Dark Terrors 3 (35 page)

The first effect was to impede the flow of blood to and from my head and the second was to make me terribly aware of my prick. Until then the experience had not been for me an overtly sexual one. Now it very definitely was. The tumescence felt like a great throbbing hard ... I don’t know, cucumber or something. And then, as the darkness filled my head, and my lungs at last began to feel they’d burst, something gave and I let myself go in an orgasm the like of which I had never experienced until then. Or since. And with it everything fell apart. Her arms dropped from the killing embrace and I felt, beneath all the fat, how her muscles suddenly tautened into a terrible convulsion. They relaxed as swiftly as they had tensed and a great gout of warm liquid
splashed over my head and shoulders before she toppled backwards, taking me with her.

Somehow I knew - from the smell, the iron taste of it, the viscosity, that she was drenching me in blood, her own blood, and that if only I could loosen the belt I might live.

I tried to struggle but she did too, and I could see now the hilt of what had been my SS dagger, which now belonged to James, protruding from her neck. But though the blood was pulsing up around it she still had strength and will and was ready to fight on, but at that moment a dark shadow seemed to flit across the room and there was James himself. He plucked the knife from her neck before she could and rammed it again and again into her neck and breasts until the flow of blood ceased to throb, became a sluggish stream, and stopped.

At last I loosened the belt. Or James did. I can’t remember which. I sat up and looked down and across her. She was on her back, half propped up on all those heavy covers and eiderdowns, her arms still twitching convulsively in front of her tortured, fear-filled face, the fingers groping towards the dagger which was again stuck in the crimson tide that flowed across her chest and into the wide valley between her breasts, which were now flopped outwards. For a moment she stared at the two of us, first one then the other, her small blue eyes baleful, filled with hate. Then she pulled in one last huge breath, let it out and blood bubbled with it from her mouth. She gave a long shudder which ended on a croaking sigh, her legs flopped apart and she was gone, as dead as the pigs whose throats she cut each autumn, whose fat she rendered down and whose joints she carved, baked, cured and pickled.

Later the post mortem report said that one only of the many wounds had killed her. The upward thrust of the dagger, whether thrown from close to or administered with a stab, had neatly passed between the central column of oesophagus and wind pipe and the sinew to the side, finding and severing the carotid artery, draining the blood from her brain.

James loosened the belt and I managed at last to get to my feet. He handed me a large threadbare towel and I began to
wipe myself. The big ginger tom appeared from under the bed and began to rub up against Fat Mary’s shin. The door, which James had only managed to pull to behind him, flew open and a flurry of icy snow whirled round the room, hissed on the range. Tom disappeared under the bed again.

‘We’d better get back to school,’ said James. He pulled the knife out of Fat Mary’s throat, wiped it on a sheet. I suppose he’s still got it. If he’s still around. It all happened fifty years ago, half a century.

‘You should wash up as well as you can so no blood gets on your clothes,’ he went on. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to know we were here.’

He was right. It was two days before she was found - the first to call was a gamekeeper drawn by the lowing of cows that had not been milked and the bellows of a sow that had not been fed and whose litter was, by then, too big to eat.

* * * *

Julian Rathbone
published his first book in 1967 and says he has lost count of those published in the intervening two decades, although it is of the order of twenty-five novels, mostly thrillers with a broadly political/green or social slant. There are also some literary/historical works (two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize), a handful of short stories, scripts for German television movies and some poetry; but until now, no horror fiction. His most recent novels,
Intimacy
and
Blame Hitler,
are both published by Gollancz. ‘“Fat Mary”,’ Rathbone says, ‘started life as the black episode in an erotic picaresque novel that really got no further than the planning stage before being ditched. Reworking the basic idea (a sort of Hansel and Gretel) I realized I was tapping some half-remembered fantasy from boarding school days, back in the 1950s. Fantasy, but with a germ of fact in there somewhere too? At all events, I have welcomed the chance horror brings of breaking out of a too narrowly naturalistic approach to fiction writing. Having also recently concluded forty years of over-indulgence in booze, I was relieved to find whilst writing “Fat Mary” that the Muse does not necessarily need priming with alcohol before delivering the goods.’

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* * * *

DENNIS ETCHINSON

As soon as I saw her face, I knew where I was.

I’d been lost in the canyons, looking for a sign, and after a while all I wanted was out. I couldn’t even read the map book. The dome light flickered like a firefly in a jar and the streetlamps were hidden behind a scrim of leaves and branches. If there really was a street called Rose Petal Lane I couldn’t find it.

Then I made the turn on to Sierra Vista and there she was, bigger than life.

It was hard to judge distances but she must have been about a half-mile away, floating through the darkness over the trees that pointed towards the old reservoir at the top. From here I figured her face was at least ten feet tall, which made her mouth roughly the size of an open manhole. I didn’t want to think about the rest of her. But I had come this far - what was the point in turning back now?

I downshifted, grinding gears, and kept moving.

The sky grew bright with the glow of her skin and the waterfall of blonde hair around her face. Her head bobbed up and down like a flesh-coloured Zeppelin looking for a place to land. As I got closer there were other colours too, drifting in and out of a long beam of light trained on the reservoir wall. The numbers were worn off the curb but I knew I had found Donn Hedgeman’s house. Who else would use the side of the Stone River Dam for a movie screen? I’d heard that his
parties were legendary. The man had outdone himself this time.

I had to park halfway back down the canyon. Porsches and Jags and Mercedes-Benzes were wedged across every driveway between here and Sunset. Walking up, I saw two college boys in red vests on one of the sidestreets, waving flashlights like ushers at a movie premiere. Somehow I had missed the valet parking. It was just as well. My Toyota hadn’t been washed in months.

On foot, I could have found Donn’s house with my eyes closed. It was only eight o’clock but already the voices were so loud they might have been screaming, trapped in the canyon and magnified by the concrete dam at the end. Over the top of a redwood fence I noticed a sea of blonde coifs, all the same colour as the one in the sky. I opened the gate and let myself into the backyard, looking around for Donn.

‘Skippy!’

I ignored the voice and kept walking as if I knew where I was going. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool lit by underwater floodlights, and a pink shape wavered near the bottom, distorted by the ripples. A group of men gathered around the edge, some in jackets and ties, others in T-shirts and jeans. They cheered as the swimmer surfaced, borne up by an inflated life jacket. Then I realized there was no life jacket. It was her breasts that were inflated. She arched her body, as if hoping to thrust her nipples high enough to catch the beam of the projector, then threw her head back and dove again, the polished lips of her vagina cleaving the water. The men hooted and applauded. I worked my way around the pool, and headed across the patio.

‘Skippy?’

There was a burst of flashguns inside the house, turning the glass walls of the rec room blue-white. I spotted a man with huge, frizzy hair next to a billiard table, surrounded by photographers. It had to be Donn.

Now someone grabbed my arm. I felt it caught between
two balloons, as if held there by static electricity. I tried to shake them off and glanced over my shoulder.

A stunningly beautiful young woman clutched my arm to her bosom. Her vinyl dress was cut so low it looked like two bald men were trying to fight their way out the front.

‘You
are!’
She got a look at my face and dug her long black fingernails into my sweater. ‘I knew it. . .!’

‘Hi.’

‘I had the biggest crush on you!’ She did not want to let go of my arm. ‘You were a
lot
cuter than that other dude, the one who played your brother . . .’

‘Tony.’

I could have told her all about Tony Sargent. How he ended up with a habit so big he couldn’t get a job pushing a broom at the studio, how he started knocking off liquor stores with his old lady’s pantyhose pulled over his head, and how he blew his brains out the night she o.d.’d on the last of his smack. I didn’t want to burst her bubble. The show had been out of production since the late seventies but the reruns wouldn’t quit. As far as she was concerned I was still Skippy Boomer. She was not alone. At least she hadn’t asked for my autograph. Not yet.

‘Was that his name?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A great guy.’ I nodded at the rec room, the way I learned to do it in acting class: the gesture first, then the line. ‘Is that Donn?’

‘Which one was he?’

‘The Hedge Man,’ I said. ‘This is his party, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Her face fell and I thought I caught a glimpse of something fading out behind the layers of make-up, something almost sad. Then she blinked at me, fluttering her false eyelashes.
‘You
know
Donn?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘He’s such a trip! I’d work for him any time...’

‘Excuse me,’ I told her, retrieving my arm. ‘I have to say hello.’

I made my way across the patio. The actress in the sky was
emoting with mounting fervour, closing her shiny eyelids and tossing her head from side to side as if lost in an opium dream, but no one seemed to be watching. I saw an old theatre projector set up on the buffet table, with several film cans stacked next to it. The reel that was on now appeared to be near its end. I opened the sliding glass door and slipped inside, as the tail of the film clattered on to the takeup spool and the beam of light went white.