He felt no different. He looked no different. Whatever she’d given him, it hadn’t killed him. The whole thing was just a mean, drunken digression. Despite which, he gave Rebecca the ring at his first opportunity, and then watched to see what would happen.
Of course it had worked. He couldn’t believe how well it had worked. Over her shrill protests, he finished his holiday eating whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted. Within a month, Rebecca had developed a double chin. Dear, vain, conceited Rebecca was swelling up like a balloon and could do nothing to stop it. His pudginess, on the other hand, was vanishing. By the time they left for home, he looked positively trim. That was when he knew.
Once they returned home, it continued. Rebecca tried everything from yoga to liposuction. The latter vacuumed fat off here and there, but couldn’t slow down its reappearance. She saw specialists in diet, hormones, metabolism. No one could account for the changes. No one could reverse them. She ate in the zone, adhered to the Atkins diet, and finally, humiliatingly, joined Weight Watchers. The latter thought she lacked the will to lose. She was cheating.
She became reclusive, and within the year was institutionalised. Never for a moment did anyone save Manny have the slightest suspicion what was really happening - and Manny, the instrument of the spell, couldn’t say a thing. It was all too sublime.
Finally, Rebecca’s clogged arteries had given her a stroke. She hadn’t lived long. After the funeral, the family returned his ring to him; it was only proper - he had stuck by her the whole time. At least, when he wasn’t eating.
The moment his fiancée was gone, any overindulging he did came back on him as it would have on anyone. He made himself rein in his appetite. The trouble was, by then he’d discovered heliked to eat that way. His body had grown used to rich sauces and huge quantities of food. It ached for more.
Rebecca had a sister, Midge, who liked him. She had always been waiting in the wings, jealous of her older sister. It was the element of sibling rivalry, stealing the boyfriend away from her dead sister, that made his part easy. Within weeks they were engaged, and he started eating again. He did so warily, with an eye to Rebecca’s replacement, because at that point he wasn’t certain the magic would transfer. But Midge wasted no time in following in her sister’s elephantine footsteps. The difference was that Midge somehow figured out he was responsible. He suspected that Manny told her, and thereafter he and Manny parted company. Midge soon rejected him. Although she never could have understood what was happening, he had learned never to involve people who knew one another.
And so he had come to the personals page, where potential fiancées abounded - a thousand women of all persuasions looking for the right man, for romance and adventure. He looked for the ones who proclaimed their thinness, their great physiques. He tailored his own ad to attract them. It was easy. They were ducks on a pond.
* * * *
Two days later, when he looked to check that his ad was listed in the personals, he found Cerise. Her ad was across from his on the page. The title caught his eye.
THE WAY TO A MAN’S HEART. WiOF, in the middle of life, slender, attractive, loves good food, trained chef, ISO delicious male, 35-45, who wants to savour the flavour. BOX 2356.
The silly ‘savour the flavour’ rhyme ought to have made him dismiss the ad, but instead it crawled inside his head like some tiny, obnoxious nursery rhyme, helixing in singsong around and around his thoughts. ‘Trained chef’ was a taunt, an invitation, a tantalising dare. He started imagining all sorts of things - of taking her to the best restaurants in the city, watching her pass judgment on the culinary delights as he devoured each one. Letting her pick out the courses one after the others, selecting his sauces, hobnobbing with the various chefs. Choosing the very shape of her own undoing.
What was the ‘O’ for, he wondered. Old, maybe, Oriental. Widowed Oriental? Slender? Well, for the time being, maybe. He would change that.
He replied to her ad immediately, calling the 900 number and leaving his name, his phone number and particulars. He finished by saying, ‘Good food is necessary for all things sensual. How can anyone be a sensualist without appreciating food? You, with your training, can’t help but be sensual. Of that, I’m certain.’ He didn’t know why, but he was sweating by the time he finished - a case of nerves. Having made the call, he found himself worried about losing her to someone else. The ad spoke tohim. He wondered if his own ad had affected the women who answered that way.
He’d never had a problem inducing them to accept the ring, which meant that they came to the date with some illusions, some ridiculous hopes that worked to his advantage. And he always began with the rose, that romantic hook. He remained attentive, cultured, never angry or even irritated; he was, he felt, a good lover, always solicitous, as hard, soft or vocal as they desired. He never looked at another woman, not even when the ballooning began. He was obsessed with watching the changes as he reshaped and distorted her. It was like peering into a funhouse mirror, witnessing a transformation that should have been his own. Behind the rapacious joy of eating and the visceral pleasure of controlling and destroying, he couldn’t imagine what he would have looked like by now without the ring, without the magic.
Responses to his ad trickled in, but he didn’t answer any of them. He waited for the woman to call him.
As the days ran on, he convinced himself that he’d been rejected, he had lost her. Maybe she’d had an answer before his. Her ad might have been in place for ages. He dug out the section and looked at it again, noting the ‘Exp. 2/19’ date at the end. His own ad didn’t expire until the 23rd, so she must have been bombarded with calls well before his own, how could she not have been? Someone had beaten him to her and there was nothing he could do, no way to get her to consider him instead. He thought of calling again, but knew how desperate that would make him sound, and he refused to be desperate. He sank into a depression, and thoughtlessly ate a huge meal to take his mind off her. Of course it did just the opposite, and he gained five pounds on top of everything else. Defeated, he returned to his mailbox and listened to a dozen unappetising answers. What could he do? He needed a vessel. He was starving without one.
After two weeks she called. a husky, lightly accented voice asked to speak with him. Her name, she said, was Cerise, like the colour. ‘I loved your reply. You seem to know me just by imagining my cooking. You made food sound as if it were your one consuming passion.’
‘It is,’ he said. His palms were sweating. ‘You - you’re a chef?’
‘Yes. Oh, not professionally. That is, I don’t work as one. But I have been trained here by the CIA, and also in France awhile ago.’
The CIA - only someone with his fixation would know to render that as a reference to a cooking school and not a collective of spies.
‘What was your specialty?’ He felt like an idiot asking it. What had happened to his refinement, his sensibility? His whole facade had deserted him.
‘Mediterranean dishes.’ Then she added, ‘So, would you like to sample my art?’
He’d intended to ask her to come to Figaro’s with him - that had been his original plan, the one he’d used on all the others. Instead he found himself saying, ‘I would love to,’ and writing down her address and promising to be there that night.
He hung up the phone and then sat still, his mouth dry, his penis as stiff as if she had just performed a striptease before him. There was something truly wonderful about her.Absurd, he thought, but I believe I’m in love.
He considered that he might even regret what had to happen to her.
* * * *
He arrived at 8:00 p.m. sharp. She had a midtown flat overlooking the park, an address that announced her wealth. The doorman called her and he heard her voice answering to let him in. The doorman touched finger to cap and held the door as he entered.
He’d brought a fine Bordeaux with him from his cellar, one that he never would have brought along on a blind first date. It seemed terribly important to make a goo
d first impression. He had his single rose, and the ring was in his breast pocket. He never knew when he was going to convince his vessel to wear it. What was important was that the magic start - that she handle the old ring sometime during the first meal. By the second or third date, he would propose, give her the ring to wear, and then let the rest happen. He’d done it enough times that the process was scripted, events pre-ordained before the first course had been cleared.
The elevator was an old-fashioned cage, and he rode up rigid with apprehension, staring through the bars but seeing nothing beyond his own desire.
Even before he’d reached her door, he could smell spices and sea scents. His stomach fluttered with anticipation at the same time as he realised the wine he’d brought wasn’t going to work. He ought to have asked what she was making. It would be interesting to see if she appreciated the gift; they could always drink it the next time.
He lifted the knocker and rapped quietly. She opened it at once.
The moment he looked at her, he knew what the ‘O’ had stood for.
‘Olive,’ he said aloud.
As though she understood his meaning, she smiled when he said it; and he thought he would go blind with lust. For a moment he actually forgot about food.
Her flesh was a deep, deep olive colour. She was as tall as he, and her bearing could only be described as regal. Her cheekbones were high, and as sharply defined as her jaw, which ought to have been too large, too pronounced on such a face but was unaccountably beautiful. Her eyes were lighter than her complexion, nearly golden. Her hair was jet black, yet where the light in her entryway sparkled in it, the hair seemed highlighted with gold, as if she’d looped thin strands through it. Her eyes looked him up and down as she spoke his name and offered her hand. He, utterly besotted, raised it to his lips and kissed it. She smiled again as he gave her the rose, and looked at him a moment over the petals. There were lines of experience beneath her eyes, but they laughed at him, promised joy.
She ushered him in, took his overcoat while commenting on the cold weather, accepted his proffered bottle. As he’d hoped, she noted its vintage with satisfaction: she knew her wine.
She wore a sort of loose, red, ochre and purple dashiki, belted in gold at her narrow waist, slit along the sides. When she reached to hang up his coat, he glimpsed her breast and realised that she was wearing nothing at all beneath the gown.
She had a bottle decanted already, some cold and golden aperitif, and she poured him a drink, then led him on a tour of her apartment. It was simply decorated in the style of a Mediterranean villa. The walls had been glazed, treated in rough imitation of old plaster. There was a mosaic built into the dining room wall of a fish creature - a kind of seahorse with a bearded human head. It looked like something that might have been uncovered at Pompeii. Whoever had died and left her a widow had provided for her very well.
‘I hope you like paella,’ she said. She placed herself on a divan across from him. Her feet, in sandals, crossed at the ankles. He couldn’t help staring.
‘You made a paella?’
She shrugged as if to say it was nothing. ‘I selected the ingredients this morning myself.’ She sipped her wine. ‘It’s important to have fresh ingredients.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So, please, tell me about yourself.’
‘Well,’ he said, and launched into a longwinded autobiography, surprising himself as he told her about his first sexual encounter, about growing up with a sense of superiority over the average citizen because he could read a wine list, because he could recognise quality in objects, in places. In people. At least, that was what he found himself saying. He described his trip to Crete with Manny and Manny’s girlfriend and Rebecca, calling it ‘the transforming event of my life’. He very nearly blurted out that he’d purchased a magic charm there - very nearly gave away his secret to a woman who was about to become its next victim - and decided that he’d best go light on the wine.
The dinner became immediately one of the greatest meals he had ever eaten. She had struck the perfect balance among the fish, shellfish and mussels, the herbes de Provence, saffron rice and chorizo. Each mouthful was like an island floating on an orgasmic ocean, so good that his eyes closed half the time. He had to eat slowly. She plied him with more wine, a lovely Sauvignon Blanc, and flat bread, and conversation. She described her life as nomadic. She had, it seemed, lived all over. She told him about cooking classes in Paris with artists whose names he’d never heard; about living in Venice with her late husband; about travelling finally to ‘the New World’ for a change not only of scenery but of lifestyles, of attitudes. Of people. She made it sound as if it had all taken centuries. And who had she found but a man who had himself gone to the old world? To Crete. A lovely place.
She talked and he ate, slowly, steadily, ready to die for another mouthful. He lost count, but she must have fed him three portions. She seemed only more and more delighted as he devoured the food, relishing and groaning and repeating how incredible she was. He would have eaten four or five helpings if his body allowed it, but even with the spell it was still his stomach.
Finally, sated, he sat back, saying, ‘I believe I have never in my life eaten anything at all to compare with this.’
Cerise collected his plate. After a few minutes she emerged from the kitchen with a slender, Turkish-style coffee pot. She set it on the table. It smelled wonderful. His head lolled while he studied the filigree etched into the pot. He fingered the ring in his pocket, drunk with the idea of marrying her tonight. It was absurd, he had to remind himself. He didn’t want a wife, only a receptacle, a fiancée. But, dear God, how could he allow her to slip through his fingers? Whether she swelled up like a human blowfish, where on Earth would he ever taste another meal to equal this one? How could he deprive himself of her culinary art?
He mulled it over to no avail. It was a conundrum. Finally, he said, ‘You are divine, Cerise, your meal was just...breathtaking.’
‘I’m happy to have robbed you of breath,’ she said, and laughed lightly. She poured the coffee then. It was sweet and strong, an intoxicant to smother the last of his will. He took the ring out and set it on the table.
‘This will - this will sound mad, but I am mad, I think. I am madly in love with you.’ He couldn’t quite make it more comprehensible than that, but he pushed the ring towards her.
She saw it and her teeth flashed again in delight. It was a beautiful ring. She took it, slipping it on her finger and admiring it as she said, ‘I knew when you answered my ad that you were the one I was looking for. The only one.’ She slid around the table, perching beside him. The smell of her was more heady than the scent of the meal had been.
‘Oh. Oh, my, my...’ He couldn’t find the right word and embraced her instead. His hands slid like snakes inside her clothing.
She made love as she made food. Everything was fresh, full of spice, hot and overwhelming. He thought of the sea god on her wall and he imagined the face as his own. He was drowning in pleasure, letting himself go completely. He was a ship, she was a storm, and he rode the tempest, too lost to look for bearings, just spinning, spinning, rising and falling.
* * * *
In the morning when he awoke, he was alone in her bed. This room, like the others, had a sense of antiquity about it. A bronze sun with a capricious face looked at him from the wall. The mirror beside it was edged in verdigris and copper, the reflecting surface marbled with imperfections. When he got up and stood before it, he gasped.
Gasped and looked down.
His belly was swollen. He turned sideways, twisted his face, looked at the reflection, then down at his stomach, then back again. He craned his neck and patted the slight jowl under his chin that hadn’t been there the night before.
He looked as if he’d gained ten pounds.
Something was terribly wrong. He couldn’t understand it - he’d given her the ring, hadn’t he? He thought so, but he’d been intoxicated by her food and drink. By Ceri
se herself. Maybe he’d just imagined giving it to her.
He checked in his clothing, patted the pockets. Then he turned and circled the bedroom until he spied the ring on her dressing table. He snatched it up. So, she hadn’t worn it? But what difference did that make? All the others had had to do was touch it for the spell to take hold, the transformation to unfold. He crumbled under self-doubt: maybe he’d given it to her too late. Could there be a time limit that he just hadn’t encountered before? Damned if it didn’t look like the whole thing had been flipped back on him. As if he’d gained for both of them.
Uncertain, he dressed, assuring himself that, yes, the food was superb, more than superb, but not good enough to warrant this. And maybe that was it - maybe it had to be someone else’s cooking. He would go home, listen to the women who had answered his ad, select one and start over. Give the ring to some other woman as soon as possible.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 31
