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

Then I switched on the external light. Its beam cut hard into the gathering dark, revealing nothing beyond what was normally present, the paved lawn and dead flowerbeds, the fir tree over the fence, the top of the Catholic church. The light dimmed the diamond star that had appeared there.

What had happened? Had I imagined him, Joseph Traskul the piano tuner, his floating head swimming by the fence and smiling at me, before the owl somehow diverted both our attentions to the sky?

I didn’t think it had been imagination.

Well then, was I going mad?

Putting down the mug I went through into the front room and poured myself a finger of whisky.

Standing motionless, I peered out at the street. The curtains were still undrawn. My mother used to have ‘nets’ up, to stop anyone looking in at our nondescript activities. But I had taken them down in the end. I had nothing fascinating to hide, did nothing in that room, nor in any of the living-rooms, to merit such strict concealment.

Out in the street a couple of surviving oaks caught the ugly glare of the street lamps. The fifteen-year-old from three doors up was bicycling by, and the man who always walked his Alsatian dog was doing just that. Nor was anyone on the garden path that ran beside the house. The side gate was securely shut.

The clock on the church chimed. 9 p.m.

Nothing else was evident.

Soon I drew the curtains. I put on the hall light and went upstairs and put on the light in my study, which had once been my parents’ bedroom.

Turning on the computer I checked for emails. There was only one, from Peakes about some stationery.

All this time I was thinking, What did I see? Was it real?

I didn’t feel deranged. Nor did I think I had not seen what I had.

The frivolous idea that after all, and truly, the man from the pub in The Strand might be my character come to life failed to resurface. I don’t believe such things can happen. And if perhaps they ever could, I would never reckon they could happen to a man like myself.

So it was a mystery. Or perhaps something in the prawns had not been quite right, or the cheese; something as silly as that. I’d heard of such incidents, a mild hallucinatory food-poisoning. But I felt cool and quite steady, not sick, and not sweating now.

Better let the episode go. Perhaps it would prove useful, if not in revitalizing Untitled, then in my next commercial work. For honestly, now, I had no desire at all to uncork my unpublished novel from the files.

I did some small chores round the house, had a slice of supermarket cheddar on toast, and watched the news. The world as always was in unremitting chaos, and apparently the temperature in Britain had been an unseasonal twenty – roughly seventy degrees, we would have said in my youth.

I ran a bath, and afterwards went to bed.

Like many of my age I don’t sleep as well as I did.

What an unappreciated pleasure, the sleepful nights of my teens and twenties had been, the odd sleepless one an occasion for fretful wonder. Now they’re a matter of course, and on a ‘good’ night I average five or six non-consecutive hours if I’m lucky.

But I lay back and watched the darkness and the faint municipal lamplight through the curtains. I put on my bedside radio, Radio 3. They were playing Handel, I thought.

I considered my next commission, which was a small thriller, one in a series devised by someone else and something for which I had no enthusiasm, but it would help pay bills. I often do a bit of work in my insomniac hours, even get up sometimes at three or four in the morning to push some notes into the computer.

My brain however kept going back to the pub, and, nastier, the fence.

At midnight I switched to the news as I habitually do, and listened once more to the rehash of hell on earth.

What was it all for? What was to be done?

I used to get angry and have opinions. Now I take it in like a sort of slop. The bloody awful thing is, this rehearsal of horrors usually helps me drift asleep.

Which was what happened. We were on to the World Service by then, a report on some far off disaster beyond human belief, and I was asleep.

I dreamed he and I were sitting on a torn-out palm tree drifting on a salt-dark sea, and he said to me, “The thing is, Phippsy, it was written, us meeting as we did.”

To this hour, this piece of dream-dialogue frightens me. Because he speaks in the dream as he would speak. Not as I would have him speak, at least partly grammatically. Us meeting, not our. And his use of my name, like the bullies at Chaults Grammar School. My father’s, therefore my name is Phipps. Although my professional name is R.P. Phillips. Harris suggested that, while he was dismantling my first book and sending me home to reinvent it. “Phipps – no, old son. Doesn’t have a ring to it. Phelps, I wonder…? No. No – Phillips.”

In the dream Joseph Traskul was not in his black clothes and bashed boots from the pub. He wore Vilmos’s garments, Vilmos’s loose shirt and broken coat.

The radio must have said it, three hundred people were dead. Both the dream-Joseph and the dream-I heard this.

Joseph said to me, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” quoting the Book of Job, and also, naturally, Melville’s Moby Dick.

One gets used to rising early. My almost ten years in the library service had marked this indelibly on my mental clock. Even when I sleep especially badly I rarely get up later than eight.

I used to have a paper delivered, my father’s habit. I stopped that too a couple of years back. I seem to listen to enough news. The post, which used to arrive at