The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Short Story Collection
Publisher: DAW Books
Published: 1985-09-04T23:00:00+00:00

Light came into the hall from the glass in the door, but going up, it grew progressively murkier.

It was a small house, and the landing, when I got to it, was barely wide enough to turn round on. There was the sort of afterthought of a cramped bathroom old houses have put in—it was to the back, and through the open door, I could see curtains across the windows. They, too, must be boarded, as she had said. And in the bedroom which faced the back. A pathological hatred of the sea, ever since she had been raped into unwanted pregnancy beside it. If it were true…Did she hate Daniel, as well? Was that why she kept him as she did, clean, neat, fed, cared for and deliberately devoid of joy, of soul—

There was a crisp little flick of paper, the virtually unmistakable sound of a page turning. It came from the room to my right: the front bedroom. There was a pane of light there too, falling past the angle of the half-closed door. I crossed the door and pushed it wide.

He didn’t glance up, just went on poring over the big slim book spread before him. He was sitting up in bed in spotless blue and white pyjamas. I had been beginning to visualise him as a child, but he was a man. He looked like some incredible convalescent prince, or an angel. The cold light from the window made glissandos over his hair. Outside, through the net, was the opposite side of the street, the houses, and the slope of the hill going up with other houses, burgeoning on it. You couldn’t even see the cliff. Perhaps this view might be more interesting to him than the sea. People would come and go, cars, dogs. But there was only weather in the street today, shards of it blowing about. The weather over the sea must be getting quite spectacular.

When she went out, how did she avoid the sea? She couldn’t then, could she? I suddenly had an idea that somehow she had kept Daniel at all times from the sight of the water. I imagined him, a sad, subnormal, beautiful little boy, sitting with his discarded toys—if he ever had any—on the floor of this house. And outside, five minutes’ walk away, the sand, the waves, the wind.

The room was warm, from a small electric heater fixed up in the wall, above his reach. Not even weather in this room.

He hadn’t glanced up at me, though I’d come to the bedside, he just continued gazing at the book. It was a child’s book, of course. It showed a princess leaning down from a tower with a pointed roof, and a knight below, not half so handsome as Daniel.

“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—

“Daniel,” I said.

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