Desolation by Tim Lebbon

He wondered whether that would have fit in well with his father’s ambitions for Pure Sight.
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    Just before midday, he heard the front door two floors below slam shut. He dashed to his living room, looked out, and watched Whistler leave the front garden with Magenta. At least, he thought it was Magenta. She seemed slightly taller today, broader at the shoulder and narrower at the waist. But she was dressed in black jeans and a tight black top, very different attire from the clown costume, and it would have been easy to be mistaken. Perhaps today she was impersonating someone else.
    Cain thought of tapping on the glass and waving, but he did not. He and Magenta seemed to hit it off yesterday, and he was keen to see her again. Yet it was her subtly altered appearance that prevented him from catching their attention, not Whistler’s presence. She was a slightly different person, and he needed no excuse to feel like a stranger.
    Peter had failed to keep his promise to show Cain around the rest of the house and tell him about the other residents. After some prevarication, Cain decided to visit Peter’s dilapidated home across the street to ask him a few questions. He needed to know how to use the equipment in the laundry room—the clothes he had worn last night (
nightmare, it was a nightmare
) were dirtied from leaning against walls and kneeling on the grass, and still speckled with his vomit—and he also needed to ask about the scratched door next to his on the landing. There was no flat in there, he was sure—he had seen or heard no sign of anyone living there—but something had wanted in. An attic perhaps,a storage space squeezed in beside his own flat? He needed to ask Peter these things, and more. And he also wanted some company. The landlord had not put him completely at ease, but if it was a choice between him and Sister Josephine or George, there was no choice at all.
    George. If they met again, Cain would have no idea what to say, or even how to look at him. He wondered whether George was home, if his stomach wound was still bleeding, or whether he had simply laughed himself hoarse.
    Cain went downstairs. It was a hot, sunny day. He stood in the front garden for a while, listening to the sudden silence from beneath the spiky shrubbery, eager to walk through the gate but compelled to stay. There was something about this garden, a skewing of senses that he could neither explain nor even be certain of. He heard a baby crying from afar, but it could easily have come from behind him, somewhere deep inside the house. A car passed by on the road, sleek and silver, but its growl seemed a second out of sync, as if the sound took too long to pass through the garden hedge.
    A woman pedestrian glanced in at where Cain stood watching, nodded uncomfortably, and Cain suddenly knew more than he should. He hated it when it happened like this, but it also gave him a guilty thrill. And even if he had tried, he knew that he would have been unable to avoid the consequence.
    The woman was uncomfortable from the sex she’d had last night, a rough, frantic fuck with a man she had known as a friend for a long time. Herdiscomfort was both physical and psychological. Her perception of their friendship had changed drastically, plunging it into terminal decline. And yet she had been as keen as he. Cain saw deeper, past the woman’s surface concerns to that coal-black knot of guilt that concerned her the most. What he had done to her, what she had let him do, belied the image of the man she had held to be true for many years. It disgusted and excited her in equal measures, and although she felt repelled by the night’s perversions, she would welcome him into her bed again at a moment’s notice. It would destroy what they had, as surely as hatred slaughters true love. But there was something challenging there now, something rich and risky. Before, the friendship had become simply convenient.
    Cain reeled,