Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

Stunned, Karen allowed him to take her to bed and pull most of her clothes off. Maddie had the radio on again. Connie Francis’ “Lipstick On Your Collar,” Julie London’s “Cry Me a River,” the Ink Spots’ “Don’t Get Around Much Any More,” Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do?,” Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry.” The noise of plates and cups and crockery being cleaned accompanied the songs, and seemed to fill the bedroom.

Neither of them were up to it and they lay together, hugging. Maddie hummed along to “Stand By Your Man.” Karen shook her head, gave up, and got out of bed. She dressed in the dark, and left the flat.

Peter lay in bed, listening to washing-up.

A week later, while Peter was at his easel finishing up a rough for a Pan thriller, a blast of noise came from his CD.

He turned around, shaking. The broken doll he had been sketching fell off its stand.

WASP’s “Fuck Like a Beast.”

Madeleine was naked in the mid-afternoon, but for insectile dark glasses and a pair of high-heeled black patent leather pumps. Her face was more oval, lines better defined. Long, tangled hair—darker than last week—hung around her shoulders and breasts. Her body was off a 70s Mickey Spillane cover, and not what he had expected under the pinnies and dresses she’d been wearing.

The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man.”

She came for him, fingers like hooks ripping his shirt and trousers apart. They didn’t make it to the bedroom for hours, and then they didn’t make it to sleep for nearly a day.

A week later, Peter woke up, still drained from the night before, to find Madeleine had locked herself in the bathroom and was sobbing.

He had to break in, wrenching his shoulder, and found her curled up between the sink and toilet bowl, clutching her stomach, a scattering of open and emptied pill bottles around her, a sweated-in T-shirt ridden up around her belly, stringy hair wrapped around her neck like a noose.

He slapped her semiconscious and walked her around the flat until the drowsiness wore off. Then he made her drink salt water until she spewed into a bucket. Undissolved pills clustered like frogspawn in her mainly clear vomitus.

She wouldn’t say anything coherent, but rambled dark and self-hating drivel at him. From somewhere, she found an Einsturzende Neubauten cassette and played “Der Tod ist ein Dandy” over and over, banging her head against the floor in time to the pounding rhythms until she was covered in blood from superficial cuts.

He phoned Karen but got an answering machine message saying she was out of the country for a week.

Madeleine started in on Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Where did she get these records from?

There was a noise in the kitchen and he got there in time to wrestle the steak knife away from her. She inflicted a shallow cut through his shirt.

A week later, exhausted and bruised, he found she’d gotten up early and left the flat. He used the time to tidy a little, washing some of the long-neglected crockery and scraping at the stains on the carpet. The flat was musty and he opened all the windows to air it out.

He was beginning to recognize the cycle. It lasted almost precisely a week. Peter wondered if there was such a thing as a serial multiple personality.

Perhaps she might not come home?

At six-fifteen precisely, she let herself in, and put her briefcase down on the sofa. She was wearing one of Karen’s suits, severe but sexy, cut tight on the hips and high on the thighs, with prominent shoulders and a don’t-fuck-with-me-jack tie.

“I had to screw them until they bled, but Futura is coming through with your market value price for the next covers. They specified more maggots for the Hutson job.”

She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, and flipped a silver lighter open, sucking flame through the tobacco tube then exhaling a cloud.

“This place is a tip, Peter. I expect to come home to better than this.”

She pulled her tie off with an expert gesture, and began unbuttoning her blouse.

“I’ve set us up with a table at Alistair Little’s for eight with the commissioning guy from Harper-Collins. Try to make a good impression. There might be a dekalogy in it.”

She slipped her skirt over her legs, and stepped out of it. She wore no underwear.

“And I fired your accountant. Weldon’s been robbing you blind for years. There’s no room for that kind of wimpery in the business. Like your ‘friend’ Karen. She’s sweet and lovely, but sweet and lovely just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

She gave him fifteen minutes to bring her to orgasm, then criticized his broken doll covers until the minicab came.

A week later, she wanted a baby. She talked of nothing else, and even bought baby clothes in pink and blue, made a start on redecorating the spare room as a nursery, and worked out on the calendar which were the best days to try. By the time the days came around, she had changed her mind…

A week later, she stole his credit cards and ran up nearly a six figure bill on compulsive purchases. She bought more furniture than could fit into the flat, a car neither of them could drive, a complete wardrobe of flashy clothes not in his size, enough food to give Godzilla a three-day bellyache. And she discovered gambling.

A week later, she went into what he thought of as her Annie Hall phase, becoming at once terminally absent-minded and cuttingly witty. Of them all, this was the one he liked the most. When she was funny, they were better in bed. She would pull faces, and remind him of his mother’s old theme tune, “if the wind changes, it’ll stick like that.” That didn’t seem such an awful fate just now. The wind changed, but…

A week later, she brought home a Siamese kitten and lavished her entire attention on it twenty-four hours a day, reading books on cat-care and attending to Mitten’s every need. She treated Peter as if he were an intruder in her idyll with the pet. When Mitten put its claws through a half-finished Jeffrey Archer cover, Madeleine spent an hour cooing over it and spitting at him that her precious better not get blood-poisoning from the lead in the paint or else…

A week later…

A week later…

… and a week and a week and a week…

A week later, he got out of the flat while she was gorging herself on chocolates in front of Anne Diamond on the television. She was bulimic in this cycle, and would stuff herself until she was sick. That left him to look after Mitten, who was fast becoming as startled and neurotic as he was. Madeleine had been anorexic a few turns back, between her poetic consumptive week and her Australian soap opera phase.

They met in Capucetto’s. He could see Karen was shocked by the change in him. He’d clearly made up the two extra years, and was galloping into his biological future.

“I’ve seen Jeanne,” she said.

“And…”

“Your lesbian waited all afternoon and went home.”

“What?”

“Her name was Madeleine Keele. ”

“Then who is she? Our Madeleine?”

“Your Madeleine, you mean. Ask her.”

“She doesn’t know. Karen, it’s even weirder than you think. She doesn’t just change her personality. Her hair changes, the shape of her face sometimes, her body…”

“You’ve been sleeping with her?”

He had to tell her. “Some of her.”

“Fuck you, Peter,” Karen said. “You can either live with it, or get a divorce and be deported to Warsaw. I don’t care any more.”

She left him to pay for the coffee and cheesecake.

A week later, he got back from a meeting at the new agency to find the flat filled with a burned stink. Mitten was in the microwave. Smoke filled the kitchen.