Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

open. Nick believes someone is there, sees a faint suggestion of a shadow through that slot of glass. (Somehow he is sure this shape is not that of the blonde woman, not Kit.) But still, anyway, neither is the door undone.

“Hello,” Nick calls.

Is there anybody there? Did he imagine the sound of approaching feet, the shadow? Now there is no movement. The shadow has melted, or had never existed.

He thinks, in a brief swirl of inappropriate literary memory, of de la Mare’s poem, The Listeners. The traveller knocking, and unanswered. The phantoms crowded, listening, in the house, neither replying or admitting him.

He tries to think what he saw of the flat last night. Very little. Back in the early 1800’s this would have been, he guesses, the kitchen area, but not now. Instead Kit, or ‘Kit’, had taken him straight into a big bedroom with an en suite bath, herself gone out and come back with some wine. The rest of the place had been in darkness, a rambling sort of dark, that suggested several rooms and a corridor that twisted and turned - but there was no sense of anyone else’s being there. There had been, now he thinks of it, a background dusty, musty odour, but a basement might be prone to that, however smart.

Nick now calls loudly, “I’m trying to reach Ms Price.”

No answer.

The door stays shut.

Returning upstairs to his flat, Nick discovers he is starting to shake.

He makes it to the door, opens it, slams on the lights, (perhaps they like violence for their turn on - they definitely seem to flare up with vast brilliance), scrutinises the main room and judges that nothing is changed. He does all this with enormous care, and then his eyes blacken over. It passes swiftly. In a funny way he feels better after, not shaking, steadier. As if he had been sick and so got rid of something that was poisoning him.

He checks the whole flat then, quite thoroughly. And all is well.

But he cannot simply leave this situation, can he? He does not know its meaning, which seems doubly sinister since it is veiled.

Is it that someone is after the Roman pin that Laurence hid here? This would appear to be the most likely cause. They have found out, while Laurence himself has gone to ground, leaving Nick holding the fort, as it were. Mostly he feels impeded, irritated. (And also threatened, if he is honest, in the most primal way.)

Unusually he stays in for dinner and eats a cold meat sandwich and drinks a bottle of Beck’s.

He writes a few paragraphs in the notebook, is dissatisfied with them and himself crosses them through. He is tired too. He has not slept. He repeats the couch-block of the door. He then has a bath and goes to bed and thinks, as sleep claims him, that the penetrators could return at any moment, once more entering so silently no one else in the building will notice. But he does not believe they will. He wonders if he has somehow fantasized all of it. He asks himself if the now untraceable Kit is even real. Or, more pertinently perhaps, did she lace his glass of wine in the bedroom with some unorthodox substance which he failed to identify, but which thereafter made him see the pavements and trees were turning into fossils, and demon callers had entered his home, shifted his possessions and unmade the bed on which he must - and now does - lie?

Deep in the night he wakes up. The phone had been ringing. Had it?

If so, the landline or his mobile? He falls back to sleep before he can decide to investigate.

At first next morning, he does not recollect hearing the phone, but while he defrosts and eats two croissants the idea re-emerges. He tries the ansa-machine but it has nothing, and his mobile is the same. A dream, then.

He dumps the plate and mug in the dishwasher, but then is somehow driven to look in various drawers and cupboards, all of which seem to be in the proper order - or disorder - that he himself left them in.

Kitchen seen to, he crosses to the bathroom and opens the store cabinet, but this is exactly as it was, apart from a new toothpaste and toothbrush-in-waiting, and some extra soaps he bought yesterday. He learns he wants to undo all the packaging and look inside all the individual soap boxes. He resists, then goes along with it and does so. Each box has a bar of soap, nothing else. The new toothpaste contains a tube of toothpaste.

Nick moves back out into the main room and checks the scatter of books and boxes on the bigger table, and the rack of CDs and DVDs by the TV and music centre, the bookshelves. Then he goes to the cabinet to open both doors and stare inside.

He had not thought to do this before, yet as he flings wide the doors he is thinking if this keeps up, he may need to seek a psychoanalyst.

But he forgets that quickly. Because although most of the stuff that he keeps in the cabinet is present, there is also one major composite omission. It comprises several items, but each of them was, in its own way, connected to the others, and all are gone. A kind of psychic hole seems to remain, gaping before him. What has been removed is every single article from that drawer he saw in the lobby and appropriated - envelopes, staples, paper clips, pens, loose paper, and all the notebooks from whose vitals he had so painstakingly torn their originally used pages of dates, schedules, places, times and obscure directions.

It has a queasy logic. No need to break in at the main door below - the creep from Number 14, paramour of June, is living in the building again. God knows, maybe even all the complex locks of flats here have a careless similarity, should