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

He ate the Marathon.

“Look,” said Patrick, “why don’t we just go and see? If it’s ropey or they’ve got security, obviously we’ll leave it. But the way you spoke about it – I’ve got a feeling it’s just what I’ve needed for some outdoor studies – and no one else will have anything near it. It really would help me, Susan.”

So, they went on.

Of course.

She had gone up to look at the books in the book-room. Despite having been sold once, they were all still there, all those sombre black or maroon volumes stretching up and up, like bricks in the cases. And the long table was there, and on the table the glass dish. In the moonlight, the glass wasn’t yellowish but grey.

Something was knocking somewhere, or tapping. Tap-tap. A tree branch on a window in a wind that didn’t blow. Or something in the turned-off water pipes.

Hearing it, Susan was not disturbed. Not afraid. Even when the book-room window slid up with a sharp hiss, not even then.

But she had to get back downstairs, and return to the sunken room where Anne and Anne’s mother, Catherine, were confronting each other.

Susan didn’t hurry. She was grown up now. She went out and along and down the stairs, and when she reached the room, she stood in the doorway, glancing about.

Why had Anne brought her at night? They never came here then. That time before the funeral, even, when they had been each day, clearing up, they had always left the house before it got really dark.

The trees outside were huge, monolithic, and heavily-furred as black bears. Through the crystal panes they cast their ink-black shadows.

There was no one in the room, no one and nothing. No furniture – not even any cats now, not a single plant.

Then something screamed in a terrifying way. Susan leapt out of her skin of sleep and crashed against Patrick in the depths of the double sleeping-bag.

“Hey – what? What is it?”

“Oh God –”

“What?” He rolled aside and switched on the torch, blinding her with a broad eye of light.

“Something –” she said. “There was a noise.”

“It’s those cats in the garden. Ssh. It’s all right.”

She lay down against him. “Patrick, I dreamed about her – only she wasn’t in the dream. Only – I think she was. Patrick?” Patrick was silently asleep once more.

Susan looked up where the eye of the torch still flamed on the ceiling of the bare upper room. Cat’s-eye.

Outside she could hear them now, the eerie wailing of the small tribe of cats, which still remained rampant in the eldritch garden. She and then Patrick had counted nine or ten of them in the undergrowth outside.

The smell of cats’ urine was still strong in the house, too, but Patrick dismissed it, did not seem to care. He did not mind the several boarded-up ground floor windows, or the leak which had occurred in the drains to one side, and added another foul odour.

They had got in without trouble. Others had already been before them at the gate, breaking boards, squeezing through. The For Sale sign had Under Offer pasted over. There were no notices about dogs or vigilance.

He had stood on the drive, among the vast architecture of trees and thickets, and the deep green sea of nettles, gazing at dim faded wedges of cut pumpkin walls.

“The colours are like you said – but even better than you described them. It’s almost prehistoric-looking out here. The whole thing is worthy of Cézanne. Or – Klimt.”

To have pleased him so much should have been enough, but now it was not. She had hoped the outer wall would be impassable, and then, when it wasn’t, that he would hate the house, be repelled.

The garden, where, during the afternoon and evening, they had come to see the cats, was what involved Patrick most, the glimpses of the house slotted into boughs of cabbage green foliage.

He left Susan quickly and suddenly. Taking his sketchpad and a handful of crayons and pencils, he was off, dumping his rucksack beside her in the grass, so she felt she had to stay to guard it.

Then she saw him too in glimpses, climbing a terrace by a pool clotted with enormous fretted angelica leaves, between the bay trees and the holly and rhododendrons. He sketched, leaning at angles, matching the angles of the house, perhaps.

Finally Susan dragged the bags to one of the side doors. Standing outside this door, she could not recall it. With all the boarded windows, only the colours of the house – as Patrick had partly said – were really as she had recollected them. Ivy was growing in festoons along brickwork and drainpipes.

She thought the door would be locked. But it gave. Very likely the others had already broken in.

Patrick was by then up an apple tree, among the last of April blossom.

She shoved the bags inside the door, then sat down on the path in the sunlight, her back to a wall.

Later, she began to see the cats, some black and white, and a tabby one, then three gingers, moving singly, or poised in groups behind ferns or high grass. They must be escapees from the flight to Devon. Had Jackie known?

Somehow – I don’t remember that apple tree. Did they plant one – a mature one? Oh, he’s climbing down now. Nor that monkey-puzzle up there. They always look man-made, monkey-puzzles, but by someone very artistic. Made out of papier mâché, then covered with prickly black velvet.

The sun shifted. The path sank violet with shade and it became colder.

At last Patrick walked over. “Don’t you want to make any drawings?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Okay, let’s take the bags in. See where we can sleep tonight.”

“Do you still want to?”

“Sure. That’s fine.” As if to please her, since she wanted to, which she had (feebly?) tried to tell him she did not.

“This light,” he said, “is so good. Look at the sunshafts. I’d like to set up for a quick study with