Turquoiselle, Tanith Lee [100 best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

lion’s body and a manlike face,surrounded by a great mane. Loved eating humans. What’s for Sunday Dinner, Mrs Manticore? Ooh, Manti. It’s roast man with a bit ofroast man.They had three rows of teeth, all pointed. And barbs in the tail. Set thetable, Mrs Manticore, set the table on a-roar!”

Carverfound he stared at Croft. Carver switched off the stare. He glanced round atthe trees. Nothing moved. Everything holding its breath.

“No,”Carver said, quietly.

“Everheard of Paracelsus, then,” asked Croft, flirtatiously – there was no otherword for it.

“I’veheard of him.”

“Physician-alchemistin 16th Century Europe. Said everyone should fuck or masturbate. Commended thepractice as healthful. A man of common sense. He also named an algae that hada certain colour. Nostocaris. Or Nostoc, they have it now. Blue-green. Specialproperties. Or there’s a fish. Its name means Shining Knife. It gives off ablue-green glow in the dark of the deep sea. This scares off would-bepredators. But also – and hear this, Car, my dear boy – it glows sostrong it casts no giveaway shadow – like the Devil, or someone without asoul. And by its own light it can find its prey with enormous ease. They don’tget warned by shadow, they’re dazzled by glare. And then – Gotcha! ”Croft smacked his hands – pulled from his head with an almost murderous speed –together.

Carvermoved back before he could stop himself. He stood up.

Croftwas grinning, laughing up at him, delighted as a three-year-old child with hisalarming coup.

“It’senergies, Car. That’s why your damn sheds light up. And that’s why wewant to eat you alive. You can conjure energies. You’re like a mastthat catches lightning. Only it isn’t lightning you catch or that you create.We don’t know – I shouldn’t tell you this, but I might as well, you’re evenmore ignorant about yourself than we are – we don’t know quite what you do do, or create.But it’s there. It goes off the scale. It has about the potential charge of alittle thermo-nuclear device. Only it doesn’t go off bang, old boy. It doesn’tirradiate or poison or fry. So what does it do? Eh, Car? Eh? Any ideas? Anyresponse? Where do we go from here?”

Memory walkedwith Carver, strangely, through the leafy wooden outland of the ‘Place’. Itslotted itself, surprising sometimes, between the on-off flutter of codes, numbers,digits that seemed also, if patchily, to need to be there in his head with him,trying either to centre or to faze him. Maybe too wanting to remind him ofsomething, but whether helpfully or simply without logic or relevant meaning,how could he tell? He knew definitely what he was doing. Wandering their ‘grounds’,as if perplexed and brooding, as if hoping to make sense of Croft’s enthusedoutburst. But Carver had not credited a word of Croft’s confidences. They werelies, set to provoke or tangle, all part of the game that went on here, andperhaps – one point of truth – had done so too at Mantik.

Thereason for the game was not clear, and might not ever (to him) be fathomable.There had been plenty of that before. He had certainly seen Mantik coin suchscenarios in which he had had his part, but never knowing more than hisparticularised role. For now he wanted merely to see if he could find the end ofCroft’s set-up’s ‘Place’ – the physical geography of this territory set ingardens and bounded only one way by sea. Where was the boundary, wall,barricade? What was its type and what lay beyond? Might it, if not now then inthe future, be penetrable from the inside out: Escape. And Carver wore for thissearch the body-language and general appearance of a man concerned andunnerved, which was reasonably good camouflage. He had not questioned Croft,after Croft’s vibrant statement on energies. Carver had stared at Croft, asbefore Carver had not let himself stare. And when Croft rose and, smiling,pleased, (the three-year-old again), sauntered, whistling, away, silentlyCarver watched him go, standing with his hands loose at his sides, eyes wideopen, frowning. The picture of inarticulate insecurity that might well, afterall, be sincere.

Thestorm Fiddy had prophesied did not yet manifest. Yet the darkness of the day,especially between and below the trees, intensified. It was eventually like anafternoon in an English November. Sunset due at about 4 p.m., but a sky soungiving that by three lights had gone on in the school classroom or thecollege hall. Even, back then in Sara’s flat. And before then too, in the squat where she had lived atfirst with him, and with his father.

Andthis was the memory that now walked up beside Carver. Opening some after all accessibledoor, it soaked gently inside.

Andit was a new memory – was it? Something (something) not recalled for twothirds of his life – twenty years – or longer. Never recalled since childhood...

Howold then was Carver, in this memory?

Aboutthree, he thought. (An actualthree-year-old child.)

Adark day, and the one electric bulb in the squat’s side room, that dangerousand illegal rewiring had enabled to burn. The flare of it was calmed by alopsided lampshade of dingy fake pinkish silk. And Sara was sitting on acushion by the wall, asleep. The air was cold; no heating, but the cold notyet biting or raw. A mild early winter then, back whenever in the earliest ‘80’sof the previous century.

Carverwas trying to wake his mother. Who repeatedly, soporifically, shrugged him off.But the man was there then, and picked him up. A big man, bearlike, with adirty unwashed tang to him, which they all, in their individual ways, gave off.How not? There was no water here to wash in, except the cold water from theother premises with the outdoor tap, and this had to be heated on the open firein the communal room. The child who was Carver had anyway no aversion to thesmells. They were normalcy. The man was warm, and held him with a vastprotective surging ease.

“C’monnow, darling,” said the man, hugging Carver close. “Leave your poor mum to abit of kip. You sit with yer da. Ah, you’re a lovely boy, you are. You’ll be afeller, you will, when you grow up. I’ll take yer fishin’