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Authors: Graham Masterton

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)

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BOOK: Feelings of Fear
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“I have plenty of money. We could have a good time.” Inside, his sensibilities winced at what he was having to say.

The girl looked him up and down, still smoking, still chewing. “You look like a big strong bloke,” she suggested. “We could always do it here. So long as you've got a johnny.”

He looked around. The street was deserted, although an occasional car came past, its tires sizzling on the wet tarmac. “Well …” he said, uncertainly. “I was thinking of somewhere a little less public.”

“It's up to you,” she said. “My bus'll be here in five minutes.”

He was just about to refuse her offer and turn away when she flicked her hair with her hand, revealing the left side of her neck. It was radiantly white, so white that he could see the blueness of her veins. He couldn't take his eyes off it.

“All right,” he said, tightly. “We'll do it here.”

“Twenty quid,” she demanded, holding out her hand.

He opened his thin black wallet and gave her two ten pound notes. She took a last drag on her cigarette, flicked it into the street, and then she hoisted up her dress to her waist and tugged down her white Marks & Spencer panties. Somewhere in his mind he briefly glimpsed Lucy's voluminous petticoats, the finest white cotton trimmed with Nottingham lace, and the way in which she had so demurely clasped her thighs tightly together.

He kissed the girl on the forehead, breathing in the smell of cigarette smoke and shampoo. He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks. Then he tried to kiss her lips but she slapped him away. “What are you trying to do? Pinch my gum? I thought we were supposed to be having it off, not kissing.”

He grasped her shoulders and stared directly into her eyes. He could tell by the expression on her face that she had suddenly begun to realize that this wasn't going to be one of her usual encounters, twenty quid for a quick one. “What?” she asked him. “What is it?”

“One kiss,” he said. “Then no more. I promise.”

“I don't like kissing. It gives you germs.”

“This kiss you will enjoy more than any other kiss you have ever had.”

“No, I don't want to.” She reached down and tried to tug her panties back up.

“You're going to go back on our bargain?” he asked her.

“I told you. I don't like kissing. Not men like you. I only kiss blokes I'm in love with.”

“Yet you don't mind having sex with me, here, in the street, somebody you don't even know?”

“That's different.”

He let go of her, and lowered his arms. “Yes,” he said, rather ruefully. “That's different. But there was a time when it was the greatest prize that a man could ever win from a woman.”

She laughed, a silly little Minnie Mouse laugh. That was when he gripped her hair and hit her head against the back of the bus shelter, as hard as he could. The glass frame holding the timetable was smashed, and the timetable itself was splattered in blood.

As she sagged, he held her up to prevent her from dropping to the ground. Then he looked around again to make sure that the street was still empty. He hoisted her up, and carried her around the bus shelter and into the bushes behind it. He found himself half-climbing, half-sliding down a steep slope strewn with discarded newspapers and empty lager cans and plastic milk-crates. The girl lolled in his arms, her head hanging back, her eyes closed, but he could tell by the bubbles of froth that were coming from her mouth that she wasn't dead.

He took her down into a damp, dark gully, smelling of leaf-mould. He laid her down, and with shaking hands he unzipped her jacket and wrestled it off her. Then he tore open her dress, exposing her left breast. He knelt astride her, lowered his head, and with an audible crunch he sank his teeth into her neck, severing her carotid artery.

The first spurt went right over his shoulder, spattering his coat. The second hit his cheek and soaked his collar. But he opened his mouth wide, and he caught the next spurt directly on his tongue, and swallowed, and went on swallowing, with a choking, cackling sound, while the girl's heart obligingly pumped her blood directly down his throat.

*      *      *

Whether he was driven by rage for his lost possessions, or by disgust for the world in which he now found himself, or by sheer greed, he went on an orgy of blood-feeding that night. He slid into a suburban bedroom and drank a young wife dry while her husband slept beside her. He found a young homeless boy under a railway arch and left him white-faced and lifeless in his cardboard bash, staring up at the sodium-tainted sky. He hated the color of that sky, and he longed for the days when nights had been black instead of orange.

By the end of the night, he had left nine people dead. He was so gorged with blood that his stomach was swollen, and he had to stop in the doorway of Boots and vomit some of it up, adding to the splatter of regurgitated curry that was already there.

He returned to his empty house. He would have liked to have stayed up longer, walking around the rooms, but the sun was already edging its way over the garden fence, and the frost was glittering like caster sugar. He raised the cellar trap and disappeared below. He slept, and he dreamed …

He dreamed of battles, and the screaming of mutilated men. He dreamed of mountains, and forests as dark as nightmares. He thought he was back in his castle, but his castle was collapsing all around him. Chunks of stone fell from the battlements. Towers collapsed. Whole curtain-walls came roaring down, like landslides.

The earth shook, but he was so bloated with blood that he barely stirred. He whispered only one word,
“Lucy …”

It took the best part of the day to demolish the house. The wrecking-ball swung and clumped and reduced the walls to rubble and toppled the tall Edwardian chimneys. By four o'clock the demolition crew were working by floodlight. A bulldozer ripped up the overgrown garden and roughly levelled the hardcore, and then a road-roller crushed the site completely flat.

During the next week, trucks trundled over the site, tipping tonnes of sand to form a sub-base, followed by even more tonnes of hydraulic cement concrete. This was followed by a thick layer of bituminous road pavement, and finally a top wearing course of hot asphalt.

Deep beneath the ground, he continued to sleep, unaware of his
entombment. But he had digested most of his feast, and his sleep was twitchier now, and his eyes started to flicker.

The new link road between Leeds and Roundhay was finished in the middle of January, a week ahead of schedule. In the same week, his property was sold at auction in Dewsbury, and fetched well over £780,000. A Victorian portrait of a white-faced woman in a white dress was particularly admired, and later featured on the BBC's
Antiques Road Show.
Among other interesting items was a Chippendale secretaire. The new owner was an antiques dealer called Abrahams. When he looked through the drawers, he found scores of unopened letters, some from France, many from Romania and Poland, and some local. Some were dated as far back as 1926. Among the more recent correspondence were seven letters from the county council warning the occupier of a compulsory purchase order, so that a new road could be built to ease traffic congestion and eliminate an accident black spot.

He lay in his casket, wide awake now and ragingly hungry – unable to move, unable to rise, unable to die. He had screamed, but there was no point at all in screaming. All he could do was to wait in claustrophobic darkness for the traffic and the weather and the passing centuries to wear the road away.

Lolicia

H
e came home from the studio just before eleven in the evening, his chinos crumpled, his hair sticking up, and the back of his shirt stained with sweat. He slung his coat over the back of the living-room couch, came straight into the kitchen, kissed Susan on the cheek and then went straight to the freezer and took out a frosted bottle of Stolichnaya.

He poured himself a large glass and drank it as if it were water. Then he poured himself another, and drank half of that, too.

“Jesus, you don't know what a day I've had.”

“Oh, yes?” Susan banged the pot sharply on the hob and he should have taken his cue from that.

“We didn't finish shooting the last scene till gone nine.”

“You could have called,” said Susan. “The clam sauce is ruined.”

“Hey, I'm sorry. I had no idea it was going to go on so damned long. That scene when the girl gets strangled—”

“You still could have called.”

“Listen, I've said I'm sorry. If the meal's ruined I'll take you out to eat. I'll take you anyplace you want to go.”

“Jeff, I don't want to go out to eat. I've spent most of the afternoon making all of this. It was supposed to be special. I've made you
frittata.
I've made you
pinzimonio
salad. What do you want me to do with it? Throw it all away?”

Jeff came over and peered into the saucepan. “Looks all right to me. Kind of gummy, maybe. But so what. We could call it
spaghettini alla gummy vongole.”

“That's it!” she said. She picked up the pan and turned it upside-down over the sink.

“For Christ's sake, Susan, what are you doing? Listen, that was a joke, okay? I'm sorry I'm late and I'm sorry I made a joke, but let's forget it, okay? Let's just have something to eat, okay? I could eat a horse. I could even eat a gummy
spaghettini.”

She dropped the pan with a clatter, and turned on him. “You have been late every single night for the past three months – that's when you've bothered to come home at all. Ever since you started this series I haven't seen you from one week's end to the next. You keep telling me you've come alive. ‘Oh, Susan, I feel twenty years younger.' Haven't you thought for one minute what it's been doing to me? Haven't you thought for one minute how
boring
it's been?”

“Susan, listen sweetheart, apart from post-production the series is finished. It's wrapped. We can go away for a couple of weeks. Up to Napa, maybe. We'll visit your mother, we'll drink some wine. Well, maybe we'd better drink some wine
before
we visit your mother.”

Susan pulled off her butcher's apron and threw it across the floor. “Jeff, I don't find you funny any more. You've turned into somebody I don't even know and I don't even like. Even when I've seen you, you've talked about nothing else but
Creatures
this and
Creatures
that and say, ‘honey, I'm so worried about
Creatures.'
You're selfish and obsessive and totally one-dimensional.”

Maybe it was sheer exhaustion after sixteen solid hours of shooting the last episode of
Creatures.
Maybe it was too much vodka on an empty stomach. Maybe it was simply the let-down of leaving the studio to whistles and cheers and coming back to someone who had no idea what he had managed to achieve. Whatever it was, he slapped her.

There was an extraordinary moment in which he felt as if he had stepped through a mirror. Out of one life and into another.

He said, “Shit, Susan. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

“You—” she began, and she tried to slap him back, but he dropped his martini glass and caught hold of her wrists. The glass shattered on the kitchen tiles. She tried to slap him again, but when she couldn't, she wrenched herself free from him and went straight to the front door.

He followed her, trying to catch her arm. “Susan! I'm sorry! I lost my temper, that's all! It's not your fault!”

She snatched her keys from the hook by the door. Her cheek was flaming red and her eyes were filled with tears.

“Listen, I'm really sorry, sweetheart! Don't go! You can come back here and hit me back, OK? I'm sorry!”

“You
bastard,”
she said, with a terrible vehemence.

“Susan, for Christ's sake, don't go out! You shouldn't drive while you're feeling like this!”

“What, are you worried I might kill myself?”

She went out of the door and slammed it behind her. Again he followed her, but she was already halfway down the steps in front of the house.

“Susan! Listen to me!”

But she didn't listen. She climbed into her little black Honda sports car and backed down the driveway. By the time Jeff reached the street she had sped off out of sight.

Across the street, his neighbor, Bill Arnold, was standing in his bathrobe in his open doorway, staring at him.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Jeff shouted at him.

He went inside and poured himself another large vodka. He looked around the kitchen – at the carefully prepared salad, at the freshly fried
spaghetti frittata,
at the beans still simmering on the stove. He smashed his fist down on the counter and the lid toppled off Susan's favorite cookie-jar – the one in the shape of W.C. Fields – and broke.

How the hell could he have hit her? He stared at his offending hand and he couldn't believe it.

They had argued before, frequently, and sometimes their arguments had led to slammed doors and nights on the couch. But he had never touched her, not once. If only he could run those few seconds back, and cut them out. If only they could be sitting down at the table, drinking a celebratory glass of Orvieto and eating the dinner that she had spent so much time preparing. He lifted the saucepan out of the sink and flushed away the splattered clam sauce. He felt so upset so that his hands were shaking.

He went through to the living-room and picked up the phone. It rang for a long time before anybody answered. “Hazel? Listen, this is Jeff.
I'm sorry to call you so late. No, nothing like that. Susan and me have just had a bit of a bust-up. Well, yes. It was all my fault. I was tired, I lost my temper. Well, look, I expect she'll come over to your place. About five minutes ago. Sure. But when she gets there, can you ask her to call me? Can you do that, please? And can you tell her how sorry I am? Well, I will, for sure, but it might help if she hears it from you, too.”

BOOK: Feelings of Fear
7.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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