Turquoiselle

by Tanith Lee

  Carver thought, afterwards, he said to her then, “You healed your bruises and turned back into a brunette. And your eyes are dark now. They used to be blue. Not shape-changing. It’s called personal delusion. And wearing contact lenses.”

  But presumably he did not say it. He had already stopped seeing her; she was only a voice, and words, and images that formed from them.

  Besides, by then also he knew, or something in him knew, that to fight any longer was useless. And outside the night was black and red and made no sound, as it crept towards them up the hill.

  “Preece, like certain others who would finally contact such people as myself, and you, tend themselves to minor but fascinatingly odd talents. Preece could undo locked doors without keys. Sunderland was like this too. Do you recall Sunderland? I don’t know what he was good at. Something. But what you’ll want to know, or you will feel that you must have the knowledge of, a decision that is valid, is what is your personal – power – skill, shall I say? Your special and major talent. Mr Croft mentioned something?”

  “Energies,” Carver (afterward) thought he had scathingly, wearily, said. But he had not said anything.

  “Croft – his name, too, was altered in childhood – he derived from an area off the Mediterranean, unaffiliated with either the Arab nations or the Jews, let alone the Russian political landmass. Mr Croft was born in Britain. But that was in the past. Now, in the recent days here, when he began firstly to feel the effects of the induced madness, as we must term it, he became somewhat fulsome, unwise... enough to alert you, maybe, or not. I suspect you are so accustomed by now to the extreme behaviours of others. Their unreliable and occasionally dangerous sillinesses. Hysterical women. Eccentric men. Even the terrible and brutal rages of your father. But Mr Croft no doubt told you, you could summon and release energies, the nature and direction of which none of them, here in this stronghold of Croft’s organisation, had quite been able to solve, let alone take precautions against. A pity for them, that. Mantik, on the other hand, solved the puzzle some while back. Then, you may think unkindly, wickedly, they allowed certain aspects to proceed, exposing to your particular skill persons of assembled types, to see precisely the results. Do you recall the man nicknamed Bugger Back-Scratcher at the place on Trench Street? The man who always, too intimately, felt the male workers up, when performing their security checks? He was one of the people Mantik left open to your skill. No, no, of course you had no notion. Believe me, take it in and don’t let go of it, you were, during all these events, innocent. Mr Back-Scratcher finally sexually assaulted a man on the tube, in front of witnesses. Mantik hushed up the business. They rescued Mr Back–Scratcher from the force of the Law, recompensed the assaultee. Mr Back–Scratcher is elsewhere now. Treatable, apparently. His exposure was limited and intermittent. And, obviously, some persons, as with any – shall I say, diseases? – will be much more susceptible than others. It has been noted, nevertheless, even once a formula for general protection was developed for use by Mantik, passed off as one more essential ordinary medical shot – against ‘flu, MRSA – there were always slight discrepancies. You may, for example, have noticed that some people, when they are with you, even if not acting in any overtly peculiar way, are still prone to silly little affectations and mistakes. Repeating some word over and over – that’s a favourite. Jack Stuart found it very amusing, that. He found, luckily for Mr Stuart, that once he left your vicinity, this blip quickly corrected itself for him. Mr Carver, I have to say, even I, who am virtually totally naturally immune to your skill – your unconscious, and innocent and deadly skill – seem to be repeating certain words, phrases, as I’ve sat here with you. Full, for example even, if in different syntactical forms. Forms, even. Even, even. But you know, don’t you, you’ve known in some way all your life, that people close to you, exposed to you, and inevitably those that work with you, live with you, sleep with you, fuck with you, seem to lose their reason.”

  Carver (afterward) thought he did not speak. Not now.

  “You produce, Mr Carver, an energy, decidedly, and of a sort largely unquantifiable. Although by now heightened by Mantik’s chemical treatment of certain articles and objects – things you might, given your tendency, appropriate – steal. The chemical, by the way, is in itself harmless. The rest of Mantik’s crew, or anyone, remain impervious, having no reaction to or with it. Which, evidently, is not so for you. Evidently also, the chemical formula was allowed to pass into the hands of Croft’s people, so that once they got hold of you, they could apply it and immediately witness the unmissable result. The augmentation reacts with and on you, Mr Carver. Your astonishing power is galvanised. And, incidentally if most effectively, this is what produces the extravagant side effect, the coloured glow that filled your private garden shed, and now lights up to the left of us, here. Your own unease and dread, Mr Carver, have changed its nature, (you see, nature repeated by me yet once more), turned it through the colours of the Alert, blue-green right through to scarlet: 6th Level High. And the volume of your deadly, (deadly, again), power is now also raised to a phenomenal level. It goes perhaps without saying, Croft’s outfit did not in any form understand precisely what it indicated – or what that power entails. They were hoping to learn. Obviously, once they had you here, certain people were set specially to watch you. I was one. Mr Van Sedden and Mr Ball were the main operatives. And as we see, they were affected very rapidly. But I must add, even when you were first held here, drugged and investigated, helpless, your power worked on all and everything around you. Unconscious, Mr Carver, you were and are as lethal as when fully aware. Even your prime interrogator, I’ve heard, lost purchase after only a day and night. They thought it was a breakdown. It was. Your work. As I say, Croft and his people hoped to learn what you were, and what you could accomplish. They have. I though am, as I said, immune. Ninety-nine percent immune. As, very probably, the other member of our trio is, or perhaps any of our kind. But nobody, Mr Carver, nobody else. And that is why no one has yet come up the hill, to us here. A purely animal response. They sense you are here. But also, Mr Carver, that is why they will, eventually, irresistibly, arrive. Your skill, your genius, Mr Carver, is to bring insanity. And by now you can affect machines too. Am I correct – your cars frequently needed repairs, your phones – other items? Even – it has been mooted at Mantik – you can upset the weather. But your main talent lies with people. Your main talent lies in driving your fellow humans mad. To start with, your father and your mother, the most and worst exposed, and as your power erratically and blindly grew, caught in its blast. Later, if more patchily, fellow students at your schools, even certain adolescents and teachers at the special college, though by then you had become even more solitary, and Mantik, too, was already experimenting with antidotes, several of which had some helpful effects. Nevertheless, you have seen what you can do with the entirely unprotected. Donna, even Maggie, Donna’s mother. Even Mr Johnston, your neighbour in the village. He was one very susceptible victim, who did not have much contact with you at all, though of course, generally meeting you at the garden’s end, by the shed, where – naturally – your ability was itself augmented. Mr Johnston went mad and acted out the fantasy of a dangerous intruder. Even manipulating his injured leg to move with an unusual fluidity it should not have been capable of – and for which he has paid physically, since. He might even have murdered you that night, if Mr Croft’s battalion hadn’t stepped in first. Madness. The infliction of madness is your power. You can drive insane. You can even drive to suicide. You have always been a gun, Mr Carver, but now the bullets are in, you are loaded and primed. You are a missile, Mr Carver, and now the clock has struck midnight, the hand of authority has turned the key and pressed the button. Mantik. They perfected your talent and let their enemies – their Life-Long Enemies – seek and find and take you. And so you destroyed these enemies of Mantik, as you were intended to. Not even knowing, Mr Carver, what you did. Forgive me,” she said, the voice said, gentle now, sorrowful and
sorry. “Forgive me, Car. For telling you the whole truth at last.”

  White.

  White flashed, cracked, burned, blanked.

  Out of the redness, blind whiteness. The ruby glare had flared to Diamond. Top Level Alert. Annihilation. Terminus.

  A second later, pale and amorphous, offering no competition, real lightning clawed across the hill. And instant thunder detonated less from the sky than underfoot.

  As with the explosion, the earth shook. And the central shed’s blind white glare went out.

  Carver, in the darkness, could see her now, again. Anjeela. Her voice had stopped, and so she returned. And – she was no longer Anjeela. In the dark, after the bursting of the glow had died and the lightning melted, he could make out this woman had herself grown luminously pale. Her skin had become ethnically European, her features the same, nose, mouth. Her shadow eyes. He knew her, even so. Knew the one that now she was fully changing herself into.

  Beyond the windows and doors things like strands of shiny foil-covered wire were rushing rustling down. The rain had come. And in the rain, over the slope of the hill, hundreds of fireflies danced: solar or battery torches, the colour of a cheap bad Sauterne, (the sort his father had drunk), sliding upward through the deluge.

  Twenty-Two

  Rain rushed, noise of thin silver and rusted tin; the thunder dragged its heavy train carriages around and around the sky. They sat, facing each other, the man, the woman, on the shed’s floor. Neither spoke now. Beyond the square of darkness they inhabited, the other dark made sound enough. And soon, through the windows, light bloomed, shattered by drops of water on the glass. And the shapes appeared through the broken pebbledash of light and night and water. They were like ghosts. So many, a great gathering, not speaking, either, making no sound he could distinguish. But closer. Close and closer, close as the windows. Up against the glass in the windows and the doors. (Just as Croft had stood before, that was it.) Pressed up to the glass, the faces pressed to it, and each pressing to it one or both hands, their palms flat... On both sides of the shed. Nothing visible outside now but men and women, the tops of their bodies and their faces and rained-through hair, and hands, and behind them other bodies, faces, wet hair, hands – standing just like Croft. But all these Crofts facing in, at the man and the woman seated on the floor. Unmoving. Unspeaking. And otherwise only the rain and the thunder, and the million bits of pebbled torchlight.

  “The door,” he said. But it was futile. He did not continue.

  “The door’s locked, Car,” she said however. Her voice was calm and miles off. “You locked the door.”

  I know, he said, but he did not say it.

  They could break in, the mad ones outside. The shed was only wood and glass. They could break in, would break in, the mad ones, the ones he had driven mad. If he had, if that was what he could do, if he could – something (something) something had. Him?

  He had never known himself. Now he saw himself, as if he also were outside himself, looking in through a rain-speckled and unclear pane of glass.

  He saw himself, and did not know who he was.

  And she, he saw her too, and she was not her but someone else.

  The shed trembled. Thunder. Or the pressure of flesh and bone. Only slight. But it would not take much.

  “Car,” she said. The woman in the shed with him.

  What? he said. He had not said it. “What?” he asked her aloud.

  “In a moment,” she said, “you must get up, go to the window, and look out at them.”

  Why? “Why?” he said.

  “I think it may make them draw back,” she said.

  He did not get up.

  Then he got up.

  He walked to a window.

  All the faces, the eyes. He stood, not close to the glass as Croft had, or as they did, but a couple of steps back. It was completely straightforward to look at them, even into the eyes of them. They did not appear real. Like Croft, too, Croft as now he was, there seemed, behind each face, each pair of eyes, nothing. No one was home.

  But, as she had suggested they might, they began to shuffle and slip aside, away. The rain-tide of them was slithering off. And the ones behind were also withdrawing. Not so far, maybe the space of a metre, another half metre, left at this one window, between the shed wall and the crowd of mad people.

  Carver recognised one or two of them now, men and girls seen inside the building or the grounds previously. The unsociable ones and the smiley ones. There – the girl with the clipboard who had last taken him to Croft – a man who had greeted Carver in the plush restaurant-canteen – “Hello, Car – enjoying that? That’s a good steak, that, Car–” And there, the fatter woman from the judging panel that followed Hamel’s death.

  If he moved from the window, would the tide of them merely flow in again right up to the glass?

  Carver left the window, crossed to another. Here too, instantly, the crowd began to shift and sidle away – and when he glanced, the first window had stayed unoccupied. He went from glass to glass. As each emptied, he went to the next, and none refilled.

  They were indeed all moving off even a little farther, about five metres now, on the first side, and there, see, a distance down the south-facing hill, twenty metres, twenty-five –

  The woman, not rising, had craned her neck to watch him.

  When he left the windows altogether he did not return to the area of floor where she sat. He sat against a wall, under one of the cleared windows. Then recalled he had in fact moved back to sit here previously, when she told him to rest against a wall...

  How did you know? But he did not ask her.

  It’s stage-managed, that’s how she knows. Do this, she’ll say, and it will work. He had not driven anyone mad. It was their game, their theatre production, during which they would drive Carver insane.

  But he thought of Sara, shrieking, and his father – he thought of the girl at the college he had first had sex with, who had reached her climax clinging to him, and told him how wonderful he was, and then, later, would not leave him alone, and then later again one day took off all her clothes, and danced naked on the unsafe fire-escape, cursing everyone till a medic came with a hypodermic, and Carver had not known why. And a thousand instances, all of which could be explained away.

  The rain fell.

  Lights flickered outside, more distantly.

  What time was it?

  What time is it?

  “What time,” he said, “is it?”

  “About midnight,” she said, “I think, by now. Try to get some sleep,” she said.

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

  I don’t know you.

  He did not know–

  I don’t know–

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

  He was walking through a corridor full of mirrors, and in every one 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 with him. It would be Carver himself, of course, who could not keep up with the shadow.

  Nothing seemed changed when he woke... except the rain had stopped. And there was a lightening to the sense of the dark, if not actual light.

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

  She did not react when he got up. But that might not mean anything. She might well be wide awake, her eyes closed but all of her alert and 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. They had revised their position, but were intransigently there. Like the woman on the floor.

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

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