Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

The rest of the evening was awkward, with Elaine pleading with him to see a doctor. “You’re not here with me anymore,” she was saying, or was that Miri, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? He no longer knew when or with whom he was. It was all he could do to keep his eyes in the same day and place for more than a few minutes at a time.

By the end Rick had known Miriam for six months or so. He’d told Matt about her, but then had been reluctant to share more than a very few of the actual details. He just wanted someone to know, in case — but he didn’t understand in case of what. Matt ran into them once, when Rick had tried to drive her to a restaurant. He’d been so stupid about it — he should have been driving her to a hospital instead. She’d lost enough fat in her face by then that when she reacted to anything he couldn’t quite tell what the emotion was — everything looked like a grimace on her. When she walked she was constantly clicking her teeth together and there was a disturbing wobble in her gait. He knew she must eat — how could she not? But it could not be much, and she had to be doing it in secret because he’d never actually seen her put anything into her mouth except a little bit of water.

When she breathed sometimes it was as if she were attempting to devour the space around her — her entire frame shook with the effort. When he first experienced this he tried to touch her, pull her in to comfort a distress he simply could not understand. But soon he learned to keep his distance, after getting close enough he felt he might dissolve from the force of what was happening to her.

He hadn’t told her they were going to a restaurant. He said he just wanted to get out of that building where they spent virtually all of their time. Finally she stumbled into his car and caved into the passenger seat. He drove slowly, telling her it was time they both tried new things.

“What, you’re breaking up with me?” A thin crimson line of inflammation separated her eyes from their tightly wrinkled sockets.

“No, that’s not what I meant at all. I mean try new things together, as a couple. Go places, do things.”

“You have the only new thing I need, lover.” Her leer ended with a crusted tongue swiped over cracked lips.

“It doesn’t feel healthy staying in the way we do. Maybe it’s okay for you, but it doesn’t work for me.”

He pulled up in front of a little Italian place. It wasn’t very popular — the flavours were a bit coarse — but the food was always filling.

“No,” she said, and closed her eyes. She was wearing so much eye make-up that it looked as if her eyelids had caved in.

“All I’m asking is that you give it a try. If you don’t like it, okay. No problem. We’ll just go home.”

She slapped his face then, and it felt as if she’d hit him with a piece of wood. She continued hitting him with those hands of so little padding, spitting the word “lover!” at him, as if it were some kind of curse.

He had no idea what to do. He’d never been struck by a woman before. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a physical fight with anyone. And now she was screaming, the angular gape of her mouth like an attacking bird’s.

“Hey! Hey!” The car door was open, and someone was pulling her away from him. Miri was beside herself, struggling, kicking. Rick was leaning back as far as possible to avoid her sharp-pointed shoes. Over her shoulder he saw Matt’s face, grimly determined, as he jerked her out of the car.

She spat at both of them, walking back toward her apartment with one shoe missing, her clothes twisted around on her coat-hanger frame.

“I should go get her, try to coax her back into the car,” Rick said, out of breath.

“Glad you finally introduced us.” Matt was bent over, wheezing.

Of course she had apologised in her own way, showing up at Rick’s door the next night, naked, crying and incoherent. He got her inside before anyone else could see. And then she would not leave for weeks, sleeping in his bed, watching him eat or stand before his easel unable to paint. Most of the time he slept on the floor, but sometimes he had to have something softer, and lay on the bed trying to ignore her mouth and hands all over him, in that fluttering way of hers, until she stopped and lay cold against him.

“I’m glad you were able to join us today.” Matt stood at Rick’s office door, looking unhappy. “Were you really sick, or did you get Elaine to call in and lie for you every day?”

Rick was unable to do anything but stare as Matt’s words rushed by him. He’d been in the office for only five minutes or so and already he was feeling disoriented. Papers were stacked all over his desk, and message notes were attached around his monitor, even to his lamp base. He never left things like this.

Finally, he looked up at his old friend. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You haven’t been here in four days! I can’t keep coming up with excuses for you with the partners.”

“Four days?”

Matt stared at him. It made him uncomfortable, so he started sifting through the piles of papers. But these were piles of print on paper, black on white, black and white. Before he could turn away he was seeing the shadows of her eyes, the angles of her mouth in the smile that wasn’t a smile. “Maybe you are sick,” Matt said behind him.

“You said Elaine called in every day?”

“Right after the office opened, once before I even got in.”

“Elaine never lies. That’s one of the best things about her. I don’t think she even knows how,” Rick said absently, looking around the office, finding more phone messages. Some appeared to be in his own handwriting.

“Well, I know. Of course. Look, I didn’t mean—”

“Are you sure it wasn’t someone who just pretended to be Elaine?”

But then someone was softly knocking, or rubbing, on the door outside. And Rick couldn’t bring himself to speak anymore.

“Ricky?” she had said. “Are you home?”

But he couldn’t get out of his so well-cushioned chair. The doorknob rattled in its collar. He willed the latch to hold.

“Ricky, we don’t have to do anything,” she said in her child’s voice, muffled by the door.

“Ricky, I just need — are you too tired, Ricky? I just need—”

After a few weeks she had stopped. Later he heard she’d killed herself, but he never saw a word about it in the papers. One afternoon a truck came and took away all the stuff in her apartment. A white-haired man came by, knocking on each door. But Rick hadn’t answered when the old man knocked on his. Later one of the other tenants would tell Rick the white-haired man had claimed to be her uncle.

The next week was when the colour-blindness had come over him like some sort of virus, intermittently, then all at once. One of the doctors he saw said it appeared to be a hysterical reaction of some sort. Whatever the source, or the reason, he stopped painting, and she mostly left him alone for a long time after that, reappearing now and then to monochrome the world for a while, or to take a day or two, or to eat one of his new memories and leave one of the tired old ones in its place.

And now it had looked as if he was going to be happy, or at least the possibility was there, and she couldn’t just leave that be.

The bedroom was completely black, except for a few bright white reflections of window pane. And the side of Elaine’s face, as she slept on her back. Lovely and glowing and ghostly.

The children were out there asleep in their own beds, or should be. At least he hadn’t heard them in hours. He prayed they were. Sleeping.

But it was all so black, and white, and something was rubbing at the door.