspre descended to the insularium, the first short prelude to that greater, abysmal descent. She knew, her very spirit guessed, that this night was the ending. And she was dull with terror, lax with it, she walked like one almost asleep.

Within, her mind turned drearily about and about.

Her blonde slippers on the stair, she thought of her lover, the moon’s rising and his arrival in the garden to find, at last, she had not come to meet him. Her flaxen dress brushing over the occult threshold, she wondered how long he would linger before he went away. On each occasion of their parting she had said farewell to him as if forever, dimly acknowledging this last night would claim her finally, fold her away into its obscurity. From which, her instinct told her, she would not return. Her impulse was not to resist. Such seeds as resistance had never been planted in her character. She was just that creature her mentor had trained her to be—pliant, sweet—only he had left any imprint on her psyche, molding her gradually and mysteriously to other patterns. Yet he had been, it seemed, too gradual, too patient, too much an optimist. Seeing the shadow of the chamber spread like a deep well before her, Jaspre felt a moment’s wilder fright, picturing how he might come to the house to seek her, batter on its doors, invite the wrath of the woman’s cold and unstressed powers—but he, too, feared. The witch, he had called her from the first. He had never gone close to the inner walls of the house. No, he would not risk himself in such a way. He would merely suppose the immaculate idyll ended, and so it was. He would hasten to safety. Jaspre mourned and she was glad it should be so.

She had never asked his name, even. In a year she, being herself, had not thought to ask it. Yet, he had known her name, and might remember her, a little while, grieve for her, perhaps. And she, adrift in endless moonless, starless night, might sense that memory and tremulously burn like the palest spark, until he should utterly forget.

High in the vault of the chamber, the chandelier ignited into fire, not blue but purple.. The witch stood waiting, straight and stony, her hands folded, each finger exactly fitted between two others.

“Come here, Jaspre. Disrobe.”

Jaspre saw the marks upon the floor, the Circle, the Star of the Five Points, the figures of the zodiac—and other talismans, infinitely less clear and more inimical. The purple glare, while it showed all, seemed to give neither illumination nor dimension.

“Hurry,” said the woman. “Why are you so reluctant? Have you mislaid who it is you serve? Yesterday, only then, you laid flowers at his feet and poured wine into the cup. You have been dutiful, but can you have omitted love?”

“No, my lady. Oh, no.” If not to resist, she had learned somewhat to lie.

“For where else,” mused the woman, “could you bestow your love? Not upon me, for sure. Not upon yourself, for yourself you do not know. Only Angemal is your motive and your lord. Remove your garments.”

Jaspre shivered. Her hands hesitated over pearl buttons, satin lacings. Somehow she had also learned the vulnerability of nakedness.

But at length, naked, vulnerable, she lay down within the Circle, and it was closed upon her. Far away then she seemed to see her own luminous flesh, enmauvened by the ghastly candles, dashed with painted symbols, touched with oil and soot and water, and the unholy rosary of crystals pooled in chains between her breasts. The drugged resins uncurled their vapors. She floated in a syrupy sea of dread, her face beneath its surface, drowning.

The woman spoke aloud for a long while, but not at any time to her. It seemed the woman must be speaking to Angemal. And Jaspre felt his untrue beauty hover like a smoking star.

A knife slit the sea, the vapor, glittering.

“Kiss the blade.”

Jaspre kissed the blade.

“Consent,” said the woman. “Tell me so.”

Jaspre shut her eyes. “I consent.”

The pain licked out, her left wrist, her right wrist. Drums pounded in her veins. With abject horror, Jaspre felt herself commence to fall—

—And the dream began suddenly, and was appalling.

Jaspre hung from the fifth window of the great tower of stone, by her wrists. Two scarlet cords bound them, and she, depending from the cords, drew them tight. Her arms seared and throbbed so she moaned for their agony, while below, the endless drop of stone sheered down and down, and down and down. One other thing fell from the tower, a ladder of gold. Even as she looked at it, the ladder quivered. Its silken rungs sang out. Jaspre realized, even through her blinding hurt and fear, that something had sought the ladder’s foot, something climbed toward her.

Angemal came to her, as he had been so ceaselessly invited to do. She recollected the black horse, the black-clad rider, who turned away his face. His face was not beautiful, then, but hideous, so hideous it could blast with fire as his laughter had blasted the fountain of her hair. But, how had such a notion claimed her? Pain and terror suggested it. The golden rope, enchanted from her hair and her soul, tingled, rang.

Jaspre writhed as she hung from the cords of her spilling blood, and the incredible tower swayed like a granite stalk. Jaspre screamed—

And woke as if she had been flung upward through the floor, the witch’s face above her, malevolent and intent, its eyes alive, its lips parted.

“Ah,” said the witch. “Go back—” and struck Jaspre across the cheek.

Cast from fear into fear, Jaspre was flung down again.

She felt herself, weightless as a feather, spinning, tumbling.

She lay at the tower’s foot, and before her the shaft of it ran up and up, becoming a slender pole, an awl, a needle, nothing. A black cloud clung to the side of the tower where it had thinned to an awl. The cloud moved stealthily upward, and she believed it was the thing which now Angemal had become. No ladder of gold, no cascade of golden hair remained to aid its journey. Jaspre lay fluttering on the rock plain beneath the tower, and found herself a white butterfly.

Her body hung far away, out of her sight, screaming no longer, already dead.

Jaspre’s wings flickered. She flew up into the air. She flew across the vacant rock, leaving the tower, the miasmic climbing cloud, the remembrance of her own self hung out for it, an empty vessel of flesh.

There was no more pain, and as she drew further and further from the immensity of the tower, very little sensation of any kind. She herself had already half forgotten herself. No longer did she have a name, or any care. Only love remained with her, though love was also nameless now, love and sorrow both, and both limitless and inexplicable. The void and its mists enveloped her. The tower was only a colossal specter at her back. The rocky plain ran on and on, barren of everything. And she, a shining flake of snow, sailed on her tiny tissue wings into the formless dark.

* * * *

The woman stood, and experienced the enormous energy that seemed now to drive toward her. Its center was the girl who bled slowly to death in the heart of the Pentagram. But its source lay deeper down. The atmosphere of the insularium was charged and murmurous. Vials and vases shifted softly in their cabinets, the telescope rattled, the chandelier vibrated, splashing the floor and the inert body with wax, as if an earth tremor went on under the house.

The woman drew her breath thickly. Her dead eyes were quickened, her mask face almost galvanized to expression. Prepared and ready, her stance never altered as one by one the lights sank and bloodied to extinction.

A vast blackness, impenetrable and complete, brimmed upward through the chamber.

Seeing nothing, hearing no sound, still the woman knew some fabric of dimension gave way. A presence like a cool heat, invisible, untouchable, passed through, and was in that place with her.

The woman kneeled.

“Lord of lords,” she said. “You are welcome, at last.”

The voice which answered spoke within her head. It answered with one word, a word in a language obsolete and lost, a word no longer capable of any meaning. And yet the woman was granted a total understanding of that word, of all its myriad and profound convolutions, its nuances, its embryo.

She started instantly and involuntarily to her feet in a terror worse than any terror Jaspre had ever known.

And at once a hundred articles fell from their shelves and smashed all about, and the room was garishly lit by burning powders, so not a trace of darkness remained.

* * * *

Darkness had failed, the desire of all one life had failed. Great fear stole in behind failure, shadow of a shadow.

Yet the woman walked from the insularium, straight as a rule, and in her cold unimpassioned voice, she called the mute servant to her. She instructed him on the cleansing and clearing of the chamber. One further item must be removed from it. The wrists of the girl were to be tightly bound, she was to be found some rag of clothing to put on. Then the servant should carry her outside the walls of the house, among the bone trees, and throw her down there. From her apartment then all the furnishings must be stripped, broken and burned. The bed, the chairs, the rich garments, the harpsichord. Even the jewels must be thrust into a fire, consumed.

The man gestured that he grasped what should be done, and went about it silently.

The woman proceeded through the house. As she moved beneath the many candelabra and the lamps, a silken thing glowed brightly in her hand. With one last stroke of her knife she had severed Jaspre’s hair. She had stripped her of everything, her life, even her death—which now was purposeless.

Stiffly, the woman stepped into the avenues of the long garden, into darkness that was not darkness.

Among the pavilions of these trees, Jaspre had played as a child, here she had wandered into her young womanhood, shut from the world. And here he too had come, the intruder, the ruiner of all, who should in turn be ruined.

The moon poised on the peak of an unseen mountain in the sky, as white as fear.

The woman reached the lawn ringed by its savage shrubbery, the spiked and twining briers, and there she saw him immediately, now seated, idle and dismayed, now springing up alarmed. The moon chalked in his pale face, the leaves rained black lights across it. The woman saw him as if he were some cipher only, the humble garb, wild hair, wide eyes. Here it was, that which had cheated her after all, had marred the delicious fruit in some insidious manner the woman neither knew nor cared to know. He was the ultimate of all Jaspre’s treasures that would be destroyed.

“Come seeking love?” the woman said. “Here it is then.”

And she tossed to him the golden rope of hair like a spray of silver water over the night.

Then she spoke swiftly to the garden.

At once the shrubbery came alive, lifting on its stems to seize and tangle, and the long briers like spined serpents thrashed and fell down on him. She did not hear him shout or cry aloud. She did not even stay to witness what she had wrought on him, his body whipped, clawed, flayed, his eyes scratched out. She turned and retraced her way briskly toward the house and into it, not glancing back.

Directly returning to the insularium, she found the mess of misadventure already tidied; and the half-dead useless thing had been dragged from her sight. While perhaps only psychologically perceived, there swirled the smell of burning silk, the sharp cracks of splintering wood.

All that she must do, she had done. Yet, she had importuned him, angered him, and now he had withheld at last what she had asked and schemed to get life-long—but still she must propitiate him, Angemal who was Arimanio, Prince of Darkness.

So, her rage in check, her anguish reined, she drew back the curtain of samite, the curtain of velvet, unlocked the door of horn and iron. Spat upon, degraded, his word of denial twisting in her brain, she would kneel and worship him, atoning all her days for ever once imploring him. And maybe he would be merciful. Then she pulled aside the curtain of mail and a brazen beast shrieked in her very soul, although the witch gazed in upon the alcove and therefore in upon herself as pitilessly as she gazed upon all other persons.

She never changed, although she felt, soft as a kiss, the curse he set on her, some future of blight, disease or madness, felt it begin within her at that very instant she beheld the statue. There were marks of claws upon it, the precious tintings ripped away and the stone gouged to ugliness beneath. While from the blind bowls of its eyes, the sable jewels had been torn out.

And so she was made aware of the full measure of his jest, and his fastidious disdain, the one she had tempted with a rope of gold.

* * * *

Jaspre had flown, a weightless butterfly in a waste of granite. Then, there came a waste of coldness, where frost formed on her wings. They presently snapped off from her like broken shutters, and she smote the stony floor of Hell and crawled about there. But then there came the waste of a great and blazing light, and Jaspre opened her eyes upon a blanched sun with the face of a skull, and against this sun huge fleshless hands stretched out in supplication or in hate.

She had been cast out into the wood of dead trees, which seemed to her to be all the world there was for her now. Her hair had been sheared, coarse sacking covered her skin. Bracelets of agony held her wrists. Her hands were numb and flaccid, and there was no strength in her, not even the strength to lament. So she lay and watched the white sun creep across the fingertips of the trees. The earth was not as he had told her, her lover, yet she loved him only the more for his lies which had been beautiful and kind. And if she must die here in the wilderness of the bone trees, she did not care, if he should only continue to live happily in some dream, or magic place he had conjured.

“But I will take you there, my child,” he said, his voice, for her, like music.

And she smiled with joy, supposing she imagined it, until he lifted her in his arms.

For a few moments she lay against him as the pain melted from her wrists and body and a warmth and strength flowed like wine through her limbs, her heart, her reverie, and then she raised her head and looked at him. She knew him immediately, no other but the wanderer who had found her in her garden, the young man she had loved. She knew him also as he truly was, since now he had set aside the screen of illusion. Tall and pale, his hair blacker than blackness, apparelled in the dark of the moon and gemmed with its light, his eyes the oceans and the shores of night, his face no longer hidden, more wonderful than the face of any statue. She was not afraid. Love cannot fear. She asked him nothing.

But as he held her now, the bandaging upon her healed wrists turned to jewels, the sacking robe to velvet. And, as in her dream, her hair grew like a wind and poured over like a tide, a streaming silver that was gold, until it brushed the ground.

The bleached trees parted and darkness ran through. A black horse, flamed with a sapphire mane and tail, and hung with stars, stood against the sinking moon.

He mounted Jaspre before him.

“The soil, the roots of the trees, will open,” he said. “My land lies there, beneath the earth. Whatever the woman told you of it you must unremember. The country is not as once it was, nor as you have seen it.”

Then the horse danced on the ground and the ground gave way. Far off, Jaspre glimpsed—not darkness—but a glimmering multi-colored luminescence, the flowering trees of an endless spring, the towers of a rainbow city, more beautiful than in any book, and winged with a gilded morning, there in the black pit of the world.

“And this is your kingdom,” the young girl sighed.

“This is my kingdom,” said the Prince of Darkness.

And to this they went.