Fortnight of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  It was her. It was the woman in the wall. The skin on the back of my hands prickled as if I had been electrocuted.

  “Help me. Please, Help me.”

  I stared down at the eleventh brick, resting in the palm of my hand. “Help me, please, help me,” she pleaded, and then I knew for sure. I lifted the brick up and held it close to my chest.

  The bricks, damn it! She was in the bricks! Her body or her soul or some part of her last agonies alive were mixed into the bricks! That was why they had heard her whispering and pleading in different parts of town! Wherever a wall had been built or patched with any of these bricks, she was there – begging, crying to be saved.

  I walked back to the brickyard office, shaken but determined. “How much for the whole stack?” I asked the red-faced man.

  “Thought you only wanted eleven,” he retorted.

  “Well, I did. But they’re such beautiful bricks.”

  “One hundred fifty dollars even. You’ll have to carry ’em away yourself, though. My delivery truck’s broke.”

  I counted out $150, and laid them on his desk. “Tell me,” I said, as casually as I could manage. “The man who made these bricks … is he still alive?”

  The red-faced man took out his handkerchief again. “Sure he’s still alive. He didn’t retire old or nothing. He was just sick of making bricks, that’s what he said. His name’s Jesse Franks, lives over on Sycamore, right down by the Exxon gas station. He runs his own body-shop these days.”

  “Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll just drive down and load up the bricks.”

  “Get Martin to lend you a hand. About time that boy did some hard work.”

  I sat in my station-wagon for most of Saturday afternoon, eater-corner from Jesse Franks’ house on Sycamore Street, waiting to catch a glimpse of Jesse Franks himself.

  I suppose I could have gone straight up and knocked on his front door and introduced myself. After all, he wouldn’t have known me from Adam. But for what I had in mind, I preferred to remain unseen and incognito, just in case it all went wrong and I was making a horse’s ass out of myself.

  I was frightened, too, to tell the truth, because if I wasn’t making a horse’s ass out of myself, then Jesse Franks was not the kind of man I wanted to upset.

  It rained, and then the rain cleared. At four o’clock, when the clouds were scurrying like windblown newspapers and it was just beginning to get dark, the front door of his gray weatherboarded house opened, and he stepped out on to the porch. He was wearing a navy reefer coat and a brown woollen hat. He must have been forty-five years old, solidly built. He looked up and down the street for a moment, and then he came down the steps and out of his gate and started to walk southwards on Sycamore past the gas station.

  He reached the bar on the corner and disappeared inside. I gave him five minutes, while the light steadily failed, and then I opened the door of my station wagon and climbed out. The suspension groaned. I still had the five dozen bricks stacked in the back: I had chosen to come here first, before unloading them and carrying them all the way up the stairs to my apartment.

  I crossed the street keeping my head lowered and my coat-collar lifted. I went straight into Jesse Franks’ front yard, and down the steps that led to his basement. There was a smell of cat’s wee and weeds down there. I rattled the door-handle but the door was locked. I hesitated for a moment. I could give it all up now, and forget it. Nobody would know the difference. Only Nesta Philips, whose soul was somehow imprisoned in those bricks, and who could never be free.

  But she had whispered, “Help me,” with such desperation, and I knew that I was the only person who could.

  There was a broken triangle of concrete in the yard. I picked it up and, without hesitation, smashed one of the panes of glass in the basement door. I reached inside, and thank God there was the key. The door juddered as I opened it. Inside the basement it was gloomy and dusty and smelled of camphor.

  I hurried upstairs, breathless and sweating. I kept imagining Jesse Franks finishing his beer and leaving the bar and walking back along the street. His house was bare and poorly-furnished. A sagging sofa with a brown stretch-nylon cover, two second-hand wheelback chairs. A television set, and a bureau with cracked veneer. No flowers, no ornaments, and only two pictures on the wall, both of waggon-trains. In the kitchen, a faucet with a blue rubber anti-splash attachment dripped into a large stained sink. I listened, and the silence was almost more alarming than the sound of somebody coming.

  Up in the front bedroom, under the double-bed with the sawed-oak frame, I found what I was looking for.

  My mouth was as dry as emery paper, and my pulse was skipping as I dragged it out. A cheap brown-fiber suitcase, locked. I forced open the locks with my screwdriver. Inside, a selection of knives – well-worn knives, with insulating tape around the handles – as well as a cheerfully-colored profusion of porno magazines, and a large pungent red rubber apron. Underneath the apron, a woman’s dress, beige, neatly-folded; a woman’s pantyhose, underslip, and bra. All of these items of clothing were jigsawed with dark rusty marks.

  I had been to the offices of the Archman Times just after lunch, and read everything I could find about Nesta Philips. On the day that she had gone missing, she had been wearing a “beige, or light-brown dress.”

  I closed the suitcase, and picked it up. I stood for a moment, listening; and then I hurried quickly and quietly downstairs. I tiptoed along the hall to the front door. The best thing to do was walk calmly and normally out of the house, and across the street to my car. But as I reached up toward the door-handle, the key sharply turned in the lock on the other side.

  Panicking, I tried to retreat down the hallway, but the edge of the suitcase caught on the small hall table, and knives and magazines and clothes went sprawling everywhere. The front door opened and there was Jesse Franks, staring at me in complete amazement.

  “Who the –?” he began to ask, but then he saw the stained dress and the red rubber apron and the knives.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. His face was bunched-up muscle, with two glassy little pale-blue eyes.

  I didn’t wait to get into conversation. I shouldered him sharply in the chest, twisted away from his grabbing hands, and jumped down the front steps of the house three at a time. I ran across the road and wrenched open the door of my station-wagon.

  Jesse Franks, however, was right behind. He caught my arm and swung me away from the wagon. Then he punched me hard in the ribs; and then again, and I staggered back and stumbled over a low wall just behind me.

  “You interfering bastard, I’ll kill you!” he panted, and he came forward to hit me again.

  If it hadn’t have been for dumb Dennis, I think he might have done. But Dennis had been called out to Sycamore Street by a curtain-twitching old lady across the street, who had seen me breaking in. Just at that moment he came around the corner with his lights flashing and his siren warbling, and Jesse Franks spun awkwardly around as if somebody had body-tackled him.

  “You bastard!” he shouted at me, hoarsely. “You called the cops!”

  I was too winded to do anything but ineffectually raise one hand.

  Jesse clambered heavily into my station wagon, and started the engine.

  “That’s my wagon!” I protested. But all he did was to give me the finger, and snarl, “If I ever get caught, bastard, I’m going to finish you off for good!”

  He swerved away from the side of the road. As he did so, however, a huge gasoline truck emerged from the Exxon station and completely blocked the street. Jesse slewed my station wagon around, and came speeding back towards me.

  Dennis saw what he was doing, and turned his patrol car sideways-on to block Jesse’s escape.

  I can remember what happened next as vividly as if it were a video-recording, which I can run and re-run and never forget. Jesse drove my station-wagon on to the sidewalk, but it bounced and skidded out of control, and collided head-on with a hydrant.<
br />
  I started running towards it, but then I stopped. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Under normal circumstances, Jesse Franks would have easily survived a collision like that. But the crash sent a furious blizzard of bricks hurtling the length of the wagon, smashing and buffeting his head and spraying blood all the way up the windows. I saw him flailing his arms, trying to protect himself, but then a single brick struck the back of his neck and his head jerked sideways at a sickening angle. Some of the bricks burst right through the windshield and tumbled on to the sidewalk in a slush of glass.

  Dennis came hurrying over, and tugged open the wagon door. Jesse lay slumped over the steering-wheel, with dark blood dripping on to the leg of his pants.

  “He’s dead,” said Dennis, and he was shocked.

  “Yes,” I said. My stomach knotted itself up, and I had to take a deep breath and look the other way. “He was trying to get away.”

  “Well, get away from what?” asked Dennis. “I was called out because somebody was supposed to be breaking into his house.”

  “That was me. I was looking for something. Proof that Jesse Franks might have killed Nesta Philips. Go take a look in his hallway. All the evidence is there. Knives, clothes. I guess he was keeping them as some sort of souvenir.”

  “Jesse Franks killed Nesta Philips?”

  I nodded. “That’s right, and dismembered her, and baked her in his brick-kiln, I shouldn’t be surprised, and powdered up her ashes, and fired them into bricks. That way, nobody would ever find any trace of her.”

  Dennis stepped away from the wagon and sniffed. “How come you did?”

  I bent forward and picked up one of the bricks. “They say that the human spirit is immortal, don’t they? They say that you never really die.”

  They wouldn’t grant me permission for a grave at Archman Cemetery, so one day I drove the bricks out to the woods around Hamson Lake, and buried them there, neatly, under four feet of soil. I stood over the grave for a while in the chilly late-afternoon sunshine, and said the Lord’s Prayer, and thought about ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

  I thought I might have heard a voice, whispering to me; but it was probably nothing more than the wind, blowing through the trees.

  The next time Vicky brought Jimmy Junior around, she noticed a framed black-and-white photograph of a young woman on top of my bureau. She contained her inquisitiveness for as long as she could, but then she said, “Is it rude of me to ask who that is?”

  “Oh, that’s Nesta,” I told her.

  “Nesta? You never mentioned any Nesta.”

  “No, she’s gone now,” I replied. I picked up the photograph and smiled at it regretfully. “We were neighbors, that’s all. Just very close neighbors. She lived –” and I pointed toward the wall.

  Making Belinda

  St Brelade’s Bay, Jersey

  Jersey is the southernmost of the Channel Islands, about 15 km long by 10 km wide, lying within sight of northern France. Its northern coast is characterized by high, rugged cliffs, but it slopes southwards through many pretty steep-sided valleys to St Brelade’s and several other attractive and sandy bays. Jersey is a tax-haven, with its own legislative assembly (the States) and its own police. Its countryside is intensely farmed with tomatoes and potatoes and flowers under glass; while its towns are depressingly suburban, like any British seaside resort.

  St Brelade’s Bay, however, is one of the most unspoiled, with smooth sand and jagged rocks, and the balmy, timeless, slightly eccentric feeling of Mr Hulot’s Holiday. In 1910, the teeth of a Neanderthal man were discovered at La Cotte, a rock-shelter in St Brelade’s Bay, which gave me the first inkling for Making Belinda.

  MAKING BELINDA

  He lifted his arm in slow-motion, like a Movietone newsreel of an athlete breaking the hundred-yard sprint record in 1936, and the cocktail-waiter immediately caught the confidence in his wave, and deafened himself to the plaintive “could we have two pina coladas, please?” from the man with the brightly peeling head and the yellow Hawaiian shirt, and came weaving along the terrace to ask him what he wanted.

  “The Perrier et Jouët, Belle Epoque, rosé,” he said.

  A frown at the wine-list. A moment’s defensiveness. “Ah. We don’t sell that by the glass, sir.”

  “I didn’t ask for a glass. I want a bottle. With two glasses, please.”

  “Of course, sir. Two glasses? May I see your key?”

  It took the waiter ten minutes to bring the champagne and to make a fuss about opening it. Bryan didn’t usually like fuss; but today he sat back and allowed the waiter to show off. It was, after all, Perrier Jouët Belle Epoque, in a wonderful stylized art-nouveau bottle. The man in the yellow Hawaiian shirt watched suspiciously.

  A small but sharply-humiliating experience had taught Bryan a long time ago that it was naff to make a performance over opening wine. In front of a very stylish young woman, he had sniffed a Chianti cork – a Chianti cork – and she had flayed him with supercilious laughter. Bryan had also learned with equal pain that it was just as naff to order anything flambé, or to drink any kind of coffee with cream floating on the top, or to push £10 into the maitre-d’s hand in the hope of getting a good table.

  These days, Bryan’s motto was: don’t give the bastards even the chance to laugh at you.

  Bryan was a print rep. He had sold color printing for Johnson & Foreman for nearly nine years, driving hundreds of thousands of miles. Rain, shine, seasides, provincial cities, isolated factories. Walls, hotel kettles, florid wallpaper, sausages for breakfast. He had eaten in more hotel restaurants than he could remember, and he had learned his social graces the hard way.

  His mother and father had eaten their Friday supper straight out of the Daily Mirror, walking along the street. His cheeks still burned when he thought about it. But he himself had learned to be self-contained, and self-disciplined, and tight. He had also learned that it’s a serious mistake to pretend to be more sophisticated than you really are; because wherever you go there will always be someone more sophisticated than you, and with one small word they can make you publicly bleed. Not only can, but will. So – although Bryan himself was self-made, he had learned to despise the self-made. (How many Benidorm-bronzed print-buyers’ wives, in overtight gilt evening-dresses, hysterical with a whole afternoon’s gin, had massaged his thigh under how many dinner-tables?) From Newcastle to Plymouth, O Lord; from Bradford to Bishop’s Stortford. Desperate for what? Not sex. They were usually too squiffy for sex. Reality, maybe.

  But this evening was different. This evening Bryan was celebrating one of the most profitable print contracts he had ever negotiated; alone; on the cocktail terrace of L’Horizon Hotel, overlooking the smooth brassy sands of St Brelade’s Bay, on Jersey; and this evening he could risk showing off, just a little. Shortly before lunch, after only two and a half hours, he had signed contracts for £2.3 million worth of color brochure printing; two and a half hours in a bland featureless office in St Helier, all dusty yuccas and chipboard partitions and travel posters; and that was it. The deal closed, the contracts initialled, everybody happy. Mr Shah had shaken his hand. He had shaken Mr Aziz’s hand. Very good, excellent, nice to do business with you. Budduh-budduh-budda, mate, and chicken biryani to you too.

  From the terrace of L’Horizon it was only fifteen stone steps to the sand. In the distance, where the sea glittered, they were dragging in the last of the pedaloes, complicated silhouettes of skinny girls and skeletal machines. There was a faint smell of fish-and-chips on the wind, from one of the beach cafes; and the last children on the beach sounded as sad as distant seagulls.

  Earlier in the day, when the sun was high, Bryan had seen topless girls sunbathing underneath the promenade, breasts like caramel creams. All the girls were gone now; but Bryan had asked for two champagne glasses because a thirtyish woman with a handsome face and highlighted blonde hair was sitting two tables away, wearing a pink halter-top that emphasized her heavy bosom, and bright Bermuda shorts. She wa
s concentrating on solving the Daily Telegraph crossword, and Bryan found that attractive. Intellectual, but apparently alone.

  He stood up, scraping his chair. He stood over her. She bit the end of her ballpen with lipstick-tinged teeth.

  He was about to open his mouth and ask her if she wanted to share his celebration, when she said, “‘Join to make a saving,’ four letters.”

  “Pardon?” he replied.

  She looked up. He could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. A thin, shortish man with deep-set, almost Russian-looking eyes and his black hair well cut, but somehow too thin and too shortish to be quite convincing enough. His trousers too shapeless to be provocative but too tight to be fashionable.

  “‘Bond,’” she said, and wrote it into her crossword. “Thank you.”

  He tried to laugh. “I’m not sure that I helped very much.”

  She paused for a moment, then took off her sunglasses. “Yes, you did. Just by being there. It always helps if I can ask somebody out loud.”

  “Oh. Good. Well, so long as I was useful.”

  Another pause, and he didn’t go away. At last she looked up again. “Did you want something?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, “Yes,” and nodded. “I did a bloody good business deal today; and made myself a bloody good commission; and I’ve just ordered a bottle of Perrier Jouët rose, and I can’t drink it all on my own. So I was wondering if you’d like to join me.”

  She stared at him without blinking. Eyes flecked; very little compassion. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “I don’t want to drink it all on my own.”

  Still she didn’t blink. “I’m sorry, I really don’t care. Don’t drink it on your own. But you’re not going to drink it with me.”

  “Oh,” he said. He tried to smile. Nobody had put him down quite as directly before. “Well, then … looks as if I’ll have to find somebody else.”

  She didn’t even answer. It was so obvious on this nearly-deserted terrace that there was nobody else – not unless he wanted to celebrate with a fat French woman in a catastrophic blue dress who was sitting with her legs set staunchly apart; or a malarial-looking couple who must have been over ninety, and were probably clinging to each other to stop themselves from trembling so much.