Bad Dreams

by Kim Newman

  'No,' she said again, 'I don't think so.'

  His question was only a thought. Some day?

  Her answer was not even that. Maybe, who knows, never…

  She gave him her hand to be kissed - the Kind always found it hard to dispense with the old manners - and left him, the curtains closing after her. On the balcony, he was alone again.

  His fingernails, he realised, were two inches long, and curled into bony barbs. And his mouth was full of blood.

  Inside, he was shaking. She had left something of herself in him, perhaps out of tenderness. He hated her for that gesture, and tried to force the images she had spilled into him out of his mind, erasing the centuries with a burning fury.

  A girl came out. She had a short black dress, red hair and pale freckles the assistant director who had supervised her screen test thought would not show in Technicolor. She was lighting a cigarette, and shivering. She was here with the assistant director, and was not sure whether she should go to bed with him tonight. He was important, but maybe not that important. Daphne had told her to get an agent, and sleep with him.

  'Oh,' she said, 'I'm sorry… I thought there was no one out here.'

  He laid his hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. Her eyes moved from side to side, trying to take all of him in. His nails pinched her bare skin, drawing points of blood.

  Still trying to wash Ariadne out of his mind, he bent his neck and kissed the girl - Therese Colt - on the mouth, forcing his long tongue into her throat, latching suckerlike to her tonsils.

  Therese did not struggle, melting in his embrace as she had done during the screen test with the iron-jawed desert sheik.

  He sucked part of her in, finding the Mary Teresa Garrity beneath Therese Colt, and gulped it down. She tasted bitter. After Ariadne, they would all, for a while, taste bitter. He sucked back his tongue, pulling it out of the girl with a rasping slurp, and pushed her away.

  He wiped his bleeding mouth with the back of his hand, scraping away skin, then pulled out a silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his dinner jacket, balled it, and used it to mop up the mess. Therese was looking at him with concern, unheeding the part of her that had just been torn loose. Blood was seeping from one of her nostrils, and his nailpoints had opened three twin vents in the side of her dress, exposing more freckles.

  'Mister,'she said, 'are you all right?'

  He ignored her. She stepped closer, reaching out, but then her knees gave way and she slumped to the floor in a faint.

  The Monster grabbed the rail, and took control of himself. Gripping tight, he watched his hands as the nails shrank. He smoothed his hair, and tugged at his clothes, sharpening his appearance.

  Therese would recover. She had warmed him, helped him survive Ariadne's indifference. He had taken something from her, but had also left something inside her. Perhaps he had chilled her heart where it needed to be chilled. She would not sleep with the assistant director, but she would become a star.

  He left her there, and went back into the restaurant. Ariadne had rejoined Cameron Nielson, and was listening intently as he talked to her. The Monster knew he was talking about his work, for he could feel the young man's burning intensity from across the room. Ariadne had her hand lightly on his arm. The Monster was still shivering. Ariadne gave him the briefest of smiles, and returned her attention to the playwright.

  They would never speak again, the Monster and Ariadne, although they would occasionally be in the same city and sense each other's presence. If there were, as she had implied, others of the Kind still surviving, then he never encountered any.

  Tail Gunner Joe was drunk and getting abusive, calling the waiters 'kikes' and 'Commies'. He was itching for an injection, the Monster could tell. The Lawyer was making inscrutible little notes. And the Objectivist, deprived of his presence, had gone to the powder room to repair herself.

  'And when we've finished hammering the fuckin' Reds,' Tail Gunner Joe told the Lawyer, 'we're gonna go after the fuckin' queers.'

  The Monster watched Ariadne lean over to Nielson, and saw the playwright's face rise to meet her kiss.

  'Fuckin' asshole bandits oughta be strung up,' the Junior Senator grumbled. The Lawyer was shut up tight, his face not registering everything, but the Monster could sniff his funk.

  Ariadne broke the embrace, and nipped playfully at Nielson's ear. He smiled, an odd expression on so serious a young man, crinkling his face like a comedian's. He called the waiter for more drinks.

  If he could not have Ariadne, the Monster swore, he would have her protege. Not now, but when she was through with him.

  He would have Cameron Nielson drained and drunk dry, and he would then turn his attention to anything, or anyone, that came from the man. His women would weep blood.

  When he was through, it would be as if the playwright had never walked the Earth.

  FIFTEEN

  IN THE TAXI, on the way to St John's Wood, Nina fell asleep on Anne's shoulder. The creosoty smell of the girl's hair dye was pleasant in a roundabout way. Anne almost relaxed.

  Nina had lent her an outfit - a short, tight skirt, black tights, a black jacket not designed to fasten up - and helped make her up. She had suddenly turned into a teacher, gently ridiculing Anne's idea of a tarty face, and subtly rearranging and highlighting her make-up. Anne had to admit she did not look bad, and hoped she could pass for one of Nina's workmates. She had tried a pair of Nina's spike heels, but they had pinched painfully, and she had to hope her comfortable flats would pass. They were black, highly polished and matched the rest of her get-up.

  It was a dingy afternoon, and slate grey slabs of cloud had brought the already early sunset forward. The chilly, heavily padded interior of the cab was comfortably gloomy, lit only by the orange numbers adding up on the meter as the fare increased.

  Anne found that Nina had, in her sleep, reached out and taken hold of her hand. Nina's own was cold, but she squeezed gently. The unconscious intimacy surprised and comforted Anne. She wished that she could express her feelings in such a simple, honest manner.

  Of course, a cynical footnote inevitably came to mind. Doubtless, Nina was habitually intimate with strangers in ways far more involved and far less innocent than hand-holding.

  Anne could not help thinking of Judi.

  For the first twelve years of the dead girl's life, Anne had seen her sister, been with her, talked to her, spent time with her, almost every day. And yet, her images of Judi as a baby, as a little girl, as an elementary school pupil, as a young teenager were alternately fuzzy and artificial, like the photographs she had collected in a folder somewhere. Anne was not sure whether her memories were first hand, or had been impressed upon her by the familiarity with those snapshots and the reminiscences of relatives.

  Everything else about that period of her life was still vivid - arguing with Cam about trivial things like who should sit in the front seat of the car, being taken for the first time to the theatre for one of Dad's plays and not understanding what was going on in the dark auditorium or the remote stage, being taken by her mother on a holiday for two in the desert where the cowboys had lived and getting bored after a few days with the heat and the sand. But Judi, dead Judi, was quietly fading from her memory like a disgracefully dissolute pharaoh being rubbed out of the history books by unforgiving high priests.

  In that folder, there were a number of photographs of babies and little girls, usually caught by the sun among the greens of the garden in New Hampshire, that Anne could not identify. They might be of Judi, but they could as easily be of her younger self. Not until they reached school age, apparently, had the sisters developed any distinctive characteristics of their own.

  Much clearer in her mind were the scenes from later life.

  Now, it seemed to Anne as if the first time she had really noticed Judi was during the summer after she returned from college. During the three years the sisters had mainly lived apart, Judi had grown into an intelligent, difficult, uncomfortab
le teenager, chain-smoking at fifteen, reading her way through every book in the house, from Peyton Place to The Romantic Agony. She had been interested in Anne only in that she would have liked to know the blow-by-blow details of her sister's sex life as a student. She had lost her own virginity, she boasted (confessed?), to one of the local stupids, and was just getting over her initial disappointment with sex by casting around for less conventional ways of annoying her family. Now, Anne suspected that at twenty-one, with two whole neatly-over-and-done-with love affairs to her credit, she must have been unbearably priggish and self-obsessed. Love Affair Number Two was going to be her first novel, but that had worked out less well even than the real life episode. Judi had read some of her draft chapters, and gone uncharacteristically quiet, refusing to offer criticisms or comments. Shortly afterwards, Anne had abandoned fiction altogether.

  Three years later, when Anne had already decided to move to London and visits to Judi in police stations were no novelty, she had seen Judi squatting in a New York City cell with five other prostitutes, dressed in glittery tatters, with a face like a painted and bruised punk madonna, and dried blood on her neck and upper breasts. Anne, brought up with liberal folk myths of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Paris soixante-huite and Attica, had seen the red badge of courage and threatened the polite lieutenant with a hardhitting expose of police brutality.

  'What you don't understand,' she had been told, 'is that your sister is a specialist.' The policeman, displaying no relish for it, had tactfully and patiently explained that Judi had come by her bruises at the hands of clients who had bought her and paid for the privilege of using her as a punching bag. This was worse than Anne had been prepared for. Prostitution, she could just about understand; the rest was beyond her fantasies, beyond her experience.

  She had argued with Judi for hours in an interrogation room, overseen by a police matron who read Cosmopolitan and looked like a more dangerous Angie Dickinson. Anne had tried to get Judi to name names and swear out complaints against the men who had gotten their rocks off beating up on her. Judi had calmly insisted on protecting her sources of income. Unlike their father, she did not want a 'rat jacket', a reputation as an informer. Of course, the NYPD did not sic Hugh Farnham on her, so she never found out just how tough she was.

  Now, Anne realised how typical Judi was of the family. Their father had a Nobel prize, Cam was supposed to be the best in his field and she was herself acknowledged as on the rise. Judi had chosen to be sado-masochist hooker, but she was determined to be the best, most professional sado-masochist hooker in the world. Given a few more years, she would probably have made more money than any of them.

  Anne felt a warm, wet touch at her throat. Still asleep, Nina was trying to kiss her neck, licking at a patch of skin with catlike absent-mindedness.

  Embarrassed, Anne lifted the girl's head. Nina woke up just as the taxi driver found the address he had been given.

  'I was dreaming…'

  EVENING

  ONE

  IT WAS THE kind of quietly well-off residential street where mass murderers live, unnoticed behind the Neighbourhood Watch stickers, until someone turns up a toenail in the rose-beds. The houses were well-maintained, 19th century and 1930s flourishes kept in good nick by careful owners, but there was an overwhelming drabness to the buildings. In the twilight, the only real colour came from the bright estate agents' notice boards posted outside almost every home. The whole street was for sale. This was an expensive part of town - upper upper middle and lower upper - and even the family cars parked in drives were high performance models. But the cracks were beginning to show. There was a stream of rubbish clogging the gutters, as if a parade had passed by with waste-paper substituting for tickertape. A few years ago, that would have been the mark of the scruffy Camden council, but now the rot was creeping into well-heeled Westminster. Even prosperity was not what it had been.

  It was not Belgravia, but it was certainly well-off, thank you very much. Quite apart from the usual expenses, mortgages and service charges would be punitive around here. The media and entrepreneur types attracted to the district were unlikely to be rich enough long enough to buy a permanent stake in the prestigious postcode. Anne knew; she had lived in a street like this for a few months, sharing her flat with that psychopath from the BBC, and had had to move on when the Newsweek commissions petered out.

  Amelia Dorf's house was different. Nina knew it right away, and led Anne across the road to it. It was set apart from its neighbours, like the manorhouse of a village. Built as a home for a large and prosperous mid-Victorian family, the five-storey pile had not, like all of its neighbours, been converted into almost affordable small units. The already formidable garden wall was topped with spear-tipped railings that were probably sharpened every day. The wrought iron gates might have been expressly designed to keep out the most determined and well-equipped lynch mob.

  Anne knew that all this meant money, and in an inexhaustible supply. Bank balances like international telephone numbers. Amelia Dorf. She would look through the files when she was in the office. Anyone rich enough to live in this house must have made the news some time in her life.

  Nina dealt with the entryphone that had replaced the bell-pull. A snake-neck swivelled above, and a closed circuit camera peered down. A green light winked, and the gates rattled mechanically. Nina pushed them inwards, and they were through before the buzzing stopped. The gates locked behind them.

  In front of the house there was a lawn. The centrepiece was an eight-foot tall evergreen topiary dildo.

  The front door was open by the time they got to it. Nina and Anne were let into the house by a large and solid man who looked slightly Scandinavian. Anne guessed that he spent most of his days in a gymnasium and knew all the correct Latin names for the muscles he had developed. He wore a quilted floor-length dressing gown that could have passed for a formal ball dress in old St Petersburg. Nina knew him.

  'Hello, Anders,' she said, chucking her shiny black coat into his hands, 'this is Anne.'

  Anders ignored Anne, but carefully folded Nina's coat with the casual reverence usually found in dry-cleaners or the very best restaurants.

  'You're early.'

  'It said five on the invitation Amelia sent out. It must be past that now.'

  'Typical of you, Nina. No one comes at the time on the card. That's why we always invite for two hours early.'

  'I'm sorry, but it's not my fault.'

  'It's hardly considerate, you know. We're not really ready.'

  Anne took off her own coat, which he took willingly and hung up. She kept her handbag though. Turning from the coat racks, he stared into her eyes in the manner recommended by most 'How to Impress Girls' handbooks. Anne almost laughed.

  'Anne,' he said, lowering his glance to her chest, 'you have startled eyes.'

  Anne raised an eyebrow.

  'You've lived many times, I can tell. We've met before. In the French Revolution.'

  Nina chipped in, 'Anders was the Marquis de la Somewhere-or-Other.'

  Anders took her hand, and kissed her middle knuckles.

  'Of course,' Anne said, pulling her fingers free. 'How could I forget? How is that pain in your neck, citizen?'

  He looked up, and really looked at her this time. There was a tracery of little scars under his jawline, as if someone had scooped out a pouch of flesh with sharp fingers. He looked too young for plastic surgery, but Anne suspected he was just vain enough to take self-perfection to expensive lengths.

  'Now whose eyes are startled?' she asked.

  He started ignoring her again. Nina pulled at his heavy sleeve, perhaps harder than she had meant to. His collar shifted, and Anne saw thick muscles with more scars.

  'Clive?' said Nina, 'is he here yet?'

  'I told you. You're early.'

  'But doesn't he stay over sometimes?'

  'Sometimes, but not now. I'm staying here now. And a few others. Daeve Pope is here. Clive is with Mr Skinner on busine
ss. They'll both be along at tea-time. Do you mind? This is expensive, antique.'

  He shook his arm free of her hold, and hugged himself. Anne caught a look of nausea under his patina of health and vigour, as if he could not bear to be touched by another human being.

  'Ciao, Nina,' said a short young man, stepping out from a room, 'who's your friend?'

  He came into the light, grinning. Anne put his age at about thirty, but he was wearing the striped blazer and straw hat of a public school prefect, and his slightly fuzzy chin suggested he had not started shaving yet.

  'Anne,' Nina said, 'this is Daeve Pope. He's a writer…'

  Nina had been about to say 'he's a writer too,' but Daeve cut her off. 'Perhaps you've seen my work,' he said, 'I do essays for Kerrang and Metal Hammer. I'm interested in thrash metal.'

  Daeve had a cigarette case out. He offered it around too quickly for anyone to accept, and stuck a fag in the corner of his mouth. The cigarettes were a brand Anne did not know, but they must be extra king-size because they were disproportionate, like props from a science fiction film about shrinking people. As he lit up, Daeve looked like a nearly adult-sized child.

  'Just thrash, of course. I do not tolerate glam in any way, shape or form. It's the only thing left in rock and roll with the balls to blast and the dick to come through.'

  'He's a good writer,' Nina said. 'You can tell.'

  Daeve puffed a cloud of smoke, and hung his head on one side, posing. 'Remember,' he said to Anne, suddenly shaking his head up and down so that his boot-black hair flopped over his face and pumping the air with an angry milkmaid's fist, 'just thrash.'