Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (42 page)

    "Thank you very much. But, well, I don't even know your name."

    "My name is Kaaiija," she said.

    He made an attempt to repeat the name, and she shook her head, smiling.

    "Kay, ay, ay, eye, eye, jay, ay: Kaaiija," she repeated.

    "That's an unusual name," he said.

    "It is Estonian."

    She raised the glass of wine to her lips. She was drinking red, although the bottle he had brought was white.

    "Are you from Estonia?" he asked, he would have admitted, a little gormlessly. History had proven that he was fairly inept at small talk such as this.

    "I am from a place called Valetada. It is an island. It is a very traditional place."

    She placed particular emphasis on the word traditional, and he wondered if she was referring to some obscure idiom that was lost in translation.

    "You have a hint of an accent," he said.

    "So do you."

    "I can assure you mine is only West London, through and through. Nothing more glamorous than that, I'm afraid."

    There was something a little flirtatious in her body language. It was difficult to ascertain whether it was accountable to the drink or some other reason.

    "Where is the island you are from?" he asked, somewhat awkwardly.

    "You can see it on the map. It is to the west, in the Baltic Sea. Our family home is in the middle of the island."

    "I expect it's quite different from the mainland?"

    "It is," she said, "as it always has been. We have strong customs and traditional ways, surrounded as we are by water."

    "I will profess, I am a little ignorant as to the culture and geography of Estonia," he said.

    This was not a lie, but it would have been more truthful for him to have stated that he could not, in fact, distinguish his Latvias from his Lithuanias: the whole Baltic region (with the ignorance particular to many Western Europeans) he associated with cold and dark winters: a hinterland consisting of grey satellite states each one interchangeable from the next, neither Scandinavian nor Eastern European.

    "Linguistically and culturally we are, I suppose, closer to the Finns, although-" she added, "-there are differences."

    "I suppose things are very different since the fall of the Soviet Union?"

    "Yes, though we gained independence long before that."

    She raised the wine glass to her lips and took a very delicate sip, not taking her eyes off him for one moment.

    "How long have you been over here?"

    "It is sometimes difficult for me to remember," she said.

    Her expression changed, and for one moment she looked as if plagued by some distant memory, or some occurrence from long ago in her past. Then she looked at him so directly and so intensely that he began to feel quite uncomfortable.

    "Shall we go into the living room, David? Shall we?"

    "Yes, by all means. I would be interested in seeing the rest of your flat."

    Her eyes did not leave him for a second.

    "Seeing as we are neighbours," he added.

    "Come then. I will show you."

    He followed her out of the kitchen into the darkened hallway.

    "Will you turn the light out, as you leave?"

    "Yes, of course."

    He was unsure of her motives in this: was she, in her own way, attempting to create some type of atmosphere, or was it to save on electricity, pure and simple? In order to turn the light off, for some reason, he moved his wine glass into his other hand. His finger flicked the switch, and he noticed that it was slightly tacky, in the way these things get, from cooking vapours and so forth.

    The hallway seemed very long. The layout of her flat was notably different from his own, and as he followed, he passed two other rooms, the doors of which were shut.

    "Here is the living room," she said.

    They were entering a room at the far end of the corridor, from which a pale yellow light emerged. The ceiling seemed very low in comparison to the kitchen, and there were many items of furniture carefully positioned so that, although the room was filled with chairs and tables (and not two but three settees) the impression was still one of balance and proportion.

    "Very nice. It's lovely what you've done with the space here," he said.

    "It is the living room. The living room is for entertaining."

    At this moment, remembering the events of the previous evening -how she had said she had guests - and emboldened, perhaps, by his own nervousness and the first taste of the wine, he ventured a question.

    "I remember you saying you had guests last night. Do you entertain often?"

    She looked at him as if he had accused her of some small slander.

    "Guests? I had no guests last night."

    He could offer no rejoinder. He was aware that he had gone a little red.

    "Sorry. It's just that-"

    The room was very quiet: quiet enough for it to occur to him why it is a custom to have background music playing in such social situations. He could hear the faint ticking of a clock, and then, from somewhere in the flat, in one of the unexplored rooms a sudden thud as if something had fallen.

    "-I thought I heard you say yesterday that you were expecting guests?" he finished.

    She sat down in an armchair upholstered in purple velvet, and crossed her legs in a very languorous fashion.

    "David," she said.

    Her legs, he noticed, were really rather short, given her height.

    "There were no guests."

    He realized that now he was standing inside it, the room was a great deal smaller than he had previously thought. He moved over to the nearest item of furniture - a recliner - and sat down. Whilst placing his wine glass on the floor he couldn't help noticing that the carpet was absolutely covered in hairs: hairs from some domestic animal, one would have thought, though they reminded him - too much - of the doll's hair: the doll he had found outside his flat the previous evening.

    "Do you have a pet, Kaaiija? A cat, perhaps?" he asked.

    It was a potentially hazardous inquiry: one that called into question his host's domestic pride, yet a question that needed asking, he felt.

    "A pet? Why do you ask?"

    "I have seen a cat in the building," he lied, thinking about the noise he had heard. "I've often wondered to whom it belonged."

    "I have no pets. It would seem unnecessarily cruel to keep an animal living in a flat in the city."

    "I quite agree."

    He raised the wine glass to his lips and took a sip. There was a very large crack in the ceiling, he noticed. It forked at one end, and the plaster had flaked around it.

    "What do you do, David - for a living?" she said.

    "I work in market research. Nothing very exciting."

    "You are typical English man. You always put yourself down."

    She was watching him over the top of her glass, not so much sitting in, as draped across the armchair. Her movements were (perhaps calculably) lithe, and he began to feel that the whole situation was a little absurd. To be frank, he was beginning to feel like the protagonist in some tawdry second-rate erotic vignette. A table light positioned to her right held much of her face in shadow. He could see, from where he was sitting, that she was wearing an amount of make-up that gave her complexion a distinctly greasy quality.

    "In what area of market research do you work?" she said.

    "Are you familiar with qualitative and quantitative studies?"

    She shook her head.

    "I work closely with groups of consumers: potential consumers. I find out what makes people buy a certain brand of soap powder, say, or toothpaste."

    "Interesting," she said, very slowly. There was absolutely no way of telling from the tone of her voice whether it was a remark that had been intended as facetious.

    "And how do you find this information?" she said.

    "Well, people fill in surveys. They answer questions, and the results are communicated back to the client. A lot of emphasis is placed on creating brand loyalty."

    Her expression betrayed no information whatsoever.

    "It's not very interesting," he added. It was a somewhat adolescent thing to say, and as soon as he had said it, he regretted doing so.

    "Have you always worked in market research, David?" she said.

    "I used to work in advertising. I worked at a small agency, but I left because there was an awful amount of back-stabbing going on."

    "Back-stabbing?" she said, her eyebrows raised.

    "Not literally, of course," he said. "You know: game playing. I found it all very oppressive, that's why I got out. There are things I miss, though."

    At this point, she placed her wine glass on the tabletop and put both legs - slightly splayed - on the floor. Her face was completely in shadow.

    "I knew you were an honest person, David. That is why you return my doll."

    He took another drink. He was beginning to feel a little lightheaded, though largely from the stuffiness of the room.

    "What is it that you do yourself?" he asked.

    "I have-" and here she paused, "-a small private income."

    He was wishing very much that she would either lean forward or sit back. Looking at her directly was akin to viewing a lunar eclipse.

    "You are an honest person," she repeated.

    "As I said, it was nothing, really."

    "No," she said, abruptly.

    She got to her feet and took a few steps towards him. He noticed that one of the buttons on her shirt had come undone. He could see her skin underneath, and it too was marked by a curious translu-cence. She stood in front of him, not moving. He was completely unsure of what was about to happen. He was unsure as to whether she was about to commence with the removal of all of her clothes, or else begin screaming at the top of her voice.

    "I'm sure Marguerite would like to thank you personally for your kindness," she said, in an even monotone.

    He cleared his throat gently. The room really was most unpleasantly stuffy, he thought.

    "Marguerite?"

    "Yes. She would like to thank you personally."

    "I don't believe I know any Marguerite," he said.

    "Oh, but you have already met her. It is through her, that we meet, David."

    "Do you mean-?" he began, but he did not finish his sentence.

    She took another step towards him. There was something almost feline about her movements.

    "She's waiting," she said.

    He got to his feet, the wine glass in one hand.

    "Shall we, David?"

    "Yes," he said.

    She took the wine glass from his hand and placed it on a nearby table. Then she moved towards the doorway, and although she did not actually take his hand, he nevertheless gained the impression that he was being conspicuously led. They had not, by this point, had any form of physical contact, and she was in fact closer in proximity to him now than at any other stage throughout their encounter. Again, he caught her perfume. It was an intoxicating scent, although there was a trace of something else as well. Her hair fell past her shoulders, so very black it seemed to absorb all light. She reached the doorway -he barely a foot behind her - and then turned. He jumped a little: a small sound escaped his throat. Up close, her face had quite an unpleasant aspect. He knew it was not uncommon for women to use a cosmetic concealment to cover any unsightly blemishes on the face, but it appeared that the entirety of Kaaiija's face was slathered in such a substance. Her skin looked very grey, as if she perhaps had some birthmark, or "port wine stain" that covered the majority of her features and sat uneasily with the consistency of the cosmetic. Some of the make-up had got into her hair as well at the edge of the temple. In the yellow light her eyes appeared very dark indeed, almost black.

    "You may leave this light on, David," she said.

    He had no intention whatsoever of touching anything.

    "She waits," she said.

    He followed Kaaiija into the hallway. She moved over to the doorway to the left, and from her hip pocket removed a key. In a singularly graceful movement she inserted the key into the lock and gave it a very gentle turn. He heard the small click of the latch. Kaaiija opened the door and felt for the light switch, almost as if she had little or no idea as to its location. From where he was standing he could see nothing of the room's contents.

    "I know she would wish to thank you personally," she said.

    She entered, and he followed.

    The room was full of dolls. There were dolls seated in chairs: dolls positioned on the windowsill: a doll on all fours frozen in the act of crawling across the carpet, its head angled towards the doorway. They were all of a similar kind to the one he had discovered by his front door, yet their clothes and the colour of their hair varied. They did not appear to have been arranged in any obvious manner or formation: in fact, he had the curious sensation that the room had been a hive of activity only moments before their arrival.