Desolation

by Tim Lebbon

  Chapter Four

  Strangers

  Cain opened the curtains and watched the sun rise. It emerged above a row of houses, a red smudge that manifested slowly from the polluted air, finally shaking itself free and heading skyward. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. The sunrise was startlingly beautiful in a way that he had never been able—or allowed—to express, but the siren remained silent.

  In the cool light of day, he began to wonder what he had seen and heard the previous night. Banging, somebody screaming, and then laughter, as if he were being conspired against and tricked. George stumbling through the garden, holding his stomach as if stabbed . . . or perhaps only holding in his own mirth. And the dog in that garage, chewing and snapping and slurping its way into something else’s still-warm flesh. It had all felt so staged. So false. So controlled. He had sensed eyes watching over his shoulder all the time, mocking him. The world laughed in his face as he saw import in everything, sensed significance in the wave of a leaf or shift of a shadow. Last night had been so unreal, like a movie played out in his mind. A movie in which he had played the leading part. He sat on the sofa and shivered, hugging himself close because there was no one else to do it, clasping his own shoulders hard, pressing in his fingernails to make sure he was still awake.

  He felt so alone.

  Birds sang outside his window, unseen but keen to be heard. Their song was insistently cheerful, even though their chicks may be lying dead beneath their nests or torn apart by a cat. They seemed to be singing for anyone but him.

  Cars passed by, ferrying people to work or school or some other important place, leaving him in his flat.

  A leaf scraped against the living room window, carried on the breeze, an early death anticipating autumn still several months away. It danced there for a while, tickling the glass as if requesting entry. Cain stood quickly, but the leaf, finding his image wanting, drifted away to some secret demise.

  He felt so alone.

  There were no noises from within the house, and he wondered whether everyone else had gone out. Either that or they were sitting still and silent in their flats, listening for him. Perhaps they were all together somewhere, wondering how he was going to react to last night’s events. That was something he was still unsure of himself.

  In the dining room, his vomit had dried on the floor. He took a few minutes to clean it up, gagging on the stench but managing to not puke again. As he mopped he imagined that he was disposing of last night’s experiences, scooping them up and tying the bag so that they could not escape again. Like his dream they lingered on, but also like his dream they were consigned to the parts of his mind where memories and nightmares became inseparable. He knew where he had been and what he had seen—his muddy boot-prints had staggered all over the flat—but he had to find a way to control his fear and confusion.

  As a nightmare, last night took on a different shade.

  He made himself a strong coffee and then called the Voice.

  Hi, Cain, he said, I was worried about you last night. You hung up so quickly.

  “Why didn’t you call back?” Cain would not have been at home anyway, but he felt suddenly scared at the sense of abandonment.

  You’re your own man now. You have your own life, and a future. I didn’t want to intrude.

  “You wouldn’t have been intruding,” Cain said, but he remembered rushing downstairs to follow the injured shape of George, and he wondered just how he could portray any of this to the Voice.

  So how are things?

  “Fine. They’re fine.”

  Any dreams?

  “Plenty, but then you know that.”

  Bad?

  Cain took a noisy sip of coffee for the Voice to hear, giving himself a few seconds in which to think. “Different,” he said at last. “It involved someone else from the flats. Bloke called George. He’s already introduced himself, he came to . . .” Wake me when I was screaming in my sleep, Cain thought. That was not something he wanted to tell the Voice.

  At least you’re dreaming about someone else.

  “Yes, and it was nothing to do with the house, or my father.”

  Good. Cain, I’m proud of you. You’ve achieved so much in so little time. You realize that, don’t you?

  Cain looked around the flat, still smelling the results of last night’s nightmare. Outside, the whole world continued without him. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  I could talk here for ages, quiz you, ask what you’re thinking and what you’re doing . . . but I’m happy to leave all that to you. This is your chance now.

  “I’m on my own,” Cain said, his voice flat and emotionless.

  That’s right. But though I won’t question you any more, I want you to know that we’re here if you need us. Day or night, any reason, absolutely anything. You understand?

  “Absolutely,” Cain said. “And I’m grateful. You need to know that.”

  I know you are. Take care, Cain.

  “Thanks. I’ll speak to you again soon.” Cain hung up. Grateful . . . grateful for being on my own. He wondered whether that would have fit in well with his father’s ambitions for Pure Sight.

  Just before midday, he heard the front door two floors below slam shut. He dashed to his living room, looked out, and watched Whistler leave the front garden with Magenta. At least, he thought it was Magenta. She seemed slightly taller today, broader at the shoulder and narrower at the waist. But she was dressed in black jeans and a tight black top, very different attire from the clown costume, and it would have been easy to be mistaken. Perhaps today she was impersonating someone else.

  Cain thought of tapping on the glass and waving, but he did not. He and Magenta seemed to hit it off yesterday, and he was keen to see her again. Yet it was her subtly altered appearance that prevented him from catching their attention, not Whistler’s presence. She was a slightly different person, and he needed no excuse to feel like a stranger.

  Peter had failed to keep his promise to show Cain around the rest of the house and tell him about the other residents. After some prevarication, Cain decided to visit Peter’s dilapidated home across the street to ask him a few questions. He needed to know how to use the equipment in the laundry room—the clothes he had worn last night (nightmare, it was a nightmare) were dirtied from leaning against walls and kneeling on the grass, and still speckled with his vomit—and he also needed to ask about the scratched door next to his on the landing. There was no flat in there, he was sure—he had seen or heard no sign of anyone living there—but something had wanted in. An attic perhaps, a storage space squeezed in beside his own flat? He needed to ask Peter these things, and more. And he also wanted some company. The landlord had not put him completely at ease, but if it was a choice between him and Sister Josephine or George, there was no choice at all.

  George. If they met again, Cain would have no idea what to say, or even how to look at him. He wondered whether George was home, if his stomach wound was still bleeding, or whether he had simply laughed himself hoarse.

  Cain went downstairs. It was a hot, sunny day. He stood in the front garden for a while, listening to the sudden silence from beneath the spiky shrubbery, eager to walk through the gate but compelled to stay. There was something about this garden, a skewing of senses that he could neither explain nor even be certain of. He heard a baby crying from afar, but it could easily have come from behind him, somewhere deep inside the house. A car passed by on the road, sleek and silver, but its growl seemed a second out of sync, as if the sound took too long to pass through the garden hedge.

  A woman pedestrian glanced in at where Cain stood watching, nodded uncomfortably, and Cain suddenly knew more than he should. He hated it when it happened like this, but it also gave him a guilty thrill. And even if he had tried, he knew that he would have been unable to avoid the consequence.

  The woman was uncomfortable from the sex she’d had last night, a rough, frantic fuck with a man she had known as a friend for a long time. Her discomfort
was both physical and psychological. Her perception of their friendship had changed drastically, plunging it into terminal decline. And yet she had been as keen as he. Cain saw deeper, past the woman’s surface concerns to that coal-black knot of guilt that concerned her the most. What he had done to her, what she had let him do, belied the image of the man she had held to be true for many years. It disgusted and excited her in equal measures, and although she felt repelled by the night’s perversions, she would welcome him into her bed again at a moment’s notice. It would destroy what they had, as surely as hatred slaughters true love. But there was something challenging there now, something rich and risky. Before, the friendship had become simply convenient.

  Cain reeled, taking a step back, shocked by the clarity of these alien thoughts. In the split second it had taken for the woman to nod at him, he knew everything, a confused stew of images and senses that made up a whole, coherent story. He could smell the faint whiff of their sex, feel the roughness of the man’s hands and the grinding of the woman’s teeth, and though none of the visions were clear in themselves, their combination was startling.

  More startling was the woman’s reaction. She looked away, face reddening, step quickening. She knew that he knew. Cain felt no surprise in her mind. Could guilt blind that easily? Or was this simply the way of things out here in the world? Perhaps out here strangers really were simply books to be read.

  Cain ran from the garden and across the road, forgetting to look out for traffic. Heaven stood before him in all its shabbiness, so out of place in this street and yet so at home, as if it had been here first.

  He turned and looked for the woman, but she had vanished. His sketch of her thoughts had faded quickly, like a dream already forgotten at daybreak, but a sour taste remained in his mouth. He spat, tasted sex, spat again.

  “Drink?” Peter asked. “You look thirsty.” He was standing in front of the run-down house, proffering a bottle of water. Cain had not heard the corrugated iron door being prized open, but he supposed he had been away on his own for a while.

  “Thanks.” He took the bottle and drank, relishing the ice-cold water washing taste from his mouth and throat.

  “Single mum,” Peter said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That woman you were looking at. Single mother, lives in a flat ten doors down from you. Nice girl. Very fuckable.”

  “Well, I wasn’t really thinking about that,” Cain said, an inexplicable blush burning his cheeks.

  “Yes, okay, Cain. Anyway, I assume you were coming over for a social visit?”

  “Just wanted to ask a few questions, really.”

  “Sure, no problem. So are you settling in all right? The others not giving you too much of a hard time?” He smiled broadly. Cain wondered whether he would always think of himself as subject to someone else’s mockery.

  “They’re fine. I’ve met them all apart from Sister Josephine.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Well . . . Magenta is very nice.”

  “She is, isn’t she? Was she working when you met her?”

  Cain was not entirely sure. “Yes,” he said. “She’s very talented.”

  “You have no idea.” Peter’s smile remained as broad as ever, and it touched his eyes. Here was a man finding humor in his situation, and whatever the cause of that mirth, Cain could not help feeling self-conscious.

  “So you live here?” he asked.

  “Heaven? Yep. Nice pad, don’t you think?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Ha! Don’t let appearances deceive you, Cain. It’s just a facade. Inside, everything is different. Glorious, intriguing, wonderful . . . different.”

  Cain waited for an invitation to enter, but none was forthcoming.

  “So!” Peter said. “Laundry room! I never did finish the tour, did I? Very sorry about that. I’m a busy landlord.” He strode past Cain and across the road, turning and waiting for Cain to follow. “Let’s not be too long about it,” he said, glancing up at the sky. “It’s a lovely day, filled with potential. I hate to let potential fade away.” He opened the garden gate and walked to the front door.

  Cain heard the shrubbery rustling as Peter passed by, as if the things living under there were cowering away, or rushing to get a look at the man’s legs. Either way, the landlord had caused a reaction.

  “Sister!” Peter gushed. “You look ravishing today.”

  “I’ll pass by, if you please. I have business to attend.”

  “More people to save?”

  “Always.”

  Sister Josephine glanced at Cain as she pressed past him in the lobby. Her habit flowed like oil, so black that Cain could almost smell the color on it. Her Mona Lisa smile was welcoming but formal. And her eyes were a stunning green, so piercing, so cool and intelligent, that Cain gasped out loud.

  “Hello, Cain,” she said.

  “H-hello.”

  And then she was gone, pulling the front door shut behind her.

  Cain turned to Peter and raised his eyebrows, not knowing what to say.

  “She has that effect on everyone,” Peter said.

  “She’s a nun?”

  “Either that or a stripogram. I’ve never seen her out of the habit. Though I’d like to, eh?”

  “She’s beautiful” was all Cain could say, and even through Peter’s lecherous laugh he could not manage an impure thought about the nun. Later maybe, when he was over his shock. But right now, Cain could swear that he’d had something bordering on a religious experience. Her smile, so exquisite. Her eyes, so deep.

  “Strange one, that,” Peter said. He turned and headed past Sister Josephine’s front door. “But as I told you, they’re all a bit strange in here. Right then, laundry room!”

  He opened the door leading to the basement, stood back from it as if contemplating something, and then glanced at Cain. “You sure?”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure you want to see the laundry room?”

  Cain nodded. “I have laundry to do. And I wouldn’t want to misuse anything down there. Why, is there a problem?”

  Peter shook his head, the normally confident smile slipping into something more nervous. It looked painted on, like a clown’s. “Nah, not really. I’m just not that keen on being underground.”

  “Don’t like the dark?” Cain asked.

  “The dark’s fine. As I said, I just don’t like being underground. It’s the same as being buried.”

  “Except that there aren’t steps up out of a grave.”

  Peter nodded, but he did not meet Cain’s eyes. “Well, all right then, but we’ll just pop down and up again. The stuff’s easy to use, just basic washers and dryers.” He started down the timber staircase, still talking, words tumbling over each other as nervousness took over. “The washer’s more of a commercial design, bigger, more hard wearing, so don’t be afraid to use it as much as you want. Electricity’s included in the rent that you’re having paid for you by Afresh, so no coin slots or tokens needed, or anything silly like that.”

  He flicked a switch, and a bright light flooded up out of the basement, blinding Cain for a few seconds before his eyes adjusted.

  “Oh, the light’s a bit harsh,” Peter said apologetically. “That’s down to me.”

  Cain paused halfway down the stairs, watching Peter where he stood uncertainly at the bottom. The landlord looked around the basement, his eyes never resting, head jerking this way and that like a bird wary of predators.

  “It stinks down here,” Peter whispered, and Cain was not sure whether the comment was meant for him to hear or not. He took in a breath, smelling only drying washing and the faint tang of electrical equipment, and something altogether more earthy.

  The basement was surprisingly large. The staircase stood in one corner, and the room extended so far out that Cain was sure it was larger than the house’s footprint. Perhaps it went under the front garden, providing scant bedding for the plants that grew there. It contained
several washers and dryers lined along the walls, a couple of ironing boards, and some airing racks adorned with clothing. He wondered whose laundry this was, and smiled as he tried to attach items with their owners. An old woollen jumper, that would be Whistler. Combat trousers, Whistler again, or perhaps George. Several vest tops and narrow jeans, probably Magenta. Her rack also contained a few undergarments, functional rather than provocative, and Cain felt a surge of heat to his groin. Strange that she would leave her panties down here for anyone to see, touch, or take. Very strange.

  “There’s a spare rack over there for you,” Peter said, pointing across the basement.

  Cain nodded, not looking. He was staring at one of the other full racks, trying to convince himself he was not seeing what he was seeing. He wanted to ask Peter, but the memory of that secretive laughter came at him from last night, group laughter, planning games and laying clues for him to follow.

  “Don’t worry about the chairs. Sometimes the Sister holds a sort of communion down here, people off the street, that sort of thing.”

  Cain barely heard. It had to be George’s rack. It held a T-shirt, holed and still stained with blood. One hole in the chest, and others that were more like tears or gashes. And those wide terra-cotta stains, faded with several obvious washing attempts, but still there.

  Peter glanced at Cain, followed his gaze. “People do tend to leave their washing out down here,” he said, very slowly, “but they honor each other’s privacy. I’d fuck Magenta at a moment’s notice, for instance, but I wouldn’t dream of touching her underwear.” He stood in front of George’s rack, obscuring it from Cain’s view, and raised his hand toward Magenta’s drying clothing. His fingers did not quite touch it, though they flexed and stretched. “I wouldn’t dream of smelling it, either. Because there’s respect down here. And it wouldn’t smell of her anyway . . . not when she’s been working.”

  “She’s an impersonator,” Cain said, confused now, unsure of Peter’s shift from discomfort to issuing subtle threat.