Tears came to my eyes and then dried up. Older recollections—highly-charged sexual moments—mingled with the memories of a few hours before. Things he’d said to me, things we’d done. Even more powerfully: all the things we hadn’t done.
I was fairly drunk. Feeling no pain, as they say—except in my heart. As I walked up the hill from South Harrow station, I cursed myself for not having gone with him, for not having seized a precious few hours of joy. Why did I always worry about what came next, why was I so desperate never to be caught out, always to behave correctly? What was the big deal about faithfulness and propriety, and getting home before dawn? It had never made me happy.
All too soon I was standing on the doorstep, trying to dig out my key from the clutter in the bottom of my handbag. I couldn’t find it, but that didn’t mean a choice between dumping everything out on the ground or ringing the bell—long ago, and without telling Peter, I had hidden a spare as insurance. The brick was still loose and the key was still there. It was a bit stiff turning in the lock, but it let me in.
The house was dark and silent. He hadn’t even left a light on for me. I felt annoyed and yet relieved that I wouldn’t have to hide my guilt and lie. With luck, I wouldn’t wake him. I switched on the light in the corridor and opened the bedroom door and then I stared in horror feeling everything, my own sense of identity, swirling madly.
The bedroom furniture had changed. The bed was in a different position. And in the bed, sleeping beside Peter, was a woman. Peter’s wife.
Not me—I wasn’t Peter’s wife any longer. I wasn’t anything to Peter. Not since our divorce had become final, more than two years ago. And for two years before that we had ceased to live as man and wife.
I stared and stared as if seeing a ghost, but the only ghost in that house was me, the ghost of myself as I had been five years ago, when I was turning thirty. Meeting Nick tonight had brought that troubled young woman back to life, made her more real than the woman I thought I was now, thirty-five and single, living in a shared flat in Kilburn, with a room and a life of her own. What sort of a life was it that could vanish so completely after a brief meeting with an old lover?
The ghost I had become stared and stared, unable to move, unable to think of how I could explain my presence when they woke, as they would at any moment, and found me here, more than four years out of my rightful place.
BLOODLETTING by Kim Antieau
Kim Antieau was born in Louisiana in March of 1955, raised in Michigan, and now lives with her Canadian husband in White Salmon, Washington. More and more the pattern takes shape. She was reticent with regard to number of cats. Antieau has come on very strongly in the horror genre in the past several years—her record all the more impressive in that her sales were to Big Press magazines and anthologies. Her first collection of short stories, Trudging to Eden, appeared this past summer from Salamander Press.
As to how she spends her day, Antieau relates: “I will say I have so many irons in the fire right now that I should become a smithy, a welder, a vulcan, something pertaining to fire. I work as a librarian, writer, publisher, editor, and artist. I’m creator of MommaEarth Goddess Runes, a modern divination tool for women. I’m also creator of a new comic strip called Vic and Jane. I am also editor and publisher of Daughters of Nyx: a magazine of Goddess stories, mythmaking and fairy tales, plus I recently finished another novel, The Jigsaw Woman, which I hope someone will finally have the good sense to buy.”
Anna’s blood began speaking to her soon after she was hit by the car, soon after she began reading about all the killings.
Someone in the city park gunned down ten people. Another person took a shotgun to the top of the Cramer Building, began shouting “Bang! Bang!” and killed twenty people. Then there was the mother of two from Manchester who tried to kill the governor, and the teenaged boy who killed his entire family one evening after an argument about which reruns to watch: Barney Miller or M*A*S*H*.
Anna had noticed a few murders here and there before her accident. As she sat every morning sipping her tea and cutting her toast into small pieces before eating them, she would occasionally glance at the front page of the paper. More often than not, however, she flipped past the first page, scorning the headlines. “What country are we invading this week?” she would say. Then she’d turn to the Living or Entertainment sections. She liked reading the book reviews the best, planning which book to buy for her weekend reading.
Sometimes, on the way to the books, a headline would catch her eye. She would skim the article and shake her head, wondering how this woman could have killed her own children, or that man his wife.
Everything changed after the accident. Anna had been walking down Fourth Avenue on her way to her job as a secretary in an ad agency when she decided to stop at the bakery across the street. She remembered later that she had looked for cars—she was certain of it. In any case, a car hit her. She was rushed to the hospital with internal injuries. They hooked her up first to one solution and then another. For hours—days?—she watched the deep red liquid dripping into her veins.
The ad agency sent her a bouquet of flowers and a get-well card signed by everyone in the office. They told her they missed her “quiet sweetness” and wished her a speedy recovery. Her father came up from the country and offered to take her home. “The city’s no place for a hurt girl,” he had said. “I can’t take care of you here.”
She kissed his cheek and told him not to worry. Her neighbor Bev had promised to look in on her when she got out of the hospital. Besides, it would be like a vacation.
“I can sit around the house and just read and watch television,” she said. “It will be a great rest.”
Anna was grateful to be alive and even more grateful to finally leave the hospital. She had the newspaper delivered to her home every morning and began watching the early morning news shows.
“I don’t want to lose touch with the real world,” she told Bev when she brought over a poppyseed cake for Anna one morning.
Sometime later, Anna’s blood began speaking to her. She didn’t know what it said, exactly. It just seemed to buzz at her. She told herself it was her organs readjusting themselves after the accident. She told herself this as she read the front page of the morning paper. Someone else had been killed in a park in a different city. Later the buzzing grew, and she turned up the evening news to drown out the noise.
And then she remembered that she had someone else’s blood inside of her. Was that why her blood was buzzing? They had put someone else’s blood into her body. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who could have been sick. She had heard of people getting diseases from transfusions. Perhaps this was what was happening to her. Her blood was not talking to her. She laughed in the quiet of her apartment, kicking at the newspaper she had dropped at her feet. Talking blood was nonsense. She would ask the doctor about it all when she went in for her check-up.
The doctor listened to Anna’s story of buzzing blood.
“I really can’t explain it,” she said, grinning widely, letting the doctor know ahead of time that she knew how foolish she sounded. “It just buzzes. Could I have caught some strange disease during my transfusions?”
The doctor checked her out thoroughly—that was how she put it. “I have checked you out thoroughly,” she said, “and I really don’t think there is anything wrong. You’ve had a terrible shock to your system. You need time to rest. That’s why you’re at home, Anna. You haven’t let those little devils at the ad agency talk you into doing any work at home, have you?”
Anna shook her head and smiled shyly, waiting for the doctor to pinch her cheek or give her a lollipop or something. She had been silly, hadn’t she?
The days passed, and Anna read her papers and watched television. The man who killed the people in the park said voices in his head had told him to shoot those people. The man in the Cramer Building said the same thing. A woman who had killed her children said little. She pounded on her chest and cried, “Mea cu
lpa, mea culpa!”
Bev brought over another poppyseed cake.
“Have you noticed all the crazy people lately?” Anna asked. “There are a lot of maniacs out there.”
“Yeah? They’ve always been out there.”
“No, I would have noticed,” Anna said.
“I tell you they’ve always been there,” Bev said, cracking her gum. “Haven’t you heard? The entire world has been slowly going crackers since the industrial revolution. Losing touch with the earth or something.”
Bev nibbled at her cake and looked bored. Anna stared at her. She had never noticed how harsh Bev looked before. She wore too much makeup and looked bored most of the time.
“I would have noticed,” Anna said again. She wrapped the poppyseed cake in tin foil and put it in the refrigerator. This marked the end of Bev’s visit.
Anna’s blood buzzed louder as her neighbor left the room. That night she squeezed her eyes shut and put her fingers in her ears, trying to stop the noise. That only shut out the other sounds, and all she could hear was her heart pounding and the blood coursing through her veins, talking to her, talking to her.
Her blood began telling her to do things. Bad things. She called her doctor, but she was out of town.
Anna sought solace in the papers. Perhaps she could find an answer there. The Cramer Building man had been in an auto accident before he began shooting. The man in the park had had his appendix removed a week earlier. She hurried through the papers, looking back, trying to find more clues. Maybe they had all been in the hospital; they could have all gotten blood. Maybe it had belonged to just one maniac and now it had spread and they were all going crazy. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy. Some other country was trying to sabotage the U.S. through the blood supply. Of course! She read the papers; she listened to the news. She knew there were plenty of people out there trying to get her and everyone else.
She picked up the phone and began dialing the subscription departments of several newspapers, one on the East Coast, one on the West, and one in the Midwest. She blocked out the sounds of her blood and waited for the papers.
When they arrived, she read them greedily. She knew, after she had finished, that the bad blood had gotten everywhere. People out there were listening to their blood, telling the police afterwards that they hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. They had to do what the voices told them to do.
Anna called her father.
“Anna, you were always crazy,” she heard him say. “Even as a child. Especially as a child. It’s no wonder you’re having these crazy ideas.”
She hung up on him, wondering why she had not seen earlier how cruel he was to her. In fact, she had not noticed a lot of things. She hadn’t been paying attention and look what had happened to the world.
She asked Bev over but when she saw her she had an overwhelming desire to do something bad to her, so she shoved a half-eaten poppyseed cake at her and told her to leave and never come back.
Anna sat alone in her apartment, waiting for the voices to stop. They kept telling her where she could get a gun or a knife. Be like the man in the Cramer Building, the blood said. Or go to the park. Find a politician. The voices pounded and flowed through her.
She chewed her fingernails. She could do what the voices said. Bad things. But then she would be like all the rest. And who was to say that that would make the voices stop? They might ask her to do other things.
There was only one thing to do. She went into her bathroom and took out a package of razor blades. She nicked her pinkie with one to make certain the razor was sharp. Then she sat in the living room, surrounded by her newspapers, with the evening news on in the background. Beginning at her wrists where her talking blood pulsed, she made two long deep lines down her arms.
It was time for a bloodletting.
FLYING INTO NAPLES by Nicholas Royle
Born in Manchester in 1963, Nicholas Royle now lives in London. In very few years he has established himself as one of England’s foremost horror writers, scattering some seventy or more stories throughout the small press and the major markets. His first novel, Counterparts, appeared from Barrington Books this last autumn. I had the pleasure of attending its launch party at The Nellie Dean pub in Soho, but had to help escort a suddenly legless Irish artist back to his flat before I could snag a copy. Royle has also edited two original horror anthologies, Darklands and Darklands 2. New English Library will be reprinting these in a mass-market format, and with any luck perhaps they will reprint Counterparts as well, as it’s out of print and I never did manage to snag a copy.
Royle reports: “I’m still working as a freelance journalist to pay the bills but am being more selective about the work I take on.” He then advises me: “Watch out for the Genitorturers and their album ‘120 Days of Genitorture’ (they’re crap but the cover photos are interesting).” Yes. Rock music again. The conspiracy thickens.
Flying into Naples the 737 hits some turbulence and gets thrown about a bit. It’s dark outside, but I can’t even see any lights on the ground. I’m a nervous flyer anyway and this doesn’t make me feel any better. It’s taking off and landing that bother me.
But when we’re down and I’m crossing the tarmac to the airport buildings, there’s a warm humid stillness in the air that makes me wonder about the turbulence. I wander through passport control and customs like someone in a dream. The officials seem covered in a fine layer of dust as if they’ve been standing there for years just waiting.
No one speaks to me and I get on the bus marked “Centro Napoli.” I’m on holiday. All I’ve got in Naples is a name, a photograph, and a wrong number. The name is a woman’s—Flavia—and the photograph is of the view from her apartment. The phone number I tried last week to say I was coming turned out to belong to someone else entirely.
I’ve worked out from the photograph and my map that the apartment is on a hill on the west side of the city. There’s not much more to go on. It’s too late to go and look for it tonight. Flavia won’t be expecting me—beyond occasional vague invitations nothing has been arranged—and she could take a long time to locate.
I knew her years ago when she visited London and stayed in the hotel where I was working the bar. We knew each other briefly—a holiday romance, if you like—but something ensured I would not forget her. Whether it was the sunrise we saw together or the shock of her body in the quiet shadow of my room over the kitchens, or a combination of these and other factors—her smile, my particular vulnerability, her tumbling curls—I don’t know, but something fixed her in my mind. So when I found myself with a week’s holiday at the end of three difficult months in a new, stressful job, I dug out her letters—two or three only over eight years, including this recent photograph of the view from her apartment—and booked a last-minute flight to Naples.
I’d never been there though I’d heard so much about it—how violent and dangerous it could be for foreigners, yet how beautiful—and I would enjoy the effort required to get along in Italian.
I’m alone on the bus apart from one other man—a local who spends the 20-minute ride talking on a cellphone to his mistress in Rome—and the taciturn driver. I’ve come before the start of the season, but it’s already warm enough not to need my linen jacket.
I’m divorced. I don’t know about Flavia. She never mentioned anybody, just as she never revealed her address when she wrote to me. I’ve been divorced two years and a period of contented bachelorhood has only recently come to a natural end, and with the arrival of spring in London I have found myself watching women once again: following a hemline through the human traffic of Kensington, turning to see the face of a woman in Green Park whose hair looked so striking from behind. It may be spring in Berkeley Square but it feels like midsummer in Naples. The air is still and hot and humid when I leave the bus at the main railway station and begin walking into the center of the city in search of a cheap hotel. I imagine I’m probably quite conspicuous in what must be one of the most dangerous areas but
the hotels in the immediate vicinity—the pavement outside the Europa is clogged with upturned rubbish bins; the tall, dark, narrow Esedra looks as if it’s about to topple sideways—look unwelcoming so I press on. It’s late, after 10:30 pm, and even the bars and restaurants are closed. Youths buzz past on Vespas and Piaggios unhelmeted despite the apparent dedication of the motorists here to the legend “live fast, die young.” I hold my bag close and try to look confident but after 15 minutes or so the hotels have disappeared. I reach a large empty square and head deeper into the city. I ask a gun-holstered security guard if there is a pension in the neighborhood, but he shrugs and walks away. I climb a street that has lights burning but they turn out to be a late-night bar and a fruit stand. Two boys call to me from a doorway and as I don’t understand I just carry on, but at the top is a barrier and beyond that a private apartment complex, so I have to turn back and the two boys are laughing as I walk past them.
I try in another direction but there are only banks and food stores, all locked up. Soon I realize I’m going to have to go back down to the area round the railway station. I cross the road to avoid the prostitutes on the corner of Via Seggio del Popolo, not because of any spurious moral judgment but just because it seems I should go out of my way to avoid trouble, so easy is it innocently to court disaster in a foreign country. But in crossing the road I walk into a problem. There’s a young woman standing in a doorway whom in the darkness I had failed to see. She moves swiftly out of the doorway into my path and I gasp in surprise. The streetlamp throws the dark bruises around her eyes into even deeper perspective. Her eyes are sunken, almost lost in her skull, and under her chin are the dark, tough bristles of a juvenile beard. She speaks quickly, demanding something and before I’ve collected my wits she’s produced a glittering blade from her jacket pocket which she thrusts toward me like a torch at an animal. I react too slowly and feel a sudden hot scratch on my bare arm.
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