“Of course it’s me.” Peter set the flashlight on the night stand. He wore the tuxedo he had on the night I met him, complete with the silly bow tie.
“The tie’s too much, isn’t it?” he said, pulling an end to unloose it. He slid it off his neck and dropped it to the floor. “In fact, it’s all too much.” With a laugh, he began to strip. “Mind if I join you? I’m freezing me bum off.” He scrambled under the duvet, enveloping me in his arms.
I kissed him with all the longing and hunger I’d been feeling for so long. I wanted him to know how I’d been starving: for food, for hope, for him. I reached up to stroke his long, silky hair, but instead felt…a claw.
It scratched at my face. I screamed, but no sound came out.
What was in my bed wasn’t Peter: it was a coyote. And I wasn’t in the warehouse, I was in a tent in the woods—a forest like Rosalee’s Sherwood, full of terrifying creatures: vampires, werewolves, demons—attacking and eating each other.
I heard a snort as the claw came at my face again.
I reached to push the claw away, and woke. I’d been dreaming, but the claw—it was real.
Much’s claw. The little dog was asleep beside me on the bed.
Finally coming to full consciousness after the nightmare, I realized Much must have crawled onto the futon sometime during the night and now slept beside me, his paw waving only inches from my face, in pursuit of some dreamworld prey.
I was safely in my Wendy House in the factory. The panic button was within reach. I could see it in the yellow light from the parking lot outside. No woods. No coyote. No demons. And no Peter. I took deep breaths to still the thumping in my chest.
My mouth felt dry and nasty from last night’s whiskey. No wonder I was having bad dreams. No. It wasn’t entirely bad, that dream. Peter’s presence had felt so soothing, so erotic, so right.
I got up and opened a water bottle. I gulped it down with a couple of aspirin, hoping to alleviate the hangover I knew was coming. How odd I’d dreamed of Peter as some were-coyote. I hadn’t thought of that coyote since I left San Francisco. It all seemed so long ago and far away—like some book I’d read in childhood. I shivered and crawled back into bed, glad of Much’s body heat and comforting presence.
Now I understand the lure of the werewolf romance. It was a fantasy of a lover as fiercely protective and loyal as a dog.
Morning came too soon, along with excruciating hammering in my head. Not only from the hangover—which was intense—but something else. The whole warehouse shook. Something noisy was going on in the Rat Hole. On my run to the loo, I saw two workmen emerging from the hole carrying Ratko’s futon. On my way back, I saw them carrying his desk.
Liam and Davey, both looking awful as I felt, stood staring from their doorways as the furniture piled up.
“Anybody need a nice bed?” said Alan Greene. He climbed up from the stairwell and smoothed back his greasy mane “Some if this ain’t half bad. It’s all going to the charity shop if you don’t want it.”
I waited for him to say something about my need to move out, but he seemed to have moved to bigger prey. He was taking on Jovan Ratko now—maybe trying to erase all traces of Peter and his friends from the building.
Liam watched the workmen take their burden out to the parking lot. “You’re mad to fuck with Ratko’s gear.” He shook his head. “That bloke has killed people, mate.”
“But he’s pulled a runner ain’t he?” Alan said. “He’ll never make it back from Croatia. He was here on an illegal visa. And we happen to be in need of a dungeon, and here we have one—right handy.” One of the workmen came in from the lot with a dolly loaded with several boxes. His cohort followed, carrying a tripod.
Davey wiped his eyes as if he thought he might still be dreaming.
“You’re chucking Ratko’s gear to make yourself a photography studio?” Davey was still dressed in his clothes from the night before and stank of stale whiskey. I felt queasy. “I take it the bank’s been paid on this place?”
“Correct,” said Alan. “But we have to save every penny to keep up payments. Shooting our own covers will do that. My photography is widely published, you know. Lots of girls willing to pose for a free portfolio from an artist who shows in London galleries. Now look at these manacles I bought on e-Bay…”
Davey’s brows rose with dark eloquence, but he said nothing as he headed off to the canteen.
Liam shook his head again. “Don’t underestimate Jovan Ratko, Alan. Or Peter. You’ve no idea who you’re dealing with.”
Alan chortled. “I’ve a fine idea who I’m dealing with. So does Henry.” He opened another box, full of paddles and whips.
I escaped to the office to use the computer and ask Vera if she might know what Peter had done with my contract, but the atmosphere in the office was tense. Meggy came in to announce that the milk had gone off, but a tight-lipped Vera kept her eyes on her computer screen.
The Professor’s voice came from the inner office, arguing loudly with Henry about
Fangs of Sherwood
. He kept repeating the words “Paranormal pooftas” at increasing decibels.
I would have liked some non-spoiled milk, since the tea table carton was my main source of protein these days, but I put a couple of sugars in my black tea and went to the computer desk. I had once held carbohydrates in such contempt. Now I was grateful for any calorie I could find.
I tried to block out the chaos, and reminded myself to be happy the bank wasn’t going to evict us all. And grateful that Henry’s attention was on the Professor instead of my missing contract. With Alan busy with dungeon construction, the computer was mine for the day. After my usual heartbreaking visit to my gmail, I gulped my too-sweet tea and decided it was time to fight the despair.
My odd dream had somehow calmed me. I started to write a nice, long message to Plant, acting as if things were perfectly okay—as I’d often advised my readers to do in a time of crisis. After all, “as if” sometimes turns into reality.
And even if it doesn’t, a little self-delusion always makes things easier to bear.
I wrote as if Plant would soon be home, recovered from his heart attack—and my book would soon be lucratively published by Sherwood, Ltd.—and I was not sleeping in a seedy warehouse soon to be shared with a sex dungeon.
I worked on picturing Plant reading my message on his old Mac when he got home from the hospital. Maybe with Silas in the kitchen cooking something low-cholesterol, but delicious. I even pretended I wanted that relationship to work, although right now, my anger at Silas bubbled up every time I thought about him.
But I stifled it and wrote paragraphs filled with stories about Davey and Liam and the Professor, and Rosalee and her cowboy lover. I described the last weekend of alcohol abuse as a great lark, and even made the dungeon seem like a silly joke.
If I could only convince myself of some of it, I might be able to banish my feelings of dread and doom.
Over the next few days, when nothing was done to evict me from the Maidenette Building, I went back to work on my editing and kept my hopes up for Peter’s return. But the atmosphere in the office continued to be so gloomy that I was actually pleased to see Rosalee bounce in for her editing conference with the Professor on Thursday.
She stopped at my desk and beamed a sunny smile.
“I hope Alan Greene isn’t here,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “I do not want to see that creep. Do you believe he keeps calling me trying to have phone sex? The first few times I went along with it, because Colin was out doing some sales thing, but Alan’s fantasies get so perverted. Gross me out!”
I tried to look sympathetic.
“Maybe providing him with phone sex the first few times gave him the wrong idea. Have you thought of telling him you have a boyfriend?”
Rosalee had no time to respond, as the Professor wheeled by and summoned her into Henry’s office.
“I feel like I’m being sent to the principal’s office in school,” she whispered. “Wish me luck.”
I tried to look wishful. At least the phone sex incident provided me with a new Rosalee story to tell Plant. I almost felt compassion for Alan. Rosalee’s mixed signals would befuddle any man.
But my compassion waned when Alan himself showed up a few minutes later, looking slimier than ever. He had slicked his hair back into the rat-tail again and changed from his work clothes into an Italian-cut jacket and Gucci knock-off boots. He gave me a contemptuous smile on his way to join in whatever dramas were taking place in Henry’s office. Now my fears were for Rosalee.
But when Rosalee emerged about an hour later, she was all smiles. I was afraid to ask what had transpired, for fear of triggering one of her mood swings.
Instead, I showed her a map of Swynsby-on-Trent I’d found on the town website.
“Do you want me to print it out for you? This area is full of fascinating places to explore. Did you know that King John stayed here—in the building next to what’s now the Green Man?”
Rosalee looked at me blankly.
“You know, the King John who was Prince John in the Robin Hood stories? Who signed the Magna Carta? There’s a copy of the original Magna Carta in Lincoln. We should take the bus into the city so we can see it—and the real King John’s own handwriting. Almost like being close to Robin Hood.”
Rosalee dismissed all this with a grunt.
“Na. Let’s go to the Green Man. I need a drink, baby girl.”
So now I was her drinking buddy and “baby girl.” I decided to take that as a compliment. But as soon as we were out of earshot of the building, her happy mood faded. She launched into a tirade about Alan. She said he kept trying to “cop a feel.”
“I can’t tell him to go screw himself, because I need him for a while longer, but as soon as my book comes out, I’m going to sue for sexual harassment. Not just Alan. The whole damned company. They call those books erotic? Have you looked at them? Nobody even has sex. It’s all sicko stuff. Talk about a hostile work environment! I’ll sue, totally.” Her face reddened and her shoulders rose as her rage escalated. “That old Mr. Weems acts so proper and everything, but Alan showed me his new book. Gross me out!”
I tried to explain that the books were fantasies, sort of like vampire stories, and Henry didn’t want to torture people any more than she wanted to suck their blood. But I knew I wasn’t completely convincing. Mostly because I’d lost my own conviction that the stuff was harmless, since the dungeon building had started. The line between fantasy and reality seemed to be blurring with Henry and Alan.
But Rosalee calmed down as we approached the pub, and after ordering a plate of chips and a raspberry Bacardi Breezer, her mood was chipper again. She announced that she’d decided to let the Professor do whatever rewrites he wanted, as long as he wasn’t going to bill her for them. Now, she said, it was time for us to plan our book tour, since she didn’t trust Henry or Alan to do it right.
She was so full of enthusiasm, I didn’t bother to tell her about my own book’s threatened cancellation.
“That Alan is mental or something,” Rosalee said, pushing the plate of chips toward me in an offer of sharing. “He told Henry all these crazy things about me—like how I’d worked for some marketing place in Hollywood. Me! I did some publicity for the Renaissance Faire, is all. And he doesn’t even know you’re famous. ‘I’m doing a tour with the Manners Doctor,’ I said. ‘So I can get on any TV show I want.’ He acted all surprised. It’s hard to believe Alan can have all those PhDs, when he’s such a moron.”
I studied Rosalee’s big moon face as I accepted the offered chips, trying not to look like a ravening beast. It was comforting that Rosalee was growing suspicious of Alan’s grandiose lies. Maybe she’d actually prove to be an ally. Between bites of greasy, vinegar-soaked potato, I related the story of Alan’s new “studio.”
Rosalee’s reaction was pure drama-queen.
“Oh my god! You can’t stay there. How awful! That’s definitely a hostile work environment. Totally. You should sue.” She grabbed my hand. “We gotta get you out of there. Come to Puddlethorpe with me. Please?” She squeezed my hand. “Really. I’m bored to death out there. Colin has left me all by myself almost every night since I got here. He travels on business all the time. And there’s no Internet access and no TV. The only thing I can do is work in the garden. I love to garden, but at night—oh, my god, I’m going crazy.” She let go of my hand and smoothed her napkin with exaggerated prissiness. “I promise I won’t put my elbows on the table or anything.”
I declined as gracefully as possible, but the truth was, if the cottage had been equipped with Internet access, I might have chosen Rosalee’s nonstop monologuing over the dungeon-building. But at the moment I couldn’t go anywhere without access to email.
Not until I heard from Plant. He was never out of my thoughts.
When I got back at the factory, I bumped into Henry Weems, emerging from the stairwell to the dungeon. I was terrified he’d talk about evicting me again.
“Oh, there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” he said in his befuddled-accountant way. “Er…Miss Beebee tells me you’re something of a celebrity in the States?” He peered at me over his glasses. “You have a column in a newspaper?”