Legenda Maris by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

all. Daniel...! She’d
also demonstrated he could hear, and respond to a direct order, for he was
raising the mug again, drinking again.
    “Now,” she said to me, “if you’ve
finished your tea, I’ll have to ask you to go. I’ve his bath to see to, you
understand.”
    I sat petrified, blurting some sort of
apology. My brief brush with the bizarre was over and done. I tried not to
visualise, irresistibly, his slim, pale, probably flawless male body, naked in
water. He would be utterly helpless, passive, and it frightened me.
    I got up.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “No, it was good of you to bring the
dressing gown.”
    I couldn’t meet her eyes, and had not
been able to do so at any time.
    I wanted at least to say his name,
before I went away. But I couldn’t get it to my lips, my tongue wouldn’t form
it.
    I was out of the room, in my coat, the
door was opening. The rain had stopped. There wasn’t even an excuse to linger. I
stepped on to the path.
    “Oh, well. Goodbye, Mrs. Besmouth.”
    Her face stayed shut, and then she shut
the door too.
    I walked quickly along Sea View Terrace,
walking without having yet caught up to myself, an automaton. This was
naturally an act, to convince Mrs. Antacid, and the unseen watchers in their
houses, and the huge dark watcher of the night itself, that I knew precisely
where I wanted to go now, and had no more time to squander. After about half a minute,
self-awareness put me wise, and I stopped dead. Then I did what I really felt
compelled to do, still without understanding why. I reversed my direction, walked
back along the terrace, and into the curling alley that ran down between Number
19, and the shoulder of the cliff.
    I didn’t have to go very far to see the
truth of the amorphous thing I had somehow deductively fashioned already, in my
mind. The back of Number 19, which would normally have looked towards the sea,
was enclosed by an enormous brick wall. It was at least fourteen feet high—the topmost
windows of the house were barely visible above it. I wandered how the council
had been persuaded to permit such a wall. Maybe some consideration of sea-gales
had come into it.... The next door house, I now noticed for the first time,
appeared empty, touched by mild dereliction. A humped black tree that looked
like a deformed cypress grew in the garden there, a further barrier against
open vistas. No lights were visible in either house, even where the
preposterous wall allowed a glimpse of them.
    I thought about prisons, while the
excluded sea roared ferociously at the bottom of the alley.
    I walked along the terrace again, and
caught the bus home.
     
    Sunday
was cold and clear, and I went out with my camera, because there was too much
pure-ice wind to sketch. The water was like mercury under colourless sunlight.
That evening, Angela had a party to which I had been invited. I drank too much,
and a good-looking oaf called Ray mauled me about. I woke on Monday morning
with the intense moral shame that results from the knowledge of truly wasted time.
    Monday was my free day, or the day on
which I performed my personal chores. I was loading the bag ready for the
launderette when I remembered—the connection is elusive, but possibly Freudian—that
I hadn’t got the pre-paid receipt back from Mrs. Besmouth. Not that it would
matter too much. Such records tended to be scrappy in Angela’s department. I
could leave it, and no one would die.
    At eleven-thirty, I was standing by the door
of Number 19, the knocker knocked and my heart was in my mouth.
    I’ve always been obsessive. It’s brought
me some success, and quite a lot of disillusion, not to mention definite hurt.
But I’m used to the excitement and trauma of it, and even then I was; used to my
heart in my mouth, the trembling in my hands, the deep breath I must take
before I could speak.
    The door opened on this occasion quite
quickly. She stood in the pale hard sunlight. I was beginning to learn her face,
and its