by Kim Newman
Then Skinner took a fold of skin under the hinge of her jaw between his thumb and forefinger. He pinched hard, twisting the flesh deftly, and a network of painways came alive in the lower left quarter of her face. Nerves in her cheek flared and died like fuse wire. Half her teeth became explosions of pain.
… she dreamed that the Monster who was always coming after her, coming to get her, had at last caught up with her and was at last getting her. Getting was something worse than she had ever dreamed.
'… and that was just a playful touch, dear. Nothing special. There's more.'
Next, he sliced through her sleeve and pressed somewhere in the socket of her shoulder. Her arm jumped like a galvanised frog's leg, twisting free of the hands that held it down. She tried to make a fist, but could not. The arm hung limp, put out of action by an instant's agony.
'This is foreplay?'
'Oh no,'said Skinner, 'this is an aperitif.'
She would have spat in his face, but there was no water in her mouth, no strength in her lips.
'You don't know how much you mean to me, Anne, how much you're going to give me.'
He kissed her on the mouth. She felt the outlines of his teeth behind the press of his thin lips.
He was holding her all by himself now. The other presences were gone, drawn back into their master. She felt a cool, slim hand take her own, the hand that still flapped like a skewered starfish from Skinner's nerve press.
It was Judi.
'Now I've got you here,' he was saying 'I almost wish I could prolong the moment indefinitely. It's my favourite part, you know…'
'Ah,' she said, 'but you can't have your cake…'
'… and eat it. I know, Anne. I know.'
Her hand was gripped tightly, sending a new charge of pain up her arm. Skinner was wrapped up in his own personal rituals.
'You're going to be my banquet, Anne. I wish I could make you understand how old and important what I am going to do to you is. Perhaps afterwards. If anything in this world is sacred…'
She was weak now, dulled almost to a swoon, but when he started to do it to her, she found she still had the strength to scream.
He began to feed off her.
From deflating lungs, through a dry and shrieking throat, out of a pain-throbbing mouth, she screamed and screamed…
EIGHTEEN
AT THE MONSTER'S right hand, Judi felt him feeding off her sister as he had once fed off her. She remembered her own death, and those of all the other ghosts. Innumerable times, she died, feeling life flow from a broken body, from a thousand broken bodies, into the eternally renewed substance of the Kind. It was an everlasting agony.
The Kind thought of their prey as food, sometimes as submissive lovers. But the ghosts knew different. Bleeding their life out in lumps, they were all their murderers' mothers, their screaming deaths violent and protracted labour pains. The cycle of rebirth left all the parents shadows in the Monster's Dream, but it also gave Judi a strength she found surprising.
She was more real than she had been since her death. When the Monster was feeding, he was unaware of everything else, like a man caught up in the throes of a protracted orgasm. No man can come and think of something else, Judi knew, and the Monster was at his most manlike this very moment. And while he was a lover, he was also a baby, demanding life, tearing through flesh to reach the air, suckling, sapping Anne's whole being. For the Kind, there must be deaths with each birth, with each rebirth.
There was no blood yet, but there would be soon, Anne's screams seized up in the back of her throat as she felt the monster's tendrils fixing like hooks into her mind.
Judi looked at Skinner's broad back as his head dipped towards Anne's chest, and met her sister's eyes. Anne was rigid, refusing to tremble, fighting him inside her head.
Judi remembered. They all remembered.
Judi felt Anne's mind pressing in upon her own, the sisters overlaid upon each other, Anne's ghost was forming around her as Skinner sucked her dry. Instamatic fragments of Anne's memory fell into Judi's consciousness. Amid the confusion of faces and feelings. Judi saw herself made different by an unfamiliar personality prism.
She loved her sister, and her sister loved her. At last, she knew their father had loved them both with an equal distance, an equal dread of losing them as he had lost so much else. Things between them were right, at last.
There was a streak of white zig-zagging from Anne's temple into her hair. Her eyes opened wide while her pupils contracted.
Judi and Anne met in the Dream, and found themselves handcuffed. They melted together. Their communion triangulated the Monster. He was a white hot presence, the apex of their triangle.
Judi was able to latch onto Skinner.
Skinner was enjoying his meal, relishing his fuck, exulting in his escape from the womb of womankind. Later, he might even get sentimental about his ghosts, about the empty meat he left behind. But now he was naked need, all the lusts wrapped up in a forever body.
He was in control, but he was caught between the sisters.
It would end now, they decided. The Monster was not forever. Everyone died. No matter how long it was put off, death must come.
Judi laid her insubstantial hands on the Monster's shoulders as he killed Anne, testing her ability to feed off him.
Then came the sunbursts from the deeps of the Monster's mind. The pressure of his prodigious weight of memory drove Judi near to madness. He had had to repudiate nine tenths of his past in order to remain sane, but he had not really forgotten anything. Thousands of years of dreams swept through Judi. Beautiful dreams, dangerous dreams, altruistic dreams, depraved dreams, monomaniacal dreams. Suddenly, she knew his true name, his original name. Even he thought he had forgotten that.
She knew things she could not continue to live with, even live this Phantom Zone version of life with. Death should really be forever. And, as she wanted to die, she wanted her sister to live.
She took her hands away from the Monster's shoulders and put them into his skull. The ectoplasmic wisps sank easily through his hair, into his brain. She made fists, and then opened them, stretching her fingers as widely as she could. Then, catching all the weight she had just taken on and adding it to what little reality she had had, she hurled herself down the funnels of her arms, through the bottlenecks of her wrists, and into her solid hands.
The ghosts swarmed inside her, and were channeled through her almost-real form. They slammed into Skinner like ectoplasmic bullets, and exploded inside him.
Her legs, her body and her head became truly ghostly, but her hands filled out like welder's gloves full of lead shot. She had her bony hooks in the Monster's brain. He let Anne go as she yanked him backwards. He was too tall, but she could float off the floor as he stood up straight, flying from the fixed points in his head like a girl-shaped flag. He grabbed for his head, trying to force the fingertubes sticking out of his forehead back into him.
Inside his head, she could feel a Hiroshima firestorm. All that was his was leaking into her hands. It hurt her.
There was a name. Ariadne. Who was Ariadne? An answer, or just a sledge thrown into a fire? Under the circumstances, Judi did not care.
He was ruptured. This, after everything, was the last night of his life. Judi felt his incredulity for a moment…
… then something flooded into her wispy body with the force of a hundred gallons of boiling lead squirting into an inflatable sex doll. What was left of her flesh exploded, and was spread throughout the Dream like the components of a new universe after a new big bang.
Just before her mind went out like a spent firework, for an eternal moment, Judi thought that she was the Monster now…
And then there was light.
NINETEEN
IN THEIR DREAM, Judi and Anne were Siamese twins, connected by the hind-parts of their brains. Each had a separate personality and a different face, but they shared an unconscious mind. Each loved her sister, although each could never really know what
the other's face looked like. When they were born, they were holding hands, and they grew up to make their parents and friends proud. Judi became a famous actress and talk-show personality, noted especially for her Ibsen women; and Anne became a best-selling author of fairy tales and fables. A doctor once thought they could be separated, but Judi and Anne were happy just as they were. They never did die, and there were no such things as Monsters. The End.
TWENTY
HE FELL INTO her arms this time. His face was still young, but it might just as well have been drawn on a paper bag. He was senile. Anne could feel nearly naked bones inside his clothes. She heaved him away. It was as easy as tossing a bin-liner full of screwed-up envelopes over a table. Skinner bounced on the bar, and only just managed to stay standing up. He turned, looking for her. She wondered if he were blind.
'Anne,' he said, his face starting to curl around the edges, 'Angel
The fires were out, but the tawdry inferno lighting was still on. The Club Des Esseintes was pathetic again. An early Beatles track burbled tinnily on the p.a. 'Chains'.
He was not much of a Monster any more, but he was still coming to get her.
'Don't think I'm dead, dear. With your help, I can start all over again. Easy.'
He lurched forwards, a badly-made scarecrow with a rancid pumpkin head, and made it halfway across the floor. She backed away from him.
'I've been in worse shape than this. Plenty of times. It'll be you and me, Angel…'
'I've told you before, Skinner,' she said, 'that's not my name!'
Her shout cut through the music, and struck him like a well-aimed blow. He reeled, and staggered forwards, arms out before him, hands hanging from his wrists like dead leaves.
The wall behind her was cold. The mural was flat and unmoving. There was a rack next to her. She flicked a glance at it and saw a selection of leather whips and bludgeons. S and M tools. Weapons.
The thing she reached for turned out to be a leather-sheathed stick, jointed in the middle, about two feet long. At one end was a contoured grip; at the other a cluster of short tails. Their undersides were lined with sharp little hooks. It felt heavy in her hands, and dangerous.
Putting her whole strength into the swing, she hit Skinner across the face. It cracked open. The stick came out of her hands and somersaulted away from them.
Skinner shrank, and she fell on him, shrieking, tearing at his split face. The skin flaked under her clawing fingers and came off like an onion skin. Beneath was an older, greener mask. And beneath that, another, and another, and another. Progressively older, progressively less human-seeming, progressively deader. The layers were dry and crinkly. He seemed to have no moisture in him at all.
Long before she exposed the curiously shaped skull, the Monster was still. His ghosts had gone with Judi, and he was dead.
Ding-dong, the witch is dead!
She spat on him now, and kicked his tenantless body. It felt good. Skinner came apart like a man-sized breadstick. She pulled off his arms and legs and twisted them like wet towels. She trampled his ribs underfoot, squashing his internal organs as they were exposed. Dust rose from the many rips in his skin. With the stick, which she reclaimed, she thrashed the whole mess until it was unidentifiable. His clothes tore as easily as his desiccated flesh.
His pocket watch shone among the rotting fragments. She picked it out, and gripped it in a painful fist. It was too large to be contained completely by her hand. But it was real. Solid. It ticked. Real seconds passed. The past ate up the future.
'That's forever, Skinner!'
Suddenly, she was tired. She had been awake around the clock.
DAWN
LATER, but not much, Anne escaped from the Club Des Esseintes. All the doors were locked now, so she had to use a crowbar-like instrument of torture on them. There was no fire damage in the nostalgia shop. It had a secure-looking grille over its window and front door, so she had to force her way out of a side door.
She came out roughly where she expected to be, next to the already-open amusement arcade. No one bothered her. She binned the implement, and walked away.
There was a pale woman outside Patisserie Valerie, almost an albino. Anne could not help noticing her. She wore heavy dark glasses. She needed to tell someone, so she told the woman.
'Dead,' she said, 'it's dead.'
The woman nodded, a ripple running through her silk-white hair. She did not answer, but she leaned forwards and placed a cold kiss on Anne's cheek. It was like a mild electric shock.
The woman was walking away, slipping into the crowd. Anne dropped Skinner's watch into her coat pocket, and felt the cold.
There was a closed newspaper stall on the corner, with a poster of yesterday's Evening Standard headlines. AZIZ VERDICT RETURNED. POLICE CONSTABLE CHARGED. Anne felt waking life calling her back.
She looked around for the woman who was the last of the Dream, but she was gone.
It was nearly dawn now, and the streets were busy. Her breath frosted as she walked, and she felt all sorts of aches and bruises. She wanted to get home and take a bath, but she did not feel sleepy any more. She was wide-awake.
The pre-work traffic made crossing streets difficult. She did not feel ready for the underground yet, so she walked to the bus stop under Centre Point. It was just a building. The buses were already running, but there were none waiting. As she stood around, stamping her feet against the cold, the skies lightened and the streetlamps went out.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel owes a lot to Neil Gaiman, Eugene Byrne, Stefan Jaworzyn and Philip Nutman. Eugene contributed information about sub-machine guns, hospital life and the 100 Years War. Neil made some suggestions about Martin Landau and Howard the Duck. Stefan advised on drug abuse. Phil started the whole train of thought. An assortment of people gave advice, criticism, encouragement and assistance: Lisa Tuttle (who told me Americans do not have teatime), Nigel Matheson, Clive Barker, David Pringle, Kathy Gale, Meg Davis, Antony Harwood (my agent, who stuck by this book for a long time), Roz Kaveney, Norman J. Warren (who made Bloody New Year instead), Maureen Waller (my editor), Josie Peer (who deserves more credit), Stephen Jones (who hates this book) and, especially, Lisa Gaye (nice Jewish girl). They were divided about 50:50 on the carrot scene, but I left it in.
-Kim Newman,
Crouch End, London,
March 1990.