Clockatrice by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“God’s mercy,” whispered Robert, and spilled his wine down the embroidered coverlet.

But Diana said to him plaintively, “Oh, Robert, my dear love, why did you not come to meet me that night?”

And he shook from head to toe in the warm bed, and his feet went cold as frost.

“Which night? When — when?”

“That night you bade me seek for you in the glade below my father’s garden. The glade with the pine tree growing there.”

“Did I not meet you, surely I did, my lovesome Diana,” he said, not able to help himself, frozen with terror and yet racked with pity.

“No, you were not there. Instead the Devil came and opened his bony serpent wings in the tree. His scaled tail coiled all around the branches, just as we are told it did in Eden. Oh, Robert, I wish I had seen you before he shut me fast in stone.

But all I saw was the red back of his throat, like the stenchy gape of Hell, and now I am stopped forever, and all forevers that may be.”

“Poor girl,” said the old man in the bed, and wept.

But she only turned her head, once to the left, once to the right, then raised her arms in supplication, and let her arms fall down again by her sides. Just as the doll did that came out of the clock. Yet instead of sliding away backwards into the wall as the doll had into the clockcase, Diana Sesby merely vanished.

“I have dreamed,” said Robert. “I have dreamed and now I am awake again.” But he knew he had not dreamed, and that he had not slept. “It is to be my death,” he said. And he was quite correct.

A single text remained that described the anecdote. Because the priest that secretly heard the premortis confession of Robert Southurst, (who clandestinely had remained a Catholic all those years) was so troubled by it, he committed this section to paper.

But in Cromwell’s time, less than a decade later, the chapel where the priest’s books were kept was burned, along with a great many other things. And so, by now, no record exists.

To herself, Dru admitted that Trenchall had annoyed her. Not, obviously, by not wanting to prolong their sexual adventure, (she herself had neither anticipated nor wanted that) but by his truly bloody awful bad manners. Which had been equally evidenced in his underhanded treatment of the presumably unaware blonde American.

Dru’s annoyance was perhaps surprisingly sharp for a few days. And once she sloughed it, she decided she would after all make something creative of her weekend at Sessonby.

Having had her photographs printed by the usual team, she studied each shot. There was one particular take of the Diana statue, more luck, she felt, than expertise — for the glade had been so dark and the ground so sludgy, (and he, distraction). The picture showed the entire statue, all four foot nine of her, from sweeping skirthem to just above the top of her head. And the clearest of detail was in it, everything sidelit in a quite uncliched way.

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