The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Linda ... She was still on my mind—at the back of it, anyway—later that night as I sat in the bar of my hotel beside an open bougainvillaea-decked balcony that looked down on the bay and the seafront lights of the town. And maybe she wasn’t all that far back in my mind—maybe she was right there in front—or else I was just plain daydreaming. Whichever, I missed the entry of the lovely lady and her shriveled companion, failing to spot and recognize them until they were taking their seats at a little table just the other side of the balcony’s sweep.

  This was the closest I’d been to her, and—

  Well, first impressions hadn’t lied. This girl was beautiful. She didn’t look quite as young as she’d first seemed—my own age, maybe—but beautiful she certainly was. And the old boy? He must be, could only be, her father. Maybe it sounds like I was a little naive, but with her looks this lady really didn’t need an old man. And if she did need one it didn’t have to be this one.

  By now she’d seen me and my fascination with her must have been obvious. Seeing it she smiled and blushed at one and the same time, and for a moment turned her eyes away—but only for a moment. Fortunately her companion had his back to me or he must have known my feelings at once; for as she looked at me again—fully upon me this time—I could have sworn I read an invitation in her eyes, and in that same moment any bitter vows I may have made melted away completely and were forgotten. God, please let him be her father!

  For an hour I sat there, drinking a few too many cocktails, eating olives and potato crisps from little bowls on the bar, keeping my eyes off the girl as best I could, if only for common decency’s sake. But ... all the time I worried frantically at the problem of how to introduce myself, and as the minutes ticked by it seemed to me that the most obvious way must also be the best.

  But how obvious would it be to the old boy?

  And the damnable thing was that the girl hadn’t given me another glance since her original—invitation? Had I mistaken that look of hers?—or was she simply waiting for me to make the first move? God, let him be her father!

  She was sipping Martinis, slowly; he drank a rich red wine, in some quantity. I asked a waiter to replenish their glasses and charge it to me. I had already spoken to the bar steward, a swarthy, friendly little chap from the South called Francesco, but he hadn’t been able to enlighten me. The pair were not resident, he assured me; but being resident myself I was already pretty sure of that.

  Anyway, my drinks were delivered to their table; they looked surprised; the girl put on a perfectly innocent expression, questioned the waiter, nodded in my direction and gave me a cautious smile, and the old boy turned his head to stare at me. I found myself smiling in return but avoiding his eyes, which were like coals now, sunken deep in his brown-wrinkled face. Time seemed suspended—if only for a second—then the girl spoke again to the waiter and he came across to me.

  “Mr. Collins, sir, the gentleman and the young lady thank you and request that you join them.” Which was everything I had dared hope for—for the moment.

  Standing up I suddenly realized how much I’d had to drink. I willed sobriety on myself and walked across to their table. They didn’t stand up but the little chap said, “Please sit.” His voice was a rustle of dried grass. The waiter was behind me with a chair. I sat.

  “Peter Collins,” I said. “How do you do, Mr—er?—”

  “Karpethes,” he answered. “Nichos Karpethes. And this is my wife, Adrienne.” Neither one of them had made the effort to extend their hands, but that didn’t dismay me. Only the fact that they were married dismayed me. He must be very, very rich, this Nichos Karpethes.

  “I’m delighted you invited me over,” I said, forcing a smile, “but I see that I was mistaken. You see, I thought I heard you speaking English, and I—”

  “Thought we were English?” she finished it for me. “A natural error. Originally I am Armenian, Nichos is Greek, of course. We do not speak each other’s tongue, but we do both speak English. Are you staying here, Mr. Collins?”

  “Er, yes—for one more day and night. Then—” I shrugged and put on a sad look, “—back to England, I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?” the old boy whispered. “There is something to fear in a return to your homeland?”

  “Just an expression,” I answered. “I meant I’m afraid that my holiday is coming to an end.”

  He smiled. It was a strange, wistful sort of smile, wrinkling his face up like a little walnut. “But your friends will be glad to see you again. Your loved ones—?”

  I shook my head. “Only a handful of friends—none of them really close—and no loved ones. I’m a loner, Mr. Karpethes.”

  “A loner?” His eyes glowed deep in their sockets and his hands began to tremble where they gripped the table’s rim. “Mr. Collins, you don’t—”

  “We understand,” she cut him off. “For although we are together, we too, in our way, are loners. Money has made Nichos lonely, you see? Also, he is not a well man, and time is short. He will not waste what time he has on frivolous friendships. As for myself—people do not understand our being together, Nichos and I. They pry, and I withdraw. And so I too am a loner.”

  There was no accusation in her voice, but still I felt obliged to say: “I certainly didn’t intend to pry, Mrs.—”

  “Adrienne,” she smiled. “Please. No, of course you didn’t. I would not want you to think we thought that of you. Anyway I will tell you why we are together, and then it will be put aside.”

  Her husband coughed, seemed to choke, struggled to his feet. I stood up and took his arm. He at once shook me off—with some distaste, I thought—but Adrienne had already signaled to a waiter. “Assist Mr. Karpethes to the gentleman’s room,” she quickly instructed in very good Italian. “And please help him back to the table when he has recovered.”

  As he went Karpethes gesticulated, probably tried to say something to me by way of an apology, choked again and reeled as he allowed the waiter to help him from the room.

  “I’m ... sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “He has attacks.” She was cool. “Do not concern yourself. I am used to it.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. Finally I began. “You were going to tell me—”

  “Ah, yes! I had forgotten. It is a symbiosis.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I need the good life he can give me, and he needs ... my youth? We supply each other’s needs.” And so, in a way, the old woman with the idiot boy hadn’t been wrong after all. A sort of bargain had indeed been struck. Between Karpethes and his wife. As that thought crossed my mind I felt the short hairs at the back of my neck stiffen for a moment. Gooseflesh crawled on my arms. After all, “Nichos” was pretty close to “Necros,” and now this youth thing again. Coincidence, of course. And after all, aren’t all relationships bargains of sorts? Bargains struck for better or for worse.

  “But for how long?” I asked. “I mean, how long will it work for you?”

  She shrugged. “I have been provided for. And he will have me all the days of his life.”

  I coughed, cleared my throat, gave a strained, self-conscious laugh. “And here’s me, the non-pryer!”

  “No, not at all, I wanted you to know.”

  “Well,” I shrugged, “—but it’s been a pretty deep first conversation.”

  “First? Did you believe that buying me a drink would entitle you to more than one conversation?”

  I almost winced. “Actually, I—”

  But then she smiled and my world lit up. “You did not need to buy the drinks,” she said. “There would have been some other way.”

  I looked at her inquiringly. “Some other way to—?”

  “To find out if we were English or not.”

  “Oh!”

  “Here comes Nichos now,” she smiled across the room. “And we must be leaving. He’s not well. Tell me, will you be on the beach tomorrow?”

  “Oh—yes!” I answered after a moment’s he
sitation. “I like to swim.”

  “So do I. Perhaps we can swim out to the raft ...?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  Her husband arrived back at the table under his own steam. He looked a little stronger now, not quite so shriveled somehow. He did not sit but gripped the back of his chair with parchment fingers, knuckles white where the skin stretched over old bones. “Mr. Collins,” he rustled, “—Adrienne, I’m sorry ...”

  “There’s really no need,” I said, rising.

  “We really must be going.” She also stood. “No, you stay here, er, Peter? It’s kind of you, but we can manage. Perhaps we’ll see you on the beach.” And she helped him to the door of the bar and through it without once looking back.

  III

  They weren’t staying at my hotel, had simply dropped in for a drink. That was understandable (though I would have preferred to think that she had been looking for me) for my hotel was middling tourist-class while theirs was something else. They were up on the hill, high on the crest of a Ligurian spur where a smaller, much more exclusive place nested in Mediterranean pines. A place whose lights spelled money when they shone up there at night, whose music came floating down from a tiny open-air disco like the laughter of high-living elementals of the air. If I was poetic it was because of her. I mean, that beautiful girl and that weary, wrinkled dried up walnut of an old man. If anything I was sorry for him. And yet in another way I wasn’t.

  And let’s make no pretense about it—if I haven’t said it already, let me say it right now—I wanted her. Moreover, there had been that about our conversation, her beach invitation, which told me that she was available.

  The thought of it kept me awake half the night ...

  I was on the beach at 9:00 a.m.—they didn’t show until 11:00. When they did, and when she came out of her tiny changing cubicle—

  There wasn’t a male head on the beach that didn’t turn at least twice. Who could blame them? That girl, in that costume, would have turned the head of a sphynx. But—there was something, some little nagging thing, different about her. A maturity beyond her years? She held herself like a model, a princess. But who was it for? Karpethes or me?

  As for the old man: he was in a crumpled lightweight summer suit and sunshade hat as usual, but he seemed a bit more perky this morning. Unlike myself he’d doubtless had a good night’s sleep. While his wife had been changing he had made his way unsteadily across the pebbly beach to my table and sun umbrella, taking the seat directly opposite me; and before his wife could appear he had opened with:

  “Good morning, Mr. Collins.”

  “Good morning,” I answered. “Please call me Peter.”

  “Peter, then,” he nodded. He seemed out of breath, either from his stumbling walk over the beach or a certain urgency which I could detect in his movements, his hurried, almost rude “let’s get down to it” manner.

  “Peter, you said you would be here for one more day?”

  “That’s right,” I answered, for the first time studying him closely where he sat like some strange garden gnome half in the shade of the beach umbrella. “This is my last day.”

  He was a bundle of dry wood, a pallid prune, a small, umber scarecrow. And his voice, too, was of straw, or autumn leaves blown across a shady path. Only his eyes were alive. “And you said you have no family, few friends, no one to miss you back in England?”

  Warning bells rang in my head. Maybe it wasn’t so much urgency in him—which usually implies a goal or ambition still to be realized—but eagerness in that the goal was in sight. “That’s correct. I am, was, a student doctor. When I get home I shall seek a position. Other than that there’s nothing, no one, no ties.”

  He leaned forward, bird eyes very bright, claw hand reaching across the table, trembling, and—

  Her shadow suddenly fell across us as she stood there in that costume. Karpethes jerked back in his chair. His face was working, strange emotions twisting the folds and wrinkles of his flesh into stranger contours. I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs ... why I couldn’t say. I calmed myself, looked up at her and smiled.

  She stood with her back to the sun, which made a dark silhouette of her head and face. But in that blot of darkness her oval eyes were green jewels. “Shall we swim, Peter?”

  She turned and ran down the beach, and of course I ran after her. She had a head start and beat me to the water, beat me to the raft, too. It wasn’t until I hauled myself up beside her that I thought of Karpethes: how I hadn’t even excused myself before plunging after her. But at least the water had cleared my head, bringing me completely awake and aware.

  Aware of her incredible body where it stretched, almost touching mine, on the fiber deck of the gently bobbing raft.

  I mentioned her husband’s line of inquiry, gasping a little for breath as I recovered from the frantic exercise of our race. She, on the other hand, already seemed completely recovered. She carefully arranged her hair about her shoulders like a fan, to dry in the sunlight, before answering.

  “Nichos is not really my husband,” she finally said, not looking at me. “I am his companion, that’s all. I could have told you last night, but ... there was the chance that you really were curious only about our nationality. As for any veiled threats he might have issued: that is not unusual. He might not have the vitality of younger men, but jealousy is ageless.”

  “No, I answered,” he didn’t threaten—not that I noticed. But jealousy? Knowing I have only one more day to spend here, what has he to fear from me?”

  Her shoulders twitched a little, a shrug. She turned her face to me, her lips inches away. Her eyelashes were like silken shutters over green pools, hiding whatever swam in the deeps. “I am young, Peter, and so are you. And you are very attractive, very ... eager? Holiday romances are not uncommon.”

  My blood was on fire. “I have very little money,” I said. “We are staying at different hotels. He already suspects me. It is impossible.”

  “What is?” she innocently asked, leaving me at a complete loss.

  But then she laughed, tossed back her hair, already dry, dangled her hands and arms in the water. “Where there’s a will ...” she said.

  “You know that I want you—” The words spilled out before I could control or change them.

  “Oh, yes. And I want you.” She said it so simply, and yet suddenly I felt seared. A moth brushing the magnet candle’s flame.

  I lifted my head, looked toward the beach. Across seventy-five yards of sparkling water the beach umbrellas looked very large and close. Karpethes sat in the shade just as I had last seen him, his face hidden in shadow. But I knew that he watched.

  “You can do nothing here,” she said, her voice languid—but I noticed now that she, too, seemed short of breath.

  “This,” I told her with a groan, “is going to kill me!”

  She laughed, laughter that sparkled more than the sun on the sea. “I’m sorry,” she sobered. “It’s unfair of me to laugh. But—your case is not hopeless.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tomorrow morning, early, Nichos has an appointment with a specialist in Genova. I am to drive him into the city tonight. We’ll stay at a hotel overnight.”

  I groaned my misery. “Then my case is quite hopeless. I fly tomorrow.”

  “But if I sprained my wrist,” she said, “and so could not drive ... and if he went into Genova by taxi while I stayed behind with a headache—because of the pain from my wrist—” Like a flash she was on her feet, the raft tilting, her body diving, striking the water into a spray of diamonds.

  Seconds for it all to sink in—and then I was following her, laboring through the water in her churning wake. And as she splashed from the sea, seeing her stumble, go to her hands and knees in Ligurian shingle—and the pained look on her face, the way she held her wrist as she came to her feet. As easy at that!

  Karpethes, struggling to rise from his seat, stared at her with his mouth agape. Her face screwed up now as I
followed her up the beach. And Adrienne holding her “sprained” wrist and shaking it, her mouth forming an elongated “O.” The sinuous motion of her body and limbs, mobile marble with dew of ocean clinging saltily ...

  If the tiny man had said to me: “I am Necros. I want ten years of your life for one night with her,” at that moment I might have sealed the bargain. Gladly. But legends are legends and he wasn’t Necros, and he didn’t, and I didn’t. After all, there was no need ...

  IV

  I suppose my greatest fear was that she might be “having me on,” amusing herself at my expense. She was, of course, “safe” with me—insofar as I would be gone tomorrow and the “romance” forgotten, for her, anyway—and I could also see how she was starved for young companionship, a fact she had brought right out in the open from the word go.

  But why me? Why should I be so lucky?

  Attractive? Was I? I had never thought so. Perhaps it was because I was so safe: here today and gone tomorrow, with little or no chance of complications. Yes, that must be it. If she wasn’t simply making a fool of me. She might be just a tease—

  —But she wasn’t.

  At 8:30 that evening I was in the bar of my hotel—had been there for an hour, careful not to drink too much, unable to eat—when the waiter came to me and said there was a call for me on the reception telephone. I hurried out to reception where the clerk discreetly excused himself and left me alone.

  “Peter?” Her voice was a deep well of promise. “He’s gone. I’ve booked us a table, to dine at 9:00. Is that all right for you?”

  “A table? Where?” my own voice breathless.

  “Why, up here, of course! Oh, don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. And anyway, Nichos knows.”

  “Knows?” I was taken aback, a little panicked. “What does he know?”