She studied it with some curiosity, then jabbed her finger at one point where lines converged.
‘Mirror,’ she said, indicating the wall. ‘And that one there as well.’
Matt stared round, following her finger to the big curved mirror at the centre of the artwork opposite the window. He realised she was right. It was only a small part of the whole diagram, but it was there. In fact, now she had pointed it out, it was kind of obvious.
‘What is all this?’ she asked with a smile.
He shrugged helplessly. ‘No idea, but she dated it tomorrow.’
‘Sounds like a Kaidan,’ she said dryly. ‘A ghost story. You think she will be back tomorrow to greet us as new tenants?’
That was a bit too close to what was in his head. Aiko pressed a glass of wine into his hand. He took it gratefully and made half of it vanish in one large sip.
‘Focus, Matt-chan,’ she said with a grin, rubbing at his shoulder. ‘We should get on with things, yes? We should take some more pictures? In spite of ghosts.’
He nodded with a sigh.
‘I’ll go and get ready, you set up the lights and screen,’ she said, and slipped out of the room.
Focus indeed, he thought wearily. That was easier said than done. Aiko would be a while in the bathroom, preparing face and body, so he crossed to the big mirror and stared carefully into it, angling his gaze so he could pan round the room, trying to follow some of Feather’s sketched lines. He felt stupid and the task was made even harder by the curve, but the wine was dulling any questioning now. At one point, his gaze through the mirror encountered another on the other side of the room, and yet another layer of world opened up. In the distance, twice reflected, he could see a third version of the apartment. Just a small square that included part of the doorway and hall beyond. It was hard to make anything out—like looking through a cheap microscope—and he impatiently swung away to turn the light on. As he moved, there was a flash of awareness, the shocking realisation that there was someone standing just inches away . . .
. . . as though she had been staring over his shoulder.
He locked his movement instantly and slammed backwards against the wall. Reflections still muddled his brain. He was unsure what was real and what was all a scene in some huge hall of mirrors. He closed his eyes furiously, trying to earth himself.
‘Feather?’ he murmured.
He stared round the empty room, his heart racing. It had seemed so clear—a serious faced girl looking at him with big eyes. It was a sickening sensation, trying to decide whether he had seen a ghost or some flash of hallucination. He glanced warily at the mirror again, half expecting to see her lost somewhere in the confusion it contained. But there was nothing. He urgently grabbed the book and found some of the photographs, trying to compare what he thought he had seen with Feather’s reality. But they told him nothing he didn’t already know. The face was the same. But whether it had come from within or without was anybody’s guess.
He sat down and inhaled, still feeling deeply shaken.
‘What was that noise?’ Aiko asked anxiously, stepping into the room again, wrapped in a towel, her face half-finished. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’ he murmured. ‘Nothing—no—nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. I just thought . . .”
‘Is that book getting you . . . spooky?’ she asked, picking it up and studying the pages. ‘Seriously?’
‘Well . . .’
‘This is just—she was a bit crazy, that’s all. No more than many people—many of your favourite artists. All of us in fact. There’s no ghosts here.’
‘Shaddup,’ he muttered, embarrassed, trying to smile.
Aiko shook her head and tossed the book at him, then stepped back into the bathroom. Trying to calm himself, he flipped onwards through the pages, but the result was a second shock that eroded reality even further. A coupling of three words . . .
I had some company today. It is rare—many people are scared of me for some reason. I am the quiet girl whose thoughts they can never know. And those who are not scared of me, I am scared of them. They smell of desperation and decay. But sometimes not. That’s why I still go out to the good places—and occasionally find someone. Usually visitors, foreigners, as here. I had my red lights on in the flat. He looked surprised when I served silungur (pickled trout) with crusty bread and homemade pickled mushrooms—not sure he liked it. Then glasses of port, which seem to me to fit well with this shadowy place. We spent three hours having sex in positions 3, 8 and 10. He was shy at first, but burst out laughing when I told him my classification and showed him this book. That was good. Then we were at the window, naked. The window where I dance. And he told me that this was the line he always rode to travel home. He would always be glancing up at this block as the intercity train accelerated slowly away from the terminal, in case I was dancing. That was nice. One day I will dance for him.
Matt closed the book, feeling his skin prickling even more. Dance for him . . .
Aiko returned to find him staring at nothing and gave him a worried look. She was now wearing a light robe, her face decked with immaculate and colourful made-up.
‘Matt-chan,’ she said uneasily, ‘I was thinking, maybe we should paint the walls soon,’ she said. ‘And make this place ours rather than hers.’
He refocused his eyes and stared at her in dismay.
‘No,’ he protested. ‘We can’t . . .’
‘I don’t like the way you are since moving here. You seem very . . . far away sometimes.’
He gave her a blank look, honestly surprised.
‘Am I?’
‘And I want a home. I am sure you would feel better as well.’
He put the book aside and stared at the wall, feeling deeply disturbed.
‘We can’t paint over these,’ he said, almost feeling a prickle of tears. ‘That would be . . . would be . . .’
There was a silence. He didn’t know what to say.
‘Come on Matt-chan,’ she said with a grin, putting her arms round him from behind and kissing his ear. ‘She’s not a ghost still haunting this miserable little apartment—who would haunt this place? And I am working again tomorrow. So we should carry on and finish some things, right?’
He gave her embracing arms a squeeze in return, then reluctantly went to find the green screen.
***
The next morning, a sharp sensation in his side jerked him out of dreams of following lines and shapes with no destination. He looked around, hunting for reality, but reality was only Aiko standing over him, dressed trimly in her work clothes and grinning. She removed her finger from the well-defined ticklish spot beneath his ribs.
‘Good luck, Matt-chan,’ she teased. ‘Good luck facing the forces of darkness.’
He gave a sleepy growl and rolled over. It was too early and the night had been too restless and uncomfortable for him to be in the mood for humour. But as soon as she had pattered out of the door—such a perfect, dedicated Japanese working girl that he half-imagined her running down the stairs with a slice of toast in her mouth—he sat up. There seemed little point in trying to sleep again since restlessness had already set in. His eyes flickered around the room, looking for anything different, but there was nothing. The day seemed bright, so far as he could tell down here in the shadows. Just a normal London day with the normal London sonic backdrop. ‘Is there anybody there?’ he asked, drawing the words out in a theatrical incantation. Then he frowned, screwed up his face to try to dispel the prickling in his eyes. Feather had mentioned no time in her notes—at least as far as he could tell. Some unknown thing, in the mind of a crazy artist, might just possibly have been intended to take place at an unknown time on this day that didn’t seem any different to any other. And now almost certainly wouldn’t. After all, a dead girl cancels out most things. Even art.
‘Feather,’ he said out loud, ‘you are a complete fruitcake. I hope you can hear me.’
He kicked the bedclothes aside. There was a d
ull throb of annoyance—almost rage. What was happening to him? There was too much to do to waste time with this.
He busied himself washing up. Checking through the online auctions. Packing a couple of things ready for mailing. Unpacking a few more life’s possessions. Publicising this that and the other. Grubbing a few more of the golden coins needed for survival in the dance of London that was starting to seem wearily like a computer game. And when there was no work left, he paced back to the tiny kitchen and crossly studied the fridge for something to eat. A plate of edamame salad and a Turkish sausage and, with nothing else to do, he found himself looking at the book again while he ate and the day ticked onwards. Somewhere outside, beyond the buildings, the sun was rising higher. The temperature climbed slowly from morning towards the pre-noon. The rush hour, if such a jumbled mess of busyness and gloom could be called anything so precise as an hour, was over and the general throng of the London day was in full progress.
In the absence of any new information, the book predictably made no more sense than it had before—it was either beyond fathoming or totally illusory. Maybe the diagrams meant nothing at all. Maybe Aiko was right and Feather had been a crazy and that was that. Instead of worrying about them anymore, he turned the pages and focussed on some of the sex positions she had laid out with such detail. The simple rawness and beauty of those quiet pencil lines was another world entirely. Maybe worth testing out with Aiko, if they could ever find the energy for it at the same time.
But even here the tone of the book only remained happy for a brief time.
There are places where humanity cannot go, except caged in massive machines. The most forbidden places in the city. The railway tracks run through a mythological land visible only through the windows—a land that can never be touched and rarely be seen. Sometimes I want to go there—to climb up the ancient brick and smell the smell of metal and electricity. Lie there in the dark. Have sex there. But then again, I suppose I am similar in reverse—a similar unreachable world to those that pass by below and spare a glance. It is hard to imagine worlds that can collide less, the one protected by illusions of privacy and private, the other the forbidden zone of the rails. It makes me wonder whether any human interaction is any closer . How can people ever touch, given the vast distances that fill our heads?
These were melancholy thoughts and he closed the book feeling unexpectedly touched. For all her occasional visitors and her strange communication with the world as it rolled past her window, Feather seemed a symbol of isolation, radiating it out into the world like some kind of disease. It made him think in turn about Aiko, with diffuse thoughts on just how close they were or could ever be, even leaving aside cultural and language barriers. Like many people, they had found a level of trust and intimacy up to a point—but that was all. Beyond lay vast reaches of each other that neither of them would ever fathom.
Perhaps in defence against such thoughts, he felt a wash of deep affection, a strong yearning to gather Aiko’s small and sharp edged form into a hug, into some tight and safe place.
The melancholy stasis of his thoughts was soon interrupted, though with no particular drama, by a bump from the living room. Almost like a summons, he thought. In a moment, Aiko was forgotten and he looked at the door, skin prickling all over, trying to get himself back to Earth. He stepped through into the living room and the culprit was clearly to be seen. A small lamp was lying on the floor. He picked it up. The window was open, the room stirred by a gentle wind. A shirt he had left hanging from the empty curtain rail was flapping where the lamp had been. Perfectly normal. ‘Idiot,’ he muttered. He grabbed the shirt to put it away, but then it dawned on him that something about the room was subtly different. Something intangible, something about the quality of light. Outside were just the usual buildings silhouetted against the morning sun and gleaming tracks. Nothing unusual there.
But then he saw it.
A thin sliver of sunlight, just a few centimetres wide, was cutting into the window frame. A wedge of thin white. He stared at it, eyebrows clenched, and as he looked it seemed to move. Slower than a snail, it expanded across the wood, almost seeming to crawl, and reached the edge. He spun round as the pale bar hit the opposite wall of the room. He realised that it perfectly matched one edge of the painting. He looked at the sketchbook again and it clicked. Dec. must be declination—the seasonal angle of the sun above the equator. And even as he watched, the light was still moving, growing. It was carefully planned and almost mystic. Feather the scientist—that’s what this was.
For a moment he stared out across the tracks, trying to work out where the light was coming from—no doubt some random chink of wall and roof that happened to let a small gleam through. But he quickly gave up and sat down on the bed and watched as it moved slowly across the design in a perfect diagonal path. The light meshed with the patterns on the wall, forming new patterns, revealing regular shapes that hadn’t existed before. Lines and planes and triangles. Then it reached the mirror and something even more remarkable happened. It was pale—the hazy yet strong London sun—but it gleamed back across the room, focussed by the concave surface and squarely striking a second mirror, which in turn reflected it out of the room and into the hall. The reflections amplified the intensity and he could clearly see it catching more mirrors, only to be reflected yet further. Some of them were splitting the beam, or scattering it across the walls, some acting only as reflectors. The whole apartment was coming alive with light in a carefully worked out, meticulously plotted pattern that surrounded him with a pale and almost unearthly illumination.
The rest of the world seemed to have stopped. The silence was absolute, deafening. All the trains on the London railways had come to a halt, every police car and London bus had stopped, every person on the streets walked in silence. Memories of his horror at the crawling light came back to him and he smiled. There was nothing alarming about this—it was magic pure and simple. He glanced around, sure he wasn’t alone. He could almost feel a figure sitting beside him on the bed, staring as raptly as he at the fulfilment of her art but, he was sure, understanding it far more. A prickle of proximity on the skin. There was a meaning hidden here that went beyond just putting on a pretty show, that was very clear. But he also knew that he had no chance of working it out. Maybe that didn’t matter. He wanted to reach out, squeeze a hand if there was one to squeeze. Some brief communication of the luminous wonder that was being enacted.
The original light eventually passed off the mirror and the room faded to dark again. There was just a last shape on the wall reaching towards the edge of the design, and as it touched it, it began to pass from view. He felt a stab of panic. It was slipping away—he hadn’t even photographed it. Something so ephemeral that it could never be recaptured. But those thoughts faded away again almost as soon as they arose and instead he sat filled with a glassy relaxation as the gleam shrank until it was nothing more than a thread that followed the curving edge of the pattern, almost down to the millimetre. Then it was gone, the performance over. The dull grey of the city canyon returned.
He drew a deep breath, then glanced blearily round the room, almost convinced that there had been a movement that went with the vanishing, a faint awareness of jeans and brown hair. But of course there was nothing. He drew a deep breath, feeling that prickling sensation of waking from a particularly intense dream. Would the sun be back tomorrow? Or was this the only moment of the year when it would pierce the complex geometry of the buildings?
‘Feather,’ he murmured, ‘you’re quite the genius, you know that?’
Outside, London was starting to impinge on his awareness again. A wail of sirens somewhere in the distance signalling some drama or other. A mundanity that was not very welcome. He sighed and blinked and peered out of the window again, watching an intercity train pass by, left to right, slowly heading for who knows where.
***
Aiko arrived back from work and found him lying on the bed. She poked him crossly.
&nb
sp; ‘Wake up, Matt-chan,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry.’
Matt blinked at her hazily, as though trying to remember who she was, then smiled and sat up.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise it was so late.’
‘What have you been doing?’ she demanded. He smiled again.
‘Oh nothing much. Just watching the ghosts . . .’
***
The next morning, there was a ring at the doorbell announcing the delivery of a large soft package—curtains. Simple lace plus heavy red fake-velvet-type. Good for keeping the light out. Matt put them up in a few minutes, but not without a complex feeling, almost, but not quite, of regret.
‘Sorry, Feather,’ he murmured aloud. ‘Don’t blame me.’
That night, as they lay together, one arm of each trailing round the other, it was indeed much darker. Matt’s sleep-hazed eyes followed the last few glowing patterns imprinted on the room, some still moving with that incalculable motion. New patterns that matched nothing on the wall, distorted and corrupted by hanging fabric. The green glow of the railway signal . . . the orange and white of the city lights . . . lines and squares. As he watched, trying not to analyse anything and trying to repress a slight prickle of unease, one cubic gleam came crawling slowly across the bed sheets towards them. It arrived at Aiko’s face and stopped. He saw her twitch slightly, frown in her sleep, then turn over, but the light remained, illuminating her ear and cheek.
Then it winked out . . .
YES, I KNEW THE VENUSIAN COMMODORE
Mark Valentine
He didn’t need much make-up—he already looked strange. That buttercup hair worn short and slick, close to the skull: in contrast, those eyebrows, full, dark and highly arched. The delicate nostrils that always seemed to be quivering, and the triangular chin, quite as sharp as an obelisk. All they did for the film was to make his face even paler, and paint in a couple of black chevrons on his cheekbones. He already had a slender figure and long fingers and when he issued haughty orders to his troopers or the Earthling captives, his whole body seemed to point and command. The effect was only slightly dissipated by the way he swaggered on set in the clinging mock-silk blue tunic and ruched, high-collared purple cape.
Strange Tales V Page 18