by Tanith Lee
There was so much they couldn’t do then, of course. Like dentists. I remember that first time I had to have a tooth out. They gave me a local injection—that’s what he called it. But I felt everything he did. Agony. And that was only a tooth. Oh dear.
Jean died too, of course. So did Susan. But I wasn’t with them, we’d lost contact. A niece wrote to me about Susan. I can’t remember with Jean. It’s funny, sometimes I wonder if I made them up, my friends. The way lonely children do. Imaginary friends… Jean and Susan. After I lost Ben. I know I didn’t make Ben up. Ben was real.
It’s afternoon now, and I’ve managed to drink some Marmite in hot water, which is always so comforting. I don’t want to do anything, only sit here. No doctor has come and no one’s called. Will I be able to get to the door if they do? All those stairs…
I keep thinking this same phrase over and over again. I don’t know why, or where it comes from. It’s about being on a train journey, or I think it is, where the train doesn’t stop at your own station, so you have to go farther on, to a bigger terminus, and then take another train back. ‘Unable to stop,’ the phrase has it, ‘having to go all the way in and then back out again’. Perhaps it’s from a book, or one of the short stories they read on Radio 7—no, it’s Radio 4 Plus now, (or is it 4 Extra? I can’t recall. It was easier when it was an entirely different number).
Seven, Seven and Susan. And Jean. And unable to stop, having to go in and then out again… Out again. Or in.
Irvin:
99
When my venerable physician returned next day there was enacted a scene worthy of King Lear, during which he ranted and raved and stalked the entire premises, bellowing for the landlady, who failed upon her cue and could not be found. “What possessed you, Irvin Thessaris, to abandon yourself in such a palsied and verminous stye? No wonder you have gained the state wherein I find you!” But I, being too weak to reply, he quit me, and I thought I should then be left in peace in my Hell to suffer. But no. Back comes he with an army: one to lay and light my fire, another to cook broth upon it. Well, then, only two, but by then their energy and actions filled up every mote of the chamber. There might as well have been two hundred.
“Pay heed to me, Thessaris,” next sternly said my doctor, “you are undone. By which I mean, and here I will not piffle my words, you have been poisoned.”
“I know it,” I said. Or thought I did.
Regardless he plowed on. “There is little I can do, sir, I am sorry to say. For I have seen you at the Obelisk, and though there are actors that better you, you are good enough at your trade, and once or twice you shine, sir, yes indeed, you have shone. I do believe they will not, at once, forget you.”
Although I knew quite well, as I had tried to assure him, I had noted Death’s bony thumb was pointed four-square at me, yet it is a chilling matter to hear some other pass your sentence. It has been only in the air, one might say, but now is written in black ink upon a page. Dead. I should soon be dead.
He then however began, with the fussy complicity of a housewife, to outline who should come in and when, and how I should be washed, and the bed-linen changed, and various other aspects of my comfort, and my hygiene—on which I prefer we shall not dwell. Besides this, my feeding, while I might still take sustenance, even a little wine and brandy with aqua of Mercury, and tincture of poppy seeds, to ease my pains: all such were now arranged, since my landlady was a whore and slattern and should, if ever he set eyes on her, be hauled before the Justice. The doctor told me lastly that my bill for all this care, now so assiduously ordered, was beyond my means. And so he would not charge me it.
I thanked him, rather insultingly, I think. But either he missed my wit, or could not decipher it from my congested throat.
“Instead,” he frankly owned, “I will take up that hound of yours. Whatever name you lavished upon him, I have named him Horatius.”
Just then my faithless dog appeared in the doorway. Tall and jet-black, with his one flop ear red as an autumn rowan, he stared upon me bleakly from his night-black eyes. The villain, he had kept me no company, stolen my food, and brought on my head the complaints and costs of half the neighbourhood. Yet there he stood, noble as a hound of Egypt, favourite of some hunting Pharaoh—or of Antony, perhaps, who kissed and clove with Cleopatra. Horatius.
Well named.
“He shall come out with me,” went on the doctor, my trouble long since sunk beneath his jolly sky-line, “for I am taking myself and my family to a province of the coast. There, at the country house, he can chase rabbits, be my fetcher for pheasant. Even after the deer, I believe, he would show himself with honour. And there are young bitches enough he can paddle. He’ll keep me in good dogs till I am done.”
All this while my dog had stayed and stared on at me. Now he advanced, at a stately pace, until he reached my bedside. He had a good smell, all forgot by me since I’d not seen him close on a month or more. Like copper and new horsehair, and mushrooms baked with new honey.
“Well, Horatius,” I said. “Are you content?”
He at least, if the doctor did not, seemed to fathom my words.
He bent his head, and like a true gentleman, a brother or a son, he touched my forehead with his wet and wintry snout. So cold it was to my fever, it was like a diamond star emblazoned at my forehead’s centre. I seemed to see out there, at a hole or a window, into a clear sweet darkness, deep as the seas, and shallow as a ray of moonlight—if it should be black.
“Go then,” I said to him. “Be happy and prosper, my Horatio, my Iago. God send you good, you bad fellow.”
He turned then and padded out.
He had been my priest. He had marked me with the sacred fire. I was absolved.
My doctor fussed about the last arrangements, and the server came and fed me a little broth, which was pleasant, and I able to swallow it.
The room was warm, and something burned in a pewter pot, the scent of which eased my physical discomfort.
But my worries had shrunk to nought. I pictured Merscilla. Casting herself upon me, her voice, of such beauty, like some instrument not yet invented, crying out in despair: “Thy lips are cold!” But she would never do it. Nor did I mourn that she would not. I should be dead before the raucous clocks began their disorderly riot for midnight. Dead before another golden sun arose. My space I had had to walk the stage of this world. I had played my part as well I might. And had not one, at least, informed me I had been good enough. More. That—once, or twice—I had shone. I had shone. Man, nor woman, can do no more than that. It is the work of the stars, the moon, the sun, to see to the rest of it. Blow out then, the lamp. And sleep.
Dawn:
100
I can hear someone ringing the bell, down at the front door. Three flights of stairs, and I can’t even get out of the chair to cross the room. I can’t even get to the window to call down.
The telephone is out in the hall, too. No chance of that.
It may not be the doctor anyway. It’s almost four o’clock and already quite dark. A Jehovah’s Witness, very likely. And if it is the doctor, he’d say, “I’m sorry, Mrs Threstorillikiss, but you’d be better off in the hospital.” So what is the point?
It’s lucky. I don’t want to visit the lavatory. I’ve found I’ve wanted that less and less in the past few days. It’s supposed to be the other way round, isn’t it, when you’re old? Unless, of course, I’ve been there and just don’t remember.
I had a cup of tea too, about two o’clock, after lunch, when I sat down here again. So I’m not thirsty. I wish I’d thought to bring the portable radio in. But I didn’t, so that’s that.
There it goes again. The bell.
Do stop. I can’t help you. And you can’t help me. I’d like to be quiet now. Good.
I think he’s realised.
I can hear birds singing, that’s odd, it’s too dark, they ought to be in their nests, or wherever they go for shelter in the winter. Just because you can’t see things, doesn
’t mean they’re not there. All those pigeons, too, I think they’ve got into the other part of the house roof. Well. Good luck to them. I don’t need that bit of space, do I?
The street is very quiet now. I can hear a plane going over. What a shame, I’ll never eat that soup now, and it’s minestrone, one of my favourites. Perhaps they’ll give it to someone. I wonder… I wonder what I’ll do, tomorrow.
Pink:
101
I don’t want to be cruel. Let alone overly cynical. Or—worse—make a big joke out of this. It’s an extraordinary story. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it, I’d never even read before about an instance so complex, so incredible. Plus it is hilarious, in its own rather sinister and deeply sad way. So. I’ve got to be careful. Hence this preliminary work out on it all. A sort of dry run. Or—yes, why not, a dress-rehearsal. The big stuff, when I write it, will have to be very different. And I can’t reveal my source, obviously. Luckily, enough people have been involved on the edges to get a partial idea of what went on. The ones that don’t, don’t count. Some of us will never understand it. I’m not sure I do. It scares me, though. I mean, something like this. You think, if it can happen like that then why not to me, given the right amount of stress, or of peculiar circumstances, or chemicals in the blood and brain, or just plain life. Life will always get you, one way or the other.
OK
My name is James Pinkerton, which I’m afraid, besides sounding very Gilbert and Sullivan, has earned me among my colleagues the dubious nickname of Pinky, or Pink. The last is a slang term too for a certain part of the female anatomy, a wonderful part, true, but I’ve never been that keen on its being applied to me. As a bloke, I’m not, in any other way aside from name, PINK. Not even politically. (Politically I’m not really anything. They’re all crap now, as far as I can see, which I’ve gone into print often enough to point out.) Anyhow, that’s enough of that.
When I first heard about what had been going on, from—I’ll call him D.C.W.—I thought initially it was too crazy to do much with. Then I thought about it. That is, properly. Then I looked up a few other cases. Horrifyingly, there were more than I’d ever have thought could be likely. There are, of course, quite a few of the better known and more ‘modest’ (shall I say) types involving normally two elements. But the extravagance of this dossier puts most of those well into the shade. Similar, or nearly similar examples, however, have been, and still are, documented. I note here particularly the tragedy of Eric Verner Wassen, in Hungary, in the early 1920’s. I won’t go into all that here. Look it up on the net.1
OK
The first thing, after my rather cursory research, was to do the follow-up ground work. Which meant moving around the place, and talking to people.
Most people, I find, really want to tell you things. And if they know absolutely zilch, then they’ll make something up. Of this I’m wary, having learnt the hard way, years back, when I was starting.
The suburbs can be less people-indifferent than inner London, but even so they’re not that socially involved. No, despite what a lot of Londoners say, those little clusters of shops and by-ways, where you can meet the same people again and again, are still not like the old villages that, even now, you can come across, in Scotland, say, or the outlands of Manchester. Plenty down here pretend to be arm in arm, and heart in pocket with the rest of their ghetto. But they’re not. Again, it’s gossip, speculation. If something looks really exciting, or awkward—some gorgeous girl, some dangerous, spiky guy—they may take notice—but even so it’s mostly guess work.
About her, though, one or two, (more than that, of course), began to get the hang of the facts, even if they improperly understood, and so dismissed these, with the usual amused and condescending casualness. Mrs Jones was odd. But, they added, she didn’t cause any trouble. Poor old cow, some of them said, (or bat, or biddy. Or cunt. Depending on their favourite pieces of the vernacular.)
None of them recalled when she’d moved into the area. A lot of them, inevitably, wouldn’t even have lived there, or been born, when she had. Some of them knew approximately where she lived. Some didn’t. No one, not even my source (D.C.W.) knew how or where she got started. She had had a husband—Mr Jones. But this was before anyone’s time. Or, before anyone had ever seen, let alone noticed her especially. Somebody told me he could remember seeing her in her twenties—“Pretty little thing. A bit cagey though.” No, he didn’t recollect a male partner. Thought she might have had a kid, little girl, dark hair, about two or three. Several women guessed Mrs Jones had ‘inherited’ her property, in her thirties, or fifties. She was alone, and a miserable old cow (or bat or biddy etc etc). One middle-aged trendy in shorts said he could recollect, as a child, throwing stones at her windows, and putting a firework through her door on November 5th, because she had told him and his friends off in the street. (But apparently he recounted this anecdote about several women.)
I worked with all this. Then binned most of it
OK
I’m in the pub, the one near the station, and nearest to Mrs Jones’s final address.
It’s an old pub, The Black Sheep. Bits of it go back to the Sixteenth Century, or so the discreet notices say. Certainly the ceiling is low enough that if you wear a piece (I don’t) you could scrape it off on a beam.
There are in this pub a lot of ancient relics. (I don’t refer to the customers.) Aside from the beams and the narrow wooden stairway that leads to the upstairs dining area, there are glass cases with mummified cats in them, blackly hard, so sculptural they might never have been alive. These poor buggers were buried under the foundations around the 1590s to protect the building. There is also a huge painting in the bar perpetrated by a local artist in 1901. It depicts a Scapegoat—that is a human man, not a goat—as in the more famous artwork by… (who the hell is it? Holman Hunt? I’ll have to look it up…) He is loaded with chains and in filthy rags, and stands at the edge of some sort of narrow river, staring and mad. A nasty sight to have hanging over you as you quaff your pint. But it turns out this is exactly where Mrs Jones always sat. At least, when she was—in that particular mood. This is how Josh the pub landlord, put it. Mood.
“You mean… the man?”
“One of them,” said Josh.
“Right. There were two—yes?”
“Well, I only saw two.”
“And this one was how?” I asked.
“She’s sat under The Scapegoat. And he, this one, he’s the bloody maddest. No one what hadn’t seen it before, well, they’d laugh out loud. Or it’d go all quiet. I used to say, it’s fine, she’s no trouble. She wasn’t. And some of them, well, they’d come in just to look at her. Some of them always laughed. One or two took pictures on their phones. You know. She didn’t seem to, like, notice. But she was often talking to someone.”
“To herself?” I asked.
“Nah. Someone else was with her. Only no one else was with her, you get me?”
There was a dog, he said, too. No, not a real dog. But real to her. The dog was always doing something wrong. And then it wasn’t there. “I mean, it was never there—but now she said it wasn’t.”
“Did she talk to you?”
“Sure. She’d want a coffee, or wine. Sometimes beer. She had a funny way of wording it, but I got the drift. And she wasn’t loud.”
“Just her clothes.”
“Yeah. Just her clothes, like.”
“So what were they?”
“Big hat. Big floppy shirt. Big coat, long lapels. Just scruffy baggy old trousers. Men’s, I think. Nearest I can think with the whole get-up—like Pirates of the Caribbean. That kind of stuff.”
“Historical.”
“S’pose. Like a kid dressing up. Fancy dress. Amateur theatrics. Yeah, that’s it. Feather in it,” he mused.
“In what?”
“His hat, mate. Her hat. The man. The second man.”
OK
“Who was the first man, the other one?” I asked a bit later, after
the lunchtime rush had eased.
“Eh? Oh that. He was—er, he was just like some bod from some London firm. Suit. More casual at weekends. Hair slicked back. Well, it was a wig, you get me? And the other one, that was a wig too.”
“What other—oh, right. You mean the other man had a wig too.”
“Sure. Long brown curls, him. A woman’s wig, or that’s what Posie says—she’s bar staff. But they used to wear their hair that way, like, fellers then. 1700’s? But the city guy in the suit, hair’s short. But her hair wasn’t like that. She had long hair. Most of it grey, she was knocking on. She used to put it up, or when I saw her in the street, when she was, well, when she was just being normal, it was up in a kind of bun. Used to call it that, didn’t they? My mum called it that. A bun.”
I checked all this over with him. They were things mostly I’d heard before, but his take was, for all the vagaries, more condensed, more decided. One long-haired man in period costume, or at least an approximation. Another man with short hair in a suit, or more casual modern masculine wear.
I asked him if the man in the suit spoke to other people not actually visible or apparently real.
“Not often. Last time I saw him though yeah, he did. I’ve just remembered too. There was a girl. No, not with the man. I mean she was being this girl. She had her own hair down then, and a bright red T-shirt. Of course, I say girl. I mean, sort of. You know. She drank… one glass of lager. She kept quiet. She seemed sort of looking for someone. I didn’t like the look of her. Funny thing to say. Because, well, it was all the same, wasn’t it? But this girl—only not girl, though dressed up like one, this old girl in her tight jeans and her red T-shirt, she had a look… You could just believe she’d stab you or something. Something… like that. Can’t explain it. Come to think of it, though, I saw her in the High Street an’ all once. She was chatting away to someone then. I mean, someone what wasn’t there. ‘Micky’ she called him. ‘Have you got enough cigarettes,’ she said, ‘Micky?’ And something about the way she said it, even though it wasn’t to no one as was there, made me go cold. Blimey. You’ll think I’m as bloody bonkers as she is.”