Jeff Gelb: Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

"None of this is real," he told himself, but even his voice was feminine. He climbed slowly out of bed and his breasts swayed, just the way that Anna's had swayed. He walked across the room and confronted the full-length mirror beside the dressing table. There was a woman looking back at him, a beautiful naked woman, and the woman was him.

"This isn't real," he repeated, cupping his breasts in his hands and staring intently at the face in the mirror. The eyes were his, the expression was his. He could see himself inside that face, his own personality, Gil Batchelor the bus salesman from Woking. But who else was going to be able to see what he saw? What was Brian Taylor going to see, if he tried to turn up for work? And, God Almighty, what was Margaret going to say, if he came back home looking like this?

Without a sound, he collapsed to the floor, and lay with his face against the gray carpet, in total shock. He lay there until it grew dark, feeling chilled, but unwilling or unable to move. He wasn't sure which and he wasn't going to find out.

At last, when the room was completely dark, the door opened, and a dim light fell across the floor. Gil heard a voice saying, "You're awake. I'm sorry. I should have come in earlier."

Gil lifted his head. Unconsciously, he drew his long tangled hair out of his eyes, and looked up. A man was silhouetted in the doorway, a man wearing a business suit and polished shoes.

"Who are you?" he asked hoarsely. "What the hell has happened to me?"

The man said, "You've changed, that's all."

"For Christ's sake, look at me. What the hell is going on here? Did you do this with hormones, or what? I'm a man! I'm a man , for Christ's sake!" Gil began to weep, and the tears slid down his cheeks and tasted salty on his lips.

The man came forward and knelt down beside him and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It wasn't hormones. If I knew how it happened, believe me, I'd tell you. But all I know is, it happens. One man to the next. The man who was Anna before me — the man who took the body that used to be mine — he told me everything about it, just as I'm telling you — and just as you'll tell the next man that you pick."

At that moment the bedroom door swung a little wider, and the man's face was illuminated by the light from the hallway. With a surge of paralyzing fright, Gil saw that the man was him. His own face, his own hair, his own smile. His own wristwatch, his own suit. And outside in the hallway, his own suitcase, already packed.

"I don't understand," he whispered. He wiped the tears away from his face with his fingers.

"I don't think any of us ever will," the man told him. "There seems to be some kind of pattern to it; some kind of reason why it happens; but there's no way of finding out what it is."

"But you knew this was going to happen all along," said Gil. "Right from the very beginning. You knew ."

The man nodded. Gil should have been violent with rage. He should have seized the man by the throat and beaten his head against the wall. But the man was him, and for some inexplicable reason he was terrified of touching him.

The man said, quietly, "I'm sorry for you. Please believe me. But I'm just as sorry for myself. I used to be a man like you. My name was David Chilton. I was thirty-two years old, and I used to lease executive aircraft. I had a family, a wife and two daughters, and a house in Darien, Connecticut."

He paused, and then he said, "Four months ago I came to Amsterdam and met Anna. One thing led to another, and she took me back here. She used to make me go down on her, night after night. Then one morning I woke up and I was Anna, and Anna was gone."

Gil said, "I can't believe any of this. This is madness. I'm having a nightmare."

The man shook his head. "It's true; and it's been happening to one man after another, for years probably."

"How do you know that?"

"Because Anna took my passport and my luggage, and it seemed to me that there was only one place that she could go — he could go. Only one place where he could survive in my body and with my identity."

Gil stared at him. "You mean — your own home? He took your body and went to live in your own home?"

The man nodded. His face was grim. Gil had never seen himself look so grim before.

"I found Anna's passport and Anna's bank books — don't worry, I've left them all for you. I flew to New York and then rented a car and drove up to Connecticut. I parked outside my own house and watched myself mowing my own lawn, playing with my own daughters, kissing my own wife."

He lowered his head, and then he said, "I could have killed him, I guess. Me, I mean — or at least the person who looked like me. But what would that have achieved? I would have made a widow out of my own wife, and orphans out of my own children. I loved them too much for that. I love them still."

"You left them alone?" Gil whispered.

"What else could I do? I flew back to Holland and here I am."

Gil said, "Couldn't you have stayed like Anna? Why couldn't you stay the way you were? Why did you have to take my body?"

"Because I'm a man," David Chilton told him. "Because I was brought up a man, and because I think like a man, and because it doesn't matter how beautiful a woman you are, how rich a woman you are… well, you're going to find out what it's like, believe me. Not even the poorest most downtrodden guy in the whole wide world has to endure what women have to endure. Supposing every time that a woman came up to a man, she stared at his crotch instead of his face, even when they were supposed to be having a serious conversation? You don't think that happens? You did it to me, when we met at the hotel. Eighty percent of the time your eyes were ogling my tits, and I know what you were thinking. Well, now it's going to happen to you. And, believe me, after a couple of months, you're going to go pick up some guy not because you want to live like a man again but because you want your revenge on all those jerkoffs who treat you like a sex object instead of a human being."

Gil knelt on the floor and said nothing. David Chilton checked Gil's wristwatch — the one that Margaret had given him on their last anniversary — and said, "I'd better go. I've booked a flight at eleven."

"You're not — " Gil began.

David Chilton made a face. "What else can I do? Your wife's expecting me home. A straight ordinary-looking man like me. Not a voluptuous brunette like you."

"But Margaret's going to know you straight away. You may look like me, but you're not me, are you? She'll know you're not me the minute you walk into the house. So will my dog."

"Bondy?"

Gil felt a prickle of deep apprehension. He had never told Anna that his dog was called Bondy.

David Chilton said, "I've taken more than your shape, Gil. I've taken your memory, too. In the middle left-hand drawer of your desk at home, you have a flashlight, most of your credit card statements, a stapler, and the souvenir issue of Playboy when they stopped putting staples through the centerfold. Your father used to play the bassoon on Sunday afternoons, even though your mother tried to persuade him not to."

"Oh, Jesus," said Gil, shivering.

"You want more?" asked David Chilton.

"You can't do this," Gil told him. "It's theft!"

"Theft? How can a man steal something that everybody in the whole world will agree is his?"

"Then it's murder, for God's sake! You've effectively killed me!"

"Murder?" David Chilton shook his head. "Come on, now, Anna, I really have to go."

"I'll kill you," Gil warned him.

"I don't think so," said David Chilton. "Maybe you'll think about it, the way that I thought about killing the guy who took my body. But there's a diary in the living room, a diary kept by most of the men who have changed into Anna. Read it before you think of doing anything drastic."