Touchy and Feely

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Come on, Feely,’ said Robert. ‘Don’t be shy and retiring. Come on in. We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’

  ‘I, uh—’

  ‘Come on, Feely! Not like you to be lost for words! We’re having a good time here, aren’t we, Serenity? We’re having a bee-aye-double-ell ball! Why don’t you join us?’

  Serenity giggled. ‘Come on, Feely!’ she repeated. ‘Come on, Feely!’ Then—to the tune of ‘Hang On, Sloopy’—she sang, ‘Come on, Feely—Feely, come on!’

  Feely opened his mouth and closed it again. He had never experienced such an avalanche of emotions, all at once. Embarrassment, jealousy, lust, anger, rage and elation. He felt as if God had opened the top of his head and poured them all in, without even giving him the chance to say stop!

  ‘Don’t you Cubans know how to have fun?’ Robert taunted him. ‘I thought Cuba was the land of sex and rum and sex and big fat cigars and sex! Here—come and have a piece of this! How can you refuse?’

  Feely lifted up his drawing. ‘I did this for you,’ he said, so weakly that he could hardly hear his own voice. Robert and Serenity obviously couldn’t hear him either, or didn’t care. Robert circled his right arm around Serenity’s flabby waist. He heaved once, he heaved twice, and then he rolled right over onto his back, his left arm still extended, so that Serenity was lying on top of him, facing upward. She kicked her legs and screamed and laughed and shrilled out, ‘You’re crazy! What are you doing? We’re going to fall off the bed!’

  Robert laughed at Feely, over Serenity’s shoulder; and Serenity laughed at him too.

  ‘Here it is, Feely, the promised land. Come and stake your claim.’

  ‘Come on, Feely—Feely, come on!’ sang Serenity.

  Feely didn’t hesitate. He dropped his Captain Lingo drawing onto the floor. He reached behind him and dragged off his polo shirt, inside-out, and dropped that too.

  ‘Yayy!’ Robert encouraged him, as he unbuttoned his chinos. But then, ‘Don’t forget your socks, Feely! There ain’t nothing more guaranteed to put a girl off than a naked guy wearing nothing but his socks!’

  Feely tugged off his socks, and then he stumbled out of his pants. He had to grab the end of the bed to stop himself from falling over. But then he was standing there naked and skinny, and so excited that he could hardly breathe.

  ‘Here it is, Feely!’ said Robert. All the same he wasn’t sure what Robert and Serenity expected him to do. Feely climbed onto the end of the bed, but he felt inexperienced and thin and unsure of himself and he was convinced that they could actually see his heart beating, under his ribcage.

  ‘Give the kid a helping hand, will you, darling?’ wheezed Robert. ‘I’m dying of asphyxia under here.’

  Serenity lifted herself up a little, even though Robert grunted and said, ‘Squashed to death by an overweight bimbo, that’s what they’ll put on my headstone!’ She reached out and took Feely’s hand, and drew him closer. ‘Come on, Feely,’ she whispered. ‘Feely, come on.’

  Feely edged himself closer and closer, and then Serenity guided him inside her. She felt so warm and liquid that Feely thought that there was no sensation in the world which could possibly feel more ecstatic. And she was still looking at him, and still smiling, and she seemed to be so calm and matter-of-fact.

  Then they were all together. Robert heaved his hips up, and Serenity arched her back, and at the same time she grasped Feely around the waist and pulled him into her. This was like nothing he had ever felt before, nothing he had imagined before . . .

  And suddenly it was over. Robert slumped and let out a deep groan of defeat. ‘God, I’m too drunk . . . God, I’m far too drunk.’ All three of them collapsed and lay there with their arms and their legs entangled. Feely could see a hand and at first he thought it was his, but when it wriggled its fingers he realized it was Serenity’s. Robert was breathing noisily against his neck.

  As he lay there, it slowly crept into Feely’s mind that he loved these people. Not just Serenity, because she was a girl, and her breasts had looked enticing in the firelight; but Robert, too; for all that he was so cynical, and he drank so much, and he had nearly killed them both. And it wasn’t because they had all had sex together, either. It was the closeness. It was the feeling of being in a family, where they could say whatever they wanted and do whatever they wanted. Feely suddenly understood that he had reached the place where he was going. Here, on this bed, with Robert and Serenity, this was the north.

  Eventually Feely sat up. He reached out and stroked Serenity’s hair, and then her shoulder. She looked at him and said, ‘I’m hungry again. Are you hungry?’

  ‘It’s that dope you smoke,’ said Robert. ‘Personally, I couldn’t eat another thing.’

  With that, he let off a loud, complicated fart. Serenity let out a shout of laughter and fell on top of him, and Feely started laughing, too. For nearly five minutes, the three of them lay on the bed, laughing until they had to bang each other on the back.

  But Robert suddenly stopped laughing and said, ‘Shit!’ and then ‘Shit!’ and started ferreting wildly through the sheets.

  ‘What’s wrong, man?’ Feely asked him.

  ‘My fingers!’ said Robert, in desperation. ‘My goddamned fingers have fallen off!’

  The House of Loathsome Things

  It took them nearly two hours to find 7769 Lamentation Mountain Road, and by then Steve’s left eye was throbbing so much that he could barely open it. He knew it was stress, and he knew he should probably take something for it, but he had never liked pills. His mother had always taken pills. So far as she was concerned, pills were the answer to everything, from chronic disappointment with her choice of husband to a fallen Parmesan soufflé.

  When they saw headlights on the Berlin Turnpike less than a mile up ahead of them, Doreen realized that they must have passed the house already. She turned the Tahoe around and drove slowly back the way they had come.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she said, peering through the windshield as if she were a lookout on a whaler. ‘Alan’s really going to need your support right now.’

  ‘I know that, Doreen. But this is a homicide, or even a double homicide. It doesn’t matter who’s involved, homicide has to be a higher priority than sexual assault.’

  ‘Have you heard yourself? He’s your son!’

  ‘I know. But if he did it, then he deserves whatever he gets.’

  ‘You don’t really think that he assaulted that girl, do you? It sounds to me like she made it up, so that her parents wouldn’t give her a hard time for playing mummies and daddies while they were out.’

  ‘Doreen—I don’t know. I haven’t heard the evidence.’

  Doreen drove in silence for a while. But then she said, ‘I don’t entirely blame you. I mean, kids these days. It’s about time they carried their own cans. They always seem to expect that we’re going to do it for them, and then they get chippy with us when we say no.’

  Steve was wiping his nose. ‘That doesn’t make me feel any better. But, thanks.’

  They turned a rising left-hand bend, and as they did so they saw a track running off to the right, between overgrown bramble bushes. The bushes were thick with snow, which had effectively camouflaged the track when they were approaching it from the opposite direction. Doreen stopped the SUV and said, ‘Logically, 7769 should be here.’

  ‘Well, let’s give it a try.’

  They bumped and jostled their way down the track, with branches scraping against the Tahoe’s doors, and snow dropping from the overhanging trees. After about a half-mile, they found themselves in a clearing. It was strangely luminous, because of the snow, and Lamentation Mountain was rising to the north-west, barely visible, like a bad memory.

  At the far side of the clearing there was a small single-story house, painted pale green. It had a low, shingled roof and a verandah all the way around it. Not far away from the house there was a shed made of rusty corrugated iron, and resembling a disused pig-pen.


  ‘Doesn’t look like there’s anybody home,’ said Doreen.

  They drove slowly up to the house and stopped. Steve climbed out of the SUV and took out his flashlight and his gun. Doreen climbed out, too.

  ‘Maybe we should come back with a search warrant,’ she suggested.

  ‘I don’t know whether we’d get one.’

  Their footsteps crunched on the snow as they crossed the yard at the front of the house. A washing-line was suspended from the verandah to a skinny, leafless tree. There was a green plaid shirt on it, and three pairs of boxer shorts, all frozen solid. ‘Hope he thaws those out before he tries to put them on,’ said Doreen.

  They went up the steps to the front door and knocked. Each knock echoed from the trees on the opposite side of the clearing.

  While they waited, Steve looked around. It was hard to tell if anybody still lived here. There was a sagging canvas chair, and a rusted table with a hammered-glass top, and a child’s scooter with no back wheel, but they could have been abandoned long ago.

  Steve opened the screen door and tried the door handle. To his surprise, the door wasn’t locked. ‘Maybe he wasn’t expecting visitors.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t have anything worth stealing.’

  ‘Still,’ said Steve, ‘we’d better check the place out, just to make sure that nobody’s broken in.’

  He opened the front door and went inside, and Doreen followed him. They found themselves in a chilly living room. It was sparsely furnished, but there were plenty of signs that somebody was still living here. The fire in the hearth had gone out, and it was heaped with soft gray ashes, but the ashes were still faintly warm. There was a damp, sagging couch, upholstered in worn brown velveteen, and the cushions were still out of shape where somebody had been lying on them. There was a stool next to the couch with an ashtray on it, crammed with cigarette butts, as well as the plastic tray from a microwaveable fruit pie, and an empty Miller bottle.

  Steve flicked his flashlight left and right. The walls were papered with large green flowers, faded by years of damp and sunlight. Next to the fireplace there was a calendar from Middletown Auto Spares, still turned to August, with a color picture of a 1957 Chrysler 300F on it—‘red-hot and rambunctious.’ On the opposite wall there was a large photograph of a hairy-legged spider, torn out of a magazine, and a yellowed black-and-white photograph of a couple standing outside a hardware store. By their hairstyles, and the way they were dressed, Steve guessed that the photograph had been taken sometime in the late 1960s.

  Stacked in one corner of the room were at least a dozen copies of Guns & Ammo, as well as several of Hot Rod, and three numbers of Hustler.

  ‘You can tell a pin-headed male chauvinist by the books he reads,’ Doreen quoted.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I did, just now. These are the same magazines my Newton likes to look at.’

  Steve went through to the kitchenette. It was fitted out in yellow and scarlet Formica, and every shelf and work surface was crowded with half-empty tubs of margarine and dirty plates and unwashed coffee cups and torn-open packs of instant pasta and curled-up Kraft cheese slices. The old Westinghouse cooker was thick with dark brown grease and there was a saucepan on it which was filled with rancid gray foam.

  ‘Well,’ said Doreen. ‘We’re not looking for Mr Clean.’

  Steve opened and closed the kitchen drawers. He was looking for boxes of ammo, but all he found was filthy knives and forks, an egg-whisk that still had egg on it, used batteries, rubber-bands, and the same detritus that everybody keeps in their kitchen drawers, like business cards from screen-door salesmen, and take-out pizza menus.

  He opened the door to one of the bedrooms. As he did so, Doreen said, ‘Don’t come into the bathroom, not unless you have a really strong stomach. He had a dump this morning but forgot to flush.’

  The bedroom wasn’t much better. There was no undersheet on the bed, only a heavily stained and misshapen mattress which looked as if it had been rescued from a roadside ditch. A coffee-brown candlewick bedspread was lying on the floor, along with a heap of dirty socks and work shirts. A small dressing table stood beside the bed, its veneer lifted by damp. There was an economy can of Right Guard spray deodorant on it, and a bottle of Aramis aftershave.

  ‘At least he knows that he smells bad,’ said Doreen.

  Steve opened the door to the second bedroom. It was in total darkness, but his flashlight caught the smeary glint of glass. He took a cautious step forward. The room was surprisingly warm, unlike the rest of the house. As he took another step forward, however, he was overwhelmed by the worst stench that he had ever smelled in his life. It was thick, and leathery, and rotten: like natural gas, and putrescing fur coats, and raw chicken that had gone past its sell-by date. He covered his face with his hand, but even so he couldn’t stop himself from retching.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, taking a step backward.

  ‘What is it?’ said Doreen. Then, immediately, ‘Sweet Jesus. What’s that smell?’

  ‘Here, the windows are covered, let’s have some light.’

  Steve groped around the door-jamb until he found the light switch. There was a single fluorescent tube hung diagonally across the ceiling. It flickered for a few seconds, and then it sprang into full brilliance. Doreen made a desperate haaahhh noise, like a terrified child.

  The room was filled with tables of assorted sizes, and each table was stacked with glass fish-tanks. The fish-tanks, however, didn’t contain fish, but spiders, and snakes, and giant snails, and centipedes, and enormous slugs, and some glutinous creatures that Steve couldn’t even put a name to. All of the windows were covered with corrugated cardboard, and there was a small electric storage heater standing in the center of the room to keep the temperature up in the seventies.

  As Steve looked around, his hand still clamped over his face, one of the largest spiders jumped against the glass of its tank, and he couldn’t stop himself from jerking back. Everything else seemed to be moving, too. A brown centipede with rippling legs; and scores of cockroaches; and a pale beige slug which kept rolling its eyes in and out.

  Steve ducked his head down and quickly checked under the tables, just to satisfy himself that there were no rifles or ammunition concealed there. Then he switched off the light and closed the door.

  Doreen was standing in the middle of the living room, fanning herself furiously with her hand. ‘I’m going to have nightmares about this for the rest of the year. I mean, where does this guy get off?’

  ‘Maybe he identifies with spiders and centipedes. Insects kill things at random, don’t they, without any qualms about it?’

  ‘We really have to find this guy, don’t we? If his pet collection is anything to go by, he’s seriously nuts.’

  Steve took a last look around. There was nothing else they could do here, not tonight. They couldn’t even admit that they had been here, and searched the place.

  ‘Come on,’ said Doreen. ‘We should get you back now.’

  Steve nodded. He stepped outside the house and found to his relief that his headache had almost gone.

  They climbed back into the Tahoe, and Doreen started the engine. She had only just released the parking brake, however, when they saw headlights jostling toward them, over the snow.

  ‘Holy moly,’ said Doreen. ‘It’s him!’

  The Heartless Coachman

  Mr Boots was waiting for her by the back door when she returned, his tail drumming against the washing machine.

  ‘I know, fellow,’ she said, tugging his ears. ‘You must be starving. I’m sorry I was out for so long.’

  Sam stayed outside. ‘You don’t need me to come in, do you, Sissy? I’d best be getting home.’

  ‘Don’t you want a drink? It’s the least I can offer you, for driving me all the way to Canaan and back. How about a brandy?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sissy. I’m just about ready for a mug of warm milk, and the latest Clive Cussler.’

  Sissy went
back to the doorstep. Snow was spiraling out of the sky, onto his shoulders. ‘What happened to us, Sam? When did we lose our licentious youth?’

  ‘The only licentious youth I know is working behind the counter at Quinn’s Drugstore.’

  Sissy leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Thanks, Sam. I’m going to read the cards again tonight, and see what’s going to happen next. You don’t mind if I call you, do you, if I need you?’

  Sam kissed her back, and squeezed her hand, but somehow this attempt to show her how much he felt for her seemed desperately sad, and all Sissy could do was give him a regretful little smile, and turn her face away.

  Mr Boots prodded her with his cold wet nose, behind the knees, just above the top of her boots. ‘OK, fellow, I’m coming. Thanks for everything, Sam. You’re an angel.’

  Sam said nothing. He was obviously aware that something wasn’t quite right between them, but he didn’t know what. Or else he did know what, and didn’t want to face up to it. When it came down to it, warm milk and Clive Cussler were so much more comfortable than vodka and Sissy Sawyer.

  Sissy opened up a pack of Bil-Jac senior dog food, chicken and oatmeal flavor. Mr Boots didn’t like it as much as Alpo’s hearty beef, bacon and cheese, but the vet had warned Sissy that he needed less fat and more fiber at his age, and in any case it usually gave Sissy a quieter night.

  She lit a cigarette and built up the fire, which had sunk down to nothing but a few glowing embers. Then she sat in Gerry’s old armchair, still wearing her coat, smoking and thinking. She couldn’t get those three people out of her mind. Les Trois Araignées. She could still see the older man, chopping his hand; and the younger man, laughing. If she had taken a photograph, and reversed it left-to-right, and changed the ax into a pruning-hook, it would have been almost an identical reproduction of La Faucille Terrible, right down to their facial features.

  But what had exhilarated her, and bewildered her, and tired her so much, was the way in which she had been drawn toward them. Not only to Canaan, but to Orchard Street, to the very house where they were staying. She couldn’t explain it. She had always been highly sensitive to other people’s feelings. As she had told Mina Jessop, she could feel true love through a cinderblock wall. But the magnetism which had pulled her today was stronger than any emotional force which she had experienced before.