Free Legenda Maris by Tanith Lee Page B

me that
the door stayed shut, and gave every sign of remaining so. With the inebriate’s
hidebound immobility, I found this hard to assimilate. But presently it
occurred to me that she might be inside, have guessed the identity of the
caller, and was refusing to let me enter.
    How long would the vodka stave off the
cold? Ages, surely. I saw fur-clad Russians tossing it back neat amid
snowdrifts, wolves howling in the background. I laughed sullenly, and knocked
once more. I’d just keep on and on, at intervals, until she gave in. Or would
she? She had over fifty years of fighting, standing firm, being harassed and
disappointed. She’d congealed into it, vitrified. I was comparatively new at
the game.
    After ten minutes, I had a wild and
terrifying notion that she might have left a spare key, cliché-fashion, under a
flower pot. I was crouching over my boots, feeling about on the paving round
the step for the phantom flower pot, when I heard a sound I scarcely know, but
instantly identified. Glancing up, I beheld Mrs. Besmouth pushing the wheelchair
into position outside her gate.
    She had paused, looking at me, as blank
as I had ever seen her. Daniel sat in the chair like a wonderful waxwork, or a
strangely handsome Guy Fawkes dummy she had been out collecting money with for
Firework Night.
    She didn’t comment on my posture,
neither did I. I rose and confronted her. From a purely primitive viewpoint, I
was between her and refuge.
    “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,”
she said.
    “I didn’t think you would, either.”
    “What do you want?”
    It was, after all, more difficult to
dispense with all constraint than the vodka had told me it would be.
    “I happened to be up here,” I said.
    “You bloody little do-gooder, poking your
nose in.”
    Her tone was flat. It was another sort
of platitude and delivered without any feeling, or spirit.
    “I don’t think,” I said, enunciating
pedantically, “I’ve ever done any good particularly. And last time, you decided
my interest was solely prurient.”
    She pushed the gate, leaning over the
chair, and I went forward and helped her. I held the gate and she came through,
Daniel floating by below.
    “You take him out at night,” I said.
    “He needs some fresh air.”
    “At night, so he won’t see the water
properly, if at all. How do you cope when you have to go out in daylight?”
    As I said these preposterous things, I
was already busy detecting, the local geography fresh in my mind, how such an
evasion might be possible. Leave the house, backs to the sea, go up The Rise
away from it, come around only at the top of the town where the houses and the
blocks of flats exclude any street-level view. Then down into the town centre,
where the ocean was only a distant surreal smudge in the valley between sky and
promenade.
    “The sea isn’t anything,” she said,
wheeling him along the path, her way to the door clear now. “What’s there to
look at?”
    “I thought he might like the sea.”
    “He doesn’t.”
    “Has he ever been shown it?”
    She came to the door, and was taking a
purse out of her coat pocket. As she fumbled for the key, the wheelchair rested
by her, a little to one side of the porch. The brake was off.
    The vodka shouted at me to do something.
I was slow. It took me five whole seconds before I darted forward, thrust by
her, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, careered it around, and wheeled it
madly back up the path and through the gate. She didn’t try to stop me, or even
shout, she simply stood there, staring, the key in her hand. She didn’t look
nonplussed either—I somehow saw that. I was the startled one. Then I was
going fast around the side of Number 19, driving the chair like a cart or a
doll’s pram, into the curl of the alley that ran between cliff and wall to the
beach. I’m not absolutely certain I remembered a live thing was in the chair.
He was so still, so withdrawn. He really could have been same kind of