Truly, he thought, the earthy-minded Famurza had somehow plumbed the need that lay at the bottom of his disenchantment with all sensory pleasures. It would be good to visit, to sojourn for an hour or so, in that city whose people had long passed beyond the lusts of mortality, beyond satiety and disillusion.
A moon, swelling from the crescent toward the half, arose behind him as he reached the foot of the low-mounded hill on which the cemetery lay. He left the paved road, and began to ascend the slope, half-covered with stunted gorse, at whose summit the glimmering marbles were discernible. It was without path, other than the broken trails made by goats and their herders. Dim, lengthened and attenuate, his shadow went before him like a ghostly guide. In his fantasy it seemed to him that he climbed the gently sloping bosom of a giantess, studded afar with pale gems that were tombstones and mausoleums. He caught himself wondering, amid this poetic whimsy, whether the giantess was dead, or merely slept.
Gaining the flat expansive ground of the summit, where dwarfish dying yews disputed with leafless briars the intervals of slabs blotched with lichen, he recalled the tale that Famurza had mentioned, anent the lamia who was said to haunt the necropolis. Famurza, he knew well, was no believer in such legendry, and had meant only to mock his funereal mood. Yet, as a poet will, he began to play with the fancy of some presence, immortal, lovely and evil, that dwelt amid the antique marbles and would respond to the evocation of one who, without positive belief, had longed vainly for visions from beyond mortality.
Through headstone aisles of moon-touched solitude, he came to a lofty mausoleum, still standing with few signs of ruin at the cemetery’s center. Beneath it, he had been told, were extensive vaults housing the mummies of an extinct royal family that had ruled over the twin cities Umbri and Psiom in former centuries. The princess Morthylla had belonged to this family.
To his startlement a woman, or what appeared to be such, was sitting on a fallen shaft beside the mausoleum. He could not see her distinctly; the tomb’s shadow still enveloped her from the shoulders downward. The face alone, glimmering wanly, was lifted to the rising moon. Its profile was such as he had seen on antique coins.
“Who are you?” he asked, with a curiosity that overpowered his courtesy.
“I am the lamia Morthylla,” she replied, in a voice that left behind it a faint and elusive vibration like that of some briefly sounded harp. “Beware me—for my kisses are forbidden to those who would remain numbered among the living.”
Valzain was startled by this answer that echoed his fantasies. Yet reason told him that the apparition was no spirit of the tombs but a living woman who knew the legend of Morthylla and wished to amuse herself by teasing him. And yet what woman would venture alone and at night to a place so desolate and eerie?
Most credibly, she was a wanton who had come out to keep a rendezvous amid the tombs. There were, he knew, certain perverse debauchees who required sepulchral surroundings and furnishings for the titillation of their desires.
“Perhaps you are waiting for some one,” he suggested. “I do not wish to intrude, if such is the case.”
“I wait only for him who is destined to come. And I have waited long, having had no lover for two hundred years. Remain, if you wish: there is no one to fear but me.”
Despite the rational surmises he had formed, there crept along Valzain’s spine the thrill of one who, without fully believing, suspects the presence of a thing beyond nature…. Yet surely it was all a game—a game that he too could play for the beguilement of his ennui.
“I came here hoping to meet you,” he declared. “I am weary of mortal women, tired of every pleasure—tired even of poetry.”
“I, too, am bored,” she said, simply.
The moon had climbed higher, shining on the dress of antique mode that the woman wore. It was cut closely at waist and hips and bosom, with voluminous downward folds. Valzain had seen such costumes only in old drawings. The princess Morthylla, dead for three centuries, might well have worn a similar dress.
Whoever she might be, he thought, the woman was strangely beautiful, with a touch of quaintness in the heavily coiled hair whose color he could not decide in the moonlight. There was a sweetness about her mouth, a shadow of fatigue or sadness beneath her eyes. At the right corner of her lips he discerned a small mole.
Valzain’s meeting with the self-named Morthylla was repeated nightly while the moon swelled like the rounding breast of a titaness and fell away once more to hollowness and senescence. Always she awaited him by the same mausoleum—which, she declared, was her dwelling-place. And always she dismissed him when the east turned ashen with dawn, saying that she was a creature of the night.
Skeptical at first, he thought of her as a person with macabre leanings and fantasies akin to his own, with whom he was carrying on a flirtation of singular charm. Yet about her he could find no hint of the worldliness that he suspected: no seeming knowledge of present things, but a weird familiarity with the past and the lamia’s legend. More and more she seemed a nocturnal being, intimate only with shadow and solitude.
Her eyes, her lips, appeared to withhold secrets forgotten and forbidden. In her vague, ambiguous answers to his questions, he read meanings that thrilled him with hope and fear.
“I have dreamed of life,” she told him cryptically. “And I have dreamed also of death. Now, perhaps there is another dream—into which you have entered.”
“I, too, would dream,” said Valzain.
Night after night his disgust and weariness sloughed away from him, in a fascination fed by the spectral milieu, the environing silence of the dead, his withdrawal and separation from the carnal, garish city. By degrees, by alternations of unbelief and belief, he came to accept her as the actual lamia. The hunger that he sensed in her could be only the lamia’s hunger; her beauty that of a being no longer human. It was like a dreamer’s acceptance of things fantastic elsewhere than in sleep.
Together with his belief, there grew his love for her. The desires he had thought dead revived within him, wilder, more importunate.
She seemed to love him in return. Yet she betrayed no sign of the lamia’s legendary nature, eluding his embrace, refusing him the kisses for which he begged.
“Sometime, perhaps,” she conceded. “But first you must know me for what I am, must love me without illusion.”
“Kill me with your lips, devour me as you are said to have devoured other lovers,” beseeched Valzain.
“Can you not wait?” Her smile was sweet—and tantalizing. “I do not wish your death so soon, for I love you too well. Is it not sweet to keep our tryst among the sepulchers? Have I not beguiled you from your boredom? Must you end it all?”
The next night he besought her again, imploring with all his ardor and eloquence the denied consummation.
She mocked him: “Perhaps I am merely a bodiless phantom, a spirit without substance. Perhaps you have dreamed me. Would you risk an awakening from the dream?”
Valzain stepped toward her, stretching out his arms in a passionate gesture. She drew back, saying:
“What if I should turn to ashes and moonlight at your touch? You would regret then your rash insistence.”
“You are the immortal lamia,” avowed Valzain. “My senses tell me that you are no phantom, no disembodied spirit. But for me you have turned all else to shadow.”
“Yes, I am real enough in my fashion,” she granted, laughing softly. Then suddenly she leaned toward him and her lips touched his throat. He felt their moist warmth a moment—and felt the sharp sting of her teeth that barely pierced his skin, withdrawing instantly. Before he could clasp her she eluded him again.
“It is the only kiss permitted to us at present,” she cried, and fled swiftly with soundless footfalls among the gleams and shadows of the sepulchers.