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

go – and watched as,with its own lunatic grace, it withdrew seamlessly back and back into her hand,regaining its proper length, sibling to the rest, the polished oval just apleasingly coloured and burnished nail. The curl was sliding up as well, up andup, faster, faster, snapping home just under her shoulder with the others,slinking in among them to hide.

Hedrew away from her. Two metres between them now.

“Veryclever,” he said. His voice had no substance. It was a mindless and redundantvoice. Not even his. Then whose? Who – what – was speaking through him?

Shesaid, “It’s what I can do.”

Hesaid, “Their cameras will have seen you do it, in that case. Or do they knowalready?” He thought, Nothing happened. It was some form of hypnosis. Ordrugs... It will be some drug –

“Theydon’t know. Won’t hear. Can’t see. Something is messing up the spy-cameras, theclever sound system. Sun spots. Something.”

Something, he thought.The repeated word from the beginning, from the dark, from – somewhere.

“I’llsee you around, Car,” she said. She smiled. Her eyes – were not blue. They were– dark. Dark bronze – And then she blinked. Her eyes were blue.

Sheturned and ran lightly away. Fleet, he thought, that old word, fleet as adeer.

AJ crossed themind-screen. MV. 1. 1.  4. 4.

Full night hadcome, by the time he got round to the northern side again, having given up ondiscovering any finishing line for the ‘Place’. He had had nothing with him.Having to go out with Croft had precluded that, nor had he been given anycoffee or water, no nourishment, only confusion and its subsequent anger.

Regainingthe more inward environs of the ‘grounds’, Carver found tonight severaldrinking parties went on. Hardly a wake. An anniversary perhaps. Or seven or sobirthdays being celebrated separately but simultaneously. Given Charlie Hemel’sdeath, that was peculiar. But by now, everything was. One seriously sane andreasonable event might, in this climate, be the most suspicious. Carver wasenthusiastically offered, and accepted, a drink of apple juice among theloitering festivities he inadvertently passed. Was the juice spiked? It seemedonly by very weak vodka. He drank enough to alleviate thirst. The day, andcurrently the night, stayed weather-wise oppressive, but finally dim thunderswere rolling round the sky. Pinkish sheet lightning sometimes opened the blackceiling wide. (A pink lopsided lampshade. C’mon now, darlin’, leave your poormum to a bit of kip. A mast that catches lightning. Look – a duckie bird.Crazy. So many crazies in his life. What memory could he trust, here? How manyhad been implanted? Fingers thatgrew long like CGI. )

Hereached the foot of the rise, (on which the seven railway carriages werestalled), by his own guess around 10.30 p.m.

Forsome time he leaned on a tree below the hill.

Therehad been isolated rills of noise rising, sinking, and strings of lights acrossthe woodland, bonfires even. But here, only darkness. So, no doubts.

Theshed, just as before, was glowing. The central shed. This was, it went withoutsaying, something else theyhad done. An organised and chemically-triggered glow. Mantik must have organisedsomething similar. Treating objects he might steal. A slow release, empoweredonly in one closed area. The shed. No other answer made sense. Why, God knew.He was the errand boy, the pawn. Move him here, there. Decoy, bait,shadow, fall guy. Experiment?

Tonight,to start with, he did not properly scrutinise the illumination. His imaginationhad once more stepped in to try to block his intellect. It’s just the same. Carver. A vividturquoise. Should be used to it by now, Except, tonight, it was in reality – if any of this were real – not just the same. Tonight,the sheen that bloomed like radiation from the shed – was green. Lime-green.Emerald infused by citrine, much sharper than the sting of vodka in juice. Acolour that any minute might become solely the yellow of a mid-Urgency,doubtless escalating, Alert.

Hesat in the dark, the shed’s light burning above him, his back to the trunk of atree.

Thethunder and lightning had rainlessly aborted. There was, in the inert warmth ofthe air, the taint of burnt wood from the party fires. There had also been somefireworks and Chinese Lanterns for a short while, lifting southward, towardsthe sea, maybe on the terrace from which the cyclist had taken flight.

Senseless.Even macabre, in an amateurish fashion.

Carverslept a little. And Anjeela had filled her mouth with him, sucking andcaressing. But the sharp dream-pleasure woke him, and immediately died, gurningnumbly down the darkness, leaving a sour ache; and even that died, losing itsway.

Theletters and numbers resumed their irritating constellations.

Heregistered that code, one of the less elusive, which worked the alphabet in twoblocks of 1 to 9, and then one last block of 1 to 8 – the letter A counting as 1,B as 2, etc, with I as 9. Then resuming with J as 1 to R (9) and S to Z (1 –8).

Itwas the code Mantik had used to warn of the disappearance of a member of thestaff. Carver’s iPhone had given it as a games clue, Clue up being thesignal, the 2nd Clue the code. That morning the second clue had read Always Justified Marketable Value. You took thefirst letter of each word, in this instance AJMV – and that gave you,conversely, on the 1 to 9, 1 to 9, 1 to 8 principle, the numbers/letters A – 1,J – 1 and M – 4, V – 4.

Thecode’s numbers and letters presented showed all the other alphabeticalinstances – while leaving out all remaining letters that themselves would benumbered 1 or 4. They were then S and D. The subject therefore had suchinitials. In other words, Silvia Dusa.

Avery straightforward code, transparent enough, and one of hundreds Carver hadhad, over the years, to learn. Strange therefore, really, he had not, untilnow, picked up on its recent reissue – here, both on his mind-screen, and spokenaloud to him by the blue-eyed black woman who had had sex with him in the bed,and later, out in the woods, grown her fingernail, and finger, and one coil ofhair, like an effect in a movie.

Butignore the effect – doubtless stage-managed and sensibly unbelievable. The mainquestion now was another one. Anjeela