Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

of light shoots over it, a slim firework, as the lighted taxi grumbles off along the main road. Nick has somehow never seen that reflected phenomenon before. Or he has, and forgotten.

A car is parked in one arm of the cul-de-sac’s U. A man huddles in it, using a mobile phone. Another man by the car turns and comes straight over to Nick. So now what is it? A mugging? Nick looks at the man wearily. If you are going to mug me, hurry it up. I’m tired.

“Do you know the Lion?” the man asks. A strangely silly query. Nick resists the urge to answer Which lion? Aslan?

“The what?”

“Lion. Supposed to be a pub up here keeps to the twenty-four hour opening. We been looking for the bastard for over an hour.”

“Sorry,” Nick says. “I don’t know of any pub with that name round here.”

“I told Rod he’d got it wrong. You sure though?”

The man has a doughy tense face. He wants a drink, it seems.

“I’m sure.”

“Right.”

The man turns. Then he glances back. He looks at Nick silently as Nick goes by and up to the front steps of the flats. All the while Nick anticipates an assault. But he has always been this way, the writer thing again; a story must occur. No one ever has attacked him, even robbed him. Not since childhood.

Inside the lobby it is warmer. He climbs slowly, taking off his jacket as he does so because it seems heavy to him now. His shoes also feel heavy. When he gets in he will strip and shower, make some tea, put on the TV, sit and watch until he goes to sleep. He does not want to think of anything else. He has had enough. Enough.

When he reaches the flat, out of nowhere again comes that terrible urge to weep. And he stands immobile, pushing it from him with the last of his strength. Only then, lachrymosity mastered, does he open the door and step into the darkened flat. For a split second he beholds the window incoherently luminously floating there ahead of him, before the lights go on. But he has not lit them.

“You’ve kept us waiting, you have. Where’ve you been? Out cruising? Or cottaging? Took your time.”

There are three of them. Two sit on the longer couch, and one has a powerful flashlight next to him, currently switched off. The other one, the third, has just come from the kitchen, now also lighted, with the second bottle of vodka and the Orange Dry and the ice tray. They have finished, it seems, the first bottles of both drinks, which stand vacant on a table. The man from the kitchen is the man who lost the drawer. He still looks a bit sheepish. But the man who called out to Nick just now from the couch does not. He seems assured, cheerful and friendly, his banter just a bit crude, but then that will not matter, will it, between open-minded guys?

Nick says nothing. What the fuck can he say? Again they have broken in, leaving no external evidence he could see. They have made themselves at home with his booze, even the last of the Cheddar and apples. They have only been waiting, knowing it will be all right, he will not object. Probably they have watched the TV, the stand-by light is on - and yes, now one of them turns it on again with the remote, but cuts the sound down to nothing. Once more a scene or soundtrack is to be played against other scenes from a foreign film, this one seeming to be Japanese Science Fiction.

Nick is aware they must have turned off the lamps and TV at some previous point so that, from the road, he had not seen light in the big window. The firework gleam he had thought was a reflection from the taxi’s headlights was most likely the flashlight they had used afterwards, being hastily switched off - in response to a call from the man in the car outside, while the other man there had detained Nick an extra minute with his Lion inquiry.

So there are in fact five of them. Three here, two outside.

They wanted to surprise him. Like those moronic parties with the distressed fifty-year-old woman whose birthday seems forgotten, but then everyone springs from the abruptly floodlit room waving glasses and shrieking Happy Birthday. Which is surely enough to kill her. But not all women in their fifties die from loving kindness.

Christ.

Oh Christ what do they want?

Are they going to kill him?

The drawer-man has put the new drinks on the table.

Sit down,” says Friendly from the couch. “It’s your pad.”

Nick does not move.

Then the other one from the couch, who is younger, about Nick’s own age perhaps, gets up and comes towards him. The man is pale and shaven-headed, and he speaks with a slight accent. Nick cannot identify it.

“Sit down. He said.”

“All right.”

Nick crosses the room and sits on his other, vacant, couch.

“That’s it,” says Friendly. “Won’t offer you a drink. Not enough to go round. OK with you?”

Nick stares at him.

Then the drawer-man speaks. “Shall I pour?”

“Yeah, pour away. You be mother.”

Nick looks at the big drinks, the tumblers. They don’t seem to be his or anything to do with him.

Friendly takes a prissy little sip of his sloshing glass; sets it back and leans forward, his pudgily muscular arms resting on his thighs, and he is smiling at Nick. He has a round face and furry out-of-date sideburns, somehow like a bear.

“Now you see, our mutual friend’s bint upstairs, the one he called June, which isn’t her name, had a bit of a tiff with him and put a drawer of his property out. Now June, I’ll still call her that for convenience, has seen the error of her ways. She has seen it enough that she is in a hospital bed at the moment, getting over the manner by which she saw it. You may be