Greyglass, Tanith Lee [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

GREYGLASS

Tanith Lee

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Book One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Book Two

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Website

Also by Tanith Lee

About the Author

Copyright

Book One

I

She lived in a vegetable house. As time passed, it grew about her. Rooms and passages added themselves, stairways, attics, cellars; windows formed. Outside, and all around, the gardens also extended into mossy terraces with pools, massive stands of huge trees, thickets of rhododendrons. Where visible through these, the house appeared like an orange pumpkin – the one in Cinderella perhaps, which became a coach to take her to the ball. However, the house was only volatile in an accretive, sedentary way, adding to itself, certainly determined not to move anywhere else.

“We’re going up to see the old lady now. Put your coat on. Hurry up.”

Susan glanced at her mother, and laid down the nail scissors with which she had been cutting figures of thin paper.

“Are those my nail scissors?”

“– – -”

“I said, are those my nail scissors?”

Whose nail scissors, after all, could they be?

“Yes, Mum.”

“Don’t call me Mum.”

“– – -”

“Say Mummy.”

“Mummy.”

“I’ve told you not to use the nail scissors for that. It spoils them.”

Susan looked at the spoiled scissors. They appeared the same as when she had taken them from the bathroom cabinet half an hour ago, as her mother was peeling vegetables for – don’t say dinner, say lunch – lunch.

“Go and put your coat on. Will you hurry, Susan!”

Susan ran out. She was twelve. For a year she had been menstruating regularly, using deodorant and mascara, and wearing tights. She felt twenty, then fifteen. Then eight. Even between one running step and another she might change.

Her mother was calling again. Susan had been supposed to put on her school blazer from the hall. But Susan ran into her bedroom and took up the jacket from her chair. In the mirror, as she passed, she glimpsed a plump ugly girl, with short fair hair, who, sometimes, by careful arrangements of light and shade, the mirror and herself, might be transformed into something else, someone of consequence, even perhaps attraction.

“Susan! What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to go up there,” said Susan, to the corner of the room. The corner did not reply.

It was spring outside. More spring than had yet got into the year, or the old building, or the flat on the second floor. The Georgian pillars and porch had burst into slices of sunlight and the steps were warm.

“Why have you put that jacket on, Susan?”

“You said –”

“I said a coat. Your blazer.”

But now there was no turning back.

The sun dappled leopard spots through the chestnut trees by the wall. The buds were sticky, still red but not green.

Susan looked at her mother. A slim beautiful woman, a fully-formed creature, at no disadvantage since adult. Her hair, which was black this month, gleamed with a reddish light like that on the chestnut buds.

“Why do we have to?”

“What? Why do we have to what?”

“Go up there.”

“You know why. You know perfectly well why.”

“But –”

“And we’re late.”

They walked quickly along Constance Street, where the tree roots had here and there upheaved the pavement, and into Dunkirk Street, where there were no trees and the sun fell hot, burning on their heads.

“You brushed your hair,” said the adult woman.

“Mmm.”

Susan had not, what a bit of luck.

Sundays would be all right, if it weren’t for this – this, and the approaching shadow of school tomorrow, but that was almost a whole day away.

“Oh damn, we’re so late. Come on.”

In at the park gates. People were strolling about. There was a van selling ice-cream. Dogs rushed barking, and somewhere children screamed, and a big blast of exciting drum-thick bad music roared from a radio on the lawns.

“Bloody music,” said Susan’s mother. “People.”

They were almost running now.

Straight through the park, with its possibilities of life, straight along the gravel path by the black, still-winter beds, a handful of crocuses and anaemic daffodils, and out of the other gate.

Here was ominous, curving Tower Road, with its enormous beech trees and oaks, its gardens behind ten-foot stone walls clung with ivy. Set far back, roofs of houses showed, like the upper turrets of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

“Mum, I’ve got a stitch.”

“Mummy. Damn, it’s ten past twelve. Oh damn.”

“Why do we have to go? You don’t want to. She just goes on.”

The road curving and coiling,