by Tanith Lee
To Indigo
Tanith Lee
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Part 1
One
Two
Part 2
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part 3
Ten
Eleven
Part 4
Twelve
Part 5
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part 6
Seventeen
Part 7
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Part 8
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Part 9
Website
Also by Tanith Lee
About the Author
Copyright
As when a prowling Wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where Shepherds pen their Flocks at Eve
In hurdl’d Cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps ore the fence with ease into the Fold:
Or as a Thief bent to unhoard the cash
Of som rich Burgher, whose substantial dores,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbs, or ore the tiles;
So clomb this first grand Thief…
Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life,
The middle Tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a Cormorant…
Paradise Lost
Book IV
Milton
1
Breaking in was easy. Although of course, I had been thinking about it, and how to do it, for some time. Really the arrangement was very slipshod. I mean with the flat. And from what I had been told recently by him, it seemed to me anyone could have done something similar, someone with a grudge – or a fear – against or of him. I laid my plans such as they were over the weekend, and made my ‘move’ on Monday. Which is far too alliterative a phrase, but there, it’s a fact. Basically in my own little way, I went in for the kill.
My own little way. And that sounds like Lynda. “You do like to have your own little way,” she used to tell me. Not, you notice, my own way. My own little way. “Go on, then,” Lynda used to say. “You just do what you want. It’s no good me arguing…” (“My arguing” I used mentally to correct her with a sort of dry shiver), “you’ll just have to have your own little way.”
Did I have my own little way with Lynda? Now and then, I suppose. But that is another story.
When I got to Saracen Road, I stopped a moment and looked over at the park. It was summer. It still is. I wasn’t really looking at anything over there, just taking my bearings. He had spoken about the park and the trees. It was as if I had to be quite sure they were all really there. And they were.
So then I checked the parcel.
This was my masterstroke. At least so I thought then.
It comprised a sturdy manila envelope measuring approximately ten inches by twelve and a half – and was far too stout to go through any ordinary letter-box, especially after I’d packed it full with old newspaper cut to size. I had stuck on the anonymous printed label. I had also placed a quantity of stamps on the thing, then lightly rubbed them with an ink-pad – as if they had been smudgily franked. I’ve had enough such mail in my time.
I didn’t think anyone could trace this to me. But then no one, hopefully, would need to see it beyond a cursory glance, if that. After which I intended to remove it, along with myself, from the scene of the crime. On the other hand, if someone insisted on accepting the parcel, no crime could occur. It wouldn’t matter. Perhaps not much would.
As for myself, there was my disguise. I’d finally done what he had often told me to do, which was to shave off all my thinning hair. Instead I had grown quite a thick moustache in the space of three days. I’d bought a T-shirt too, black, and put on my tired old jeans that look like every other ageing man’s tired old jeans. Oddly, shaven and moustached, I thought I looked two or three years younger than my allotted fifty-fifty-one. There were the smart sunglasses too, somebody else’s forgotten pair I’d swiped from the unmanned counter at Smiths those months before. A crime already, we perceive.
Did I look like a thug? No. Five foot ten, skinny, with my hunched shoulders, narrow hands and feet and nose – I wasn’t bruiser material.
I crossed the street. It was a quarter to twelve, noon.
Nearly time for You and Yours.
That was not what was thumping from the terrace of houses. A selection of rock or pop CD’s were mutilating the still just morning air. Which was as he’d told me as well. He had said his particular terrace-house of flats, 66, Saracen Road, was a noisy place that got on his nerves, or on his ‘tits’, depending on his mood when remarking.
Not only was it 66, Saracen Road, either. His flat was at the very top. Flat 6 – the Number of the Beast indeed.
I had labelled my parcel carefully. Here was a mistake any flustered, overworked post-person might create.
I looked at the list of names above the bells. Then I pressed his bell. What does that say? My pedantry? My caution? He was not there. I had every reason to know he wasn’t. Or even if amazingly he was, it might be one more lie, his not answering.
But for whatever reason he didn’t answer. And I tried the bell annoyingly quite a few times.
About four minutes passed. Now I hesitated and clicked my tongue, perplexed, irritated. After which I started on the next five bells, one after another.
No 5 was in, it was some of their tasteless ‘music’ I heard hammering on above. They took no notice, perhaps couldn’t hear their bell, which augured well. (A rhyming phrase now. Normally I would vet and remove it).
It was No 3A which spoke to me. “Yeah?” The voice was male and – shall I say – bored.
“I’m sorry to bother you…”
“Yeah?”
“I have a package here…”
“Put it through the door, man.”
“I’m afraid it won’t fit through the letter-box.”
“Shit. I gotta come down?”
“No, no. Excuse me, the package isn’t for you.”
“Then why the fuck are you…?”
“It’s for a Mr Traz…” – carefully I laboured over his name – “kull? Flat 6.”
Silence.
I said, “It was delivered to me wrongly in Sarandene Road – No 16…” (Such a road did not, obviously, exist).
And “So?” said the other.
“I’ve come out of my way,” I replied sternly. “Mr Trazcool doesn’t answer. This is a nuisance. Maybe you could let me in and I’ll leave the thing for him in the hall. I’m not coming back with it.”
No response save the sudden wasp-like rage of a buzzer as the front door opened.
“Tha…” I tried. Old habits, like war-torn Celtic warriors, die hard.
I doubt the moron in flat 3A heard me.
Then I was inside the hallway, shabby, airy and patchily white from big and grimy opaque windows. A mountain of stairs rose ahead. Evidently I wasn’t going to deposit my spurious packet on the dusty table down here. Conscientious citizen as I must be, I was going up the whole bare stairway right to the top, all the way to N.O.T.B. 666. Where, please God, the door was as once he had described it, and the bloody awful racket from unmusical No 5 would continue, so no one would hear me as I smashed the glass panel, slipped my hand across and released the single Yale lock from inside.
ONE
Joseph. This, his name.
He liked to be known as Sej. He’d later told me he was dyslectic (normally erroneously spelled “dyslexic”) and possibly that was why he had taken the initial J of his forename and fixed it on the end of the se from the middle.
Joseph Traskul: Sej.
It has a sort of Germanic, certainly European ring to it, his full name. It is like that of some mentally tortured poet, probably from a well-to-do mercantile family, dead before forty, circa 1800.
I wondered from the very first if his name was a lie.
I have wondered if all of him was, and is, a lie.
The strangest thing.
But it was all very strange. Or only – very stupid.
I had gone up to London to meet Harris Wybrother. He used to be my agent but had retired a couple of years before. Despite this he still sometimes put publishers my way, or me their way depending on how one looked at it. Harris was only two or three years my senior but I had always found him much older.
Maybe he was a sort of authority figure to me. I always remember the first time we met, when I was mid-twenty-ish and he twenty-two-ish going on forty-ish, looming over me from his desk. “This isn’t bad, Roy. It has potential shall I say? But you need to do quite a bit of work on it. Don’t worry, old boy. We’ll knock you into shape. And then – who knows?” Harris had been at Oxbridge. He had connections. I of course had been to the local grammar and then straight into the library service.
I stayed with Harris a handful of times, in the late ’80’s and ’90’s, at his father’s “place” in Hampshire. I think the first occasion I expected to step right back into a sort of between-the-wars Wodehouse scenario. It was a little like that. But not Wybrother Père. He was a piratical type who acted, and looked if it came to it, very much younger than his son. There was no longer any Mrs Wybrother. Normally a different woman, or once three women, were staying in the house and sharing the pirate’s bed, appearing at breakfast in silk dressing-gowns or sporty cotton undies. Harris, though unmarried, had a regular fiancée he seemed always and only to retain in London.
The “place” itself was big. It was an old vicarage, worth apparently a “bomb”, though the drains and general plumbing were on the sleepy side.
It was surrounded by woods and fields and had gardens. These were maintained by a sort of ghostly ever-grumbling gardener. He would appear suddenly at the windows of the dining-room on summer evenings and stand silent, motionless and glaring horribly in on us all, rather like Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw.
There were a couple of tennis courts as well, and Harris once or twice insisted I play some sets with him. But I’m no good at tennis, or any games, and dislike them all, perhaps only for that reason. That I always went along with his suggestions was less proof of an obedient guest than the fact Harris always somewhat reminded me of one of the more amiable bullies at school.
The house stayed Wodehousian even as late as 1997, by which time the fields had become town, and a new estate had been built practically on the front lawn. But Harris’s father had sprung by then what I took for his final surprise. In his sixties he’d been expected hourly to die of drink, or other over-indulgence, but instead he had cut and run to Spain with a girl of twenty-four. She was rich apparently, too. The last I’d heard he was still there, seventy-one by now and going strong, his child-bride of thirty-something firmly at his side and “Serenely putting up with,” Harris had said, “Dad’s endless stream of bimboritas from the bars.”
No doubt Wybrother Senior’s youthful tendencies had moulded Harris’s aura of age. (How I dislike the Americanised apostrophe’s following an s. But I’ve given up on that one. Hardly any publisher in the English language would now countenance the old tradition of Harris’. Not that this, as will become obvious, is ever intended for publication.)
When I received the most recent summons to lunch with Harris in London, I went. The possible chances of a book contract were usually illusory. So one took what one could get.
Harris came “down from the country”, from the Wodehouse house. We met at a restaurant called Le Grill in Holborn, one of those small quirky venues that can sometimes supply haute cuisine, and are a kind of Masonic secret among any that know. Harris had previously ordered me: “Don’t tell anyone about this, eh, Roy? Keep it for us. The good and the slightly great.”
We ate steak, Scottish, or so it purported to be. There had been starters of something to do with Scandinavian prawns, ‘seasonal’ asparagus. We drank the appropriate wines, which were very drinkable. Naturally Harris knows exactly what to choose. Frankly I can never be that bothered. If something is palatable, and in my case, affordable, I’ll drink it. After the main course there was cheese – actually very good. We took coffee.
And now, I thought, having as always been careful and restrained, as my own father would have instructed, Harris might offer a titbit, some man – or more often now, a woman – who might be interested in a book from me. At this point I’d better add, my forte is usually the minor thriller or detective novel. But such basic works may, if wanted, be constructed to incorporate certain preoccupations. Or should I say themes.
This time, however my lunch impresario did not suggest a single thing. Over the brandy and coffee his eyes grew suddenly like an infant’s. And by that I mean through changing colour – to a sort of milky blue; by nature they’re grey.
“Fuck it, Roy,” he said, gazing out into the vistas of Holborn Viaduct, “Dad’s dead.”
Such a phrase, bathetically, heaven forgive me, alliterative. Dad’s dead.
But I was shocked too, in my own (little) way. Both at the news and Harris being abruptly so unlike himself.
Stupidly I said, “Your father…” I certainly didn’t mean to seem to correct him.
But he snapped, “Dad, yes. My bloody father.”
“I’m so sorry, Harris.”
“So am I. No, let me be painfully honest, Roy, I don’t give a flying – I don’t care, Roy. Which has to be wrong, yes?”
His milky eyes said something other. Poor bastard, he seemed not to know. Had some hidden unnoted weeping turned his eyes blue?
“When did it happen?”
“Two days ago. Two days. Can you believe that bitch Veronica…” he meant the thirty-something child wife, “only called me last night. And do I mean night? It was two minutes to two in the morning.”
“Must she? How would one know? Perhaps. Oh, perhaps. I’ll give the cow the benefit of the doubt. I have to go over for the funeral and to sort things out. And there has to be an inquest. Oh not,” he startlingly nearly bellowed, so our fellow lunchers raised their brows, “like one of your bloody yarns. They just do it. Oh God, Roy.”
I forbore to ask if Janette, his glacé fiancée, was going with him to give support. I’d only met her once.
Possibly she wasn’t really as she had seemed to be, not when he and she were alone.
Just then anyhow his mobile phone went off. His ringtone was a special piece of Brahms.
At once, like Pavlov’s dogs, trained to the right response, he was chatting into it in his ordinary Harris manner. His eyes unfilmed, went grey again.
“Sorry, Roy,” he said as the call ended. “Emergency over at The Elms.” The Elms was his name for a well-known publishing house near the Euston Road. “Get me a cab, will you?” he added to the waiter, “and the bill. Really sorry to run out on you. You must email and tell me all your news, what projects you’re working on…” Projects meaning books. Projects. “Don’t rush off because I have to, stay and have another brandy.”
We shook hands and he went away.
I didn’t want another brandy, hadn’t really wanted the first one. It was quite hot although only April, too hot for excess alcohol.
I walked down from Holborn to the Strand feeling rather flat, although Harris’s lunches seldom led to much work nowadays. And I was slightly unnerved. Probably at the touch of what my father had been used to call the Grim Reaper. Harris’s father had been just over seventy, but I was fifty. Well over the boundary on the downward path to old age and death.
After all I went into a pub and ordered half a pint of Wincott’s Bitter, a funny old brew you see less and less.
Sitting in the dark corner, staring into the beer’s murky depths, I had a bleak look at my life. What was I doing, where heading for? Why? What aims did I have, hopes cherish? It was a sorry and banal resume. I was a plodder, and I did what I was told where I could find anyone – parent, employer, publisher – to tell me. I kept the “wolf from the door” by hard graft in the softest of professions. I lived slowly and prudently, with little occasional and mundane treats, like the very glass-full on the table in front of me, Wincott’s. My life was a glass of bitter.