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

without apparently a care on earth, were sitting laughing in a corner booth, drinking colas and what I took to be screwdrivers.

A smart woman and man, who looked what one used to call European, were consulting a street map in the corner of a maroon velvet banquette.

“What can I get you, sir?”

I asked for a whisky and soda and hastily added, “No ice, thanks.”

The man came back with the whisky as specified and set it on a small white mat.

I looked at that, then into my drink. I was going the same way as Ed. What else had I got?

Raising my glass I drank a healthy swallow, and then gazed through the green and brown bottles along the bar into the shadowy mirror on the wall. You could see the foyer reflected there, a surge of incoming people, luggage on trolleys, a giggling blonde in her fifties, and Joseph Traskul, seated idly and relaxed, in a chair beside a potted palm.

3

It hid a cupboard, the door to the right.

Opened, that revealed an electricity meter, a plastic bucket and a tattered broom leaning sidelong in space. On a wooden shelf were two large boxes of matches, an empty milk bottle from the past, with a candle stuck in it, a London telephone directory with its cover off, a broken terracotta flowerpot.

These things looked to me like the accumulated and forgotten detritus of many occupancies. Even the matchboxes were void when I inspected them.

I had put on plastic gloves by then. The rest of my DNA would have to take its chance. I have never been fingerprinted. I have no form. And today anyway, I wasn’t really myself.

The other door, to the left, gave on a not unspacious room, probably about fifteen feet square. To the left side a single step went up into an open plan kitchenette.

There was a lot of light in the room, from two front windows, and from the kitchen itself, which had two side windows plus a closed, locked and keyless clear glass door, that led on to a balcony above the street.

A door to the right of the main room showed a narrow corridor, off which lay a bathroom with a suite of an intense murky brown, a bedroom, and a further, narrower enclosure that must be intended as a spare room. These three rooms had back windows only.

Outside the bedroom was a fire-escape, and below the brief back gardens of the terrace, some beautified with small trees and plants in pots, others, like this one, left to weeds and ragged grass.

After I had gone through the whole flat, I returned to the main area, and stared about again.

The walls throughout had been painted white. That must have been at least five years ago. Nothing shows dirt, as my mother had been used to say, like pale things.

The radiators, also painted white, had streaks of metal striped through.

Nowhere was there any carpet. The floors were bare boards. The kitchen space had been tiled but the tiles were cracked, and some loose, coming up as one trod on them. On the electric cooker something had spilled long ago and, over years perhaps, been regularly baked into a sort of laminate. The once trendy units were without pans or tableware.

I found one overhead bulb with a shade. This was in the bedroom. I assumed it was the bedroom because there was a bed in it, a meagre double, with a pillow having no pillowcase. There were no sheets or covers. The mattress was nude as the floors.

Each of the windows however had a single flimsy curtain, wrapped over the quaint, old-fashioned, now intermittently fashionable rails above. These unhemmed strips of material, could – supposedly – be dragged partly across to offer some privacy.

In the bathroom there was a water glass, the kind one can pick up anywhere. Nothing rested in the glass, or anywhere else. A wall cabinet, a fixture maybe, was vacant but for a dead moth.

Here and there about the flat I found other small corpses, a beetle, a couple of flies, some spiders in sagging webs that had died most likely of starvation. On the window-sill of the spare room a dead leaf. My knowledge of flora is limited, but it seemed to have fallen from a tree that had once been a flaming red. But it had curled together and lost almost all its tint.

By the lavatory in the bathroom lay the single page of a book.

I picked it up at once, put on the glasses I need now for small print, and tried to read the words. But not only was it in a language I failed to recognise, but the Cyrillic alphabet. Russian?

There was a doughy odour everywhere of neglect and inanition – a word I use only because no editor will ever demand that I excise it.

Throughout the whole of the flat, at least during my first investigation, this was the sum of all I found. There was absolutely nothing concrete that indicated anyone still lived there, came from there, might go back there. Nothing of any sort.

XII

(‘Untitled’: Page 191)

VILMOS was aware that the headache, to which he was often subject, was returning. Since the age of ten he had been its victim, and with the years it had increased its attendance on him. Now it arrived so frequently it seemed in fact it was his constant condition, the days without it being the curiosities. But too, strangely, when he was without the headache he quickly forgot it, being always filled by a ghastly shock on its reviving, and a sickened dread.

The pain invariably commenced with a stiffening of his neck muscles to the left side. Soon a burning tension began to fill his skull. Next there was the sensation of a shrill white violin string, tightening and tightening on an unseen peg, between the base of his skull and his left temple. Central to these two junctures, about the region of the parietal lobe,