The Book of the Beast by Tanith Lee Page A

light caught a dull sequin that all at once flashed, and then another, and another—
    Helise lay pinned under his racking body. She stared at the altering skin of his throat. It was coming out in tiny jewellery slates, which ran together. His neck was scaled now. It was all a perfect tesselation.
    Something scraped along her breast. Her head rolled and she saw a black claw retracting from her behind a thread of blood.
    She could not scream. Her screams had been spent. At that instant, the quake of his crisis rocked through her, and it was he that cried out. It was not the cry of a man.
    A whirling clotted the air, a fume of candles shaken by a gale.
    The sword of flesh unsheathed from her. She was filled only by pain.
    Something rose up, many miles high against the ceiling.
    She did not want to see. Her eyes refused to close.
    The shape of a man, but the face, the head…
    It must be a mask, a visor—it was a bird. A bird’s head, formed from a streaming mosaic of scales, but for the blackish carved beak, the thin black worm of the tongue… the eyes were green bulbs. There was no intelligence in them, yet there was being . They lived .
    Helise lay on the floor. She had no breath, no reason. Her heart had stopped, her blood was frozen cold.
    Yet she saw .
    The thing moved from her, left her. It lurched across the room. It came upon the fireplace and there it squatted, and then suddenly leapt. It was away up the chimney . It was gone.

PART THREE
    The Jew
I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray;
    But or ever a prayer had gusht,
    A wicked whisper came, and made
    My heart as dry as dust.
    —Coleridge
    The Jew had laboured into the night, poring over the antique scrolls, the tablets of wood, the books bound in vellum or horn. Haninuh the Scholar, so they called him. The Jew’s House they called his dwelling near the corn market. There was no ghetto in Paradys. No Jewish area even. Those Hebrews who inhabited the City were of the travelled kind, accustomed to a gentile world. Some had committed themselves to the Christian faith, some had given over God entirely in their intellectual venturings. The Jew Haninuh was not precisely of these orders. Then, too, other than the Jewish mezuzah , his door was guarded by a Grecian head of Hermes. Called “Scholar”, Haninuh was reckoned to be versed in mysteries.
    It was not rare with him, to spend the hours of darkness in study. Tonight, however, he had felt restless, and was unable to keep his mind on his reading. The cause of this unease was not personal. Rather it was that kind of nervousness particular to certain animals before a storm.
    Haninuh neither sought to quell his discomfort or explain it away.
    About two in the morning, he left his books, and went up through his house to a pavilion he had had built on the roof.
    Here he found, kneeling on a bench before one of the pavilion’s open shutters, a small girl-child of no more than eight years, arrayed in an embroidered shift and quantities of curling black hair.
    “Now, Ruquel,” said the Jew, “what are you doing there?”
    But Ruquel, who was his daughter by a slave woman long since laid asleep in the earth, only answered, “What a bad night it is. What shadows there are.”
    With these statements Haninuh could not argue. He had been aware for some while that his child seemed to have inherited a sensitivity to occult things; he had already, for her protection, in simple ways begun to prepare and train her.
    “Yes, my Ruquel,” he agreed therefore. “It is a night of some meaning. But perhaps you’ll trust me to keep watch in your stead?”
    At that the child nodded, and getting down from the bench yawning, kissed her father, and returned to her bed.
    Haninuh then took up his vigil in the dark, going slowly from one window to another of the six-sided pavilion. All the shutters hung wide on the close black night, and from this high vantage, at this unlit hour, one saw clearly the brightest stars caustic above Paradys.