Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  I started downstairs, ducking my head so that I could see through the banistairs into the hallway. I was so frightened that I was making a thin pathetic whining noise, like a child.

  The screams were coming from the living-room. The door was half-open, and the light was still on, but I couldn’t see anything at all. No shadows, nothing. I reached the bottom of the stairs and edged my way along the hall until I was right beside the living-room door. The screams were hideous, and in between the screams I could hear a woman begging for her life.

  I tried to peer in through the crack in the door, but I still couldn’t see anything. I thought: there’s only one thing for it. I’ve just got to crash into the room and surprise him, whoever he is, and hope that he isn’t stronger and quicker and that he doesn’t have a straight-razor.

  I took a deep breath. Then I took a step back, lowered my shoulder and collided against the door. It slammed wide open, and juddered a little way back again. The screams abruptly stopped.

  I was standing in a silent room – alone, with only a chair for company. Either we had imagined the screaming, or else it was some kind of trick.

  I was still standing there, baffled, when I heard the bedroom door slamming upstairs, and more screaming. Only this time, I recognized who it was. Katharine, and she was shouting out, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry for God’s sake help me Jerry for God’s sake!”

  I vaulted back up the stairs, my vision jostling like a hand-held camera. The door to the smaller bedroom was shut – brown-painted wood, with a cheap plastic handle. I tried to open it but it was locked or bolted. And all the time Katharine was screaming and screaming.

  “Katharine!” I yelled back. “Katharine, what’s happening! I can’t open the door!”

  But all she could do was scream and weep and babble something incomprehensible, like “no-no-no-you-can’t-you-can’t-be-you-can’t—”

  I hurled myself against the door, shoulder-first, but all I did was bruise my arm. Katharine’s screams reached a crescendo and I was mad with panic, panting and shaking. I propped my hands against the landing walls to balance myself, and I kicked at the door-lock – once, twice – and then the door-jamb splintered and the door shuddered open.

  Katharine was lying on the bed. She was struggling and staring at me, her eyes wide open. She looked as if she were fastened on to the mattress with thick brown sticks – trapped, unable to move. But beside the bed stood a huge and complicated creature that I could hardly even begin to understand. It almost filled the room with arms and legs like an immense spider; and glossy brown sacs hung from its limbs like some kind of disgusting fruit. In the middle of it, and part of it, all mixed up in it, his head swollen out of proportion and his eyes as black as cellars stood Donal Coakley, in his gray flannel shorts and his patched-up jumper, his lips drawn back as if they had been nailed to his gums. He floated, almost, borne up above the threadbare carpet by the thicket of tentacles that sprouted out of his back.

  The thick brown sticks that fastened Katharine to the bed were spider’s legs – or the legs of the thing that Donal Coakley had created out of his need for revenge. This was revenge incarnate. This was what revenge looked like, when it reached such an intensity that it took on a life of its own.

  In his right hand, Donal held a straight-razor, with a bloodied blade. It was only an inch above Katharine’s neck. He had already cut her once, a very light cut, right across her throat, and blood was running into the collar of her green sweater.

  I approached him as near as I dared. The whole room was a forest of spiderlike legs, and there was nothing on Donal’s face to indicate that he could see me; or that he had any human emotions at all.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked him. “What do you want me to say? You want me to apologize, for bullying you? I bullied you, yes, and I’m sorry for it. I wish I’d never done it. But we were all young and ignorant in those days. We never guessed that you were so unhappy, and even if we’d known, I don’t think that we would have cared.

  “It’s life, Donal. It’s life. And you don’t ease your own pain by inflicting it on others.”

  Donal raised his head a little. I didn’t know whether he could see me or not. The criss-cross spider’s-legs that surrounded him twitched and trembled, as if they were eager to scuttle toward me.

  “You don’t know the meaning of pain,” he said; and his voice sounded exactly as it had, all those years ago, in the playground of Bishop O’Rourke’s. “You never suffered pain, any of you.”

  “Oh God,” said Katharine, “please help me.”

  But without any hesitation at all, Donal swept the straight-razor from one side of her neck to the other. If you hadn’t been paying any particular attention, you wouldn’t have realized immediately what he had done. But he had sliced her neck through, almost to the vertebrae, and from that instant there was no chance at all of her survival. Blood suddenly sprayed everywhere, all over the bed, all up the walls, all over the carpet. No wonder the gardaí had broken into this house and thought that it was all decorated red.

  Katharine twitched and shuddered. One hand tried to reach out for me. But I knew that Donal had killed her – and so, probably, did she. The blood was unbelievable: pints of it, pumped out everywhere. Donal’s hands were smothered in it, and it was even splattered across his face.

  I shall never know to this day exactly what happened next. But if you can accept that men and women become physically transformed, whenever they’re truly vengeful, then you can understand it, even if you don’t completely believe it. When Donal cut Katharine’s throat, something happened to me. I’m not saying that it was similar to what happened to Donal. But my mind suddenly boiled over with the blackest of rages. I felt hatred, and aggression, but I also felt enormous power. I felt myself lifted up, surged forward, as if I had legs and arms that I had never had before, as if I had unimaginable power. I hurled myself at Donal, and the thicket of limbs that surrounded him, and grasped him around the waist.

  He slashed at my face with his straight-razor. I knew he was cutting me. I could feel the blood flying. He struggled and screamed like a girl. But I forced him backward. I gripped his hair and clawed at his face. His spidery arms and legs were flailing at me, but I had spidery arms and legs that were more than the equal of his, and we fought for one desperate moment like two giant insects. My urge for revenge, though, was so much fiercer than his. I hurled him back against the bedroom window.

  The glass cracked. The glazing-bars cracked. Then both of us smashed through the window and into the yard, falling fifteen feet on to bricks and bags of cement and window-frames. I lifted my head. I could feel the blood dripping from my lips. I felt bruised all over, as if I had been trampled by a horse. I could hear shouting in the street, and a woman screaming.

  Donal Coakley was staring at me, only inches away, and his face was as white as the face of the moon.

  “I’ve got you now, Jerry,” he said; and he managed the faintest of smiles.

  And that’s my testimony; and that’s all that I can tell you. You can talk to Father Murphy, for what it’s worth. You can talk to Maureen. If she doesn’t admit to the screaming, then it’s only because she’s worried about the value of her house. But it’s all true; and I didn’t touch Katharine, I swear.

  If you can’t find any trace of Donal, then I don’t mind that, because it means that he’s finally gone to his rest. But I’d be careful of who I bullied, if I were you; and I’d steer clear of white-faced boys in second-hand shoes. And I wouldn’t have a vengeful thought in my head, not one. Not unless you want to find out what vengeance really is.

  The Sympathy Society

  The phone rang just as Martin was cracking the second egg into the frying-pan. He wedged the receiver under his chin and said, “Sarah! Hi, sweetheart! You’re calling early!”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. Then, “Sorry, Martin. This is John – John Newcome, from Lazarus.”

  “John? What can I do for you? Don’t tell me
Sarah’s left some more documents at home.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Listen, Martin, there’s no easy way of saying this. We’ve just had a call from the British Embassy in Athens. I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

  Martin suddenly found himself short of breath. “Accident? What kind of accident? Sarah’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “I’m sorry, Martin. We’re all devastated. She’s dead.”

  Martin turned off the gas. It was all he could think of to do. Whatever John Newcome said next, he wasn’t going to be eating the full English breakfast that he had planned for himself. The flat was silent now. The television had switched itself off. The birds had suddenly stopped chirruping.

  “You’re going to hear this sooner or later,” said John Newcome. He was obviously trying to be stable but his words came out like a bagful of Scrabble tiles. “The press will be onto you. You know. Sarah had an accident on a jet-ski, late yesterday afternoon. It seems as if she went between two boats. There was a line between them. The chap from the Embassy said that she probably didn’t see it. Only a thin line. Braided steel.”

  “No,” said Martin.

  “I’m sorry, Martin. But it’s probably better that you hear it from me. She went straight into it and it cut her—”

  Martin could never tell afterward if he had actually heard the words, or if he had imagined hearing them, or seen what had happened to Sarah in his mind’s eye, as if she had sent him a Polaroid snap of it. Full color, blue sky, blue sea, yachts as white as starched collars.

  “Head—”

  No this can’t be true. This is Thursday morning and as soon as I’ve finished my job in Fulham I’m flying out to Rhodes to spend the next ten days with her, swimming and snorkeling and going to discos. Not Sarah. Not Sarah with her long blonde hair and her bright gray oystershell eyes and her Finnish-looking face. And the way she laughed – wild exaggerated laughter, falling backward on the futon. And those toes of hers, kicking in the sunlight. And she hated fat, she used to take her ham sandwiches apart and put on her reading-glasses and search for fat like a gold prospector.

  And her kisses, clicking on his shoulder, in the darkest moments of the night. And suggestive little whispers.

  “Off.”

  His mother said that he was very brave. His father stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his brown corduroy trousers and looked as if he had just heard that interest rates had gone down again. He spent most of the weekend in his old room, lying on his candlewick bedspread, facing the wall. He saw so many faces in the floral wallpaper. Devils, imps, demons and fairies. But he couldn’t clearly remember what Sarah had looked like. He didn’t want to remind himself by looking at photographs. If he looked at photographs, he would remember only the photographs, and not the real Sarah. The real Sarah who had touched him and kissed him and waved him goodbye at Stansted Airport. Turning the corner. The sun, catching her hair. Then, gone.

  After the funeral, he went for a long walk on the Downs, on the bony prehistoric back of Sussex, where the wind constantly blew and the sea always glittered in the distance. But no matter how often you walked up there, you always had to return. And, as evening turned the sky into veils of blue, he came down the narrow chalk path, clinging on to the hawthorn bushes to keep his balance, and he knew that he was going to go mad without her. He was going to kill himself, take an overdose, cut his wrists, fill his car with carbon monoxide. She was gone, and she had left him all alone in this world, and he didn’t want to be here any longer. Not alone. What was the point? What was the purpose? Everything that he had ever done, he had done expressly for her. His whole life from the moment he was born had been leading him toward her, by all kinds of devious paths and diversions. They had given him her jewelry. Her necklace, her watch. What was the point of them, if she wasn’t alive to wear them?

  And more than anything, he kept imagining what it must have been like for her, rounding the prow of that yacht, laughing, revving up her jet-ski, only to see that steel cable stretched in front of her, far too late. Maybe she hadn’t seen it at all. But what had she felt, when she hit it, and her head came flying off? Don’t tell me she felt nothing. Don’t tell me she wouldn’t have suffered. Don’t tell me that for one split-second she wouldn’t have realized what had happened to her?

  Nobody had any proof, of course, but didn’t they always say that when they guillotined the nobles in the French Revolution, and their heads had tumbled into the basket, some of them had cried out in shock?

  In their flat, two weeks later, he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to cut his throat with the steak knife that he had stolen from a Berni Inn the previous summer. Because Sarah had dared him to. Now he believed that he knew why she had dared him. She wanted him to have a way of joining him, when she died. It was drizzling outside. One of the gutters was blocked with leaves and water was clattering intermittently into the basement area outside.

  He drew the serrated blade across his neck. It tugged at his skin and blood suddenly poured on to his shirt. It didn’t hurt, but the tugging was deeply unpleasant, and the knife obviously wasn’t sharp enough. He had expected to cut through his carotid artery and send spurts of blood all over the bathroom, up the walls, over the mirror. Sarah’s neck must have pumped blood, when her head was cut off. He remembered reading about the beheading of a British soldier in a Japanese PoW camp. His commanding officer said that blood jumped out of his neck like a red walking-stick.

  He lifted the knife again. His hand was already slippery and his fingers were sticking together. He tried to cut again, but his neck was so messy that he couldn’t see what he was doing, and he was beginning to tremble.

  He slowly dropped to his knees on to the floor. The knife fell in the washbasin. He stayed where he was, his head bowed, his eyes streaming with tears, his mouth dragged down in a silent howl of loneliness and agony.

  Jenny came to see him in hospital. Jenny was plump and pale with scraped-back hair. She worked in the accounts department at Hiya Intelligence, but ever since he had started working there, she had made excuses to come up and see him in software. She had brought him a box of Milk Tray chocolates and a John Grisham novel.

  “You’ve lost an awful lot of weight, Martin,” she said, laying her little nail-bitten hand on top of his.

  He tried to smile. “Throat’s still sore. Besides, I haven’t got much of an appetite.”

  “How long have you got to stay in here?”

  “I don’t know. The psychotherapist said he wasn’t very happy with me. I said, ‘What’s happiness got to do with anything?’ ”

  “So what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘If you don’t know, you ought to stay in hospital.’”

  Jenny reached down and fumbled in her big woven bag. She produced a folded copy of the Evening Standard and handed it to him. “There,” she said. “Read that ad I’ve circled. I don’t know if it’ll help, but you never know.”

  It was a small display advertisement in the classified section, under Personal Services. It read: “Grieving? Suicidal? When you’ve lost a loved one, The Sympathy Society understands how you feel. Unlike all other counselors, we can offer you what you’re really looking for.” Underneath, there was a telephone number in Buckinghamshire.

  Martin dropped the paper on to the floor. “I don’t think so, Jenny. The last thing I need is even more sympathy. I’ve had so much sympathy I’ve been feeling sympathy-sick. Like eating a whole box of chocolates at one sitting.

  “By the way—” he said, handing her back the box of Milk Tray, “I don’t like milk chocolate. You eat them.”

  “It’s all right. Give them to the nurses.”

  She looked so disappointed that he took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “I’m just pleased that you came, that’s all. I can’t expect you to understand how I feel. Nobody can. Sarah was everything to me. Everything. I’m not making a song and dance about it. I simply don’t see the point of living without her.”
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  “What about your family? Your mum and dad? What about all of your friends?”

  “They’ll get over me.”

  “You really think so?” she challenged him, with tears in her eyes, and her lower lip quivering. “You’re hurt, of course you are. You’re absolutely devastated. But why should even more people have to suffer?”

  “I’m sorry, Jenny. It’s my life and I have the right to do what I want with it. And that includes ending it.”

  Jenny stood up, and sniffed, and picked up her bag. “If that’s the way you feel, I hope you make better job of it next time.”

  Martin gave a painful cough and held out his hand to her. “Don’t be angry with me, Jenny. Please.”

  “I’m not. I just can’t stand to see you giving in. I’d give my life for you, you know that.”

  He looked into her eyes and he could see how much she loved him. He had the dreadful, unforgivable thought that if only she had died, instead of Sarah. Hadn’t she offered her life? And if it could make any difference, would he have taken it?

  “Thanks for the book, and the chocolates,” he said.

  She didn’t answer, but she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. Then she left the ward, dancing awkwardly in the doorway with a man on crutches.

  Martin lay back on the bed. The sun crossed the ceiling like the spokes of a broken wheel. He dozed for a while, and when he opened his eyes it was almost four o’clock.

  “You’ve been sleeping,” said a soft voice, very close to his ear.

  “Mmm,” he said. Then he suddenly opened his eyes wider. That was Sarah’s voice. He was sure that it was Sarah’s voice. He turned sideways and she was lying right next to him, her eyes bright, her blonde hair spread across the pillow. She was smiling at him in that gently mocking way she had, when she caught him doing something embarrassing.

  “Sarah,” he whispered, reaching up and touching her hair. “I had this nightmare that you were dead. It seemed completely real. You don’t have any idea.”