She turned into the narrow street, Victoria Terrace, which provided a short-cut back to Carlisle Avenue, where she lived. Normally, she would take the long way round, as the terrace led to silent, dim-lit areas, where her heart would beat faster and her ears strain to detect threatening sounds. Tonight, she assured herself that at this time of day, there could be little danger, and there wasn’t. The danger came from inside her.
Lucy knew the area well. On the boss’s birthday, she and Dolores would accompany him to one of the many, small Chinese restaurants that lined the street, where he would pay magnanimously for a very mediocre meal. Further down, was the sandwich shop where Lucy went to buy her lunch. Acknowledging the landmarks of restaurant and shop, Lucy considered that her life had become narrow and its horizons were contracting all the time. Atoms of herself must be left on this street that she traversed so regularly. When she died, her ghost might haunt it.
Reaching the end of the Victoria Terrace, Lucy turned left. The street-lights here were few and far between, and high, narrow three-storied terraced houses of gray stone huddled together on either side of the road.
Lucy hesitated at the corner. She had walked down this street hundreds of times before, yet this time, on this cold, dark Tuesday, it was not the same. Normally, Lucy would see a row of terraced cottages - once cream, now soot-drenched, on one side of the road - while on the other, a line of shops, most of which were boarded up and abandoned, with litter in their porches. This street of tall, gray houses she had never seen before.
I have been day-dreaming, she reasoned, I have taken a wrong turn. Looking back up Victoria Terrace, she realised the thought itself was folly. The only intersection was halfway up and she could see it from where she stood.
Lucy’s first instinct was to retreat, take the long way home, even return to the main road and wait for a bus, because this couldn’t be happening. She must have gone mad, but in a moment of total disorientation, she found herself wondering if the street had always looked this way, and it was her memory that was faulty. Now that she thought about it, could she really swear the street had been lined with shops and dirty cream houses? Perhaps she was thinking of another street.
But I have never been here before...
The scene before her was utterly still; no lights burned in the tall, crowded buildings. At the far end of the road a massive edifice reared up, like an ancient factory or a prison. Its severe outline spoke of despair.
Without thinking, Lucy began to walk up the centre of the road. Looking up, she could see the sky was no more than a narrow, gray-orange band between the looming roofs. She did not feel afraid, only rather insubstantial, as if she too could blink out of existence at any time.
Her feet made a dull sound upon the tarmac, and the sounds of traffic seemed to fade away. I should turn back, Lucy thought. Where am I going? She thought she could hear faint music, lively and staccato, but when she strained to hear it properly, it died away. Perhaps the sound existed only in her mind.
The huge building at the end of street was growing larger before her. It might be a mental institution or a temple to a dark god. No, it was a factory. People toiled there.
A movement on the road ahead of her caught her attention. She saw what appeared to be a thin skein of smoke twisting in the air, close to the ground. As she approached, this perplexity resolved itself into a crumpled piece of paper, fretted by ground-level breezes. Closer still, and Lucy saw, with surprised disbelief, that the paper was in fact a fifty pound note. After looking around herself to check for owners of the note, and finding none, she picked it up.
Strangely enough, the note was dry. Someone must have dropped it very recently. Lucy looked up. Perhaps it had fallen from an open window, or even from an aircraft. She had heard of how human waste, and even dogs, had been known to plummet from the sky to splatter unsuspecting victims below. She did not object to being the victim of such a relatively large amount of money.
A noise now caught her attention, and she moved her perception from the magical note to the side of the road. Dim, crimson beams of light spilled from an open doorway, illuminating the wet sidewalk. The door apparently led into a bar of some kind; above its lintel a bottle shaped from pink neon tubes glowed and buzzed, two cocktail glasses winking in and out of existence beside it. Lucy was sure that moments earlier there had been no crimson light, no neon display and no bar. She smiled to herself as a foolish thought came to her: it was almost as if finding the money had somehow prompted the doorway to spring into being. Didn’t she crave for excitement in her life? What further nudging did she need? Lucy approached the open doorway, the money still held in her hand.
Inside, the bar was very dark, its air filled with what sounded like live, jazzy piano music, although she could see no piano. Its decor was shabby but somehow alluring; shredding red plush and pink and red lamp-light. At first glance, she could perceive no patrons other than herself. There was a smell of stale beer and tobacco smoke, beneath which lurked an odour of hamburger and onions. Lucy approached the bar itself, although there did not appear to be anyone on duty there. A tall, oblong spill of yellow light, which interrupted the gleaming shelves and mirrors behind the bar, indicated an open doorway, which perhaps led to a kitchen. Lucy leaned on the polished counter. She could buy anything she fancied; the thought of a whole bottle of wine was attractive. Then she could sit at one of the shadowy tables, alone with a bottle and a glass, kick off her wet shoes and drink for an hour or so. Normally, Lucy would not feel comfortable doing any such thing, but she felt she had somehow stepped into an enchanted pocket of time and space, and the opportunity should not be wasted.
As a woman came through from the brightly lit area, it seemed a shadow was conjured into being at the end of the bar. Lucy could see now that she was not the only patron, for a thin-faced man in a heavy, dark coat sat hunch-shouldered on a stool, half turned toward her. He did not look up, but stared into a tumbler of amber liquid around which he had cupped his hands, although his fingers did not touch the glass. The bar-tender, who wore a bright red blouse of shiny material came to stand in front of Lucy. Lucy looked up at her. The woman had a tired face, yet her eyes were unusually bright, almost as if a more vivacious creature were trapped within the listless flesh. ‘A bottle of wine, house red will do,’ said Lucy.
‘We don’t serve wine.’ The woman’s mouth barely moved, although her eyes darted quickly to left and right; it seemed to be a tic.
‘Beer?’
‘No beer.’
Lucy peered past the woman at the shelves behind her. They were filled with a startling array of weirdly-shaped bottles, which all looked as if they contained liqueurs. ‘What do you recommend?’ Lucy asked. She did not recognise the names on any of the bottles: Ogerond, Betwixtit, Tegammera.
The woman shrugged. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’
‘Black,’ Lucy responded, to be awkward.
Without changing her expression, the woman reached behind herself and produced a tall, dark bottle. From this, she measured a small amount of what appeared to be black ink into a glass that resembled a miniature champagne flute. ‘Two pounds.’
‘I’ve only this. Sorry.’ Lucy handed over the fifty pound note, eyeing the strange little glass before her with caution.
The woman took the note from her, but did not hold it up to the light for inspection, as most people would. She sniffed it. Perhaps there were many ways to check for forgeries.
While she busied herself with sorting out change at the till, Lucy lifted the little glass and sniffed its contents ‘What is this?’ It smelled highly alcoholic and faintly of coffee, but also of molasses, and perhaps spoiled milk.
‘A drop of black, as you asked for.’ The woman handed her a bundle of notes and coins.
Lucy did not bother to check her change. She stuffed it all into her bag. ‘But what’s it called?’
‘Axings,’ replied the woman. She went back toward the oblong of yellow light, and was swallowed by
it.
At this point, Lucy considered that she might actually be dreaming, and would soon be awoken by her alarm clock, nagging her into another pointless day’s boredom at the office. She knew it was possible to be aware that you were dreaming while you were doing it. If that was so, she would enjoy it. Anything was possible, surely, in a dream? She took a sip from the tiny glass. It was difficult. She felt like Alice in Wonderland; a giant of a girl trying to drink from a doll’s glass. Perhaps the liquid in it was ink. The liquor stung her tongue, but its taste was that of fear of the dark, of untravelled roads, of seduction. Astonished, Lucy put down the glass. How could such things have tastes? ‘Surreal!’ she said aloud.
‘A distillation of feeling.’ The voice came from further down the bar, from the mouth of the thin-faced man.
Lucy looked at him. He was handsome in a gaunt sort of way. ‘What?’
He raised his glass to her. ‘Curiosity or fear?’ The words sounded like a toast.
Lucy suddenly became uneasy. She felt the bar had filled up behind her, for she could sense pressing bodies, but when she looked around, it was still empty. Nervously, she took another sip of the drink, braced herself against the strange sensations its taste conjured in her mind. She felt the thin-faced man’s scrutiny, the oppression of invisible bodies behind her. Whatever she looked at appeared stretched, as if it might break apart at any time. She glanced down at the diminutive glass held between in the fingers of her left hand. It seemed she had made no impression on the contents. I must not finish what I started...
Not knowing why she thought that, Lucy found herself at the door. She could not remember having walked away from the bar. Looking back once as she stepped out into the night, she saw the bar-tender had come back into the room and was standing next to the thin-faced man. Both of them were looking at her with expressionless faces. Her glass stood where she had left it, only something small and scurrying seemed to be moving swiftly away from it. Lucy went out into the street.
She felt disorientated, not frightened but confused, and staggered down the street for a few yards. Where am I going? I should go back the way I came. Her head was swimming. As she looked up, the world spun before her eyes. Can I be drunk from one sip of the black? Her vision cleared, and when it did, she fell back against the wall of a house behind her.
The street appeared as it always had; drab little cottages, once clean, now soot-drenched; a row of worn-out shops. The sound of traffic murmured distantly from the main road hidden by a huddle of decaying buildings. She heard a siren and the hoot of an angry horn.
‘No!’ Nausea came suddenly, and she had to double-up to vomit onto the sidewalk. It looked like blood; black in the street-light, but immediately after the spasm had passed, she felt better, normal.
At home, Lucy turned on all the lights, and emptied the contents of her bag onto the tiny Formica-topped table in her kitchenette. A tide of paper scraps came out. Lucy pawed through it with shaking fingers. Receipts, faded with age and like felt to the touch for being kept in the bottom of a coat pocket; an extortionate electricity bill addressed to ‘the occupier’ at an address she didn’t know; a letter from a bank advising of an abused overdraft facility, written to ‘whomever it may concern’; an eviction order for non-payment of rent. A catalogue of tears and woe - financial distress in all its forms - but anonymous; evidence only of universal, urban misery. Lucy stared at this drift of cruelty for over a minute, the fingers of one hand pressed against her mouth. Then she began to laugh. Fairy gold; of course...
The following day, when Lucy arrived at work, Dolores remarked upon her appearance, which she said was ‘peaky’. Lucy considered, for a minute, telling her colleague about what had happened last night on the way home, but then remembered she had enjoyed discomforting Dolores a few weeks previously by describing her eventful drug-taking experiments of some years back. It was easy to imagine Dolores’ private inferences, if not her overt responses, to Lucy’s story. Perhaps acid flashback had been the cause of the episode. It was comforting now to think that.
At lunchtime, Lucy slouched through a slicing rain to investigate the street of transformation. By day, it was its mundane self; a thin, lank-haired woman came out of one of the houses with a push-chair, one of the few active shops remaining had a stock of exotic vegetable produce displayed outside its window. Lucy went to stand in the road. For a few moments, she closed her eyes, willing some bizarre image to manifest before her. When she looked upon the world once more, it seemed the scene before her shimmered, as if another place existed there, waiting to be focused upon, brought into being. Lucy blinked. A headache was starting. She had tried too hard to recapture a dream. It hadn’t happened.
Nothing too remarkable occurred for several days after that, although in retrospect Lucy did wonder whether she’d just missed the awareness when it crept across her. Then, one lunchtime, as she strolled along the main street, looking into shop windows, she suddenly had the distinct impression she was walking through a movie set; nothing she saw was real, but a facade. It seemed she only had to half-close her eyes to become aware of something beneath the skin of the city; another place at once more exotic yet decayed. Her flesh shuddered in a thrill of anticipation, excitement and fear. There was something she wanted so badly, yet she had no name for it. Merely the thought of its existence filled her with an unexpected hope. A noise swooped towards her like a wind, a great whine, a buzzing, trailing a jet-stream of suffocating perfume, redolent of vanilla and ashes. Lucy gasped, threw back her head, trembling and vulnerable.
The feeling soon passed, and collecting herself, Lucy noticed that several passers-by were taking a wide detour around her and pointedly looking in a direction other than hers. She wondered whether she was starting to experience some mild form of epileptic seizure. Could there be some weird condition of the brain that caused sensory hallucinations? Thoughts of making an appointment with her doctor began to form in her mind, but before she could make any firm decision, a man walked close by her, brushing her arm with his coat. Lucy opened her mouth to complain - he had plenty of room to pass without jostling her, after all - but when she saw him, no sound came out of her. It was the man she had seen in the red-lit bar several nights before.
Their eyes met.
He did not slow his pace, yet they seemed to be within close proximity for several seconds. He said. ‘Curiosity or fear?’ And then was gone, swallowed by the lunch-time crowds.
Something is happening to me, Lucy thought, and for a while she dared to hope that it was something that could show her the door to the life she had misplaced somehow, the life she was supposed to live.
Back at the office, the weird sensations pulsed in and out of her awareness. At one point, sitting opposite Dolores as they drank tea during their break, Lucy felt she possessed tunnel vision, and that only the area in her line of sight appeared normal. If she could but turn her head quickly enough, she would see the room that existed beneath, or alongside, the office that was so familiar to her. She sensed it was a darker place of crumbling decadence, its appointments baroque. Dolores herself, would be seen as she really was; a large, colourfully-plumed bird with limited intelligence but able to be trained to perform certain routines.
‘Are you all right?’ Dolores asked, her face creased in concern. ‘Are you eating properly, Lucy? Do you sleep enough?’ She laughed in mild censure. ‘I’m sure you spend too much time burning the candle at both ends.’
‘I burn my candles from the middle,’ Lucy answered.
Dolores shook her head. ‘You should look after yourself. None of us is getting any younger.’
Lucy was not disposed to thank Dolores for that reminder.
From then on, the awareness came upon Lucy more frequently. It could strike at any time, in any place, teasing her because it did not reveal any secrets, only hint that they were there. Sometimes, when she was out in the open, she thought she caught glimpses of the thin-faced man, although he did not speak to her again. Once, she
tried to follow him, but without success. Several times, desperate for answers, or a conclusion, she walked home the short way, hoping that one evening she would come across the tall, gray buildings again, but the narrow street at the end of Victoria Terrace appeared as it always had. She got the impression that the special conditions that had allowed the ‘other place’ to materialise had moved on to somewhere else in the city, like a cloud. She would just have to find it.
During these weeks, Lucy confided in no-one about what was happening to her. She stopped going out with friends, but spent her nights either sitting in her apartment willing the awareness to steal across her or else walking the streets, searching for an area of magic. She soon realised that concerted effort provided the least success. It seemed that only when she wasn’t thinking of the awareness would it come upon her, and then, because she now hungered for it, with annoying brevity. She noticed, without experiencing any particular emotion, that none of her friends had bothered to call her to discover why she had dropped out of circulation. Obviously, she meant little to them, but this did not surprise her. She felt little for them in return. No-one was concerned about her, but for Dolores, whose concern she could well do without.
As March tried vainly to transform the dirty streets of the city, Lucy’s boss and his wife celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. Wanting to share their happiness and provide a treat for their two employees, the couple offered to take Lucy and Dolores out for a meal on Friday night. In the office, Dolores agonised about a suitable present, which she felt she and Lucy should buy for the couple. Lucy, disinterested, donated ten pounds, which she could tell Dolores didn’t think was enough. Neither could she be bothered to discuss what should be bought. ‘I’ll leave it up to you,’ she told Dolores, who would probably top up the fund to at least forty pounds with her own cash.