Dark Dance by Tanith Lee

prison.’
    ‘Where,’ he said, ‘do you want to go instead? Who has prevented you? You’ve only to pack your bags and leave.’
    ‘Easier said than done. There’s no transport. The only telephone for miles is broken.’
    ‘I see,’ he said. ‘They do mean you to stay.’
    His face had drawn inward. The eyes were as she had seen them first, still and shadowed.
    ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said.
    ‘Oh, I expect I guessed. You’ve no choice then. You’ll have to remain.’
    ‘For what?’ she said quickly.
    ‘For whatever happens next.’
    ‘Don’t spy on me again,’ she said. ‘You have no right.’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘rights.’ He said, ‘Put a chair under the doorknob if it worries you.’
    ‘Would that keep you out?’
    ‘I’ve seen you now,’ he said. ‘I’m satisfied.’
    ‘That the family line goes on.’
    ‘You’re mine,’ he said. ‘A natural curiosity.’
    ‘I’m not yours. How dare you say something so inappropriate. I’m nothing to you. My mother was nothing to you.’
    ‘There you are correct.’
    ‘Then you can’t make any claims.’
    ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘No claims at all. You’re still mine. I created you.’
    ‘Fucking nonsense,’ she said stonily. ‘You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that.’
    ‘I meant to make you,’ he said. ‘I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me. I knew she would. When I went back to her that night I knew what I’d find.’
    ‘All her life,’ said Rachaela, hearing the false desperation in her voice, ‘she hated you and what you’d done. It was a constant struggle. She made me pay for you.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without expression. ‘But it’s over now, isn’t it?’
    ‘Why didn’t you leave me in peace?’
    ‘You’d had your peace long enough.’
    ‘You bastard,’ she said. But he was not her father. He was a man out of the night who held her there, not touching her, and the fire climbing the log, gilded both their faces. She could not leave. She rose. ‘I might as well go to bed.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sleep well, Rachaela.’
    To her consternation tears scorched into her eyes. He spoke without tenderness, and he was nothing to her, and yet it was as if, across the twenty-nine years of her life, this simple and insincere wish had lain in waiting, gathering true sentiment.
    She had no reply.
    She took the lamp, and left him in the firelight, while the great cat hunted somewhere through the pitch-black night.
    Through the lilies and the sunburst, she regarded herself in the winged mirror.
    She was naked, framed in black hair.
    Her white body, creamed of all its down, only the sable fleece at her groin. Long and slender, like something carved from a bone, but full-breasted, the little sweets of the nipples dilute-rose. A blue-green shadow reflected on the whiteness, something undersea.
    She stared at her body, what she could make out of it portioned by the mirror, trying to know it as her own.
    Rachaela had never seen her mother’s nakedness. Her sagging defeated frame had stayed swathed in zippered day clothes, and nighties and tent-like dressing-gowns. And once the knock on the bathroom door and her mother’s harsh frightened voice, ‘You can’t come in.’ Her mother had been scandalized that Rachaela slept naked. In the same way she had been scandalized at the frequent hair washing, and Rachaela’s habitual lateness at her places of work. All the same, all condemned.
    Her daughter was a being from Venus.
    She had bought Rachaela sensible nightdresses and marked the shampoo bottle and set the alarm clock in her own bedroom to wake her so that she might come in and shake Rachaela awake. ‘They won’t stand for it. Do you know you used almost the whole bottle when you washed your hair? Why don’t you get it cut and set?’
    A lily stood up against Rachaela’s