The Midnight Men and Other Stories (11 page)

Wendy shook her head. “I really am tired, Rosie. And if I don’t hurry, I’m going to miss my bus.”

“Okay, Mum.” Rosie kissed her cheek, the scarred cheek as always, and then started down the path that would take her into town. Wendy watched her go, love and jealousy duelling inside her. Rosie was so much like her when she’d been her age - raven-haired and sexy. Rosie could have any man she wanted. She didn’t need any gypsy glamour. Not for a long while yet.

“Goodnight, oldie!” Rosie cried out suddenly.

Wendy turned and walked in the opposite direction, her thoughts swamped by the object in her pocket.

In her late teens and early twenties, Wendy had drawn men like a magnet. She wasn’t beautiful, and she wasn’t particularly sexy, but she had something they wanted, and that had been enough for her. After a loveless childhood, she was happy to ride the wave of attention for as long as it lasted.

Then she’d fallen pregnant—the result of just another one night stand—and everything had changed. The pregnancy and the scar had come along almost at the same time. For twenty years she had become invisible to men. Could this little vial of blood change all that? Even for just one night?

When she reached the bus stop, she dared to get it out. As she sat down under the canopy, staring at the little glass vial with the minuscule cork in the end, she suddenly felt foolish - more than foolish. Gullible.

Why had she picked it up? She hadn’t intended to, not until the last second when she saw it there in the empty bin. It was a sudden impulse, brought on by some deeper desire. Was she really that pathetic that she was prepared to believe in gypsy magic? Had it really come to this?

Despite her cynicism, she found herself looking up and down the street. There was always one or two people waiting for the 10:15 bus, but not tonight. She studied the bottle again.

Did she really believe it would make her young again?

It wouldn’t hurt just to try it . . . would it?

Carefully, she gripped the little cork between her finger and thumb and pulled. There was a tiny popping sound. She raised the vial to her nose and inhaled, tentatively at first, then deeply.

“Smells of cloves,” she said to herself. That surprised her. It probably was cloves, although she’d never seen spices sold in such tiny bottles. Whatever it was, it smelled edible. She took one more glance up the street, one more sniff, then downed it in one go.

She regretted it immediately.

The initial sensation was of molten metal splashing against the insides of her throat. She would have spat the liquid back out, but she had knocked it back so hard it had bypassed her mouth altogether.

White sparks danced before her eyes, followed by an excruciating pain in her temples. Her face felt red hot for several moments, then cooled just as quickly. With her head down, she began taking deep breaths until the pain had passed. The aftertaste was electric: a heady mix of cod liver oil, red wine and salt.

Something happened, she told herself. I don’t know what, but something just happened to my face.

Her heart beating wildly, she reached up and touched her cheeks, her nose, her chin. But she could still feel the same wrinkles, the same crow’s feet, the same loose skin beneath her jaw.

She turned and studied her reflection in the glass of the shelter. It was still the same old Wendy Hutchison staring back, the same ruined face. She looked at the empty glass vial in her hand and then, with a bitter laugh, tossed it onto the pavement.

She was caught in the sudden glare of headlights. In all the confusion, she hadn’t seen the bus coming up Main Street. She reached out and flagged it down.

The driver, a regular face on the 10:15, pulled up and opened the doors. She didn’t like him. He was a miserable sod who hardly even looked at her as he took her money.

“Single to Tyrone Road,” she said, rifling through her purse.

There was no response, no issuing of a ticket, nothing. She looked up at him. The burly driver was staring at her with a wide, toothy grin on his face.

“Well hello, beautiful,” he said.

She assumed he was being sarcastic, and felt heat rise in her cheeks once more. “Single, please,” she repeated. “Tyrone Road.”

“I’ve not seen you before,” he said, completely ignoring her second request.

She looked at him sidelong. “What are you talking about? I get this bus six nights a week.”

He shook his bullet-shaped head emphatically. “Believe me, honey, if I’d seen an angel like you on my bus, I’d remember it.”

Wendy couldn’t think what to say next. She suddenly felt a dozen pairs of eyes boring into her. She glanced up the length of the bus and found that the passengers were all men of varying ages, and they were all staring at her. She turned back to the driver. He fluttered his eyelids.

“My ticket,” she said.

He shook his head again. “Baby,” he said, “you don’t need no ticket. A girl as pretty as you can ride for free.” He jerked a fat thumb over his shoulder.

“Excuse me, are you being sarcastic?”

The driver looked back at her blankly as if he hadn’t understood the question.

She looked at her reflection again in the glass behind the driver’s seat. Same old Wendy Hutchison, forty-seven, spinster for life. Same old scar.

She turned back to the driver. “Excuse me, how old would you say I am?”

The dreamy look on his face vanished and deadly panic flashed in his eyes. “Hey, sweetheart, I wasn’t being pervy with you, honest—”

Wendy waved away his protest. “No, really, how old?”

The driver looked at her, his eyes roaming over her face, her neck, her shoulders, her cleavage. “Eighteen?” he said. “Nineteen, maybe?”

She stopped breathing. Her legs seemed to have filled with iced water. She desperately wanted to sit down.

“Listen, honey,” the driver said. “You take a seat and I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

She started to walk down the bus, but as she approached the rows of seats, every one of the men started shuffling along his seat to make room for her.

“Actually,” she said, turning back to the driver. “I’ve decided I’ll walk.” And with that, she stepped off the bus and back into the cool night air. When she looked back, she found the faces of all the men pressed against the glass. The bus idled for a few moments, during which the driver looked longingly at her. Then he let out a heavy sigh and pulled away.

Alone in the silence of Main Street, she studied her reflection in the glass of the shelter once more. To herself, it seemed, she hadn’t changed. But the men on that bus - they all saw something different. But wouldn’t that be the nature of such a thing as a glamour? Wasn’t it meant to bewitch others - other men, in particular? The thought of it made her heart race, and her breath came in short gasps.

Her rapture was interrupted by the sound of a lilting whistle which echoed along the empty street. About twenty yards up the road, a tall, rumpled figure in a Paradise Palms security uniform passed briefly under an amber patch of streetlight. It was Joey. Wendy watched him as he ambled across the road towards Romany’s, the local bar and grill.

If what she thought had happened, if the contents of that little vial had indeed turned her into a ravishing young beauty, then she was willing to test it properly. After tonight, she realised, she would never get another chance. With that in mind, she crossed the road and went after her man.

***

The night was warm, and the city seemed full of electricity, full of possibility, full of romance.

As Wendy walked hand in hand with Joey, she couldn’t believe her good fortune. Joey was the only man she thought about before she went to sleep at night. Now, on this strange evening, she had a chance—just this once—to win home over, to seduce him. But Joey didn’t need much encouraging. From the moment he had seen her crossing the road, his eyes had been bright with desire.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying desperately to sound sexy. “Where do you want to go?”

He stopped abruptly at the mouth of a dimly-lit alleyway. “Here’s fine,” he said.

Wendy looked around. “What do you mean?” she said tentatively.

Joey looked at her closely, his pupils gleaming like wet tar. And he said:

“You want sex, don’t you?”

A pool of hot lead ignited in her stomach. She looked up at him and felt suddenly very vulnerable, very afraid.

“Sorry, what did you say—”

He grabbed her by the upper arm, dragging her into the alleyway. He walked fast, Wendy stumbling along behind him. When they were halfway down the alley, he stopped and thrust her against the wall, between two giant dumpsters. He gripped her wrists above her head, pressing them tight against the wet brick wall. Water ran down the back of her uniform. She could smell rotting vegetables and stale fast food all around her.

He stared into her, his eyes filled with an awful, glazed sickness, as if the glamour had awoken a dangerous, unreasoning beast somewhere deep down in his soul.

But aren’t all men like this? a voice hissed in her head.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Don’t try and tell me you’re not up for it.”

Her vocal chords had frozen. All she could do was shake her head. “I-” she managed. “I don’t want to-”

His eyes narrowed into hateful slits. “You don’t want me?” His voice was harsh, pregnant with power.

Survival instinct told her to say the right things. “Yes,” she mumbled. “I do, but not like this. At home. At least take me home and-”

“No,” he said, “I can’t wait that long. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I want you now. Now!”

His hand slipped under her work uniform, up her inner thigh, tugging at her knickers. Instinctively, Wendy knocked his hand away, but he moved back in. He planted rough, slavering kisses all over her cheeks, her neck, his slick tongue trying to force its way into her mouth-

Over his shoulder, she saw her reflection in a small cracked window, saw her true face in a fan of splintered glass, and it was an ugly face, a ruined, dreadful mask that no man could truly love—and it was not the scar which made her ugly, but the self-loathing which lay beneath it. And in that moment a dark curtain descended inside her mind, and her eyes rolled over white. Her body relaxed, and the man sensed it, running his greedy hands over her body more freely now. Gradually, he lowered his guard just as she had done.

In the theatre inside her mind, the memory of that long-ago night played like a flickering movie. Walking home late one night, five months pregnant and exhausted from work, she hadn’t seen the man who descended on her like a hawk. She was thrown into an alleyway, one just like this, and told not to scream. She was too weak, too frightened to fight back, so she had pleaded with him not to hurt her baby, her unborn baby, but the sick hunger in his eyes had not been dimmed by her appeal. As he tried to force his way into her, she had done the only thing she could. She struck him in the groin with her knee. By God, it must have hurt because he screamed like a woman. She thought that was it, the end of the ordeal. But no, his lust had been vanquished and that could not be left unpunished.

“If I can’t have you,” he hissed, “nobody’s gonna want you!”

He’d taken her by the neck and thrust her face-first into a small window set into the alley wall. The memory became jumpy at that point, as if the movie projector in her mind was breaking down. She remembered the initial pain, the sound of shattering glass, then she was lying on her back in the trash-strewn alleyway, the sensation of her own warm blood pooling in her ears . . .

She was jolted back to the present moment by that barking, bitter voice in her head.

Do it! it said. Do it now before it’s too late!

Her left hand, now freed from Joey’s grip, slipped silently into the bag at her waist, removing a small, gleaming object from its secret resting place.

“I’ve got something for you,” she whispered.

Joey stopped fumbling for a moment, pulling back to study her. An idiot smile flashed across his face.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

Her arm came up then, too fast for him to stop it, holding something which caught the moonlight in a blur of silver.

The blade flashed across his face, and for a moment she thought it had missed him; then he began to scream. He sank to the floor, his hands clawing at his face as dark rivers of blood spurted from the fresh wound. Wendy stood over him, her face frozen in an unforgiving mask.

“You - you bitch!” he spat. “Why the hell did you do that? Why?”

Carefully, emotionlessly, she placed the knife back in her bag.

“Help me!” he screamed. “I’m bleeding to death.”

“You’ll live,” she said. “I did.”

She turned and began walking calmly towards the end of the alleyway, pressing her fingers against the jagged line of scar tissue which divided her face.

The old woman’s words came back to her:

The glamour only lasts as long as it takes to get what you want. Once you’ve had your way with your man, the effect wears off.

This was an opportunity too good to pass up for one fleeting night of lust: if she never ‘had her man’ then the glamour would remain, a charm which would never fulfil its promise. And that would be the bait. With this pretty face she could lure them in, as many men as she could stomach, draw them in and then do to them what had been done to her.

Revenge was sweet, the voice told her, and she had half a lifetime of revenge to hand out.

“I’m sorry, Nan,” said Steve. “But I have to kill you.”

“That’s a shame, dear. Mind if I finish my tea first?”

Steve snatched the china cup from her and put it on the bedside cabinet. He reached down to his sports bag and produced a revolver. As he placed it gently on his lap, the old woman sighed heavily.

“Oh dear, Stevie. Does it have to be so violent? Couldn’t you just smother me quietly in my sleep?”

He shook his head solemnly. “Nan, you’re the servant of the Evil Eye. You’re the Queen of Darkness, the portal through which the hordes of evil will pass into this world. It has to be a holy bullet, one blessed by a priest. You know this.”