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

one of them, I think the 1st Boy, shouted after me: “Here, grandma, next time make sure you’ve got your other clothes on!”

And they all laughed.

Probably they were all just high on this drug named after an animal—what did I say they said it was called… bear? fox?

No, of course, skunk. Why do they call it that, I wonder, does it smell horrible?

When I came back with my shopping they weren’t there, but I’ve decided I’ll have to go the long way round next time, up through Wilchester Road. I don’t want to meet them again. It made me feel a bit ill. They are all mad, or they’ve been driven mad by the drug. Nothing is safe anymore. It was safer really in the war, with the bombs falling. People were different then. They were—people.

Emenie:

78

For a couple of nights I stayed in the room higher up the house, the one with the bed. I took a few cans of beans and pasta and one of peach slices up, and some water and Coke to drink. No electricity on the higher floors so I couldn’t make a hot drink. In the end that drove me down. I made a cafetiere of coffee, and stayed in the kitchen. The main room and the bedroom seemed warped out of true, their angles all wrong. And that clean smell was intrusive as any stink.

It snowed that afternoon, all this tattered cotton wool whirling down, like cold-white flesh flaking off the sky.

I still couldn’t get round it, couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened. I knew I had not buried Micki’s body. Yet someone had. Who? Why? How?

The snow set in pretty solidly. My supplies were low. I needed toothpaste and shampoo etc., not to mention food. In this sort of weather as well the persons who still exist hereabouts go a bit mad, rushing into the remains of the shops, even loading up home-made sleds to drag away. Of course I knew I had to pull myself together, and go on with my life. If something happens that’s impossible, you can only push it off into the back rooms of your brain. There would be an explanation. But I wasn’t going to solve the mystery yet, maybe never. So, close the door on it.

I did think about Micki now and then. I wondered how she was, breaking down as she would be, gently snowing under the ground. Her hair would go on growing for a while, what hadn’t already fallen out. That was a pleasant thought. She’d had lovely hair.

Even the cellar didn’t smell now. But this was almost certainly because of the general cold. And, too, the corpses were mostly getting quite ancient. Even Sy’s was pretty old—for a corpse, that was.

I got my thick coat, and my leather boots with the tough flat soles that came from the shoe-shop in the High Street before it was set on fire. I’d put on a jumper of dark orchid-red. I sometimes do wear red clothes. Though I don’t always dress to kill, red’s often my killing gear. If I wear red, I am fairly certain I’ll be hunting. (Hunting pink.)

Frankly, the best way I could see of scotching my concern with the mysterious grave of my last victim, was to take a new victim, and make bloody sure (or unbloodily, if the method avoided it) I left them far outside my own premises. The shopping was one thing, but it provided too the backdrop and excuse for another murder. That would do it. Wipe the slate clean. Begin a new chapter. Get me back in the ordinary and workable groove.

79

There was no one about as I plodded down the tow-path.

The Co-op, as I’d feared, had been massively scavenged by others. No bread, not a drop of wine locatable. There used to be a pub farther up, I can remember having a beer in there once or twice—people used to walk in and help themselves, even sit down at a table to drink. But that didn’t last, obviously. It was looted and cleaned out.

There were some lagers in a box. I found some soups and peas in cans, and some chicken in the freezer.

It is peculiar. The supplies do seem genuinely to be restocked, from time to time. I’ve never figured that out either, have I? But it’s as well they are, even if not today.

Having got what I could, I made my way back down to the tow-path.

The sky was that lurid greyish-white the snow turns it. It had a bulging look, the sky, as if pregnant with the snows. It was going to eject snows like multiple quintuplets all over the ruined city and its feral outskirts. It was already starting.

The deciduous trees of the park were already in full leaf again, white foliage thick as late July. The evergreens still showed a little dark. Some crows went over, jet black, the snowfall making them like pieces of a jigsaw.

This message told me there might be something very close for me.

So then I looked more intently at the park. You couldn’t make out the distant wreckage of the flats through the ongoing snow, but I could see a thin dark column winnowing lightly up in the windless debris of the air.

I crossed the bridge very carefully: half of it is down but the rubble has been solid for years, and you can get across if you have to. (Simon-Sy had, after all; I’d watched him do it, following my rat-laden promise of wine and, perhaps, sex.)

I suppose people came into this park once and played games, or had fights, read on seats in the shade, or sunbathed, or screwed behind the bushes.

Now it was just a man sitting on a pile of bricks, tending his fire.

He glanced up at me warily. And he had it written all over him. He was mine. My kill.

“Hi,” I said.

He glanced up at me again, having