Dark Dance by Tanith Lee Page B

asked.
    ‘Uncle Camillo goes here, there and everywhere. A will-o’-the-wisp.’
    ‘Uncle,’ she said. ‘Is he your uncle, Sylvian?’
    ‘The previous generation.’ Like Anna, Sylvian said. ‘He’s very old.’
    Two hundred, three hundred,’ she hazarded lightly, her heart beating in her side.
    ‘More, more,’ said Sylvian absently. ‘Uncle Camillo remembers the flight from the last city. Another country. Long ago. I don’t recall the date. I was a baby then.’
    As in the dream, Rachaela saw in her mind’s eye a burning house. A mob shouted and smashed the coloured windows with stones.
    ‘Tell me your age, Sylvian.’
    ‘Oh I forget.’
    ‘How old is Adamus?’
    Sylvian ruled through a sentence, lovingly. Seen across the table the face of the page had assumed a beautiful matrix quality from the carefully spaced lines.
    ‘Adamus is your father,’ Sylvian said.
    ‘So he tells me. How old?’
    ‘You must ask him. I forget these things. Time drags on, yet it goes so quickly. A year passes like a month. A day becomes a year.’
    ‘And you won’t tell me about Camillo.’
    ‘He moves about the house. He followed you.’
    ‘Not any more. He’s lost interest.’
    ‘Anna may know,’ said Sylvian.
    ‘I never see Anna in the daytime. Hardly any of you, apart from your servants. What are they? Some lesser branch of the family?’
    Sylvian had ruled over the final page. He put the book aside and drew another towards him.
    Rachaela could no longer watch.
    She asked them, those Scarabae she came on, where Camillo was. She believed in the augury of the dream. Camillo would show her the way into the tower. She could then break in on him as he had done on her. Beyond that point she did not venture. It was only that she did not like her powerlessness, the sense of which was growing on her.
    Then again, the dream might be and probably was a wild illusion. She misled herself. But she did not know what else to do.
    She went down to the kitchen. She meant to make her inquiries of Cheta, Carlo, Michael, Maria. None of them was there. They too had vanished.
    She guessed at their whereabouts, the caverns of unlocated bedrooms, or narrow cells where they stood upright in the dark, propped on the walls.
    The house was the tomb. These day-fearing things did not need to creep into a box. The double doors and sugar windows contained them.
    She re-found the corridor with the drowning baby in the reeds and the stuffed horse. Camillo had left no traces, not even the armour.
    She passed the painted mirror again. More hills had appeared. And the goat in the woman’s belly was indeed the result of one picture beneath another.
    In the room of the dusty piano and unstrung harp someone had rested on a peg a yellow guitar. The window in the music room, which she had not looked at before, revealed an orchestra of beasts: tigers which played flutes; an elephant in charge of an organ; a crocodile with a viola. Perhaps meant to induce laughter, the window seemed decidedly frightful, like an hallucination in infancy. Somewhere else there had been a Noah’s Ark awash on the flood and two golden unicorns left behind. But the lion and the sheep were a product of the dream. Unless it was some clue her sleeping brain had provided.
    Maybe Uncle Camillo did not know the way into the tower, had forgotten, or would not say.
    A lion devouring a sheep ... the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb... the young lion and the fatling together. ... It would be like them to have such a window. And a little child shall lead them.
    A child. Where would a child go?
    Rachaela raised her head. The naughty child Camillo—playing overhead in the playroom of an attic.
    There was sure to be one. Dust and cobwebs and antique toys of the Scarabae when they had been young, centuries before.
    She had seen no evidence of a way into an attic. She did not want to go there. If Uncle Camillo was there with his games and keys to the house, to the tower, he must stay