Turquoiselle, Tanith Lee [100 best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

Thecomputer seemed jumpy, too. It froze, came back... He shut off the Scar file, andunplugged the machine. Downstairs he did the same with the landline. Later hewould expunge all the house lights again, aside from that of the glassed-inporch. For now he left them on. It was later than he had planned. Almost ten o’clock.He could not, now, sleep as long as intended.

Hewould not bother with the news. Opening the kitchen’s back door, Carver steppedout on to the patio, among the beaming outdoor lamps. He looked about and downthe garden, the ornamental (mental) benches, the lawn, the bushes andestablished trees, the pear that sometimes fruited a harvest with the scent ofhoney and the taste of rotten wood; it had done nothing this year.

Leavingthe house shut and lit up, Carver moved down the garden. Seen from outside, theuplighter glare from the village still bloomed against the clear indigo glassof the sky. The white slender moon was westering, but bright. Nothingsuspicious was about. He could hear far-off traffic.

Hewalked towards the shed.

Theblue-green luminescence inside the shed had either not been there, or wasunnoticeable in the beginning, Carver thought. And when at first it began toshow, he had dismissed it as his own misperception, at least for a short while.It was quite pertinently like the glow – the afterglow of thieving — that had lingered forhim on those things he stole in his childhood and teens; an optical illusion noless profound and affirming for being recognised and labelled. But now, littleby very little, as the amount of small scattered objects he presently conductedhome, and so into the shed, grew in number and sequent density, so the glow had increased.Less than a bloom, it magnified to a sheen. And after this, an actualillumination. Everything he took currently, of course, came from the Mantikbuilding in Whitehall, and in itself was unvaluable. Pristine unused discs andcartridges, batteries, unink pens, tiny and now nearly redundant notepads,grips, clips, tags, tabs...the very last item to date had been the memory cardfor a make of camera with which Carver himself had never been issued. Thattheft he had placed inside the shed on the morning after Donna enacted herinitial five-star mad-scene, the morning before Carver met Silvia weeping mercury tearsin the corridor, and she had said Go to hell, and then Imust talk to someone.

Noneof the thieved articles, as they never had been, were of any lasting use, andnormally of no use to him. If they could have been, he never used them.Practical use was not their worth or significance.

Ashe unlocked the central door of the shed, something flew suddenly up from atree beyond the back wall. After dark that was uncommon. But then again, thelight of the shed might have deceived the bird, as neons and streetlamps mightelsewhere.

Carvershut and relocked the shed door from inside. He glanced from the night-blindfour back windows to the front seven.

Howalien, he thought, his house looked from here, a retro smartish ‘80’s, ‘90’s-isherection, with certain, now-dated kinks of structure. Its stark lights made ita target.

Carverturned to look around him.

Theeffect of snow-heaps, that had always struck him about the things stored in thecupboards of the chain of flats when he was a boy, lessened here, on closerinspection. There was more room to lay them out, these trophies. More space forindividual or group identity.

Theglow rising from them – blue-green like the two Lower Alert colours duly mixed,Aquamarine and Emerald – what caused it? He had never noticed such an effect anywherein the tarpaulined, scaffolded building in Trench Street, let alone the supplystores – the ‘stationery cupboards’. Carver though did not believe any longerhis imagination was to blame. His imagination did not work in that way at all.It was no doubt his imagination that sometimes made the glow seem a little less.

Withoutprelude, a bolt of crucial tiredness struck him a soggy blow. He did notfrequently experience such draining energy-slumps. He would have to, heconcluded, go back at once and sleep, even though, now, less than three hourscould be scrounged before he should resume his watch on the woods, assuming hemeant to keep it.

Heran his hand swiftly, less a regulation plain caress than an obligatory contact, over a row ofthe stolen things. Enough.

Hemoved instantly back towards the central door of the three, the one that couldopen and close. And halted. Behind him – what? – to the rear side of the shedonly the four windows, facing the garden wall and the woods. And one of thesewindows as his periphery vision had told him – Carver turned.

Outsidethe window, inside the wall,something stood, upright and solid and very close.

Itwas black, viscous rubbery black, and thehead was composed of the same material, having no features: a sculpted blob.But then – as if the turquoise gleam in the shed had flared – Carver saw afterall one feature. Eyes. Black and shiny, in-and-unhuman. Splitting the mask ofdarkness. A pair of eyes in a faceless face, looking, looking, looking into his own.

Carver was notamazed. As he would not have been amazed if nothing had happened. He hadtempted them in the lane, walking back, dawdling under the isolated and mostlyunlighted lamps; now by walking out here, the house lit like a beacon behindhim.

Hewent directly to the door he had not fully locked, and opened it quickly andjumped straight down on to the concrete apron, turning as he did so to thefigure, where it pressed close to the shed.

Andsomething now really did happen. Something changed. The sky – was very bright –somewhere, far off, a sound – Carver was no longer there. Nothing was.

Eight

Just before hewas meant to start at the secondary school at Sucks, (as Andy called it), Saraand he had to move again.

Thenew place was another flat, a partial clone of the previous several they had inhabitedsince escaping his father. Found for them, and with Sara getting assistancewith the rent, (and to bolster that, working her endless hours cleaning), theywere still inside the zone they had occupied, by then, for two years. And Andywas still enlisted, at first, and if seldom in situ, at