To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

got on his nerves, or on his ‘tits’, depending on his mood when remarking.

Not only was it 66, Saracen Road, either. His flat was at the very top. Flat 6 – the Number of the Beast indeed.

I had labelled my parcel carefully. Here was a mistake any flustered, overworked post-person might create.

I looked at the list of names above the bells. Then I pressed his bell. What does that say? My pedantry? My caution? He was not there. I had every reason to know he wasn’t. Or even if amazingly he was, it might be one more lie, his not answering.

But for whatever reason he didn’t answer. And I tried the bell annoyingly quite a few times.

About four minutes passed. Now I hesitated and clicked my tongue, perplexed, irritated. After which I started on the next five bells, one after another.

No 5 was in, it was some of their tasteless ‘music’ I heard hammering on above. They took no notice, perhaps couldn’t hear their bell, which augured well. (A rhyming phrase now. Normally I would vet and remove it).

It was No 3A which spoke to me. “Yeah?” The voice was male and – shall I say – bored.

“I’m sorry to bother you…”

“Yeah?”

“I have a package here…”

“Put it through the door, man.”

“I’m afraid it won’t fit through the letter-box.”

“Shit. I gotta come down?”

“No, no. Excuse me, the package isn’t for you.”

“Then why the fuck are you…?”

“It’s for a Mr Traz…” – carefully I laboured over his name – “kull? Flat 6.”

Silence.

I said, “It was delivered to me wrongly in Sarandene Road – No 16…” (Such a road did not, obviously, exist).

And “So?” said the other.

“I’ve come out of my way,” I replied sternly. “Mr Trazcool doesn’t answer. This is a nuisance. Maybe you could let me in and I’ll leave the thing for him in the hall. I’m not coming back with it.”

No response save the sudden wasp-like rage of a buzzer as the front door opened.

“Tha…” I tried. Old habits, like war-torn Celtic warriors, die hard.

I doubt the moron in flat 3A heard me.

Then I was inside the hallway, shabby, airy and patchily white from big and grimy opaque windows. A mountain of stairs rose ahead. Evidently I wasn’t going to deposit my spurious packet on the dusty table down here. Conscientious citizen as I must be, I was going up the whole bare stairway right to the top, all the way to N.O.T.B. 666. Where, please God, the door was as once he had described it, and the bloody awful racket from unmusical No 5 would continue, so no one would hear me as I smashed the glass panel, slipped my hand across and released the single Yale lock from inside.

ONE

Joseph. This, his name.

He liked to be known as Sej. He’d later told me he was dyslectic (normally erroneously spelled “dyslexic”) and possibly that was why he had taken the initial J of his forename and fixed it on the end of the se from the middle.

Joseph Traskul: Sej.

It has a sort of Germanic, certainly European ring to it, his full name. It is like that of some mentally tortured poet, probably from a well-to-do mercantile family, dead before forty, circa 1800.

I wondered from the very first if his name was a lie.

I have wondered if all of him was, and is, a lie.

The strangest thing.

But it was all very strange. Or only – very stupid.

I had gone up to London to meet Harris Wybrother. He used to be my agent but had retired a couple of years before. Despite this he still sometimes put publishers my way, or me their way depending on how one looked at it. Harris was only two or three years my senior but I had always found him much older.

Maybe he was a sort of authority figure to me. I always remember the first time we met, when I was mid-twenty-ish and he twenty-two-ish going on forty-ish, looming over me from his desk. “This isn’t bad, Roy. It has potential shall I say? But you need to do quite a bit of work on it. Don’t worry, old boy. We’ll knock you into shape. And then – who knows?” Harris had been at Oxbridge. He had connections. I of course had been to the local grammar and then straight into the library service.

I stayed with Harris a handful of times, in the late ’80’s and ’90’s, at his father’s “place” in Hampshire. I think the first occasion I expected to step right back into a sort of between-the-wars Wodehouse scenario. It was a little like that. But not Wybrother Père. He was a piratical type who acted, and looked if it came to it, very much younger than his son. There was no longer any Mrs Wybrother. Normally a different woman, or once three women, were staying in the house and sharing the pirate’s bed, appearing at breakfast in silk dressing-gowns or sporty cotton undies. Harris, though unmarried, had a regular fiancée he seemed always and only to retain in London.

The “place” itself was big. It was an old vicarage, worth apparently a “bomb”, though the drains and general plumbing were on the sleepy side.

It was surrounded by woods and fields and had gardens. These were maintained by a sort of ghostly ever-grumbling gardener. He would appear suddenly at the windows of the dining-room on summer evenings and stand silent, motionless and glaring horribly in on us all, rather like Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw.

There were a couple of tennis courts as well, and Harris once or twice insisted I play some sets with him. But I’m no good at tennis, or any games, and dislike them all, perhaps only for that reason. That I always went along with his suggestions was less proof of an obedient guest than the fact Harris always somewhat reminded me of one of the more amiable bullies at school.

The house stayed Wodehousian even as late as 1997, by which time