“It was a practice in Ancient Egypt, studied by him closely. Curious to think, that when they lay Hāna in the tomb at last, she too will bear this same scar upon her forehead and her skull, as did those persons in that land of pyramids.
“Ah, Ysabelle. Dear sister. If you could see her. She is like a little child again. Everything is new to her. The flight of a bird startles, even that. She does not move from her chair. A picture of repose, her drooping head, her folded hands. Le Rue says she does not quite know me – I fear she would not know you at all. But when I ask her to smile for me, she does. She will be well cared for, there. And though I must soon be gone from this country, Le Rue will take thought for her like his own. As indeed, he does for all his charges in that place.
“A note on my gift, which accompanies this letter. You will have realized, it is her hair, which of course, for such medical attention, had to be cut off entirely. All the shining locks. It seemed to me you might value them, dear Ysabelle, as you did when you were to her her closest and most intimate friend.
“Beyond this, my kindest wishes for your continued good health and the ending of your local drought.
“Your brother, if so I may call myself:
“Ernst.”
In her diary, her Book, Ysabelle wrote, “I sent for the old man, the charcoal burner they call Doggy. Having given him some coins, he went for me to the place, which he names Wolf Valley. He was the only one I could trust. He, and his kind, keep away from the village. He has under his shirt an amulet, dried sticks twisted in a knot. Near dawn, he came back. He had said there he was an old servant, and asked for her. Expectedly, they would not let him in, but said she was in the care of Dr Le Rue, and he need have no fears. When Doggy said, as I told him to, that he hoped she was better, they laughed. He caught a glimpse of others, at some windows. Their heads were shaved. One was wrapped up tight, and seemed to have no arms. The old man was brave. They hate that place.”
Under this Ysabelle, or something, has scrawled in a running jagged line:
Heart burst stifle and drown in blood
Perhaps a curse, or a wish for self.
There are records from the asylum. One may see them, if the tactic is carried out properly. There is a note on a woman, called only by her Christian name, to “protect” her. “Hāna, the prey of uncontrollable, obscene and perverse desires, a danger to herself and others.” The operation, “The last possible resort” and “practised among the ancients”, was a “success”.
Before the final page, Ysabelle sets out for herself some instructions on how best to hang herself. The strong beam in the lower room that faces the afternoon glare of the mountains, and will hold her weight, which, she admits, is much less, as she cannot eat. Mireio and Jean will be sent away with a settlement of money, as the last page also explains. The hair, a dead thing, still with its stranded mauve ribbons that she herself had helped, that morning of the ending, to tie there, is to be strongly plaited, not as before, woven, not with silk, but some coarse twine, to make it sure. And she will be naked, lest the rigidity of her clothes impedes her.
Ysabelle understands, from her reading, that few people die quickly when hanged. They are choked and strangle. In this way, the hair will throttle her, and as she kicks and gags in instinctive physical panic, her soul will remember that it is Hāna who is killing her, as she has killed Hāna. She affirms she will wear the silver locket with Hāna’s sexual hair. She has polished the metal.
She says, as if she has forgotten it was mentioned before, and as she says again, too, on the last page, that she has heard of a goat being sacrificed to bring rain.
After that, she says the nightingale has flown away.
Then she says she has finished.
After which, there is the last page.
There are some further pages after that, blank, obviously.
Inevitably, one fills them with the mind – the presumed hanging, the woman choking and kicking, rocked violently from side to side in the white vacant empty house, then only turning, slowing, still, a pendant, while the mountains and the sun stare in. After which, as it seems almost supernaturally, fire catches the house, and burns it to the ground, leaving only the puns – St Cailloux – of the lower stone floors and stone chimneys and the stone hearths, and the stone under which the book is, until the old man, maybe Doggy, fetches it out and brings it here, to me.
In a year’s time, a peasant, travelling up the lane on foot, will pause by the ruin of the house. The land by then will have been sold off, but no one, as yet, come to restore or change it. The untended cherry trees will be leafy yet, although one or two will have succumbed to the ivy, with here and there a green young fruit hard among the foliage.
The man, a stranger, will not be troubled by any stories of the region, and going into the ruin, will poke about, since sometimes, in this way, he has found useful things others have overlooked. He will find, however, nothing, and so sit down by a stone, part of one, now collapsed, chimney. He will eat his olives and bread. Then he will fall asleep, for the sun will be again very hot.
When he wakes it will be to great alarm. Across from him, in the wild grass, a small fire will have started. He must leap up to put it out, and do so quickly. For in this weather, another summer drought, fire is the fiercest enemy.
This man is canny. When once he has dealt with the danger, he will find a soreness at his chest, and looking down, where hangs the little silver cross given him as a boy, he will come to see at once what has happened, for he has heard of it before.
An hour after, in the village, he will tell his tale over his wine, and so unravel the mystery of Madame Ysabelle’s house. The truth will not make any difference to her burial place, in fact, will only consolidate her rights to holy ground, since no one has generally told the plan of suicide written in her diary.
Now they will say without compunction, that some object- a glass, or mirror, carelessly left by the departing servants – caught the harsh light from the mountains, and cast it off in a ray against the wooden wall. The concentration of this burning-glass presently sent the tinder of the drought-dry house up in a conflagration.
Most of that will be true. Not quite all. For it was no picture or glass that caused the focus of an incendiary ray, the lighting of a death pyre. It was the polished silver locket that lay pendant on the breast of Ysabelle’s hanged corpse, once she had stopped moving, once she hung quite still, a pendant herself, naked silver on a silver chain of hair, from the beam above.
I have a lock of your hair.
I cut
It from you as you slept.
I kissed you there,
Where
The scissors met.
You never noticed it had gone.
It is all I have of you,
Your hair.
Blonde spirals in
A silver locket.
NEIL GAIMAN HORROR-HOSTED the Fox Channel’s 13 Nights of Fear during the fortnight before Hallowe’en 2004 and got to introduce movies from inside a coffin. He thought it was cool.
His 2002 novel American Gods won science fiction’s Hugo Award and horror’s Bram Stoker Award, while Coraline, a dark fantasy for children which he had been writing for a decade, was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and even managed to beat its predecessor in the awards stakes.
On the illustrated front, his first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, entitled Endless Nights, is published by DC Comics and illustrated by seven different artists; 1602 is a new alternate history mini-series from Marvel, and he has collaborated with artist Dave McKean on the children’s picture book The Wolves in the Walls.