Cruel Pink, Tanith Lee [universal ebook reader TXT] 📗

any noise or disturbance from the other flat, as there never had been from the floor above mine, which also seemed unlet and vacant. Yet—how to explain this? I had, now and then, felt an awareness of another person—or people—evinced by nothing I could call up as proof—but nevertheless inhabiting both the opposite flat and the rooms above. It—they—scentless, noiseless, unlit, and having no visible form, yet I had a vague awareness of having—glimpsed them—without seeing. But no doubt that was just the foible of a tired man home from a boring job, and having no true imaginative life.

That evening Forrel called me on the landline. He frequently had, and did, after our night out in Soho. Though as to how and where he got hold of the number, I have no idea. Some illegal foray through the firm’s security, perhaps.

In the past I’d had Vanessa to contend with, either during my visits or on the occasions when she called me, fortunately not very often. I had weathered her diatribes, almost exclusively about others, as best I could; quod erat demonstrandum.

Vanessa was gone. Now Forrel seemed to take over the role. It goes without saying his voice and tone were utterly dissimilar and his complaints as unlike as I, or surely anyone, could envisage, but regrettably the niche had been filled. During the working day, fairly often now, he would—what did they call it?—buttonhole me. Pinning me to my work-station, or in a corner of The Stag, he would begin what I had recently titled Forrel’s Lament.

Tonight was no different.

“She emptied the joint account, Rod. Every fucking K. Did I tell you? Sure, there weren’t that many. And she sends me these postcards about her and this fucking man she’s with. She ends up Glad you’re not here. I’ll have to move. Get away. And that girl—that girl with black hair and tits at the place we went—can’t stop thinking about her…”

I put up with it, making conciliatory sounds, for about half an hour. Then I mournfully told Forrel I was expecting a call from my aunt, an old woman, and I’d have to go.

He let me, with the reluctance of a starving squid.

It was just after I put the phone down that I heard the noise. Frankly, I’d have had to be deaf not to.

50

A woman was shouting at the top of her vocal range, which range seemed enviable. And then there came the crash of breakage. It might have been a window—certainly glass.

I had jumped up, startled. In this myopic and sedated house I had never before heard any sort of ruckus.

There was little doubt as to the source. It was the flat across the landing. The silent, darkened, possibly unlived-in flat.

Two things occurred to me. The tumult had sounded raw and spiteful enough that maybe I should try to summon the police. Whether they turned up, of course, would be down to them. The other element was that I had been damned lucky so far to experience very few of those incursions on one’s private aural or visual state by raucous neighbours. I had heard enough from Vanessa to make me, if only dimly, conscious I had done well in this department. But now, was everything to change?

An interlude—it didn’t last—of quiet came. And then a huge masculine roaring. Followed by an alarming bang. This sounded as if a large piece of heavy furniture had been dropped from an impressive height. Had someone been under it?

It seemed not. Up geezered the woman’s rabid rant, wordless with fury and also filtered through the sandwich-filler of the landing space. After which up sprang the male voice again. And here I did make out a selection of words projected in a fruity baritone bellow.

“Again—my whisky—date of it—woman, I shall—damnation!”

It came to me that neither voice was young. Both, however, in their unmatched and savage manner, were filled by strident passion.

New tenants? Like Forrel, it seemed I too would have to move.

But then again I felt compunction. These two elder persons seemed set on acts of violence. In the ordinary way I would avoid such a situation. But a sudden unease and—almost a compulsion—overcame me.

I found I went out onto the landing.

And I stood there, undecided, resentful and cautious, nearly amused in some silly, childish way, yet too appalled, foreseeing the bloody ending of these strangers’ saga, long-enacted if never before here.

No. I had better call the police. Or else turn up the TV and glug a drink of Vodka from my limited store.

Precisely as I turned to go back in, the door of the other, south side flat flew wide. I reversed again. Two people were there. In hinder place an irate woman, with shining bobbed hair; in the foreground, looking somehow both homicidal and benign, a bemusingly oldish-youngish old man, wine-glass in hand.

“Why, Roderick,” he said, all easy-going charm once more. I knew his charm, his pleasant and coherent alcoholically undrunken joi de vivre. It was Uncle George. And behind him, frowning severely, Auntie Vanessa.

Klova:

51

It wasn’t like the old woman, how she sometimes gets in, that is different.

I was so scared I turned to run.

To run away from the flat-house, and the old man leering out of my window at me down on the street.

And the street was like dark black, the darkest of black. No lights but that one light, in my flat, where I wasn’t and no lights ever showed. So I ran right into something I thought was a tree, only trees don’t grow in that street. But the tree reached out and held me.

“Let go!” I screamed.

“No, it’s OK—easy, Klova-Spice. It’s OK.”

And what had grabbed me wasn’t a tree but it was Coal. No flames in his hair tonight. No hell in his eyes. His eyes were black.

I stopped moving and thinking and being. I just stopped. He held me up.

After a while he said, “What scared you like that? Was it me?”

“There’s an old man in