Tanith Lee
Where All Things Perish
Tanith Lee began writing at the age of nine, and after various employment, she became a full-time writer in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave. Since then she has written and published around sixty novels, nine collections and over 200 short stories. She has also scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blakes 7, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master.
In 1998 she was shortlisted for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction for her novel Law of the Wolf Tower, the first volume in the ‘Claidi Journal’ series. More recently, Tor Books has published White as Snow, the author’s retelling of the Snow White story, while Overlook Press has issued A Bed of Earth and Venus Preserved, the third and fourth volumes respectively in the ‘Secret Books of Paradys’ series. She is currently working on a sequel to her novel The Silver Metal Lover for Bantam Books.
‘Late one night, my partner John Kaiine and I fell to talking about ghost stories and other sinister matters,’ recalls the author. ‘Outside the by-then-darkened room, leaves were appearing on the trees and seeming to form strange shapes and faces. The idea of looking from windows took hold of us. Then, as is his wont, John produced an idea so perfect for a story that the usual scramble was on to grab a notebook. The spine of the work supplied, the characters began to arrive on their own, as is their wont.
‘The story was almost entirely there, even its title, which came to me at once. Then I had only to think of a remedy. I went to sleep with my head well-filled by the tale, and woke up with the solution to everything shining darkly there on some efficient desk in my brain.’
It was glimpsing Polleto again, between trains, at that hotel in Vymart, which made me remember. Which, in its way, is quite curious, for how could I ever have forgotten such a thing? So impossible and terrible a thing. And yet, the human mind is a strange mechanism, and the human heart far stranger. Sometimes the most trivial events haunt our waking hours, even our dreams, for years after they have happened. While episodes of incredible moment, perhaps only because they have been marked indelibly upon us, stand back in the shadows, mute and motionless, until some chance ray of mental light discovers them. And then they are there, burning bright, towering and undismissable once more. At such times one knows they are more than memories, more than the mere furniture of the brain. Rather, they have become part of it, a part of oneself.
‘What is it, Frederick, that you are staring at?’
‘That little man at the table over there.’
‘What, that little clerkish chap in the dusty overcoat? He hardly looks worthy of your curiosity. Of anyone’s, come to that.’
‘No, he probably isn’t. A very ordinary fellow, the sort you wouldn’t recall, I suppose, in the normal way of things.’
‘I should think not. But you do?’
‘Well, as it happens, he was resident in a place where something very odd once happened to me. And not to myself alone.’
‘He was involved in this odd thing? He looks blameless to the point of criminality.’
‘I imagine that he is. No, he was simply living there at the time, had been there two or three years, if I remember correctly. I met him once, in the street, and my aunt introduced him as a Mr Polleto. We exchanged civilities, that was all. He had the faintest trace of a foreign accent, but otherwise seemed a nonentity. My aunt confessed they had all been very disappointed in him because, learning his name before his arrival, they’d hoped for some sort of flamboyant Italian theatrical gentleman, or something of the sort.’
‘He looks more like a grocer.’
‘My aunt’s words exactly. Those were the probable facts, too, I believe. He’d been a shopkeeper, but had come into some funds through a legacy. He bought a house in Steepleford, which was where I was visiting my aunt.’
‘This is a remarkably dull story, Frederick.’
‘Yes.’ I hesitated then. I added, ‘The other story isn’t, I can assure you.’
‘The story which you recollect only since you caught sight of your Mr Polleto? Well, are you going to blab? We have four long hours before the Wassenhaur train. Let’s refresh our glasses, and then you can tell me your tale.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Oh, come, this is too flirtatious. What have you been doing all this while but trying to engage my attention in it?’
‘I protest.’
But the brandy bottle intervened. And presently, sitting on that sunny terrace of the Hotel Alpius, I recounted to my friend and travelling companion the story which I will now relate. That was the first time I ever told it to anyone. And this, now, I trust, will be the last.
The modest town of Steepleford had some slight notoriety in the eighteenth century, when it was one of the centres of a cult known as the Lilyites. These people believed so absolutely in the teachings of Christ, and acted upon them so unswervingly, that they soon turned the entire Christian church against them. There were a few hangings and some riots, as is often the way in these cases, until at last the cult lost both dedication and adherents, and ebbed away. Even so, through the succeeding years (from about 1750 to 1783), now and then some murmur might be heard of the Lilyites. Being, however, still generally feared and loathed for their extreme habits, they were soon rooted out and disposed of, one way or another. The last hint of the cult seemed to surface, nevertheless, in sleepy Steeple-ford. During the July of 1783, one Josebaar Hawkins was harangued in Market Square for holding a secret meeting of seventeen persons, at which they had, allegedly, sworn to slough their worldly goods and to love all men as themselves, in the celebrated Lilyite manner.
At his impromptu trial, Hawkins either denied all this, or ably recanted. He was said to have laughed heartily at the notion of giving up his fine house, which was the product of successful dealings in the textile industry and which stood to the side of Salter’s Lane in its own grounds. He asked, it seems, if the worthies now questioning him thought that he would also abandon his new and beautiful young wife, who went by the unusual name of Amber Maria, or drag her with him in the Lilyite fashion, shoeless and penniless, about the countryside.
Hawkins was presently acquitted of belonging to the sect. No others were even interviewed upon the matter. Thereafter no more is heard, in the annals of Steepleford, of the Lilyites, but there is one more mention of Hawkins and his wife. This record states that in 1788, Amber Maria, being then twenty years of age, (which must have made her fifteen or less at her wedding), was taken ill and died within a month. Hawkins, not wishing to part from her even dead, obtained sanction for her burial in the grounds of his house.
All this, though possibly of local interest in Steepleford, where as a rule a horse casting its shoe in the street might cause great excitement, is of small apparent value on the slate of the world. Yet I must myself now add that even in my own short and irregular visits to the town, I had been, perhaps inattentively, aware of a strangeness that somehow attached itself to the Hawkins house, which still stood to the side of Salter’s Lane.