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

returned. And – she was nolonger Anjeela. In the dark, after the bursting of the glow had died and thelightning melted, he could make out this woman had herself grown luminouslypale. Her skin had become ethnically European, her features the same, nose,mouth. Her shadow eyes. He knew her, even so. Knew the one that now she was fully changingherself into.

Beyond the windows and doors things like strands of shiny foil-coveredwire were rushing rustling down. The rain had come. And in the rain, over theslope of the hill, hundreds of fireflies danced: solar or battery torches, thecolour of a cheap bad Sauterne, (the sort his father had drunk), sliding upwardthrough the deluge.

Twenty-Two

Rainrushed, noise of thin silver and rusted tin; the thunder dragged its heavytrain carriages around and around the sky. They sat, facing each other, theman, the woman, on the shed’s floor. Neither spoke now. Beyond the square ofdarkness they inhabited, the other dark made sound enough. And soon, throughthe windows, light bloomed, shattered by drops of water on the glass. And theshapes appeared through the broken pebbledash of light and night and water.They were like ghosts. So many, a great gathering, not speaking, either, makingno sound he could distinguish. But closer. Close and closer, close as thewindows. Up against the glass in the windows and the doors. (Just as Croft hadstood before, that was it.) Pressed up to the glass, the facespressed to it, and each pressing to it one or both hands, their palms flat...On both sides of the shed. Nothing visible outside now but men and women, thetops of their bodies and their faces and rained-through hair, and hands, andbehind them other bodies, faces, wet hair, hands – standing just like Croft.But all these Crofts facing in, at the man and the womanseated on the floor. Unmoving. Unspeaking. And otherwise only the rain and thethunder, and the million bits of pebbled torchlight.

“The door,” he said. But it was futile. He did not continue.

“The door’s locked, Car,” she said however. Her voice was calm andmiles off. “You locked the door.”

I know, he said, but he did not say it.

They could break in, the mad ones outside. The shed was only woodand glass. They could break in, would break in, the mad ones, the ones he haddriven mad. If he had, if that was what he could do, if he could – something (something)something had. Him?

He had never known himself. Now he saw himself, as if he also wereoutside himself, looking in through a rain-speckled and unclear pane of glass.

He saw himself, and did not know who he was.

And she, he saw her too, and she was not her but someone else.

The shed trembled. Thunder. Or the pressure of flesh and bone.Only slight. But it would not take much.

“Car,” she said. The woman in the shed with him.

What? he said. He had not said it. “What?” he asked her aloud.

“In a moment,” she said, “you must get up, go to the window, andlook out at them.”

Why? “Why?” he said.

“I think it may make them draw back,” she said.

He did not get up.

Then he got up.

He walked to a window.

All the faces, the eyes. He stood, not close to the glass as Crofthad, or as they did, but a couple of steps back. It was completelystraightforward to look at them, even into the eyes of them. They did notappear real. Like Croft, too, Croft as now he was, there seemed, behind eachface, each pair of eyes, nothing. No one was home.

But, as she had suggested they might, they began to shuffle andslip aside, away. The rain-tide of them was slithering off. And the ones behindwere also withdrawing. Not so far, maybe the space of a metre, another half metre,left at this one window, between the shed wall and the crowd of mad people.

Carver recognised one or two of them now, men and girls seeninside the building or the grounds previously. The unsociable ones and thesmiley ones. There –the girl with the clipboard who had last taken him to Croft – a man who hadgreeted Carver in the plush restaurant-canteen – “Hello, Car – enjoying that?That’s a good steak, that, Car–” And there, the fatter woman from the judgingpanel that followed Hamel’s death.

If he moved from the window, would the tide of them merely flowin again right up to the glass?

Carver left the window, crossed to another. Here too, instantly,the crowd began to shift and sidle away – and when he glanced, the first windowhad stayed unoccupied. He went from glass to glass. As each emptied, he went tothe next, and none refilled.

They were indeed all moving off even a little farther, about fivemetres now, on the first side, and there, see, a distance down the south-facinghill, twenty metres, twenty-five –

The woman, not rising, had craned her neck to watch him.

When he left the windows altogether he did not return to the areaof floor where she sat. He sat against a wall, under one of the clearedwindows. Then recalled he had in fact moved back to sit here previously, whenshe told him to rest against a wall...

How did you know? But he did not ask her.

It’sstage-managed, that’s how she knows. Do this, she’ll say, and it will work. He hadnot driven anyone mad. It was their game, their theatreproduction, during which they would drive Carver insane.

But he thought of Sara, shrieking, and his father – he thought ofthe girl at the college he had first had sex with, who had reached her climaxclinging to him, and told him how wonderful he was, and then, later, would notleave him alone, and then later again one day took off all her clothes, anddanced naked on the unsafe fire-escape, cursing everyone till a medic came witha hypodermic, and Carver had not known why. And a thousand instances, all ofwhich could be explained away.

The rain fell.

Lights flickered outside, more distantly.

What time was it?

What time is it?

“What time,” he said, “is it?”

“About midnight,” she said, “I think, by now. Try to get somesleep,” she said.

He leaned