The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

The hollow howling of her knock faded in the house. Jonquil said, "I'm coming in. I am ." And marched back to her bag beneath the leaden gate. She surveyed the gate, and the knotted weed which had come down on it. Jonquil Hare tried the weed. It resisted her strongly. She took up her bag, in which there was nothing breakable, seasoned traveller as she was, and flung it over the arch. She took the weed in her small strong hands and hauled herself up in her clumsy, graceful way, up to the arch, and sat there, looking in at a morning-twilight garden of shrubs that had not been pruned in a hundred years, and trees that became each other. A blue fountain shone dimly. Jonquil smiled upon it, and swung herself over in the weed and slithered down, into the environ of the house.

By midday, Jonquil had gone busily over most of the Palace of the Planet. Its geography was fixed in her head, but partly, confusedly for she liked the effect of a puzzle of rooms and corridors. Within the lower portion of the house a large hall gave on to a large enclosed inner courtyard, that in turn led to the garden. Above, chambers of the first storey would have opened on to the court, but their doors were sealed by the blue-green weed, which had smothered the court itself and so turned it into a strange undersea grotto where columns protruded like yellow coral. Above the lower floor, two long staircases drew up into apparently uncountable annexes and cells, and to a great salon with tarnished mirrors, also broken like spiderweb. The salon had tall windows that stared through their blind shutters at the lagoon.

There were carvings everywhere; lacking light, she did not study them now. And, as suspected, there was very little furniture a pair of desks with hollow drawers, spindly chairs, a divan in rotted ivory silk. In one oblong room was a bed-frame with vast tapering pillars like idle rockets. Cobwebby draperies shimmered from the canopy in a draught, while patches of bled emerald sunlight hovered on the floor.

Jonquil succeeded in opening a shutter in the salon. A block of afternoon fell in. Next door, in the adjacent chamber, she set up her inflatable mattress, her battery lamp and heater, some candles she had brought illegally in a padded tube. Sitting on her unrolled mat in the subaqueous light of a shuttered window which refused to give, she ate from her pack of food snacks and drank cola. Then she arranged some books and note-pads, pens and pencils, a magnifier, camera and unit, and a miniature recorder on the unfolded table.

She spoke to the room, as from the start she had spoken consecutively to the house. "Well, here we are."

But she was restless. The caretaker must be due to arrive, and until this necessary procedure had taken place, interruption hung over her. Of course, the caretaker would enable Jonquil to gain possession of the house secrets, the holostetic displays of furnishings and earlier life that might have been indigenous here, the hidden walks and rooms that undoubtedly lay inside the walls.

Jonquil was tired. She had risen at 3:00 a.m. for the boat after an evening of hospitable farewells. She lay down on her inflatable bed with the pillow under her neck. Through half-closed eyes she saw the room breathing with pastel motes of sun, and heard the rustle of weed at the shutter.

She dreamed of climbing a staircase which, dreaming, seemed new to her. At the foot of the stair a marble pillar supported a globe of some aquamarine material, covered by small configurations of alien land-masses, isolate in seas. The globe was a whimsical and inaccurate eighteenth-century rendition of the planet Venus, to which the house was mysteriously affiliated. As she climbed the stairs, random sprinklings of light came and went. Jonquil sensed that someone was ascending with her, step for step, not on the actual stair, but inside the peeling wall at her left side. Near the top of the stair (which was lost in darkness) an arched window had been let into the wall, milky and unclear and further obscured by some drops of waxen stained glass. As she came level with the window, Jonquil glanced sidelong at it. A shadowy figure appeared, on the far side of the pane, perhaps a woman, but hardly to be seen.

Jonquil started awake at the sound of the caretaker's serviceable shoes clumping into the house.

The caretaker was a woman. She did not offer her name, and no explanation for her late arrival. She had brought the house manual, and advised Jonquil on how to operate the triggers in its panel — visions flickered annoyingly over the rooms and were gone. A large box contained facsimiles of things pertaining to the house and its history. Jonquil had seen most of these already.

"There are the upper rooms, the attics. Here's the master key."

The woman showed Jonquil a hidden stair that probed these upper reaches of the house. It was not the stairway from the dream, but narrow and winding as the steps of a bell-tower. There were no other concealed chambers.