The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams (best desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

On the landing she leaned against the banisters, and dimly considered pulling herself together. For the first time in her life she wanted somebody very badly, somebody—but Anthony for choice. Only Anthony had been driven away that morning. Her father then. Only her father was separated from her. Somebody, somebody to break this awful loneliness that had settled on her, this loneliness in which the memory of that horror was her only companion. O somebody…somebody. “I’m being silly,” she thought. What w as that idea of pulling herself together? And…and what was that other noise? She looked up.

Over the skylight above her head she saw something dragged, and knew it for an edge of those wings. There was a noise of scratching; a crack; more scratching or what sounded like scratching. The wing disappeared; came back; went again. And again she saw the beak, thrusting down through the open skylight, stabbing, questing. All bonds of habit broken, mad and fearful of madness, she screamed out and flung herself down the stars. “Father!” she cried. “Father!” and found him standing before her in the hall.

He was looking at her with that utter detachment which had come on him-not so much looking as allowing her, rather reluctantly, to be visible to him. She caught his arm, staggering, and babbling nonsense. Only sometimes she paused and clung, in frightened tears, in terror, in anguish. She didn’t dare look round; she looked at him; he would know, he would see, he would do something; and she herself could do nothing at all. But in some two or three minutes she ceased, for there crept into her exhausted consciousness the thought that all this was vain. He was still looking at her, from a placid detachment, and all he said was, “Yes, yes. Well, I was afraid you might get hurt,” and the very words cost him an effort, so that there seemed to be great silences betwixt them. Then as if relieved of her presence his eyes went blank, his voice changed. “Ah!” he murmured, “Ah!” and sighed happily, and pushed at her as if she were hindering him, pushed her away, back into the corruption that was growing round her in the dreadful odour which renewed itself, and was attacking her with a vehemence which made it seem the very body of the creature of her terror.

As he pushed her she loosed hold. It was some stranger who went by, and up the stairs—she gave another wild scream as he did so—a half warning, only he took no notice. He went from her, lost in the contemplation which held him, going away with his memories and his knowledge thick over and around him, abandoned by and abandoning everything but the pure certainty of beauty which he had seen. She dared not go that way; she screamed once more, and took a desperate little run. But her feet didn’t seem to move easily; they were sticking, sinking; she had to pull them out of the floor, or the ground, the damp marshy ground they were toiling through. She looked down; the floor was half floor and half bog, squelchy green spreading under her in patches, which widened and joined themselves, and she was being held by them as she moved. She looked up and saw the shape of the walls and ceiling, but now spectral and growing fainter against a wide open space, a vast plain, stretching emptily away to where at the horizon a heavy and inflamed sky sank to meet it. The house was no more than a shadowy diagram; all the solidity had vanished, and a mere arrangement of lines showed against the wild background. She saw it, and yet did not feel it as altogether unknown: she had somewhere been acquainted with that desolate plain. Right in front of her, beyond the framework of the front door, was the gleam of water. She dragged her feet from the mire and tried to get firmer footing, while her mind sought to remember the name of the p lace. She had never seen it yet she knew—O very well she knew it, and the figure that was coming towards her across it from far away, a tiny figure, so distant was it, but human. As she gazed she heard another sound above, and looked up to see the earlier horror flying round in circles high over her. There she stood on the edge of a swampy pool, with the pterodactyl wheeling round in the sky, and one remote companion. She couldn’t be frightened more; her dulled mind, as she stood there helplessly, returned to that approaching form, and there again she thought she recognized something familiar in its movement. It came on quickly: it was a man wrapped in a kind of large cloak, bareheaded, bald—no, not bald, but with a head shaved in a tonsure. Her remote memory woke—it was a medieval priest; he came on towards her still more quickly, and then, though his face was strange, she knew him with a quick certainty. It was—it was Peter Abelard himself, Abelard, mature, but still filled with youth because of the high intensity of his philosophical passion, and he was singing as he came: singing the words that he had himself composed, and which a voice of her own past had spoken to her but lately:

O quanta qualia sunt illa Sabbata.

Against that angry sky he came on, in that empty land his voice rang out in joy, and she tried to move; she ran a few steps forward, and made an effort to speak. Her voice failed; she heard herself making grotesque noises in her throat, and suddenly over him there fell the ominous shadow of the pterodactyl. Only for a few seconds, then it passed on, and he emerged from it, and his face was towards her, but now it had changed. Now it was like a vile corpse, and yet still it was uttering things: it croaked at her in answer to her own croakings, strange and meaningless words. Individualiter, essentialiter, categoricorum, differentia substantialis—croak, croak, croak. He was coming towards her, and she was trying to run away; and now the blackness had fallen on them both, and the horrid presence of that other filthy being had swept down. She shrieked and stumbled and fell and it caught her.

Something touched her face: something swept her arm; something enveloped and weighed against her heart. Her eyes were shut; she had no power to look again. Her brain was dazed; she had no power to think. Her mouth was panting horribly; and from it, wrenched by a physical power from a physical consciousness, there came one last and feeble and continuous effort to call Anthony. “An…An…A…A…A…” she was saying, and the effort became mere gasps as she shook and shrank. There was something which could save her—something if that something would come. She lay in a heap and the great flap of great wings beat over her, and she felt them pressing her, and something had hurt her head. “A…A…A…” she went on moaning, and claws pressed the back of her neck, dreadful, horrible claws. The smell was working within her; in some way it was Abelard. It was Abelard, and the wings lifted and again caught her. She was on her face on the marshy ground, and she was being forced over. As well as she could she hid herself, but it was all in vain. There was nothing round her but a hideous and vile corruption, nothing, nothing except a vibration that went rhythmically through her, as if-almost from somewhere within her-a horse were galloping. And then she heard her name.

It wasn’t cried aloud; it was spoken as normally as it had been spoken a hundred times in that place—the state of knowledge. When she heard it she felt herself straining to hear it again, and did, but this time with a note of command in it, so that in a hasty obedience she opened her eyes. That was what, by nothing but her name speeded on music, she had been bidden to do. She obeyed; not easily, but she obeyed.

Anthony was standing near her, and behind him was the brightness of a sky lovely in a summer sunset. His arm was stretched out towards her, and she felt the weight upon her lifting. He called to her by her name, and she answered with his own, with the name of which she had cried for help, but hardly murmured now, so spent was she. Nevertheless as she breathed it she felt herself free, and then there was the shade of wings in the air, and another flying thing sailed into sight and floated slowly down to his shoulder. There, eagle-plumaged, eagle-beaked, eagle-eyed, it rested; he raised his hand, and as if in an august leniency it allowed itself to be caressed. His eyes, as he leaned his head aside, full of love and loving laughter, rested on hers. She received with joy both love and laughter; there went out from him, and from the Augustitude upon his shoulder, a knowledge of safety would she but take it, and freely and humbly she let it enter her being. The thing she had rejected and yet used gathered and expanded round him as if a glory attended him. He looked down at her, and though she longed for him to gather her and let her feel more closely the high protection of his power, she was content to wait upon his will. As she made that motion of assent she felt the wildness of the desolate plain shut out. A covering formed over them and hid the sky; shelter was restored, and when at last he moved and came to her, and she half-raised herself to meet him, her hand touched the mat at the dining-room door, and she knew she was lying again in her own house. As he moved the eagle-form left his shoulder, swept up and round, passed her and disappeared in the shadows of the room.

But she had not time for that fantastic dream; she looked at her cousin, and felt that either she or he had changed. There was in him something which shook her with a fear, but with a fear very different from that which she had felt but now. This was power and intelligence; this was command. He came over to her, stretching out his hands, and said as he took hers: “You were only just in time, weren’t you, dearest?”

“Yes,” she said, and got to her feet, holding tightly to his grasp. He put his arm round her, and took her to a chair, and stood for awhile in front of her silent. She said suddenly: “What was it?”

He looked at her gravely. “I wonder what you’ll say if I tell you,” he said.

“I shall believe you,” she answered simply. “Anthony, I’m…I’m sorry.”

The laughter broke out again in his eyes. “And why are you sorry, my cousin?” he asked.

“I’ve behaved very badly,” Damaris said. To tell him seemed to her more important than anything else in the world could be, even the vanished monstrosity.

Anthony took her hand again, and kissed it. “And how have you behaved badly, my cousin?” he asked.

“I’ve tried to make use of you,” Damaris said, beginning to blush. “I’ve been…I’ve been…”

“…the first-born of Lilith, who is illusion, and Samael the Accursed,” Anthony finished. “Yes, darling. But that doesn’t matter between us. It isn’t that which you saw.”

“What was it?” Damaris asked shuddering and looking round in a renewed servile fear. Even as she did so he released his hand from hers and stepped back, so that, as she moved hastily to catch hold of him again, he was beyond her reach, and as he spoke there was a sternness in his voice.

“You saw what you