by Steve Harris
‘You told me you dreamed of torturing her.’
‘I also dreamed she was a ghost and she came to my bed. That isn’t wishful thinking, is it? Even if I hated her, which I don’t, I wouldn’t wish harm on her. Anyway, as I was saying, I had all these memories that didn’t quite ring true - except that they did, because I was this new person. My name was Sarah-Jane Dresden, not Snowy. And I wasn’t a computer saleswoman, but a publisher’s rep. Anyway, I was sitting in my flat - I don’t know where it was, but I could hear seagulls, so it was somewhere near the sea, and I was reading a chapter of a book called Black Rock. And the book was trying to take me over. The more I read of it, the less certain I became about who I really was. The character in the book was me. The real me. I was called Sarah-Jane but the more I read, the more I felt I was her. It was like someone had changed me into Sarah-Jane. It was a weird sensation. I was losing my identity.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I read this chapter about what had happened to my friend. I had this friend called Janie, who was an editor. She was supposed to be in my flat asleep. She told me she’d killed her husband and she’d run away. Well, somehow she’d gone. Her dead husband came and took her away, or something. I don’t really remember that bit. But the upshot of it was that I was frightened about being turned back into Snowy. I was scared because my universe seemed to be unravelling. I had this other friend called Martin, I think, and a boyfriend called Jim or something and I was waiting for them to come and help. But as I read the chapter I had in my hands, I found out that both of them had come here to Black Rock and that you’d captured them. So I realized that the only way I could save myself was to come here. But I was terrified of being turned into Snowy, because I thought that Snowy was a ghost or something. I can remember the last bit I dreamed before I woke up. Most of it’s still in my head.’
Tell me,’ Philip said.
Snowy searched for words, then began. She recited the passage she had read.
‘Sarah-Jane Dresden pulled up and got out of her car. She walked towards the house with the sound of Diamond Ambrose Anstey’s howling ringing in her ears. The dog, apparently, was trying to tell her something she already knew. That it was dangerous for her to come here. Sarah-Jane did not allow herself to think about this.’
‘Very good,’ Philip said. ‘Perhaps you ought to become a writer too.’
Snowy nodded, barely hearing him. She found the next section and said it:
‘Her heart in her mouth, she walked towards the huge black door she knew so well. A part of her remembered touching that golden door knob, remembered how it had eaten her fingerprints before they’d formed. All of this had happened to someone else, but the memories now belonged to Sarah-Jane. The metamorphosis had come on in leaps and bounds during the drive here. The change from being Sarah-Jane to being Snowy Dresden had completed itself. It had begun, she realized, the moment she read the first chapter of Peter Perfect’s book, and it had been working at her ever since: eating her away piece by piece. Now it was done and she was totally Snowy.
‘Sarah-Jane, finally, had gone.’
Philip nodded sagely. ‘Anything else?’
‘Some more stuff,’ Snowy said. ‘But I must have been getting close to waking up by then. It’s all fuzzy. Something about striding up to the door not knowing anything except that I had to fight, that I had to cling to the memories that were flooding away from me. “Once upon a time,” I was telling myself, “there was a girl called Sarah-Jane who had a boyfriend called James and…” that’s all I can remember. What do you think it means?’
Philip shrugged and smiled enigmatically. ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure someone, somewhere, will be able to make sense of it all. Maybe Carl Jung would have if he’d still been around. Or maybe there’s a real Sarah-Jane Dresden out there somewhere reading that story at this very moment and feeling the things you felt in your dream. That would be spooky wouldn’t it?’
Snowy shuddered, but the spookiness of the issue was not the prime reason for this response. The prime reason was that Philip’s gentle fingers had finally hit the spot and gone to work.
‘It isn’t so bad being Snowy, is it?’ he asked as Snowy pushed her hips up towards the fingers that had suddenly moved away from her.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she gasped.
Philip touched her. ‘Even with the rules?’
‘Stuff… uh… uh… the ruh-hooools!’
‘Would you like a surprise?’
‘Ooooh… yessss!’
‘We have visitors.’
Snowy didn’t care about visitors at that moment. The visitors could damned well entertain themselves. All she cared about was the oncoming orgasm that was rushing towards her like an express train. It would measure about nine on the Richter scale when it hit her. The earth would move. And then some.
‘Ellen’s here,’ Philip said, pushing back the duvet and lowering his head towards his busy fingers. ‘And James and Janie and Martin and Billy-Joe. The gang’s all here. And you want to stay here with them and with me, don’t you?’
‘Mmmm!’
‘And be mine for ever?’
Tours!’
‘Here in my universe?’
His fingers left her clitoris and stretched her wide and his hot tongue began to flick at her. ‘Fuck me!’ she moaned.
‘You have to promise to be whatever I want you to be.’
‘I promise!’ Snowy groaned, shuddering with uncontrollable muscle spasms.
The orgasm that followed was better than nine on the Richter Scale. It was apocalyptic.
‘I want you to be someone else,’ Philip’s voice said out there in the distance.
Three
Sarah-Jane finished the last page and put the latest sample of Black Rock down thinking that her only option was to go to the house in Tintagel to try to rectify things.
Whereupon, she understood, she would lose her sense of being Sarah-Jane, become Snowy Dresden and live happily ever after as a gasping nymphomaniac who would do whatever her master required of her. And that, she thought, would probably include torturing poor Ellen and her other friends too.
I won’t go, S’n’J thought defiantly. I’ll run away.
But deep down inside, she knew that this option did not exist. Peter Perfect was more than human. He might have been an ordinary mortal once, but he belonged to that genus no longer. Somehow - presumably from living in Black Rock - he had elevated himself to the position of mortal god. And gods could find you wherever you ran. Even if they were only half-gods. And no matter how long the chase lasted, it could only end one way. The way the god intended it to end.
Sarah-Jane felt incredibly weary. She couldn’t fight a battle because she had nothing to use as a weapon except her faithful rolling-pin or a selection of kitchen cutlery. Attacking Peter Perfect with a weapon of this type would be akin to making an as
sault on a battle tank with a banana. It wouldn’t work. Neither could she out-think or out-manoeuvre him. Nothing could be done.
It was all over.
Whatever Peter Perfect wants, Peter Perfect gets, S’n’J thought bitterly. And he wants me. God only knows why. Perhaps I can make a deal with him. Perhaps I can get him to release Ellen and James and the others in return for his having me. That would be the least I could do. That would save some of us. Maybe he’ll listen to reason.
And hoping that Peter Perfect would listen to reason, S’n’J got her jacket and her car keys.
Do you think it’ll snow? she thought as she went out of the front door.
‘You mother-fucker!’ S’n’J spat, standing up. She threw the pages across the room with all the force she could muster. The pages separated and swayed down towards the carpet like huge discoloured snowflakes. ‘You arrogant bastard! I’ll show you who’s giving in and coming to you begging for a deal. I’ll show you!’
She sat down again, shaking with fury. If she’d thought Martin was the world’s biggest and most egotistical shit, she had been very wrong indeed. He didn’t even make the minor league in comparison with Peter Bastard.
Tuck me, indeed,’ she hissed. ‘You could torture me until doomsday, you fuckhead and I’d never say that to you. I’d rather be burned alive at the stake.’
The nerve of the bastard! she thought, glaring at the scattered pages. He not only had Snowy dream she was me, but he also predicted my reaction to reading about it!
The thing that irritated her most of all, however, was the fact that Peter Perfect knew exactly how she had felt when she’d sat down to read his latest chapter. S’n’J refused to consider this and let her fury ramble on for a while.
S’n’J got up, intending to get her coat and her car keys, then she sat down again. It was no good going blazing down there to tear him off a strip. This, presumably, was what he had intended. That last section had been written with the sole intention of inflaming her. Which meant that if she went there when she was cool, calm and collected, she might well have a better chance. Folks who rushed into dangerous situations without considering what might happen often got themselves hurt.
There’s got to be something you can do! she told herself. Despite what he claims in his bloody book, there’s got to be!
But if Peter Perfect had a weak spot, she didn’t know what it was. If only he’d been Superman, she could order a chunk of green Kryptonite; if he’d been a vampire she could take garlic and crosses and Holy water. What did you take to ward off a writer? The only thing S’n’J could think of was an editor. Those were the only thorns you could insert into the sides of writers. And according to what she’d just read, he already had two of those.
‘Unless what’s written there is all lies,’ she said. But she doubted this. Martin wasn’t around, and neither was James. And Janie had vanished. The only place they could all have gone was to Black Rock.
Which meant that Peter Perfect was impervious to editors.
Maybe they’re in awe of him, like you would be if you met God Himself, she thought. Maybe he gave them demonstrations of miracles to stun them. Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps Martin can’t treat him to any of that editorial derision he’s so fond of because Martin’s terrified. But Janie once said that all writers have egos the size of China with a black strip of paranoia a hundred miles wide running through them, so perhaps a little derision is the thing that’ll bring him down a peg or two.
But derision didn’t sound like much of a weapon to use against someone who could make your lounge floor turn into a hundred-foot drop into the Atlantic Ocean; against someone who was getting stronger with each passing second.
Or that’s what he’d like you to think, she told herself. She emptied her mind - or got rid of as much of the crap as she could - and took deep and steady breaths.
She was going to have to go down there, she knew. If she wanted to see James and the others again she was going to have to break her promise to herself, go to Black Rock and fight for them.
All you have to do, she told herself, is hang on to your own identity.
If she was going, she realized, she needed a God on her side. But S’n’J didn’t have a proper bible to take with her. All she owned in the way of religious literature was a yellowing copy of The Watchtower she had once bought from a Jehovah’s Witness who expected to go to heaven if she made enough converts, and a tiny copy of the Illustrated New Testament that they had given her at Sunday school when she was little.
She found the little half-bible in a cupboard, took it to the kitchen, found the rolling-pin she’d hit Martin with the last time she’d seen him, waved the bible over it and said, ‘Bless you, weapon of righteousness,’ feeling supremely stupid as she did it. She filled an empty plastic Panda Cola bottle with tap-water and blessed it in the same way. The rolling-pin ought to have momentarily gleamed with light and the bottle of water ought to have sparkled for a second (and would have done in a decent horror novel, she thought) but neither of these things happened. In a Stephen Byrne book, this action, even performed without faith, would have guaranteed that both objects would be endowed with a certain power, but in real life this wasn’t the case.
Did you expect it to be? she asked herself.
She hadn’t expected it, but the wide-eyed little girl who lived inside her (as Peter Perfect had so accurately portrayed) had hoped it would happen and would have been delighted if it had.
You’d better keep on hoping for a miracle, S’n’J told the little girl inside her, because we’re going to need one if we’re going to get out of this the same way we got in!
She took the bible, the rolling-pin and the bottle of water back to the lounge, set them down on the table, looked at them for a while, then shook her head. None of them looked remotely convincing. A Remington pump-action shotgun lying there might have given her a little more confidence, but these little things were not going to work.
S’n’J put on her jacket, put the bible in its inside pocket, picked up the bottle of water, fumbled and watched it fall.
Dropsy! she admonished herself as she stooped to pick it up.
When she’d put the bottle in her pocket, she picked up her car keys and the rolling-pin and headed for the door, her heart in her mouth.
Look out, Peter Perfect, she thought. Snowdrop’s coming home, and she is one extremely angry woman!
27 - Meeting Mr Winter
The journey to Tintagel and Black Rock did not take the shape that S’n’J had expected. The car didn’t play up, no other drivers came at her like madmen and no black dogs attempted suicide at the wheels of her car.
She did not arrive at Tintagel hanging on to her identity with only a tenuous grasp, and no one had sent any hallucinations to frighten her.
It stood to reason, she supposed. She was doing exactl
y what Peter Perfect wanted her to do. He was confident that things would happen exactly as he had written them: she would get out of her car with the sound of Diamond Ambrose Anstey’s howling ringing in her ears. She would walk towards the house with its golden door knob, recalling how it had misted beneath her fingers and how it had eaten her prints. She would no longer know who she was: she would be more Snowdrop than Sarah-Jane.
Get out of it, Drezy, she told herself, according to the book, the metamorphosis is supposed to be coming on in leaps and bounds as you get closer to the house. That isn’t happening, is it?
She thought about it and decided it wasn’t. She was still pretty clear about who she was and who she had to stay.
Put that in your pipe and puff on it, Mister Perfect, she thought defiantly. I may end up going out like a lamb, but I’m coming in like a lion!
But, beneath the wafer-thin coating of bluster she was more frightened than she could ever remember being in her whole life. If the resident of Black Rock had already captured (or even killed) Janie, Martin and James, there was no good reason why he shouldn’t do exactly as he wanted with her.
Except for the fact that you are special to him, she told herself. If there was any saving grace to the story, this was it. She was the author’s main character, and as such, he couldn’t let her die before the end. The problem, she realized, was not knowing how far ahead the end lay.
I’ll give him a run for his money, whatever happens, she resolved and managed a grim smile.
She drove slowly along Tintagel’s main street, followed it round the sharp right-handed bend by the King Arthur’s Castle bookshop and on to the caravan park, glancing to her left from time to time, looking out to sea. The sea was flat and slate-grey. Above it, the sky was black and angry as if a storm had been commissioned for her arrival.
