Cruel Pink Read online

  CRUEL PINK

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Cruel Pink

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Emenie:

  1

  I kill people; what do you do?

  Birds are messengers, and can tell me things. Actually they can tell anyone things, but most people, obviously, don’t grasp this. It was early autumn, really warm, about 6 p.m., and I was walking along by the canal. The pigeon came over and landed on the towpath in front of me. (They don’t tow any barges along it now; there are just the derelict one or two over against the other bank. The old park is up there. Completely overgrown, of course. And beyond the old rambling trees and bushes, and taloned roses and four foot high grass, you can see the ruins of three tall blocks of flats.) The pigeon was slate-blue with a white head and clever crazy eyes. It picked something from the path and then let it fall in disgust. I read the message this time from the pattern of light and dark on its back. It told me the weather would stay good and the light would last until around ten to seven, and then there’d be a long soft twilight. Plus there was somebody by the park I’d see if I continued walking up the path towards the ruins of the Co-op. It was sort of take it or leave it, really. Both the message and my reaction. I had gone out just for a walk, really. And the pigeon didn’t promise me something I might truly find irresistible—just a possible might be worth looking at. Which was fair enough.

  Once it was sure I’d got the message, it turned round and took off, rising far up over the orange and yellow and evergreen of the trees, heading for the upper sky, above the wreckage of the suburbs. It would probably be in central London inside ten minutes, the bird. Well, in what was left of London, evidently. But for a pigeon that would, I expect, suffice.

  2

  After going on for about twenty minutes—I judge time fairly accurately—I saw a man sitting on the opposite path, near the old bridge and the green and crumbly steps, fishing with a real rod and line.

  “Hi,” I called over. “Catch anything?”

  “Nah,” he said, but without resentment.

  “I don’t think there’s anything in there, really,” I said.

  “You’re very likely right.”

  “Except the odd shoe, “I added.

  He looked up and grinned. “Oh yeah. I already caught one of them. I threw it back.”

  “So you’re just fishing for pleasure,” I playfully said.

  “Sure. Though I suppose I could’ve tried frying it in breadcrumbs and olive oil. But I’d have had to kill it first.”

  “Oh, can you do that?” I was admiring. “I mean, if it was really a fish?”

  “Sure. Used to catch salmon in Scotland. Silver-fin in California, too, once or twice, ‘bout fifteen years ago.”

  “I could never do that.”

  “You could if you had to,” he encouraged me.

  “No,” I said, sad and regretful. “I can’t kill animals. Not even rats,”

  “You’ve got a problem there, then,” he said.

  “You’re telling me. My place is overrun with the bloody things.”

  He sat, looking at me quizzically. The sun was low in the sky behind him, way over the park, shining its soft, pure, bronzy rays full on me. What did he see? This lone girl, just dressed in jeans and a floppy autumn-leaf colour T-shirt, long brown hair and paler brown eyes, clear skin, lightly tanned. A tawny girl, slim, all right enough, and perhaps lonely as well as alone?

  “Where’d you live?” he asked me.

  “Oh. Just back up there. Used to be my grandmother’s house.”

  “Right?” He was interested. Well, he was probably in some squat, or other derelict premises. He didn’t look dirty though, and his own nondescript clothes were OK. He was about thirty-five to forty. But I’m sixteen going on fifty. You can’t always tell, with me. No, I don’t lie, you can’t, you couldn’t, it’s one of my talents. His teeth were good, I saw that again next minute because again he grinned. “I could drop by sometime. Help you with your rat population.”

  I seemed to be thinking. I was, I suppose. “You know, I found a bottle of wine,” I said.

  Yet—did I really want to, tonight? Maybe I did. I don’t usually get a message from a bird, or any other signal, unless I’m up for it—even when I don’t always realise at first I am, I was. I don’t usually want to do it at home, either. But—well, I’d sort of invited him, hadn’t I? It would be rude to refuse now, wouldn’t it?

  They know, I’m sure of this, too. Even you would, if you were the one. They—you—always know. It’s a pre-arrangement, perhaps even made between us in a previous life. On such an autumn evening we’ll meet, around six thirty, and then we’ll do it—let’s do it—let’s fall in love.

  3

  “I remember this road,” he said. “From before.” This was as we were going in at the back door. (I hardly ever use the front, and now the back door lets directly into the rooms I use most often, on the ground floor. I hardly ever bother going up to the second floor. Or the narrow stoopy little attic.)

  “You mean before—well…”

  “The S hit the F. Yeah. Back then. I was younger then. You weren’t even born, yeah?”

  “You might be surprised,” I said.

  The back door lets into the utility room and so into the biggish kitchen. Then there’s a space and a bathroom opens off there, and then there’s the main big downstairs room, which is very big, being once—in my grandmother’s time—two rooms. (She wasn’t my grandmother. I killed her some years ago; an older woman. Can’t recall her name.) This house, which is detached, stands between two others, also detached, and one of which is a large bungalow with an upstairs extension. All these other adjacent houses, however, are in a pretty awful state and—like the park—massively overgrown and impinged on by huge feral trees.

  “Your fridge works!” he exclaimed as I took out the wine. Now he did sound accusing.

  “It does sometimes. Not very reliable.
Guy I used to know wired it up to something or other last year. I get about two, three hours, but you can’t ever be certain when.” (This is a lie, of course. I know exactly when.)

  “Christ.” He was peering in at the loaf and other stuff, a look of envious almost-pain on his face. “And you’ve got fucking lights,” he almost shouted, as we moved on into the biggest room. There’s only one side window left in here, from the way the rooms have been portioned off, and that is boarded up, like all the front windows. Due to the forest of garden trees at the back I hadn’t so far felt the need to blank out the glass of the kitchen or utility.

  “He did the lights, too,” I said.

  “Ever see him now?” he asked, greedily.

  “No.”

  He gave me a hard sad look, and sat down on the sofa. I lit some candles, and turned out the overhead lights. “I’d better, in case they go off suddenly.” Then I took the two dark green glasses off the fake fire-surround—at least there wasn’t any excessive, infuriating electric fire turned on there—and opened the screw-top of the wine and poured us each a large, filled glass.

  He drank about half at a gulp. And then sat staring at nothing. He was frowning. Finally he said, in a miserable and unfriendly way, “Perhaps I’d better take a look at the rat situation. Yeah?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I can smell them already,” he said. He was sullen. He didn’t fancy me now, hated me presumably for having a working fridge and electricity. Or he just didn’t know how to handle this weird brown girl, and the almost-comfort, and the silence, the utter silence, which he thought no doubt was being shut in here, but was really everything listening, waiting.

  “Maybe you could look at the cellar,” I said. “That’s where they get in.”

  “One’s fucking died down there, I can tell you that,” he elaborated as I undid the door to the basement, which door is back out in that space between the kitchen and the big room.

  “Yes. They do. In there and in the walls.”

  We stood and stared through the door-slot and down the steps into the utter sub-black below. I’m so accustomed to that stink of death, I don’t even properly register it any more. Conceivably it’s just familiar to me now, part of ‘being at home’.

  “Hang on,” I said, “there’s no light down there. I’ll get the torch.”

  There’s a cupboard by the bathroom, and I left him staring at the black, the abyss, and took out the torch and then shone it over his shoulder downwards. “Do you mind going first?” I said. “I don’t like the stairs. I’ll shine the light ahead of you.”

  He glanced back then, into my face. He looked sorry for being gruff earlier: I’m just a nervous kid, and I’ve given him wine, and I might give him other things, food and sex, and a place to stay that’s better than wherever he is currently holed up.

  “Sure,” he said. “S’OK.”

  I kept helpfully shining the torch before him.

  Then “Oh—just a second…” I said. It was plain I had forgotten something important. I hadn’t though.

  I took the light off him, and took something else out of the cupboard, leaving him in blackness a moment before swinging the torch-beam right back exactly into his eyes.

  “Shit.”

  “Oh hell—I’m sorry…” I cried, contrite. But I wasn’t. Before he could see again, and using the hand-gun from the cupboard, I shot him directly through the face and head.

  4

  In the night I lay on the bed in the room that led off the main room; it had been part of the main room, part of the part that had been the sitting room once. The bed was large, sagging and lumpy and oddly comfortable, the mattress seeming to alter its shape to fit me in whatever position I adopted. Tonight I was on my back. I had finished the remaining poured-out wine, and put the rest in the fridge to keep cold. (The fridge always works, just as the light and the fire do. Even the electric cooker functions, though I seldom cook anything on it. Cleanish water also runs from the taps. Perhaps the fishing man would have called them ‘faucets’, in the American way. Because I’d thought later he did have a faint US accent, under and around, sort of tangled up in his London English one.)

  He would be perfectly safe in the cellar. For now, or forever. He wouldn’t even be on his own. There were the rags and whitish ribs and splinters of a few more expersons. In winter the cellar was nearly as cold as the fridge. Even in summer it wasn’t too bad. Or, enough not to upset me, I suppose. As I said, the smell doesn’t trouble me. So, it is the smell of death and decay. They too exist. They underline all things, just as does the scent of sap and vegetable growth, and of flesh that is living, whether animal, avian or human.

  After I kill I always feel improved. I feel—satisfied. As if I’d cleaned the room, (which I seldom do), or cooked a wonderful meal, (which I never did or do or, presumably, ever will do.)

  And the moment when I actually kill When I squeeze the trigger of the gun, or employ the knife or other sharp weapon, or strangle with a cord or my bare hands—which, with some of the less strong, (normally women), I can adopt occasionally as my method. I’ve used other means too; there seems no point in boringly listing each and all here (I may change my mind.) But I think my—targets, shall I say?—their type, something I see or detect in them, makes me decide how I should accomplish their individual murders. Just as I know when I notice them, or meet them they, this one or that one, is to be killed by me—the idea of pre-arrangement I mentioned previously. I can walk through crowds all day and find no one that’s suitable. It’s happened. Now and then it’s happened on and on, and I begin always to be slightly uneasy, as if never again will I be able to find someone to kill. A year or so ago I was like that for almost four months. This wasn’t good for me. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t wake up properly, either. I hardly went out in the end.

  Then one morning a man went by me near the remains of Marks and Spencer’s, (in the likewise remains of the old High Street), and he was the one. And it was simply all there again. The relief nearly made me shout aloud. I was so happy. Him in fact I shoved in the canal at the deepest stretch, up past the railway bridge. He couldn’t swim, as I’d learned, and I’d partly stunned him, too. I watched him drown. I couldn’t stop smiling. He was one of the best, I have to say, but that may only have been because of the enforced abstinence that was the prologue.

  That night after the fishing man, and knowing he was there below, in the cold autumn pantry of the cellar, I heard a plane go over. You rarely do now, do you, and then generally only by night. I wondered where it was going, but it hardly mattered. Yet… there was a kind of half-musical balance for a few seconds, the upper melody of the engines overhead, and me lying on grandmother’s bed—the central theme—while below the darkened strings of my latest victim’s deadness formed the base, the percussion, steady and solid as an ancient, ticking clock.

  Curious, night thoughts.

  Rod:

  5

  I made notes on the train. I always make notes. They’re useful, I find, or at least they pass those spaces when there is nothing to do. I looked out of the train windows as well, and when the trolley came round with all that rattle and pretence of a sudden party, I bought a black tea and a shortbread biscuit. It’s an hour’s journey out of London. She lives in Brighton, my aunt. Vanessa, she’s called. I believe after Ms Redgrave. When I was a lot younger I used to ask myself if I’d have liked Aunt Vanessa better if she were Vanessa Redgrave. But probably not, if she still acted like my aunt.

  When I arrived at her house near Kemp Town, it was about twelve forty-five, a quarter to one. I say about, my watch was playing up. It tends to do that on or after a train journey, even of twenty minutes. Most machines play up when I use them. At work it’s our department’s running joke. My computer always goes wrong, and the laptop, well, Forrel actually accused me of sabotaging it. But normally someone just says ‘Poor old Rod. He can’t even get a dog to obey him.’ I don’t, incidentally, have a dog. In a flat, an
yhow, animals aren’t a wise choice.

  6

  Vanessa was in her scrubbed oak kitchen, preparing lunch, which consisted as usual of some cold bought meats and a lot of bright green supermarket salad. She doesn’t drink, but always offers me a glass of wine. Sometimes I say no. But I thought I’d accept this time.

  “It’s not good for you, you know, Roderick.”

  “What isn’t, Auntie?” I still call her that, because she once said I should, and she had never amended her edict.

  “Alcohol, Roderick.”

  She’s sixty, if I have the math right, but looks a bit a younger, slim and bright-eyed from all the salads and yoga classes, with bobbed grey hair that bounces irritatingly with health.

  The wine came in a shiny glass that could hold a decent amount, if filled up, but she as ever failed to fill further than one third of the way. It was white, the wine, Sicilian according to the bottle, before she recorked and shoved it in the fridge. As if any minute the Continence Police would arrive. If she doesn’t drink herself, I often wonder why does she do it up—she wouldn’t be offering me any more, I know that by now.

  Lunch passed in eating and in Vanessa telling me at length about her latest feuds with her neighbours—the semi-detached neighbours this time, rather than the people over the road, and with the local hairdresser who, she insists, cuts her hair too short. I told her that her hair still looked very nice. She said I didn’t understand about hair.

  During the afternoon, which was mild and fine, she gave me her usual tour of her long and quite elaborate garden. “How awful for you, Roderick, not to have one. My garden gives me scope. I hope you take regular walks?”

  “Oh, yes,” I dutifully answered. Of course I did. Ten minutes to the station every morning, ten minutes back at night. And now and then a walk to and back from The Red Stag at lunch-time, or The Black Sheep after dinner. About five minutes, those two.