And he would go to her, like an obedient dog.
He sighed.
The girls were still there, and now they were talking louder, or maybe he was listening more carefully, and the brunette was examining a strand of pale coral called angel skin. It was more white than pink, and he’d never seen coral that colour. She was talking about how it was formed from the bodies of dead sea creatures. The other girl interrupted.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Trisha. Actually, you see, angels die, and their skins just sort of slough off and drift down from Heaven into the seas, and the coral forms from the skins.’
Next to him he sensed Bev crossing herself, and he felt a surge of annoyance at the gesture. She didn’t go to church, hadn’t been in one since before they got married - at least she couldn’t blame him for that - but she still crossed herself. She still had her rosary, and he always wondered why, when she’d turned her back on the church when her faith seemed so strong. His faith had left him years ago; one day he had it, the next it was gone, and he hadn’t stepped inside a church since, hadn’t felt the need, didn’t know why anyone did.
You just don’t understand. That was Bev’s voice, and his mother’s, and maybe that girl back in high school, the one he had dated in junior year.
It occurred to him that all the little things that annoyed him about his wife were probably what bothered her about him. Only more so, since he’d been told enough by her and his parents and everyone else that he had numerous faults. Sometimes at night as he lay next to Bev and listened to her wheezy breaths he wondered why she had married him if he possessed all these character flaws. It wasn’t like he’d changed radically after marriage. He was basically the same as when he got out of college. Marriage hadn’t made him any better or any worse. He thought. He was sure there were others who could tell him different.
Maybe Bev was one of those women who see a flawed man as a challenge and think that once they’ve married him they can change him, as if he were so much clay to be moulded by her perfecting hands.
Or perhaps she liked the thrill of marrying a man so far from perfection.
Or maybe she married him, despite what everyone counselled her, because she was the type to defy everyone’s good intentions.
Or maybe she just hadn’t seen any of these flaws.
‘Let me look at some coral,’ Bev was saying now.
Well, there was white coral and red coral and blue coral, and God knows what other colours waiting in other velvet trays. Out of the corner of his eye Jim could see dust motes swirling in the rays still streaming through the window. They drifted downwards, and he remembered what the girl had said. Skins drifted downwards. He felt the pull of the light, and yawned lazily.
Of course, there were single strand necklaces, and double strands, as well as triple. There were smooth beads, hardly larger than the thread used to string them; there were chunks of coral, and there was the branch coral that looked like so many fingers and toes hardened into bizarre angles.
Bizarre angels, he thought, and chuckled aloud, then looked away as he saw the old man and Bev staring at him.
You always laugh at your own jokes, she had once accused him after they’d argued about God knows what, and he always wondered what kind of vice that was. If that was the worst he’d ever done . . . laugh at his own jokes...then...But unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst of his sins. His sins were many. Sometimes they seemed to go on and on, page after page.
Sins of stubbornness, and negativity, and insensitivity, and pride. Could one be proud of the number of sins one carried around?
Probably.
Mea culpa.
‘What do you think, Jimmy?’
‘It’s nice, hon,’ he replied and realized he hadn’t even looked. He stared down at the necklace she’d clasped around her neck, and he imagined his hands around her neck, and how it would feel. Her skin so warm beneath his, and he shifted from one foot to another, feeling the response in his body.
Swell. Add another sin to the list.
He moved closer and dropped a kiss on top of her head. Okay, that took care of the sin. She looked up at him, her thin lips pressed together, as if he’d goosed her or something.
‘My hair . . . it’ll get mussed,’ she said.
Good God. He’d just kissed her; he hadn’t vacuumed her damned scalp, and if you asked him, her hair always looked the same, no matter what she did to it, no matter what colour she dyed it, and why she always asked him—
No, he thought and blinked hard and turned around to look at the light. It was fading now, the sun having shifted since he’d last looked, and sadness enveloped him. He wanted to go stand there, and let the dust drift around him, like little skins, drifting downward ever so slowly, drifting, drifting . . . drifting. . .
‘What do you think, senor?’ the old man asked.
‘What?’Jim turned around.
‘The necklace,’ Bev said, impatient that he hadn’t been attending every nuance of the deal going on, and she thrust a strand at him.
He took the necklace, and it was as if something at once both hot and cold touched him; he stared down at the white coral and thought of skinned angels. He felt the warmth of their skins seeping out, the coldness of the water creeping in, saw the agonized looks, saw—
He shook his head.
‘No?’ Bev said. ‘What about this?’
The next necklace thrust into his hands was a double strand of reddish coral, and he saw the blood swirling through the water, felt the coldness of the skins, and yet they were so soft, so pliant beneath his fingers, and he caressed the coral, and heard the screams, and he looked up to see the old man watching him intently.
‘This is nice,’ he said hoarsely, and the old man nodded as if he’d expected all along Jim to say that.
‘I don’t know,’ Bev said. She grabbed another strand and put that into his hands, and now he had another soft buttery skin beneath his fingertips, and as he stroked the supple skins, he groaned inwardly.
‘Well, Jimmy?’
‘Well?’ He stared at her, feeling befuddled. His senses had dulled, and he couldn’t smell the intense perfumes and spices as he had before, couldn’t hear much of anything as well, as if even the girls standing so close to him had stopped talking loudly and were now whispering.
He closed his eyes and thought about Bev and how their marriage was falling apart and how they didn’t have the good sense to admit it, and how he wanted nothing more than to make the marriage ... to make something in his life work, how he wanted to make everyone realize they were wrong when they said he was stubborn and negative and callous, and all he wanted, really, was to stand in the sunlight and be left alone and not be told that he was this or that, all of it bad.
When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in the warm sunlight, looking out the window. Outside he could see Bev crossing the street at the corner, and at her side, but one step behind, was a man that he dimly recognized, and it hit him after a vague minute that the man with Bev was him.
Jim tried to move, but couldn’t. All he could do was stare out the window and feel the dust motes settling on him, like little dried-out angel skins, like the dried-out husk that he’d become, that Bev had turned him into.
He would have laughed, but he couldn’t. Nor could he weep. All he could do was feel the sunlight, and realize that the underlying smell of the place hadn’t been perfume or incense at all; it had been that of dusty dying souls.
* * * *
Kathryn Ptacek lives in a 110-year-old Victorian house in New Jersey with her writer husband, Charles L. Grant, and is the author of numerous novels and short stories in the historical romance, horror and fantasy genres. She has edited three anthologies, including the highly acclaimed Women of Darkness, and she is also the editor of The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets, a regular newsletter for writers and artists. About ‘Skinned Angels’, Ptacek says: ‘The incident with the two young women and the coral necklace is true. Years ago when I still liv
ed in Albuquerque, a friend and I drove up to Santa Fe and wandered through various stores around the Plaza. At one place, a woman showed us the necklace and said it was angel skin coral. I said, suddenly inspired, that it was formed from the skins of angels, which had sloughed off and drifted down into the ocean to form coral. Well, I grossed out the clerk and my friend (who was a Catholic and did cross herself). Years later I started to write a story about angels, but instead I remembered the coral necklace incident, and it all came together in “Skinned Angels”.’
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* * * *
The Windmill
CONRAD WILLIAMS
As they drove past the gutted skeleton of the Escort, Claire tensed.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jonathan, easing off the accelerator.
‘There was someone in that,’ she said, twisting against her seat belt to look out of the back window. ‘Stop. Go back.’
He shook his head. ‘Will you stop messing about, Claire? I can never tell when you’re being truthful. You should have been an actress.’
The car diminished. It was standing on its hubs - the tyres having melted - in a pool of oil. Claire squinted at the driver’s side: a black shape was bolt upright in what remained of the seat.
She turned around.
Jonathan was fiddling with the tuner, trying to find some music. The only station that cropped up on the automatic search was a thin, scratchy hiss, punctuated by a slow whump...whump sound.
‘Welcome to Radio Norfolk,’ said Claire, trying to purge her mind of the images with which it was now taunting her. Imagine: No lips. Just a gritted sheet of white. His fat oozing through the black shell of his skin to hang in yellowish loops, like cheap pizza cheese.
The Fens reached out beyond the hedgerows muscling against the car, green fields splashed with red poppies and sprigs of purple lavender. Claire wound down the window and breathed deeply, trying to unwind. This was meant to be a relaxing weekend but already she felt that she had made errors. And that riled her.
‘Norfolk? Why are you going to Norfolk?’ they had asked her back at the office. She had felt the need to defend the place, even though the nearest she had ever been to the county was a day trip to Mablethorpe as a child.
‘There’s lots of unspoilt coastline,’ she said. ‘I want long, windswept beaches to walk along. And there’s a stack of wildlife. Apparently.’
‘You should try Suffolk instead,’ a colleague, Gill, had said, almost desperately, while her deputy looked at her with an expression approaching pity.
Jonathan had suggested they go to Paris but she quashed that idea because she did not want to spend too much money. And anyway, what was the point of going away for a weekend to another busy, polluted city? But that was not strictly true. Her negativity had more to do with the fact that the break was Claire’s baby: she wanted to come up with the plan. Now, as they swept through mile after mile of flat, sunbleached land, she was beginning to wish that she had thought of Paris first. And she was also thinking of Jonathan’s disappointment and the ‘told you so’ triumphs of her workmates once she got back.
Jonathan was aware of her frustration. He rubbed her leg. ‘We’ll stop for a drink, hey?’ he said. ‘Next pub we come to. We’ll try some good old local brew.’
‘There was someone in that fucking car,’ she snapped, although she was already starting to doubt it herself.
‘Fine,’ he said, braking hard. ‘Get out and go and save him.’
They sat in silence, the heat building. Claire strained for some sound to massage the barrier loose between them but none was forthcoming. They had not seen a car, a moving car, for an hour or so. The occasional, isolated buildings they had passed were gutted and crippled, the life seemingly sucked from their stone into the dun pastures that supported them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just - it’s work, you know? It’s been getting me down. I just want this weekend to be perfect. I need this break and maybe...maybe I’ve not realized that you need it just as much. You’ve driven all the way from London and .. .’ she trailed off, lamely. Work excuses were crap, she knew that and so did he.
Jonathan did not say anything. He started the car and moved off.
‘Put a tape on,’ he said. ‘Anything. I’m getting jumpy with all this bloody quiet.’
She dug for a cassette from the pile on the back seat. Most were hers, although there were one or two tapes from his past, recorded on blanks by ex-girlfriends and scribbled over with red kisses. Alexander O’Neal. Luther Vandross. He had some new stuff, Fugees and Skunk Anansie, but she could not get the irritation out of her where those older albums were concerned. It was not so much the music - it was shite, that went without saying - it was thoughts, while she listened to it, of what he had been up to. Why would you play Luther Vandross if you were not doing what he was singing about?
Her fingers settled on a Pavement album they both liked. The tension between them relaxed a little but Claire was glad to be able to point out a pub - it would be good to get out of the car and make the distance between them an optional matter.
‘Where are we, navigator?’Jonathan asked, parking the car in the gravel forecourt. Behind them, a stone building with no discernible purpose was the only other sign of life around.
‘Urn, Cockley Cley. Just south of Swaffham.’
‘Right. Let’s get refuelled. Hungry?’
A man wearing sunglasses and a padded Parka uncoiled from the corner of a bench outside the pub, where he had been sunning himself. He snaked out a hand to the adjoining picnic table and withdrew a pallid sandwich from a paper bag. His flask was attached to a sling around his shoulder. Jonathan nodded as they walked by, but if the man reacted, Claire did not see it.
Inside, three men were hunched over their meals, whispering conspiratorially. A cold meat buffet under hotlights reminded Claire of a Pantone chart of greys. To their left, the lounge was empty: two men were sitting at the bar, exchanging lowing, long-vowelled words. Claire wanted to leave.
‘Jonathan—’
The man facing her wore a shirt opened to his navel. His gut lolled there, a strip of sweat banding his sternum. His nose was a sickening chunk of discoloured flesh, bulbous and misshapen, hanging down almost to his top lip. She watched, fascinated and repulsed, as he dragged a handkerchief across it, threatening to smear it even further. It looked as though it was melting. His companion was dressed in a cheap suit with a purple shirt. His hair was greased back, one blade of it swung menacingly in front of his eyes. His grin was loose and slick with spit. She could see his dentures, behind the pitted white flaps of his lips, clacking loosely around his mouth.
She edged towards her boyfriend as the landlord appeared from behind a gingham curtain. She was conscious of movement behind his arm: a swift descent of something silver, a hacking noise. She backed into a chair and sat down.
‘Pint of Flowers. And, er—’ Jonathan looked at her and she saw a little boy lost. The men eating their lunch had looked up at his softly blunted northern tones. They looked confused, as if they ought to act upon this invasion but did not know what course to take.
‘Glass of fresh orange,’ she said, her voice too loud.
The landlord poured their drinks and took Jonathan’s money. He had the look of a pathologically strict sergeant-major. His moustache and his accent were violently clipped. His eyes were an unpleasant blue.
They took their drinks outside and sat on the bench adjacent to the man with the flask. He was still eating. He gave them a cursory once-over and zipped his Parka closer to his throat.
‘Jesus,’ whispered Jonathan, downing half of his drink, ‘Jesusing Christing piss.’
‘Did you see that man’s nose?’ hissed Claire, fidgety with nervous excitement. She was close to guffawing. ‘What do you think it was? Syphilis? Cancer?’
Jonathan polished off his pint. ‘Demonic possession,’ he said, standing. ‘Drink that, bring it or leave it. We’ve been here seven minutes too long.’
They spewed gravel getting out of the car park. Claire looked back and saw the sergeant-major step out of the door, his hand raised, a stricken look on his face.
Neither of them said anything until they hit the relative bustle of Swaffham. Even then, their relief could only manifest itself in gusts of laughter.
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 13