by Steve Harris
S’n’J didn’t disbelieve this for a second. Janet’s sexual appetite was legendary. She probably would have given Black Rock’s Snowy Dresden a run for her money.
S’n’J said goodbye to Janet, put the phone back on the base and jumped when it immediately began to ring. She waited until it had stopped, then switched on the answering machine. She paused in case the caller rang again and let her mind wander back to the subject of James. And sex.
Then she decided that she might just as well stay in the bath until he arrived. Not because she intended to drag him in there with her as Janet would have done, but because the water was soothing her hurts and because she wanted to read the rest of the book chapter.
You’re not fooling anyone, my girl, she told herself in her mother’s voice. You’ve got the morals of an alley cat!
S’n’J smiled and got back in the bath. After a while she picked up the finger-dampened pages and began to read.
A while after that she totally forgot about James.
Because of what was happening to Snowy.
Snowy really was trapped.
As she read on, S’n’J felt as if she was slowly sinking in quicksand which would soon suffocate her. She fancied she’d seen the ‘electrical-items-that-work-while-unplugged’ trick in other novels (including one of Steve Byrne’s) and the plunge through the universe was familiar from Stephen King’s It but other things rang with a very nasty resonance.
The mysterious Peter Perfect seemed to be aware, for instance, that S’n’J had been unable to break the windows of Black Rock that afternoon. That she’d searched for a back door which didn’t exist. That one of her nightmares concerned dying of thirst in a place where you should have been able to find drinking water. That she sometimes neatly aligned household items for good luck.
And the further she read, the more convinced she became that Snowy Dresden wasn’t just a coincidence, but an intentional facsimile of herself. And that Black Rock wasn’t just an unpublished horror novel, but a malicious plan for the life of Sarah-Jane Dresden.
It was all impossible, of course, but that didn’t stop S’n’J from giving it due consideration.
The phone began to ring again while Snowy was busily aligning all the things in the lounge to point at the front wall of the house.
S’n’J broke out of the story and glanced at the window-sill upon which stood perhaps fifteen or twenty bottles and packets of various sizes; everything you could ever imagine using in a bath. And all of it was neatly aligned in ranks, the labels not facing her, but pointed towards what she fondly imagined was magnetic north.
It had started with the razor, of course. She owned an ancient steel Gillette job that she’d stolen from her father, back in the dark ages. And she’d stuck with it. Those gadgets that yanked the hairs from your legs using rotating discs hurt. Anyway, she’d heard stories about lengthening the life of razor blades by aligning their cutting edges to correspond with the earth’s lines of magnetic force. And somewhere along the way, it had occurred to her that if she were to line up all the things surrounding the razor, so they too faced the same way, perhaps they would act as a kind of focusing device and make the blade sharper still, or increase its longevity.
But now she’d had it pointed out to her in the story it no longer seemed to be a silly experiment she’d done for fun, but a sign of potential mental disorder. The kind of thing a crazy person might do.
The phone had rung three times by the time she’d risen from the bath once more. She’d turned on the answer phone again; so after the fourth ring, the caller would hear the ‘I’m too busy with the Chippendales,’ message so S’n’J wrapped herself in her wet towel and hurried up the hall to see if whoever it was would speak.
‘Look Essenjay, this is Martin, and I’m worried about you,’ a peeved voice said in a tone with which she was all too familiar. S’n’J flipped him a V sign and thought, Up your pipe!
‘Would you please call me and let me know you’re OK,’ he said, gave the office number and rang off.
I know you’re not there, Martin, she thought.
The question was, where was he? Here in Bude? After all he could have been telling the truth when he’d told Janet he wasn’t at his wife’s house. If she rang Ace and left a voice-mail message for him, he could call in and have that message played back to him from wherever he was - be it Bude or Berlin.
S’n’J called the office, just to be sure he wasn’t there after all. She got through to his voice-mail box, and told him that she was just leaving the house to go and stay with her sister in Scarborough. She omitted her ‘sister’s’ Christian name this time, but gave the same address and extended the same invitation. Martin, if he was free, would be welcome to join her there.
Suck on that! she told him, putting the phone down again. She could play Secret Squirrel games too.
Then she dialled the number of Martin’s ex-marital home. Where he used to live before she’d stolen him away from poor Angie. Where he’d been living ever since S’n’J had thrown him out if the truth were known.
Which it is, by certain people, she thought.
She felt sorry for Angie on two counts. First (albeit unknowingly since Martin had said he was separated), she’d taken away the poor woman’s husband, and then, to add insult to injury, she’d given him back again. S’n’J didn’t know which one she felt worse about. Angie might have been unlucky to lose her husband, but as far as S’n’J was concerned, getting him back should have made her feel as if someone up there really had it in for her.
Up in London, someone had lifted the receiver. Whoever it was didn’t speak, but the breathing S’n’J could hear quite plainly belonged to Martin. It was the tight chested, shuddering, sort of breathing you would be most likely to hear when Martin was on top of you, using you as the human equivalent of an inflatable doll.
For a moment, she couldn’t comprehend the messages the breathing contained. Not only was Martin not here in Bude, stalking her like the madman she half-suspected he’d become, but she had interrupted him while he was fucking Angie.
This is impossible, she thought and before she could stop herself, had asked, ‘Martin?’
‘Essen jay?’
In a single word his breathy voice managed to contain shock, hope, delight and extreme lust. A large and awful picture of Martin formed in S’n’J’s mind. He was standing in the hall of Angie’s house, naked and sweating, his face reddened with exertion and his thinning blond hair plastered down and darkened with moisture. He was holding the phone to his ear with his right hand and clutching his erect penis with his left. In a moment he would leer and say, ‘I’ve got something for you, little girl. Something nice. Something big and hard and tasty…’
S’n’J winced and slammed the phone back into its cradle. For a few seconds she glared at it as if it held the sole r
esponsibility for what had just taken place. Then she shuddered in disgust and wondered how she’d ever let Martin anywhere near her.
She put the image out of her mind.
Martin was in London. That was the important thing. It meant that he wasn’t going to turn up here tonight. Not if he was at home fucking poor Angie.
It did raise more questions though. Like the identity of the mystery mail-man who’d been inside the house already today, and who had returned, delivered again and vanished into thin air.
A fresh picture formed in S’n’J’s mind, in the space so recently vacated by the image of Martin. This one showed her Mr Winter folding up. This time he didn’t do it on the periphery of her vision, but square in the centre of her mind’s eye. He flattened and folded double, across his waist first, then through the centre of his body. And as she watched, the rate at which it happened accelerated massively. The first two folds were easy to see, then he became a flickering blur of flat planes which halved and shut down like a stack of pages being riffled. It took less than a second for him to become the size of a grain of sugar. Then he simply snapped out of existence.
She forced this image off its mental canvas and filed it under ‘hallucination’.
S’n’J was now no longer really certain she wanted to welcome James while dressed only in a towel, but, she sat down on the toilet seat to finish the last story pages, not knowing if she was being manipulated, or how to counter it if she was. The only course of action open to her at the moment was to read what she was sent and await further developments.
Inside five minutes Peter Perfect had hooked her again. She had forgotten all her own problems and was engrossed with those of her namesake who had dutifully lined up all the objects in the lounge and who was now standing by the open front door wondering if she should go back to the kitchen for the car keys she needed.
Her heart sank when she reached the end of the page on which Snowy, having finally got the keys had fled the house and run straight into Philip Winter’s arms.
She turned the page over, hoping for more, but that, apparently, that was the end of the chapter.
14 - Sarah-Jane’s Romantic Interlude
S’n’J was still in the bathroom when the letter-box flap rattled again.
‘Oh no!’ she moaned.
But when she got out into the hall there was no buff A4 envelope on the mat awaiting her attention. And whoever it was outside was still there because the flap rattled a second time.
S’n’J put the security chain on before she opened the door, then when she saw who it was, wished she hadn’t.
‘Hiya,’ James said.
He looked even better clean than he’d done dirty and S’n’J felt the sun break through the clouds in her mind. Its rays scattered her thoughts about the book in every direction. They skittered away like beads of moisture dropped on a hot pan.
‘Hello,’ she said, through lips that had suddenly formed themselves into a big, playful grin. ‘Come in,’ she invited, unhooking the chain and stepping back.
Her movements had loosened the towel she’d wrapped around herself and as she stood back it started to slip. She struggled to stay inside it, then realized that if she turned round James was going to be treated to a view of her bare bottom.
She thought of what Janet had said then and found that a substantial part of her wanted to flash her behind at him. It’s one of your best assets, if you’ll pardon the pun, she told herself, while she wrestled with the concept.
Don’t! her Girl Guide voice warned.
But Janet’s words about getting him in the bath inside three seconds rang in her mind, and visions of Snowy and Philip Winter fucking like animals swarmed in her head and S’n’J suddenly felt drunk with desire and very daring indeed. Her heart whacked hard against her ribs, her blood pressure rose and she began to tremble faintly, right down to what seemed to be the core of her being. She fought it for two seconds while she stared into James’ brown eyes and registered his slightly puzzled smile, then she let herself go.
‘Follow me,’ she said, turning, and led him into the lounge.
Where she discovered that her desire equalled that of her namesake.
Half-way across the lounge, she turned back to him, let the towel fall and took him in her arms.
James was taller than Martin, his body harder, his lips more gentle, his tongue more fervent. His hands were stronger but possessed a skill that Martin’s would never have.
S’n’J took his jacket off him, tore his shirt off and found her lips against pectorals that were not empty sacks of skin, but firmly muscled. His body smelled good. S’n’J took one of his nipples between her teeth and James moaned, his hands tightening for a moment against her buttocks.
She broke away from him, shuddering, and stared into his face. ‘Hello James,’ she said, ‘I’m glad you came.’ And holding his gaze, she unbuttoned his jeans, found the zipper and lowered it. He was bigger than Martin, she knew that already, but she wanted to see. She had to see. She took the waistband of his jeans and dragged them down his hips, taking his shorts with them.
The sight that greeted her was perfect and it pulsed with his heartbeat.
S’n’J ran her fingertips down its length and watched the resultant muscular spasm.
‘I want you,’ she heard herself say and encircled his erection with her hand. It seemed almost as big as her wrist and as hard as the granite her favourite haunted house was built upon. S’n’J felt as if she was coming apart inside. As if she might soon die of desire. When she took him into her mouth James made a sound like a little boy who is close to tears and its wanting tone drove S’n’J over the edge. Every nerve ending she had fizzled like fireworks.
‘Lie down,’ she said breathlessly. ‘On your back.’
James did as he was told and S’n’J straddled him, and lowered herself on to him.
During the next ten minutes she let herself turn into the same kind of insatiable animal that Snowy Dresden was supposed to be.
Only when she was worn out did she climb off James (who was apparently able to buck like the proverbial bronco, indefinitely and without coming) and worked on his cock with her hands and her mouth, hard and fast. She kept on pumping while he came and was surprised by the force of his orgasm, which shot semen with enough force to fly up the length of his body and hit him in the face.
I think I’m in love, she told herself and pressed her lips to his in a sticky kiss that she hoped would go on for ever.
15 - Ellen and Snowball the Hamster
Now they were clean and dressed again (and Janet was right about the bath being big enough for two) and sitting beside each other on the sofa, a respectable distance between them. James was reading Black Rock.
S’n’J watched him and wondered why she didn’t feel as if they were lovers. Since they had put their clothes back on they seemed to have turned into two people who barely knew one another.<
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Which isn’t exactly surprising, considering that’s exactly what you are, she informed herself. Having sex just makes you two people who had sex.
But they would become proper lovers, if nothing happened to prevent it, S’n’J knew that. It was what she wanted. James was sweet and he’d given her more pleasure in half an hour than Martin had managed in two years. He might be a bit younger than her, and ‘only’ a garage mechanic, but neither of these things entered the equation as far as she was concerned. James was like Snowy Dresden: she wanted to know more about both of them.
And anyway, she asked herself, what do you mean ‘if nothing happens to prevent it? What are you expecting?
But that question didn’t really need answering. S’n’J might have been a little confused since arriving in Tintagel that morning, but she wasn’t completely stupid. James was sitting beside her reading the story, which meant that it existed, not only in her imagination, but in real life too. And the trouble, if any, was going to be caused by Black Rock and its author.
Unless all this was an hallucination too, and she doubted that. If it was, it was a pretty good one. She’d give it full marks for content and entertainment value.
The others were pretty good ones too though, weren’t they? her Girl Guide asked. But if she started to consider what that meant, she really would go crazy. Her whole life could turn out to have been nothing more than an extended dream.
All she needed to be sure of was that James was real, and that Black Rock, the manuscript, was also real. And she was sure. Once James had offered an opinion on what was contained within the pages, she would know whether or not what she had read was real.
James’ lips moved when he read, but only - she learned from cribbing over his shoulder - when he got to passages of speech. S’n’J had seen people test the words of books with their mouths before, but they usually read the whole thing that way. Seeing someone do it only when they read speech was quite amusing and she warmed to James a little more.