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

At night, when I retired to the virtually doorless environment of the bedroom, still I utilised my waking hours, or some of them, trying to concoct a plan of escape. But by now I couldn’t think of anything that I dared to chance.

The night after the new cups appeared I attempted a foray downstairs.

It was well after 3 a.m. The piano, which now and then he played into the small hours, had fallen quiet just after two.

There were no lights on. Yet at the windows in the study, the narrow box room, and the bathroom where the door also stood ajar, embers of streetlighting fell into the house. The same was true downstairs, through the glass panel in the door.

Moving slowly and with care in my stockinged feet – I never now slept either in pyjamas or under the covers, but on top of the bed fully dressed – I crept downward.

As I reached the fifth step from the bottom, darkness flowed directly upward at me like a forming hill, blocking the light, barring my way.

I knew it was him, not some creature from the Hammer Horror films of my youth. But I cried out, lost my footing, stumbled into him. He caught me firm as a rock.

“What are you up to, Roy?”

“You frightened the life –”

“No, I asked first. What are you doing?”

I said, because I’d had my story ready, “I was thirsty,” Like the untrusted child again.

“You should have called down. I’d have brought you something.” He didn’t seem angry, or worse exhibit that resignation that had been a prologue to the blow. “I’m often about at night. I sit in your library and read R.P. Phillips.”

I supposed he used only the angled lamp on the table there, and pulled the door to, for no light from that room had entered the hallway.

He said, “Tea? Whisky?”

“Just water.”

“You should keep some by you in a bottle, Roy. You can’t keep drinking unboiled tap water, not without a filter, not anymore.”

I stood marooned on the stair. Decidedly I must not proceed further. He came back with the glass with water in it.

“It’s Volvic,” he said, “in case you think it tastes different.” And he drank a couple of swallows. “Next time, like I said, just call me.”

Upstairs I went to the lavatory and poured the water away and flushed the cistern. It wasn’t that I thought he had spiked the drink. I just couldn’t swallow it.

Other events – adventures – took place during the next week.

There were all sorts of things. Some were surprising, shocking, some nearly funny in a frightful way, as had been the red paint and the smashed china. Some were on a more instantly invasive scale. For example, his nocturnal application of white paint to the glass of the lavatory window. Others were insidious things I might not notice at first, like altering the positions of the kitchen glasses, putting them where the canned and dried food and tea had been. And those commodities somewhere else again. Or when he had misfiled every book in my library. These had occupied a logical alphabetical order, author and subject. I’d worked in public libraries and this technique, less than petty, I’d found helpful when looking for things. Now I would hardly be able to locate anything without a search. That must have taken him most of a night to arrange as well. Strange I hadn’t heard him, the library lay partly below the bedroom. My study he always apparently avoided entering unless he had asked me if he might. It goes without saying I never withheld my assent. Then I walked into it one afternoon, sent there by Sej to write, and gradually grew oppressively aware of something above me. Looking up I had to squint to make it out, but I at last saw the pale writing, scribbled in the lightest grey paint across the stained white ceiling, almost invisibly. He had climbed up the ladder again, perhaps balanced, incredibly noiseless and careful on the flat-topped desk where the computer stood. This time, no splashes. He must have covered it over. The writing was some of the invented poetry of Vilmos, copied or recalled from Untitled. If I hadn’t written it I might not have been able, now, fully to read it.

Agony unended. Like the long snow it falls

And shrouds the edges of a sword

Too murderous to die from,

Too tangible to touch.

Among the webs that midnight spins

Go staggering to the doors of rotted day,

And through the keyholes, snakelike,

Spit.

This single act horrified me so far the most, worse even than his manifestation on the stair. But the painted poetry of course, was only my little madness and Vilmos’s great one, jarred into life by Sej’s spectacular insanity.

I said nothing to him about the writing, as I’d said nothing about any of it until, when or if, I was interrogated. Then I was neutral.

He didn’t refer to the poetry at all.

That following night, or rather morning, he woke me from one of my piecemeal half hours of sleep. He did this by shining the light of a torch he must also have had delivered, (my own was defunct) into my eyes.

It’s an old and tried schematic. I had read of it, described it in some of my work – read by him? To experience it is quite devastating.

I almost attacked him. I was just compos mentis enough to stop myself.

“Sorry, Roy,” he kindly said, “I wanted to show you something.”

Presently I went down with him. It was about 4 a.m. That I was being allowed to descend to the lower storey was not lost on me.

The TV was on, the sound turned down.

Some old film was showing, black and white, staffed with a cast of, at least to me, unknown movie actors of my parents’ era. I sat on the sofa, stiff and crackling with dried paint. Although he had said he sometimes slept here, I’d never seen any evidence. Now he sat beside me. We