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

feeling that Sej had somehow also got at him, and that the labour of Duran’s girlfriend was a lie. The non-mad area of my brain dismissed this theory over and over. Duran would not be, let alone become, any pawn of Sej’s. And yet…

Instead I called a local locksmith. I explained I needed my front door locks changed and bolts replaced.

“Sorry, squire. I’m spoken for this next month.” He suggested another name and number who, politely saying much the same thing, also gave me another name and number. In the end, after several more similar calls, a nasal voice said he might be able to ‘help me out’. The price he quoted was exorbitant, but I agreed. He never turned up.

What should I do?

Damn it to hell. If Sej wanted bloody access so much let him have it. I’d had to abandon the house before. It would be lunacy to stay here now. Waiting. I began to pack that early Saturday afternoon, and in among the clothes and other stuff, held in bubble-wrap and a small box, I placed my mother’s red glass dog. Red, for Vilmos and his Order, was the colour of the lowest chakra, located at the genitals. Or blood, of course. Even a white dog could be made red that way. And what had I seen of it, that dead, white dog, I, the perceptive writer of detective fiction? A bundle out of which hung a tail. I hadn’t even gone close. It could have been a child’s sock. And the rest? Fake theatrical blood normally available in joke shops, if nowhere else – or even ketchup. And a small bolster.

I raised the lid of the piano after I’d taken the ornament. I thought of smashing the keys of the piano with the hammer I use to knock in the odd nail.

I also thought of poisoning every item of drink or food in the house. I didn’t need sleeping pills, or bleach. Clear shampoo would do in the dry ginger. Sink cleaner, a white cream, smeared last over the frozen piece of chicken, appearance and smell obscured by the cold. Enough to make him sick again. Enough to sting. I toyed with these notions. I wanted to booby-trap the place but now there wasn’t time. I had to get out, before everything else in the street curled up in another night, and lying sleepless and fully dressed for morning, I heard the two keys turn in the locks, as I hadn’t last night. I’d piled several items against the front door again, kitchen chairs, pans and pots, the original paraphernalia plus. I’d managed to bump and heft one of the armchairs out of the front room too. Make it hard for him. I would leave by the back way, use the small kitchen ladder to climb over the back fence which, as I was light, should just take my weight as it had taken his rangier, slightly-heavier one the first time.

In a defunct plastic vitamin bottle I poured a sample of the-perhaps contaminated whisky. I still wasn’t sure, there. Had I only been very tired? If it were a pill I’d like to know the brand name. Apart from slight giddiness on first sitting up, I felt fine. Thanks, Sej, for finally finding me the occasional good night’s sleep.

I was loath to destroy the computer. To have to buy a new one would be annoying, and everything lately had taken a toll on my ‘savings’. Left alone it should be useable for another eighteen months at least, and for my requirements, probably three years. I had the discs, and I’d set it to delete again.

Additionally now, I’d also pulled out the paperback copy of each of my novels, and dumped them in another bag. I’d put the big paper copy of Untitled in there too, complete with the recent printed corrections and hand-written scribbles. I added my mother’s Bible, the King James edition, retained by all of us for its language and antiquity, rather than any delusions of a God.

I locked my bedroom door again and for good measure, before that, myself pumped glue down the upright of the door’s edge. Post locking I pumped glue as well into the lock. This was sheer perversity. There was nothing interesting in the room. I just wanted to frustrate him.

But I hadn’t smashed the piano keys. It would take a lot to make me do something like that. It was a musical instrument, valuable not only as an object, but for its potential. In the same way I’d have been happy right then to poison Joseph Traskul, but not to break his fingers.

Perhaps it goes without saying I had written down the number the ghastly Cart had given me. I nearly called it twice that afternoon. But then I couldn’t say exactly where the quarry was likely to be. Take it with me, and I’d have a more concrete clue that he might be here.

At this time I had no notion of the 666 number of Sej’s London flat, only that such a flat was supposed to exist.

I’d previously checked train times on the web, and was aiming for something between three and five-thirty. The grey stone village where Matthew, once with Sylvia, lived, is like many others, all of them rather more charmingly evidenced by the famous venue in Last of the Summer Wine. It was a few miles outside Cheston, and Cheston. with its concluding change of trains at Crewe, would take, all told, four hours. Cheston had the Empire Hotel. There I would park myself over Saturday night and Sunday, and polish off the last of the credit on my Barclaycard.

Everything locked, bolted, barricaded, disconnected, made, where feasible, user-unfriendly, I left the house which had been my parents’ at 2.15 p.m. The bags were going to feel heavy. Having unlocked the back door, closed and relocked it, I climbed the kitchen ladder at the end fence. I intended to lower the bags over the top