Deep Roads (9780575096370) by Harrison M. John

Author:Harrison, M. John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2020-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Shaw woke up at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, with the impression that his landline had been ringing. When he answered he heard, instead of a voice or a dial tone, a kind of electronic silence, very pure and artificial and expectant.

‘Hello?’ he said.

He said, ‘Victoria? Is that you?’ It wasn’t.

For a while, Victoria Nyman had left him voicemail most nights, messages stored for him to find next morning – deft little instagrams that would catch him up on her day, her beautiful old house, the progress of its renovation. Life was a permanent adventure up there, she said. ‘You can sit on the first-floor landing in the sunshine, read a children’s book that belonged to your mother, then, just as you’re wondering why nothing magical ever happened in your life, the carpenter tells you you’ve got wood-boring beetle.’ After a visit to Telford B&Q she had described the racks of tools as ‘male ornaments, collectible objects for men’. It was all very Victoria: self-deprecating and cheerful – deliberately brittle, perhaps. ‘I’ve got to say I’m meeting some quite weird people.’

Shaw had never answered because he didn’t want to encourage her into the habit of it; but the messages often made him smile.

‘Victoria?’

The dial tone returned suddenly and he dropped the receiver. 17 Wharf Terrace was quiet for a change. Faint smells of someone’s takeaway supper – raw tuna with sticky fermented soy beans, from Tosa in Ravenscourt Park – were borne up on the stairwell draughts to seep under his door. He stared out across the street, to where the London summer aurora, an inert yet somehow swirling orange, could be seen between the housetops; then after two or three minutes – like someone who has taken a boiling saucepan off the heat and given it a little time to cool down – he picked up the phone again and dialled the number Annie Swann had given him after his seance.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel as if I’ve never known who I was.’

When he woke the next morning, he felt calmer. He felt at ease with himself in some way. The sensation lasted until mid-morning, thereafter returning briefly at intervals.

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