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

what I mean.” I didn’t, and was glad I didn’t. She said, “Not the sort of person anyway you’d ever want…”

“It was just for some background. Obviously I’d be happy to pay him a fee.”

“Well I don’t think – I mean, I really can’t help you. Sorry. Oh Merlin!” she screamed, nearly deafening me. Either her Arthurianly named male PA had come in, or she was pretending that he had. “Roy – forgive me – Merlin’s in a panic. I have to deal with something – big flap. Super to chat. We must do drinks sometime. By-ee.”

I tried a few others. Before I could even get on to the act of confession, that was only about three sentences into a conversation, they put me off. Only Lewis Rybourne, my most recent editor at Gates, astonished me by saying, “Don’t have a second now, but I’ll give you a call next couple of days, Roy. You’re at The Belmont, right? Talk soon.” He might even do this. But also even one more day might be too late. I ordered room service breakfast, tried to eat it, and started in on my gallery of ageing friends, hoping at least for advice, some ideas.

Stanley had had another heart attack. He was ‘all right, doing really well’, but still in the general hospital. Matthew was divorcing Sylvia after thirty years of marriage. He was terribly distressed and we had a longish conversation, while the hotel phone bill mounted to frightening proportions, “She’s had a lover,” he kept saying, “a lover, Roy.” And I thought of the fictitious affair of my fictitious version of Lynda. Ed Erskine was drinking again. He told me candidly he never started until twelve noon on the dot. “What else’ve I bloody got, Roy, eh?”

The immortal, if unvocalised line, I have troubles of my own, drove me slowly back towards my starting point.

I went out for lunch. I walked round by Lang Gardens and into Langham Place, passed the Art Deco facade of Broadcasting House, and negotiated busy Oxford Street.

What a change there had been in London over the years. Elegant places had become squalid, abominations had been done up like the Ritz. By night liquid bars of coloured light washed everything to a succulent epic panoply, and from Westminster Bridge the city resembled, at least to me, the cover of a 1950’s Science Fiction magazine.

I ate at the Pasta Post. Or I tried to.

Years ago someone ritually would have asked, “Everything all right, sir?” But now they merely scooped up the nearly full plate, bore it off, and offered me the ice-cream menu.

It was as I was leaving the restaurant that I stopped, petrified, and so abruptly a young man banged into me and with the scathing aristocratic stare of Black Africa, drew aside and stalked on.

I had recalled something after all that I had forgotten and left behind in my house in Old Church Lane, to the debatable mercies of Joseph Traskul Sej. The red glass dog my mother had loved.

Needless to say, that second night I couldn’t sleep. Nor had I, the night before. Coming in again I told reception I did indeed want the room for three nights, and they told me, as if I must rejoice, there would be no requirement that I move to another one.

So I rejoiced that I was not required to move. At least sufficiently that they seemed gratified. For even the most superficial overlay sometimes means far more than we know.

Through the hours of the night I absorbed, through my portable radio, the turmoil of the world. I fell asleep near dawn and dreamed I was standing on a London bridge, I’m unsure which – perhaps a compendium of them all. No one was with me. The bridge was totally empty, and the river below, the roads beyond, devoid of all traffic. The lights of London glittered all about and there were many eccentric new buildings; one I recall looked like an apple made of windows, with a tall stalk lit palest gold.

During the time I stood there in my dream I anticipated the arrival of someone – something – I refused to look over my shoulder to see if it had yet come.

Waking fuddled about five-fifty, the thin light struggling to penetrate the protective Belmont drapes, I thought instantly of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, quoted in M.R. James’s Casting the Runes:

Like one, that on a lonesome road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

NINE

Showered, shaved and dressed I went down to breakfast the next day. I had decided this would do me good. I forced eggs, bacon and mushrooms down my throat and drank several cups of coffee.

I had made another decision. I was going to the nearest London police station. I was going to tell them everything, and make them listen. I would not mention the drugs I had given him, even so. Hopefully he wasn’t dead, and so no post-mortem would reveal their presence or their type.

But was he dead?

Was it just conceivable he was? What then?

He would be lying on the kitchen floor of my house, gradually decomposing, as so many had in so many abodes during my lurid tales. Who would believe I’d had nothing to do with it?

I went back upstairs to my room, leaving the Do Not Disturb light on. I thought through all of it carefully. It was very incriminating, but there would have to be some get-out. I was nearly an old man. And I had no record of violence. I wasn’t gay, had no record of that either. I paid my bloody rates and taxes – A model citizen, Roy Phipps. Never trust the quiet ones.

At twelve noon on the dot, as Ed would have exclaimed, I got up and went down to the hotel bar.

It was another sunny day. Some Americans