Christopher Golden - The Monster’s Corner - Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

As the music pumped through her head, Kerry felt herself transported to a room in the Embassy Suites Hotel in D.C., back into the arms of someone she was never going to see again. She’d been a bad girl (well, a bad woman, actually, let’s face it), and the window for being able to ignore this fact would close the second the jumbo’s wheels smacked back onto English soil. Richard was going to be pissed off at her, and knowing him, she’d pay for a good long time. On the verge of tears, she pushed the volume up to full and filled her head with memory.

She felt the impacts as the wheels touched down. The double thud of a textbook landing, like a heavy hand knocking on a sepulchral door.

Welcome back to the morgue.

She turned the iPod off, blinking rapidly, and sat waiting while everyone else stood up and milled impatiently in the aisles, three hundred sheep eager for the slaughter of Real Life.

The immigration queue took even longer than usual, and by the time she handed her passport to the fatuously jolly official, Kerry’s mood had plummeted further. Maybe it was guilt over what she’d done, but she seemed to be taking the return to England even harder than usual. She knew that in a couple of weeks everything would seem normal. Her rut was there, ready and waiting, the random set of circumstances that she’d colluded in turning into her life, her story, the Kerry Jones Experience. She didn’t want her present anger and depression to fade, however, didn’t want to be accepted back into the fold. She stared balefully at the passport official, mentally daring him to give her a hard time: The photo had been taken only three months previously; she was even wearing the same jacket, for God’s sake. He merely welcomed her back, though, his accent sounding strange and provincial and dull, and waved her on toward baggage retrieval.

Welcome back?

To what?

She waited for her bag to meander out onto the belt, very much wanting a cigarette. Her consumption had skyrocketed during the week in Washington, and the duty-free cache wasn’t going to last long. She was supposed to be giving up, of course, turning into clean-living, gym-rat Kerry, the better version of herself that always seemed just out of reach. Wasn’t going to happen today. Tomorrow didn’t look great either.

Her bag eventually emerged blinking into the light, as if by accident, and she hauled it onto her shoulder and tromped off toward Customs. Slowing as she approached the channels, she tried to decide a question that had mildly stressed her out for the entire flight. She didn’t know for sure if the new iPod had to be declared, but eventually elected to head down the Nothing to Declare channel. She never got stopped anyway. She looked like a good girl.

A Chinese man with a stupendously large suitcase veered in front of her, and she accelerated round him, anxious to get out of the airport and onto the final leg of her journey, onto the tube up to Camden. She wanted a bath, some tea, and a cigarette, preferably several. She didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

“Good morning, madam,” a firm, female voice said, and Kerry felt a hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind stepping this way, please?”

She let herself be led to one of the tables by the young Scottish woman, her guts taut with weary anxiety. It was just her luck, just her sodding luck.

“So,” the woman said, “where have you been?”

“Washington,” Kerry replied, loading the word with as much cheery innocence as possible, as though hoping through pronunciation alone to demonstrate herself incapable of transgressing any law.

“Anything you want to tell me about?”

Kerry decided to go for it. “Well, there is one thing,” she said, putting her bags onto the table.

The woman’s eyes remained friendly. Sort of.

“I bought an iPod,” Kerry continued, offhand. “I don’t know whether I should have decl — ”

“If you didn’t know, then you should have gone down the other channel. That’s illegal, by itself. And yes, you should have declared it.”

The woman unzipped Kerry’s suitcase and started lifting her clothes out onto the table. Other passengers strolled by, flicking curious glances, relieved that some stranger had been sacrificed to the dark gods of Customs, and not them. Kerry watched as her holiday was picked out and strewn over the surface. The dress she’d worn to the bridal shower. The card Diane had given her to thank her for coming all that way. A souvenir ashtray stolen from the Embassy Suites. Her lips twitched slightly when she saw this last. The first time John’s hand had touched hers had been an accident, as they simultaneously stubbed out cigarettes, early one evening two days before the wedding.

“What were you doing in Washington?” the woman asked, unzipping Kerry’s toiletries bag and tipping out the contents.

“I was at a wedding,” Kerry chirped, still doing her best to seem Trustworthy and Normal, though thrown sufficiently off balance to half-fear that Washington, D.C., was well known to be off-limits to British nationals, but somehow no one had told her, and she was falling further and further into a trap. “My best friend married an American, and they had the wedding there.”

The woman gave no reaction to this, and instead unscrewed the cap of Kerry’s shampoo. She squidged a little out of the container and squinted into the bottle.

“What are you looking for?” Kerry asked, striving for a tone of bright and innocent inquiry.

“Drugs.”

“Oh.” Drugs, she thought. Drugs.

Feeling dizzy, she let the woman get on with it, and stopped trying to pretend to be something she was not. Lyrics from the album thudded in her mind as she watched the process, wondering how she’d be feeling now if she actually was a drug courier or terrorist mastermind, and not a midranking and terminally bored PR, if at some point in the muddy “whatever” of the last two decades she’d taken a different course. Unbidden, the word “excited” popped into her mind, and she frowned.

Meanwhile, the official set about dismantling her toothpaste dispenser.

Twenty minutes later, flushed and embarrassed, Kerry trekked the long corridor toward the tube. The Customs woman had relented in the end, and even let her off the duty on the iPod, though sternly admonishing her not to do it again. What was weird was that there hadn’t been even a perfunctory attempt at a body search. Kerry could have had her jacket pockets stuffed with heroin or explosives or rare penguins and got away with it. She rather wished she had, in fact. The run-in with officialdom had affected her badly. She felt strange, untethered. She’d listened to the album too much on the flight, and songs were coursing round her head. She believed there was precious little sugar in her heart anymore, though. Precious little of anything, in fact.

On the tube she reached into her bag and pulled out her notepad. The last few pages were filled with self-motivational notes she’d scribbled on the flight, while everyone else was asleep or submitting to some inane movie. She always stayed awake on the way back to England, because that was the last chance she had to feel good, to feel like she was away from home, from her job, from Richard, from everything. Already she could feel that sense of perspective and freedom ebbing quickly away. Tomorrow she’d be back at Whitehead PR, selling her life by the day in the pursuit of percentage points of popularity for companies producing crap that people didn’t need. She’d be back in a flat that cost a fortune to rent and made her feel caged, and she’d be back in the same country as Richard. Which meant back with Richard, whatever the technicalities of the situation might be. Richard with the so-handsome face, Richard with the custom BMW, Richard the Funds Manager. Richard who’d had two sizable affairs with high-powered fund manageresses, and yet who still got mileage out of Kerry’s sole previous one-night digression, five years before. Richard who was now totally unrecognizable as the genuinely funny and charming boy she’d met in her second year at university; Richard who no longer had the faintest idea of what she was like, and seldom gave the impression that he cared.