‘No,’ he interrupted firmly. ‘You know we agreed that it wouldn’t be practical to try and see each other while I’m here. Besides, it would hardly be worth it for a couple of weeks, would it?’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ I asked wistfully. ‘Don’t you miss me, Max?’
‘Of course I do, but I’m also working hard, you know, this isn’t a holiday for me. Anyway, I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Yes, but Max—’
I stopped, realizing that whatever I said wouldn’t change his mind once he’d made it up, and most of the things I found myself wanting to tell him lately were unsayable anyway, like: Max, I get so lonely without even your weekend visits.
Max, I’m forty-four and my reproductive possibilities are melting faster than the snow in California.
Max, didn’t you once assure me that Rosemary’s doctors didn’t give her more than a very few years to live, and that one day we would marry and have a family?
Max, were you a liar?
I’d been treating the Predictova kit with the watchful reverence that you might accord to a ticking time bomb in your bathroom: I mean, were my internal organs pace-egging to extinction, or what? (Not that the damn thing actually told you, it just pointed out the probabilities.) But outwardly at least my life had resumed its normal (or maybe abnormal) rhythm.
Nature intended me to be nocturnal, so by night I wrote Lover, Come Back to Me, wandered for inspiration in the village graveyard and nearby reputedly haunted places (though not the Haunted Well, because Orla and I made that one up), before finally retiring to my virtuous couch in the very early hours of the morning.
There I was awoken at dawn by Birdsong, the new baby in the adjoining cottage, until I finally rose in late morning to research, visit haunted venues, take naps, do Crypt-ograms (but not as Wonder Woman!), go to the pub with Orla and Jason, and start all over again.
The life-cycle of the Sombre-Plumaged Horror Writer.
And my publishers had brought forward the publication date of my next novel to April, due to sudden demand for my books, so at this rate they would soon be publishing them before I’d written them.
I was also working at weakening the defences of Jack Craig, upon whom I had serious designs, though unlike those of Jason’s missing wife, Tanya, mine were not of a sexual or romantic nature.
No, his sole attraction lay in the fact that he was the caretaker of the local haunted house, reputedly the most haunted manor in the country. But then, aren’t they all? It had stood empty since the death of its reclusive owner, and I was desperate to get in there. The heir had apparently taken a quick look round when he inherited before leaving the country for foreign climes: but who knew when the fancy might take him to return, or put the property on the market?
All I wanted was the key for one night, and a blind eye turning. He knew very well that I wouldn’t harm anything, but despite his villainous appearance – and reputation – he was proving remarkably resistant to my bribes.
Jack was a small, wiry, feral-eyed man who had an inexplicable attraction for some women, but personally, I found polecats much more appealing.
3
Twisted Sister
Local author Cass Leigh’s newest novel, Nocturnally Yours, will please all her fans but is not for the faint-hearted – or weak-stomached …
Westery and District Voice
March, and Max’s phone calls had dwindled further to perfunctory golf bulletins (may all his niblicks crumble to dust), and though I expected he still possessed a manner that could charm the birds from the trees, he had ceased to waste any of it on me.
Had Prince Charming come along at this point (or even a reasonably attractive frog) I would have been easy meat, especially in view of the fact that my egg count was so far one hit and one miss, and heading for the clincher: watch this space.
As Meat Loaf so aptly put it, life’s a lemon and I want my money back.
But despite the zigzag crevasse slowly opening between us, you’d still think Max would have managed to give me the news of Rosemary’s accident before I heard about it from someone else, wouldn’t you?
Well he didn’t, and to make it worse the someone else was Jane, maliciously pleased to discover that she was first with the information. While her phone calls had always been of the circling-hornet variety, this one had a scorpion sting in its tail.
That’s Jane for you, but you’ll have to take my word for it, since if you met her I expect you too would think she was the sweetest, most unselfish, truly beautiful person you’d ever met: an angel come amongst us. Sometimes I suspect her of having studied the Dark Arts to achieve this result.
To understand the relationship between my fair, angelic, successful, and respectably married twin and myself (and we are so non-identical it is hard to believe we’re even related), you need look no further than the opening pages of my very first novel Twisted Sister, where only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
I dedicated this book to Miss Josepha Brand, one of the wealthier members of Pa’s flock, since she paid for me to go away to boarding school; though whether she did it from some stirring of compassion, or because Pa’s preoccupation with casting out my devil was taking up too much of his time, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, she gave me an escape ladder that led to university, teaching and writing, even if I finally burned the rungs behind me by becoming Max’s mistress.
Twisted Sister, Chapter One
Once upon a time a baby was born, as fair, sweet and good as a cherub, the longed-for daughter after four sons. And then, unexpectedly following hard on her heels, came a second girl-child, dark and clearly devil-spawned.
A changeling, or at best a throw-back to some disreputable gypsy ancestor that her fire-and-brimstone godly parents would have preferred to pretend never existed.
In other times, other places, she would simply have been quietly disposed of, but that not being possible her parents moved their family of golden-haired children, together with the cuckoo in the nest, to a remote part of Scotland.
There the father could practise his own rigid version of a faith that was harsh, unforgiving and stark, and as his followers slowly moved into the nearby houses there grew up a sort of community about him. He wanted for nothing, for he was a tall, austerely handsome, charismatic man, and his growing flock featured many widows and divorcees of independent means.
It is a tribute to the physical stamina of both babies that they survived a baptism of total immersion in an icy loch, Julie pale and quiet but Carla angrily screaming her protest.
Afterwards while they slept, Julie’s fairy godmother scattered her crib with magic dust, rose petals and witty bon mots before airily rising and winging away, complacent in the knowledge that her protégée would flourish.
Sole attendant at Carla’s hastily borrowed cot was the Angel of Death, who flew over heavily, letting fall a crystalline powdering of ground bones and hollow laughter, before landing with the heavy deliberation of a vulture to grip the crib in pale bony hands.
Who invited her? Was she just passing, and, sensing a party of the muted kind so suited to her tastes, gatecrashed?
However it was, finding herself thrust into the role of sole sponsor she hastily bestowed what gifts she could muster on the baby’s restless head.
‘Ah yes,’ she muttered, peering down at the sleeping infant with wall-eyes like milky marbles, ‘She looks like a horror writer in the making to me.’
Was the baby that ugly? Surely not, though it is hard to tell from the one faded photo of Carla that lies loose in the album charting Julie’s precious babyhood.
But perhaps it was the only gift she had to give, caught on the hop, as it were, before, flapping ponderously, she became airborne and drifted away on the breeze like a crumpled black rag.
See what I mean? You’d have to read the rest of it to decide just who is the twisted sister.
Suffice it to say that when you’ve been brought up from the cradle to believe
you are inherently bad, evil, and devil-spawned, and even your mother takes a dislike to you for no reason other than it’s her side of the family with the gypsy blood, it doesn’t give you much incentive to change; so it was fortunate that I discovered an outlet for my darker imaginings in my writing.
First I scared the living daylights out of my schoolmates (which made me, for the first time, strangely popular), and then I began to have the odd (very odd) story published, until finally, not long after I’d moved to Westery and my first teaching post, Twisted Sister was accepted.
Now evil paid the bills: not lavishly, but well enough to enable me to give up the teaching long ago, and I’d never taken money from Max even on those rare occasions when he’d actually offered it, because I’d rather be a Best-kept Secret than a Best-kept Woman.
Meanwhile Jane, on the strength of her poetry books (and she writes poetry like there’s a word famine), and the literary merit in which I was so singularly lacking, had been teaching one day a week on a postgraduate creative writing course at the same university as her husband and Max.
This was why she knew about Rosemary’s accident so quickly, for her ear wasn’t just pressed permanently to the ground for gossip, it sent down invisible suckers, and thus it was that she phoned me, agog for a reaction to something she assumed I knew.
‘Isn’t it great news about Rosemary?’ was her opening gambit. ‘Unless they arrest Max, of course. It does sound dodgy that she should fall out of her wheelchair hard enough to hit her head and kill herself when she’s paralysed from the waist down, though, doesn’t it?’
With astonishment I watched the hand holding the phone suddenly wilt like a dead stalk – most peculiar. Then my knees followed suit, and everything shifted dizzyingly, like it did in one of my recurring nightmares, the long dark corridor ones.
‘Any moment now,’ I thought with resignation, ‘and I’ll start somersaulting backwards towards the cupboard door.’
The door I really don’t want to open ever.
‘Cassy? You’re very quiet. Are you still there?’ demanded Jane’s barracuda-toothed voice, piercing my shock and enabling me to lift the receiver to my ear again.
‘You did know, didn’t you? Or – no, don’t tell me Max hasn’t even phoned you yet? I’m the first with the news?’
‘No. Yes … I mean, he must have tried and I was out or … or something,’ I hedged lamely. ‘Jane, are you absolutely sure about this? Rosemary’s dead?’
‘Yes, two days ago. He came home and found her on the sun deck. Or rather off the sun deck.’
‘But what about the live-in carer? Max said they’d got one through an agency.’
‘Rosemary’d argued with her and sent her packing, that’s what I heard. Probably caught her flirting with Max. After all, he may be getting on a bit, but he’s still attractive. Bet he looks good with a Californian tan.’
‘Max wouldn’t flirt,’ I said automatically.
‘And you really hadn’t heard a thing? Well I was going to congratulate you, since you can at last be made a respectable woman of, and then even Ma and Pa might speak to you again. But if he hasn’t told you, then perhaps he’s tired of you, or found someone else or something?’
‘Thank you for that kind thought,’ I said coldly, but she was only saying what I was thinking. Why hadn’t he phoned me?
‘Oh well,’ consoled Jane. ‘Perhaps it’s because they’ve arrested him. Two major accidents in one lifetime is a bit of a coincidence.’
‘Of course it’s an accident!’ I said hotly. ‘Max would never have hurt her! Think how he’s stayed married to her all these years, and looked after her. And you can’t blame her skiing accident on him!’
‘I suppose so, and of course if he was going to kill her so he could marry you, he’d have done it when you were young and pretty, wouldn’t he? I don’t suppose he’s bothered now.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I meant. He didn’t love her, but he was fond of her – and her death has probably hit him harder than he’d expected, that’s why he hasn’t got round to phoning me. It would be sort of disloyal.’
‘Not half as disloyal as seducing one of his students, and then keeping her as his mistress for the last twenty or so years,’ Jane pointed out helpfully.
‘He hasn’t kept me!’ I protested, though I suppose it was true that he did seduce me.
She ignored that. ‘He’s probably bumped her off because he’s picked up some nubile young student out there. Some of them go for the sophisticated father-figure stuff. Gerald’s friend over there said that female fitness trainer they’ve hired is young and quite pretty, too.’
‘You’d better not repeat any of your fragrant little theories to anyone else,’ I warned, but I knew she wouldn’t: Jane only lets her mask slip and her mouth off-leash with me, and, to some extent, our brothers. Even her husband still thinks she’s Little Miss Angelic.
‘Don’t be silly. Anyway, now you know, you can phone Max, can’t you?’
‘I don’t have his number. He always calls me: I couldn’t afford all those transatlantic calls.’
‘You mean he didn’t leave you any way of contacting him? Not even in an emergency?’
‘He’s never been here when I’ve had any emergencies. I’m used to coping alone.’
‘I’ll find his home number for you,’ Jane offered eagerly. ‘Now, who would be best, and why would I want to know …? Oh yes, that would work,’ she mused. ‘Right, I’ll get back to you later with the number, but only on condition that you call me and tell me everything he said, mind.’
Like hell I will.
‘Thanks, Jane,’ I managed to say between gritted teeth, but only because I really needed that number and she was the only one who could get it for me. ‘You might have to leave it on the answering machine because I’m doing a singing telegram later.’
‘You can’t be serious! After that news? Surely you’d rather hang on until you’ve spoken to Max?’
‘I need the money: Crypt-ograms pay well, and they’re easy. I may not be as popular as Orla’s Marilyn Monroe act, and the jokes do get a bit much sometimes, but they don’t take much time. The Batmobile’s so old now it’s a constant drain on my bank account, and I think it needs an expensive op.’
‘You should trade that old banger in for something reliable. And why the hell didn’t you milk Max for everything you could get while he was still mad about you? It’s probably too late now – but I’ll get that number and ring you back anyway. Byee!’
Getting Max’s number must have been harder than she anticipated, because she still hadn’t rung back by the time I’d arrayed myself in my best vampire outfit, streaked my long dark locks with silver, and rendered my face even more luminescently pallid than nature had already made it with stage make-up.
Jason phoned, though, to ask if I was going to the pub that night.
‘Probably,’ I said, warmed by his lovely, treacly dark voice.
Had it not been for his far from lovely teenage son I might just have succumbed to temptation with Jason by then … and I might still, if my next egg-xamination was a Null Pointer. I was obviously running out fast, and this was no time to be choosy.
‘I’ve got to go and do a “greetings from beyond the grave-ogram” first, though.’
His voice perked up: ‘Oh goodie! Are you coming to the pub in your vampire stuff? You know that really turns me on!’
‘Everything turns you on,’ I said dampeningly, though actually it was quite consoling in the face of Max’s recent neglect to have Jason lusting after me.
‘Everything you do turns me on,’ he amended. ‘Come down later and I’ll buy you chicken in a basket.’
‘I’ll buy my own dinner, thanks. See you later, Jason, I’ve got to go.’
I felt a little better after that, though. Max might take me for granted, but other men still found me attractive even if I was sliding down the slope towards fifty faster than an Olympic bobsleigh team on their last run.
&nbs
p; And Max was probably just being ultra-cautious. He would never have dreamed that Jane would winkle out the news so fast, or he would have rung me by then.
Finding that actually I had ten minutes to spare before it was time to leave I filled in the time with yet another self-questioning list, though I didn’t expect to find anything I didn’t already know:
Writing horror versus ‘literary’ novels:
For: Against:
1) I’m a natural-born horror writer.
2) It’s cathartic to let the demons loose from time to time.
3) I could have been the monster if I hadn’t had this outlet.
4) I make a living from it.
5) You can’t eat a literary reputation.
6) I enjoy it. 1) While we’re all peddling our own versions of reality, mine is blacker than most. You don’t get literary kudos for horror unless your name’s Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker.
2) I’ll always be just the Sister of the more famous Jane and her pared-down poetry.
Conclusion:
I feel strongly that I have to write these things. Maybe I’ll never get on the Booker short list, but with a bit of luck I could be laughing all the way to the bank, even if I’m never quite in the Stephen King league.
My roots were in the graveyard, so let Jane make with the harp in the rarefied atmosphere above.
Draping a nylon cobweb over one black velvet-shrouded shoulder (think early Kate Bush on a bad day) I snarled at my image in the mirror, which is more than most vampires can do, and went out to deliver a Ghastly Greeting.
As Orla is fond of saying, Song Language’s motto is ‘We serve you right.’
As I stepped out of my front door all girded up to sing for my supper, Mrs Bridges’ upstairs window flew open and she leaned out perilously far, her loose grey hair dangling like a dingy unravelled bellrope.
‘The fuzzy-wuzzies are coming!’ she screeched.
Shouts and rhythmic thumping noises came from the room behind her.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and screamed: ‘MRS BRIDGES, TURN ZULU OFF!’
A Good Heart is Hard to Find Page 4