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

his head back on the wooden wall. He was trapped in thebody of an unknown man.

Idon’t know you.

He did not know–

Idon’t know–

What did his name mean? A butcher, someone who carved inscriptionsin stone, a sculptor, a psycho with a knife–

He was walking through a corridor full of mirrors, and in everyone he passed there was a faceless shadow with black gleaming eyes, his height,his build, keeping pace with him.

He could crawl or he could run, but the shadow would keep up withhim. It would be Carver himself, of course, who could not keep up with theshadow.

Nothingseemed changed when he woke... except the rain had stopped. And there was alightening to the sense of the dark, if not actual light.

When he looked around him, he noted the woman had altered her positionto sleep. She lay curled up on the floor, on her left side, both her armsfolded in to cushion and support her neck and skull, her knees drawn up againsther stomach. As if unconsciously to protect herself, or she was cold.

She did not react when he got up. But that might not meananything. She might well be wide awake, her eyes closed but all of her alertand listening, to see what he would do next.

The rain-spotted windows were empty of faces.

Carver went to each pane. The crowd had stayed back, twenty,thirty metres down the hill, to the south and the north, on both sides. Theyhad revised their position, but were intransigently there. Like the woman onthe floor.

Carver regarded the crowd, the mad people, as he patrolledquietly round the shed, and round once more. They were, all of them so far ashe could tell, quiescent, and not making any noise. Some of them sat on thedrenched earth, others stood.

Most of the torches had been kept on, highlighting portions oftheir group mass, or here and there gone out – maybe only the batteries hadfailed – and in these patches casting irregular shadows, blots of night,visually ominous but unmeaningful.

Every face that he could focus on, however, had stayed fixedtoward the shed. Those to the north looked upward to the south, those to thesouth looked upward to the north.

It was like – what in God’s name? – yes, some emphatic Biblicalmovie. The Tribes of Israel turning as one to stare at the mountain as Mosesdescended to them with the Tablets of the Laws of God.Or the Sermon on the Mount, for Christ’s sake, the multitude gazing up atJesus.

The imagery, its symbol – of need, savage belief, utter attachmentand expectancy, and – if only momentary – total dependence – was repellent andfrightening.

How long had they stayed like that?

As long, it might be, as he had slept.

Carver’s guts griped harshly. Not only in distaste and alarm. Theeveryday processes of elimination were asserting themselves, demanding to beattended to.

It would be wiser and more prudent to crap and piss inside theshed. But the woman – less through embarrassment and social reluctance, moresome curious protective impulse – made him bolt and bar bowels and bladderagainst compliance.

Instead he went to the central door, unlocked it, stepped out andlocked it shut again.

He had gone to the windows and met their faces and their eyes, andthey had withdrawn. What now would they do? Rush up and tear him in pieces,perhaps. Or only sit and watch their too human saviouras he squatted by some tree? He was the theatre finally, they theaudience.

Carver moved out and down the slope of the hill. Southward first.What did it matter? They could kill him, or only sit there, or someone elsewould come – some crazy leftover security man, or crazy woman who thought hehad got her pregnant or had knocked her daughter about – No. Irrelevant.

Irrelevantly then, the crowd on the hillside began to climb totheir feet, some clutching out at others, some calling out in thin lost voices –and they started to scatter away from him, Carver, the single advancing figure,to run now, some screaming, some falling and pulling others over, but mostscrambling up again and plunging on, down the slope between the trees andtheir stumbling roots, through the knots of soaking grass. Running away. It wasnot Carver, after all, apparently, who was afraid. Theywere afraid. They fled him, or what they thought he was, or what he really was.He did not have to proceed very far. When, after no vast distance, he stopped,still they poured on, shouting and crying, away. He watched them drain down thehill, like more spilled water.

When even the nearer tumbling figures had grown very small, hewalked back up the rise, past the shed, next repeating the manoeuvre on thenorthern side. It was not very different. Seeing him approach, panic andheadlong flight. More fell though that side. A few very certainly did not get up.They were trampled, he believed, by others. But by now he felt nothing, theywere not anything to him he could empathise with. No one, nothing, surely –was. Ever had... been.

He relieved himself in privacy among the bushes, cleaning upafterwards in the prescribed pastoral manner the rule books suggested. Thecollected rain was very helpfully cleansing. Lavishly it went on dripping andstreaming down from foliage and branches, up out of the grass, enough to cleanoff the shit of a whole squadron of desperate men.

The sky was paling also. Perfect on its cue: sunrise. A lovely newlate summer, early autumn, late fall, God-knew-what- season day. And in theintensifying flare of predawn, little things were glittering, catching thegleams: a slender silver broken bracelet, a broken shoe, part of a sleeve, athick chunk of hair torn out by a low bough in the panic-flight; pale indeterminatehair, dawn colour, with one High Level Red Alert of blood along its strands.

Carver reached the shed. He stood with his face against thewindowless western end of it. He felt nothing at all, but he wept. Or it wasonly the rain that had somehow filled him too and now, like the excrement, andthe humanity, must leave him.

Twenty-Three

Shehad woken and was sitting on the floor. She looked clean and fresh, even herlustrous hair – not like the piece