Read Online Desolation by Tim Lebbon - Free Book Online Page A

of fouling himself under anesthetic is awful—but he cannot bring himself to sit down and try. There is no privacy here. There is also no one else in the house to see, but with that thought comes a low, variable humming noise from elsewhere in the room. There is a definite tune to this, and although Cain is sure he has heard its like before, it is unfamiliar. He looks around and there is no one with him, only shadows where light should fall.
    He strips and the humming alters its tone, as if changed by grinning lips.
    The gown is rough and itchy. The underwear is worse. Cain folds his clothes on the chair, then opens the door to go back into the operating theater. The sourceless humming stops with a snigger, or perhaps it is the door hinge squeaking. From upstairs he hears the heating creaking on, the boiler firing up; the realization that they were still at home comes as something of a surprise, and yet, perversely, a comfort as well.
    Cain’s father smiles as he loads a syringe with a foul green concoction, something glowing and steaming that will put Cain to sleep, small things bumping frantically in the glass tube as if eager to dull his consciousness.
    It’s all for the best
, his father says, and his eyes have taken on the same sickly green tinge.
    Cain lies down on the operating table and falls asleep.
    In his dream he imagines a cool, scarp scalpel descending toward his eye, and when he wakes up he is always somewhere else.
    Â 
    He was unsure whether this was the memory of an old dream, skewed into a version of reality by time, or something more removed. There were no scars, no acorns pressed into his eyes, no feathered cuts across his throat. There was no evidence that this had ever happened at all.
    Memory was a fickle thing, exercised as it was in a place where true imagination was the only place to wander.
    Cain paused outside Flat Three, smiling selfconsciously at the door in case Magenta was already home and watching him. He moved closer to listen. No sounds from inside, no music, no signs of life. Perhaps that urge to impersonate had taken her again on the way home. He wondered whether she had always been a clown, but it seemed quite certain that she had not. He looked at his fingers and saw colorful makeup smeared there, but then he remembered that he had not touched her after all, and the paint was gone.
    He had seen nothing when he looked into her eyes—nothing more than he should have—and he was glad. He did not like knowing more. It made him believe that he was more like his father than he could bear.
    He stood there for some time, thinking about Magenta, wondering who she was. An impersonator, but for whom had she been impersonating? Was she a true street artist, practicing her art for the love of it and nothing more? He had not seen a collection dish as she sat outside the takeaway. Anda dozen local shops were probably not the best place to do something like this for profit.
    She had been eating when he arrived; she had only actually performed for him.
    â€œNo,” he muttered against the wood of her door.
    â€œI would.”
    Cain spun around. A man stood on the staircase leading from the ground floor, one foot on the first-floor landing, a bag in each hand. He had a long gray ponytail and a face as wrinkled as old leather. Cain felt vaguely guilty at being discovered leaning against Magenta’s door, and he would have apologized if the man had not spoken first.
    â€œI mean, I’m sure you would too. Sexy girl. Mostly. Difficult to tell sometimes, of course.”
    â€œI don’t think I know you,” Cain said, uttering the obvious, buying time to recover from the shock. His heart was beating the same way it did when the siren sounded, and he felt chided by this stranger.
    â€œYou don’t, yet.” Saying no more, the stranger set the bags down on the landing, unlocked the door to Flat Four, picked up his bags, glanced once more at Cain, and went inside.