To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

gone for an unusual drink with some friends. My mother had been dead for years. Breast cancer. There wasn’t much they could do for it then. But the house was useful. It was paid for, and once all the legal business was solved I was installed, only half an hour out of London’s Charing Cross. I managed to find a gardener too. He was young, quite efficient. He scalped the lawn and hauled the worst of the weeds from the flowerbeds, where a scatter of flowers then bloomed by themselves for several seasons before, finally, untended and never watered except by God, they gave up. In the end the gardener too simply vanished without a word. Perhaps someone had killed him, as happened to gardeners and many others in quite a lot of my books. I got the back and front lawns paved over then, and left the rest to itself. I sold the piano about the same time. I had never been tempted to play it.

That evening I got home around eight. I had just missed a train, then travelled standing on another, amid herds of commuters in the same case, reading papers, chatting on their mobiles, swaying there like bats the wrong way up.

Indoors I made some tea and took a biscuit from the jar, my mother’s biscuit barrel that had a fat bear on it. As a child I had loved it, the bear.

I really had altered the house very little. Only neglected it. The agency cleaning girl came once a fortnight.

She was currently a German student, who seemingly spoke only five words of English: Hello. Yes. No. Done. And Ifbee. (Perhaps six words?) That last meant If I can against all odds, i.e.: Could you clean the cooker? Ifbee.

The sun was at last going down in the fir tree at the end of the garden, not mine, but that of an adjoining plot. Beyond my back fence ran the alleyway, but the fir tree mostly hid it from me. I’d used this tree in swift descriptions here and there, a handy example of nature, its needles against this sky or that. Now a fractured golden sunset sky that had been prefigured in London’s radiance.

Mug in hand, I stared into the last light.

Sunset and dusk have a mystic significance in the East, I forget quite what. In France of course, with dusk comes l’heure bleu, when phantoms and hallucinations are seen.

The sun went. The fir grew darker and the sky like bronze. Then the twilight blueness. A bright star stood out over the roof of the Catholic church.

Vaguely heard around me the ordinary noise of a radio, some male clearing nasal passages careless of open window or listening ears, a Hoover; a night flight starting off for Europe.

And then, the phantom.

It emerged palely from the umbra of the fir tree and the gathering dark, and gazed in over the fence. Bisected by the fence at the approximate level of his jaw, Joseph Traskul’s disembodied head. Vilmos would have liked that.

I didn’t drop the mug. Maybe I clutched it far too tightly.

And he? He watched me. He was smiling.

We said nothing, either of us.

And then the owl – there was an owl, it sometimes flew across the gardens in the spring and summer, although where it came from I’d never been sure – the owl sailed by overhead.

And both he and I looked up.

Both he and I – Vilmos – Joseph – and I, looked up at the passing of the owl.

When I looked down again, the phantom was gone.

2

On the third flight I met one of the neighbours. He came out of a door above and clattered down the stair towards me.

I got ready to show him the forged packet, with its address of Saracen Road and the apparently franked postage. But, thickset and indifferent, he shouldered past me, brushing me over with a leather jacket very unsuitable for the summer weather, not saying a word.

No doubt few of them took any notice of each other in this block. Inner London is like that, even more so than the suburbs where I exist.

I went up the further three flights and reached flat No 6. His flat.

It was as he had described it. A door painted a dull white like all the others I had already seen, but this one with a panel of crinkled glass. The door had only one Yale lock. Yet it did not have a number on it, unlike those below. Nevertheless it had to be 6. The stair ended here. There was nowhere else to go.

One flight down, flat 5 was still crashing out its horrible music, tuneless, with only the deadly beat and mostly indecipherable Neanderthal lyrics, to class it as any kind of ‘song’. When I had walked by on my way up, not only was I deafened, I felt the racket through the soles of my feet, base of my spine, and punching me in the gut.

Up here, no one else was about. Through a narrow, unwashed window I could see the rear of the other buildings, and not a flicker of life. Beyond those, the London skyline.

I was scarcely furtive. I took the heavy-duty gardening glove out of my back pocket, put it on and made a fist. I smashed the glass with one smack, as if I’d been doing things of this sort all my life. Watching TV I suppose teaches one the worst skills; the morality brigade are right.

Most of the panel fell in. It must have been very inferior stuff.

I reached through and undid the door.

As it swung inward, I thought he would spring at me, out of nowhere, out of thin air.

But he didn’t. The narrow hallway was empty. In fact very empty, no carpet down, the paper even scoured from the unpainted walls. There were two internal doors, each closed.

THREE

I went back into the house, through the kitchen door, which I shut, locked and bolted behind me.