Lorelei

Lorelei by Chris Green

It is nearly three, but Lorelei can’t sleep. She is being kept awake by a piano tinkling in the next apartment. Now and again, a voice joins in with a melody. A tuneful tenor. He sounds a little like David Crosby, but of course, it can’t be. David is dead. Besides, even if he were over from the States, what would an artist of David’s stature be doing in Lowbridge. The sleepy provincial town is not exactly on the cultural front line.

A nice voice doesn’t make up for this singular lack of consideration. Lorelei wishes she had stayed over at Shaun’s, now. He had wanted her to, but she felt she wasn’t ready. It was too soon after her break up with Darren. She had a lot of things to think over before taking the next step. Besides, she had to be at work by nine, so she would have had to get up early, anyway, to go home and change.

As the player keeps starting and stopping, repeating passages and adding bits, it’s likely he is writing a song. Perhaps she is imagining it, but she thinks she can make out her name in the lyrics. Lorelei repeated over and over. She gets out of bed and moves over to the wall. There is no question. He’s writing a song about someone called Lorelei. What is going on? She has only been in the apartment for a few days and she has not yet met any of the neighbours. Apartment blocks are so impersonal. Whoever it is cannot possibly know she is called Lorelei. But Lorelei is not a common name. In her thirty-one years, she has never met another Lorelei. She is spooked. This is just too weird.

But it is happening, and worse, she can’t do anything about it now. After what happened with Darren, she needs to be careful. She can’t go around and knock the minstrel up. She doesn’t know what she might be walking into. He could be dangerous. You hear all sorts of stories and after that thing she watched on Netflix the other night. No. It will have to wait at least until morning. She will try to catch the girl she saw from the window getting into the Mini Clubman the previous morning to see if she can shed any light on the mystery minstrel. For now, she will have to grin and bear it. As she makes herself a cup of camomile tea and looks for the earplugs she bought, he does a run-through. He’s something of a virtuoso on the piano, but perhaps his lyrics need a bit more work. She can make out Lorelei, Lorelei. You’re the Queen of my dreams and Lorelei, Lorelei. You’re the moon in my June. But she has no plans to be the horse for anyone’s course, or the course for anyone’s horse, or indeed, any of the other things he mentions. Not at three in the morning or at any other time.

Rose is about to drive off in her Mini when Lorelei catches her. It is nearly half-past eight. She seems a little flustered, like she is in a hurry to get off. The engine is running. She has a stack of estate agent’s papers laid out on the passenger seat, but she smiles and winds the window down to acknowledge Lorelei. Lorelei introduces herself, says she has just moved in and asks about the stranger in Flat 4. Rose tells her she is not going to be a great deal of help. She has only seen the fellow next door once or twice and even then from a distance. He seems to keep himself to himself. She knows nothing about him, but Lorelei might want to ask Milo in the top-floor flat. Number 7. Milo, she says, is a writer. Speculative fiction. I read one of his stories in a magazine. It was about a man who faced with three choices, chooses them all simultaneously. It was good. Milo’s been on the block a long time and as a writer, he is likely to have been more observant. Don’t be put off by the way he looks. I’ve always found him quite helpful.’

Lorelei has to look up speculative fiction on Wikipedia. She discovers it is a broad category consisting of genres that deliberately depart from realism, instead presenting futuristic, and other imaginative realms, for instance, fantasy, sci-fi, alternative history, and the supernatural, with the emphasis on strange. Tolkien has long been one of her favourites. She is an admirer of Margaret Atwood. And to her surprise, she quite enjoyed the Black Mirror series when she watched it with Wendy, so she doesn’t feel too phased. She feels that she and Milo might get along.

It takes Milo a while to answer the door. He apologises and explains that he was at a critical point in a story about an employee in a government office who one day realises the paperwork he files contains codes sent to mobile phones that determine the fates of others. These are sold to the highest bidder and are then pushed through the backdoor to your devices by exploiting holes in software security. The story is getting to that complicated stage where you have to tie the ends up so that they make sense, and he has been up all night trying to finish it.

Not too many men in their fifties have green hair, but on Milo, Lorelei doesn’t feel it looks out of place. It goes with the purple smoking jacket and the gold scarf. And he seems friendly enough.

‘Ah! So if you were up, you must have heard the fellow downstairs playing the piano and singing,’ she says. ‘Rose thinks you might know something about the mystery musician.’

‘Ah, that will be Cole,’ Milo says. ‘He’s always knocking out some tune. He’s quite good on the keys, but I try not to let him distract me. I’ve got ear protectors that I put on if I need to concentrate. Peltor x4As. High Noise Cancellation. Pretty effective. Comfortable, too.’

‘What’s he like, this fellow? It’s just that my name is Lorelei and ….’

‘Lorelei. Now, that’s a nice name. Unusual. Not many Loreleis, are there?’

‘That’s exactly my point, Milo. He’s singing a song about Lorelei and I’ve only just moved in and we’ve never met so he can’t possibly know my name, but here he is apparently singing a song about me. Well, more than that. It sounds as if he might be singing it to me. Lorelei, Lorelei, you’re the queen of my dreams.’

‘I see. Not a great lyric. A bit moon, June.’

‘He does that one too’

‘I see.’

‘So what do you think about him?’

‘I don’t see a lot of him, Lorelei. He keeps himself to himself. But he looks pretty ordinary.’

‘But is he dangerous? That’s what I want to know, Milo.’

‘I see your point. More often than not, it’s the ones that come across as normal that you have to worry about. They tend to be the savage rapists and merciless killers. The thing is, most dangerous people do not look any different from non-dangerous people. They blend in. They can hide in the light. But I wouldn’t say Cole is necessarily dangerous. …… Anyway. Listen Lorelei! Having discovered he is sealing people’s fates, and this is something he’s not comfortable with, Orson Soul is wondering how he can spill the beans about what is going on and stay out of the reaches of, not just the mob and the thought police, but the lizard people from the fourth dimension, who might or might not be running the show,’

‘Hey?’

‘My story. The Pegasus Principle. I thought you would like to know where I am with it. If you should get any ideas about where it might go, please feel free to let me know, but bear in mind I would like Orson Soul to make it in case I want to use him again. Soul is a good stock character.’

‘If I come up with anything, I will certainly let you know,’ Lorelei says. ‘Meanwhile, do you think I should knock on Cole’s door to find out what it is he’s up to with this song? Only, I have to get off to work soon.’

‘I should leave it for now.’

She wants to ignore Milo’s advice, but after her nightmare experience with Darren, she is anxious about calling on a complete stranger, especially so early in the day. She wants to to be able to ask Milo if he would come with her but she is not ready to tell him about her experience with Darren. Some things are too personal to share. Under the circumstances, asking Milo to accompany her might seem a bit pathetic.

She is thrown a lifeline.

‘I have an idea, Lorelei,’ Milo says. ‘Cole is pretty much the type I’ve just been describing. He is fairly nondescript. Average height, average build, dresses conventionally in smart casual, mostly dark. No distinguishing features. Indeterminable age, neither young nor old. He is the sort that would blend in anywhere. You would struggle to recognise him if you saw him in the street. You would certainly be pushed to help police put together a photofit, should you be required to. Bearing all this in mind, I think I might be able to take it from here. ….. How about this? A kindly neighbour who has taken a shine to the new girl in the block hears what he takes to be her screams coming from the downstairs apartment. It doesn’t take him long to work out what is happening. Although he has never had a direct confrontation with the fellow in Flat 4, he has long regarded him as a shady character. From the moment he first set eyes on him parking his Tiguan in the car park, he could see there was something not right about him. A dark horse for sure. Someone to give a wide berth to. Hidden psychopathic tendencies, perhaps. He fits the profile. Call it intuition, but he had a gut feeling that something like this might happen one day. And when the pretty new girl with the long dark hair moved into Flat 4, he felt it was perhaps merely a matter of time.

He grabs the baseball bat his nephew Kevin left in the hall when he called around. His sister Sally said she would pick it up but luckily she hasn’t yet. It’s a Cold Steel Brooklyn Whopper. A good solid bat, just the kind of thing you need to have at your disposal to discourage an interloper. He takes the stairs two at a time, and launching a well-aimed Doc Marten at that sweet spot just below the mortice, propels the door to Flat 3 inward. Not a moment too soon. The thick set man in the dark Italian suit has the girl in a vice-like grip and is ripping off her clothes. He has arrived in the nick of time.’

‘Do you know what, Milo! I think I’m going to leave calling round for now,’ Lorelei says. ‘I’ll get off to work before the traffic gets too heavy.’

‘I think I’ll take a break too,’ Milo says. ‘Remember though, if you get any ideas how The Pegasus Principle should end, you will let me know, won’t you? …… But leave Orson Soul. I have plans for him.’

Copyright © Chris Green, 2023: All rights reserved.