Personal Darkness Read Free

stream, at his back lay an emerald wood where a tower burned. The window was more like a tarot card than anything. It reflected all over the polished, deeply scratched round table that stood below. The scratches spelled out a word, but not in English.
    The house was quiet and full of heat. And if she closed her eyes, the effect of shuttered hot silence and colored light, the smell of dust and powders, beeswax, cobwebs, damp, evoked the first house.
    And yet everything was changed.
    Changed—and duplicated. Perhaps not too much. Perhaps only so far as was bearable, or necessary.
    She had watched what they would do. She had been borne along by it. But she could not really say she had participated. She was still a spectator. That was her role. Witness to the Scarabae.
    Rachaela stood in the dark room under the blue, red and green window, and listened.
    The sound came, just discernible, the firm summer breeze tossing the tall pines and oaks of the common. Almost, but not quite, like the sound of the sea…
    Then a car noised dimly by, passing along the road two hundred feet below the house, where the common ended. There was not much traffic. Sometimes, people went that way, and usually stared at the house between the trees. It was quite large, with curious balancing architecture, turrets, and all the stabs of the stained-glass windows. Every one of the windows was of stained glass. All the outer doors were doubled, like air locks. There was a conservatory, and a walled garden. Like the first house. On three sides, the common spread away.
    But down beyond the road there was a scatter of big houses, and then clusters of smaller ones, and next one of those villages of London, with its pubs and shops, library, and civic buildings. The steeples of churches sprang from the landscape. On Sundays the bells rang in the distance and an ice-cream van was just audible, playing "The Thieving Magpie."
    Michael and Cheta did their shopping in the London village stores, perhaps classed as an eccentric foreign couple.
    Books were brought from the library, and punctually returned. Also tapes and discs for Eric's machine. Tapes too were carried from Bonanza Videos. They liked the videos, particularly horror films and thrillers. These they watched with straight moral faces, reminding her of gray hamsters thinking.
    Such things were very different from before. There had been no television in the first house. But here there were several. The greater one crouched in the drawing room. Eric, Sasha, and Miranda had each a set in their bedroom. A set had been presented to Michael and Cheta, and one installed in Rachaela's room. They had given her a music center too, and her own video, which she never used. She seldom watched her TV either. But one or all of the other sets were always on the go.
    There were electric lights now.
    In the kitchen, with its cream and black tiles and the collector's piece, an old, rusted, green mangle, standing by the wall, were now the mod cons: a washing machine, a dishwasher, an electric cooker, food processors, fridge. In the pantry stood a huge chest freezer where the servants inserted enormous joints of meat and the frozen swords of vast fish.
    The house was not so large as the first house.
    There were more bathrooms, adjoining all the bedchambers and sitting ready on each floor. The bathrooms were white and collectible, like the mangle, having claw-foot baths and brass Edwardian showers. They had green tarot glass windows. Rachaela had found that her bathroom window would open, and also the window in her room. This must have been especially arranged for her. She had a view out across the common. The undulating, heavily treed slopes, like a wilderness, a glade; where only occasionally some solitary walker might go by (staring up). At night, sometimes, an owl called.
    The scarred table was in the drawing room.
    Rachaela sat down at it. She did not touch the scratches.
    Was she trying to understand them at last, the