Fortnight of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  In a fit of jealousy, I thumped at the door with my fist. “Nancy!” I yelled at her. “Nancy!”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Nancy!” I yelled again. “Open this bloody door!”

  To my surprise, I heard the door unlock. Then it opened, only two or three inches. Inside, Room Two was illuminated by a single beside lamp with a mock-parchment shade. The number of times I had lain in Nancy’s bed and stared at the picture on that shade, the Spanish Armada in full sail. Nancy was naked; her skin was shining with sweat. Her blonde hair was stuck to her forehead in dark mermaid curls.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked me. “You’ll wake Simon.”

  “You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me,” I raged at her.

  “Tell you what? What are you talkin’ about?”

  “You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me there was somebody else.”

  She stared at me. I had never seen her look at me like that before. It wasn’t unloving; it wasn’t angry. If it was anything describable, it was sad, remote; like somebody who’s being carried away from you for ever at a railway station. Brief Encounters, I suppose.

  “There isn’t anybody else,” she said, with awesome simplicity.

  “Oh, I suppose I was hearing things, was I? Specks of flotsam, for instance?”

  Nancy shook her head. “Must’ve been the radio. There’s nobody ’ere.”

  She pushed the door open wide. I looked into the room, but didn’t step inside. It was obvious that she didn’t want me to step inside. Simon was sleeping in his cot with a blanket draped over one side to block out the light. But apart from Simon, there was nobody else. Nobody that I could see, anyway – although I did notice that the wardrobe door was slightly ajar.

  “Satisfied?” asked Nancy.

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt clumsy and juvenile. I supposed I could have challenged her to fling open the wardrobe; but what if there were nobody in it? Worse still, what if there were? What would I say to Nancy’s new lover, face-to-face? “Oh, hallo, I’m David from upstairs. I used to fuck Nancy but now I’m just leaving, sorry.”

  I looked at Nancy and her expression hadn’t changed. I knew then that she didn’t belong to me and that she never would.

  I said, softly, “All right,” I bent my head forward to kiss her but she dodged her cheek away. I’ve really got to tell you, that hurt. I went back upstairs and sat in my Parker-Knoll chair in the dark and cried for nearly twenty minutes. Then I wiped my eyes on the bedspread and wondered what the hell I was going to do without her.

  The next morning I got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar in Montague Street. It was run by a bullet-headed former wrestler who liked his staff to call him Mr George but whose fighting name had been Skull Thomson. I learned how to dip fillets of cod in batter and how to operate the potato-chipper and how to toss a whole bucketful of chips into deep boiling fat without killing myself. I also learned how to wrap a double portion of rock and chips in newspaper so that it could be dredged in salt and doused in malt vinegar and eaten while walking along the street.

  After three hours of frying I reeked of fat, but at least I was getting paid, and I wasn’t going to go hungry. Mr George let us have all the fish-and-chips we could eat.

  That evening, when we closed, I took two cod and chips back to 5a Bedford Row, with a saveloy for Simon. I knocked at Nancy’s door and waited.

  She took a long, long time to answer, and when she did she sounded very tired. “What do you want?” she called.

  “It’s David, Dave. I’ve got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar. I’ve brought you some fish and chips, if you want some.”

  “No thanks. Just leave me alone.”

  “Listen,” I persisted. “I lost my temper yesterday, I’m sorry. It was all a misunderstanding. Look, just have some fish and chips, no strings attached. I’ve brought a sausage for Simon.”

  “Leave me alone, Dave, do you mind?”

  I stood in the hallway with my warm greasy newspaper package, and I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel like going back to my room. It was too pokey; too dark. I went for a walk along Marine Parade, and gave my fish and chips to an old tramp who was sitting in one of the concrete shelters with a bottle of cider and a cigarette-tip glowing.

  After that, Nancy refused even to answer my knocking. I got another job, temporary carpet fitting for Vokins department store, and what with carpet-fitting in the mornings and fish-frying all afternoon and evening, I didn’t get much of a chance to think about her, either. In early September all the art students came back to Union Place, and I made quite a few new friends. I went out with a thin lithography student called Sandra. She had shaggy hair and baggy sweaters and drainpipe jeans, and although she made it clear right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to go the whole way, we had plenty of heavy snogging sessions. Whenever I got really frustrated, I bought copies of Health & Efficiency. Weekends with Sandra were all instant coffee and trad jazz and walks on the beach.

  Occasionally, however, I would pause on my way back upstairs to Room Seven, and stand outside Room Two, and listen. Most of the time, I heard nothing at all. Sometimes I heard the radio, playing faintly. But once or twice I heard Nancy’s voice, oddly thin and unsure; and that hoarse crackling man’s voice.

  On the last night of September I was passing Room Two when I heard the voice saying, “… love you beyond all conceivable loves …”

  I hesitated, holding my breath. I heard Nancy saying, “… ever, not for ever …”

  There was a muffled creaking noise. It sounded like the bed. Then some indistinct conversation, the man and Nancy both talking at the same time. Then the man saying, “Soon and soon and soon, my beautiful darling … soon and soon and soon!”

  Nancy whimpered; then cried out. The she let out a peculiar strangled keening noise. I was horrified, electrified. I rattled the doorknob sharply. Then I wrenched at it in fury and temper. I heard Nancy screaming, “No!” I took a step back, held on to the banisters, and kicked at the door with my Chelsea boot.

  The door juddered open, the catch swinging broken. Instantly, the wardrobe door, which had been wide open, slammed shut. Nancy was standing beside it, naked, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts. She stared at me wildly, whimpering, trembling, unable to speak.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw. I knew it was Nancy, it had to be Nancy, but she was hideously emaciated. Her back-combed blonde hair had turned bone-white and bedraggled; her arms and legs were as thin as chair-sticks. I could see her hip-bones stretching against her white blue-veined skin. Her breasts had shrunk to empty dugs, although the gold nipple-rings still hung from her nipples, proving beyond question that it was really her. Her eyes were dark-circled; her lips were deeply-lined.

  “Nancy?” I whispered. I was so shocked that I didn’t know how to move my legs, didn’t know how to walk. “Nancy, what’s happened?”

  “It’s nearly over,” she told me. It sounded as if she had no saliva in her mouth at all.

  “What? What’s nearly over? What are you talking about?”

  She sat down unsteadily on the end of the bed, with all the stiffness of an eighty-year-old woman. “It’s nearly over,” she repeated, nodding her head.

  I went across to the cot. Simon was sleeping deeply, whistling softly through one clogged nostril. A bottle of cherry cough mixture, three-quarters empty, stood on the edge of the basin nearby. The poor little kid was half-drugged.

  I closed the door of the room so that nobody could see in. I had kicked the screws out of the latch, that was all, so it wouldn’t take much repairing.

  “Are you ill, or what?” I asked Nancy. I was both impatient and frightened.

  “Ill?” She gave a dry little smile. “No, I’m not ill. I’m in love.”

  “But what’s happened to you? You look as if you haven’t eaten for a month.”

  “Don’t need to eat. Don’t need nothin’.”

  I glanc
ed at the wardrobe. “What have you got in there?”

  “Nothin’ in particular. Mrs Bristow’s stuff. It’s locked.”

  “It’s not locked. When I bashed open the door, I saw it open.”

  “It’s locked,” Nancy intoned. “Nothin’ inside it, only Mrs Bristow’s stuff.”

  “You won’t mind if I take a look, then?”

  Nancy lifted her head. Her eyes reminded me of poor Miss Coates, the assembler of first-aid kits, who had been carried out of 5a Bedford Row in an open coffin, in the rain. “Forget it, Dave. It’s nearly over, forget it.”

  “I think I’ve got a right,” I told her, and I made my way around the end of the bed, and took hold of the brass knob of the wardrobe door.

  “No!” pleaded Nancy. She climbed to her feet, and hobbled across to me, and seized my wrists with her claw-like hands.

  Close-up, she looked as if she had walked straight out of Belsen. Her teeth were gone, her hair was coming out in clumps, her skin was scaly and blistered. She was so weak that she couldn’t have hoped to pull me away from the wardrobe; but I stepped away in any case, in sheer disgust. I couldn’t help it. It was almost impossible to believe that she and I had once made love in the dunes.

  “It’s locked,” she whispered, throatily. “Please, Dave, it’s locked.”

  I reached out again, and this time she didn’t try to stop me. I tugged at the knob and she was right. It wouldn’t open.

  “I want to know what’s in there,” I demanded. “I’ve got a right.”

  “No,” she insisted.

  “For Christ’s sake, Nancy, I wanted to marry you once!”

  “No,” she mouthed. “And that gives you no right.”

  “Didn’t you love me, too?” I asked her.

  She slowly blinked those dead-fledgling eyes. “I thought I did. But I didn’t know what real love really was, did I? I didn’t know what it was really like.”

  “And now you do?” I challenged her.

  I heard the door of the room jar open behind me. I turned around, and there stood Mrs Bristow, in her brown candlewick dressing-gown, one eye squinched up against the cigarette that smoldered between her lips.

  “I heard a commotion,” she said.

  Nancy sat down again. Mrs Bristow came across the room, picked up Nancy’s nightdress from the bed, and draped it around her shoulders. “I think you’d better get back to your room, Mr Moore.”

  “I think I want to know what’s happened to Nancy, Mrs Bristow,” I replied, belligerently folding my arms.

  Mrs Bristow puffed smoke. “You heard her. She’s in love.”

  “She’s half-dead, for God’s sake!”

  “Love conquers death, Mr Moore. You’ll understand that one day.”

  “I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this: Nancy’s coming out of this room and she’s going to stay with me, and she’s going to eat properly. She’s got a kid to look after, for God’s sake. So, out of my way.”

  Mrs Bristow puffed, sipped, puffed. “She won’t come with you, Mr Moore.”

  “Then I’ll carry her.”

  “She’ll always come back, Mr Moore. And she’ll never love you, never. In fact, if you try to keep her away, she’ll grow to hate you.”

  “I’m going to call the police,” I replied. “I’m going to call the police and a welfare officer, and then we’ll bloody well see.”

  “No!” begged Nancy. “Dave, no, please, no!”

  Mrs Bristow stared at me with wide warning eyes. “You shouldn’t have stuck your nose where it wasn’t wanted, Mr Moore. You should have stayed in Room Seven with your baked beans and your naughty magazines.”

  “I’m still going to call the police,” I told her. I sensed that I had her worried, and I wanted to know why. Besides, if there was any chance of saving Nancy, I wanted to find out what it was.

  Mrs Bristow said nothing for almost half a minute. Nancy, her bony shoulders bowed, began softly to sob. It sounded like the sobbing of an old, old woman, who suddenly and vividly remembers her girlhood. Cornflowers, sunshine, straw hats.

  “Very well,” said Mrs Bristow. She reached over, and opened the wardrobe door.

  To my total horror, a man was standing motionless in the wardrobe. He was stocky, heavily-built, about forty-five years old. His hair was oiled and combed back from his forehead. He wore a neat little bristle mustache. He was naked, with a huge reddened penis hanging down between his thighs. His legs were shaggy with ginger hair. His eyes were totally bloodshot, totally red.

  “Is he dead?” I asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like me at all.

  Mrs Bristow shook her head. She allowed me one last look and then she closed the wardrobe door.

  “My husband, Mr Bristow.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I protested. “That’s your husband, and he’s hiding in the wardrobe?”

  “Not hiding, Mr Moore. He lives there. Or rather he ekes out his existence there. His real living is done inside his mind.”

  She went to the window, opened it an inch, and flickered her cigarette butt out into the night. Then she turned back, and blew out a last puff of smoke. “He’s a great lover, Mr Moore. Greater than you’ll ever understand. He takes a great deal out of every woman who loves him; but he gives just as much in return; if not more.”

  “But what the hell has he done to Nancy?” I demanded. “He’s killing her!”

  “In one sense, yes, I suppose he is,” Mrs Bristow replied, patting the pockets of her housecoat to find her cigarettes. “But she won’t know greater ecstasy, I can assure you of that. Now and forever after. Real ecstasy. I envy her. I envy all of them. But somebody has to take care of things on the outside, don’t they? That’s what a wife is for.”

  “He’s killing her,” I repeated.

  “Almost gone, yes,” Mrs Bristow agreed. She lit another cigarette. “Just like poor Miss Coates; and poor Miss Unwin; and poor Miss Baker; and poor Miss Dadachanji. But they’re all still there; he has them all. And as long as he lives, so will they.”

  I stared at her. “So when you gave Nancy this room – you knew – you did it on purpose.”

  Mrs Bristow nodded. “We all have to live, Mr Moore, the best way we can.”

  Something burst inside my head. It was like a melon blown up with dynamite. I lost all of my reason, all of my self-control. It was bad enough that this stuffed-dummy of a man had taken Nancy away from me; but now he was killing her, too. I shouldered Mrs Bristow aside, and yanked open the wardrobe door, and confronted the naked man who stood there with his shaggy thighs and his bloodred eyes and shrieked, “You bastard! You murdering bloody bastard!”

  I was about to grab him by the shoulders and heave him out of the wardrobe when he stretched open his mouth and he roared at me.

  I stopped dead in absolute paralytic terror. It wasn’t just a roar of anger. It was a roar like a blast-furnace; like the rumbling exhaust of a jet. It seemed to toss aside blankets and papers and tumble over bedside lights. It was deafening, and it went on and on and relentlessly on.

  As he roared, the man’s face swelled. His veins stood out like pulsing snakes. Then his face stretched and twisted, and turned into another face, the face of a pale-skinned girl. Her eyes, too, were filled with red, and she was roaring.

  I took a stumbling step backward. I was full of rage, full of anguish, but I wasn’t brave enough to face up to anything like this. The girl’s face knotted and contorted. Her forehead bulged, her nose folded in on itself, and another girl’s face appeared, slimy and dark-skinned, still roaring. I saw face after face, all women, roaring at me red-eyed, an unholy portrait gallery of hundreds of different personalities; all of them absorbed into one man’s body.

  Mrs Bristow had talked of ecstasy, of love. But all I saw was agony and distortion and screaming helplessness.

  Stiff-legged with fear, I reached down and scooped Simon awkwardly out of his cot. Nancy, her head bowe
d, did nothing to stop me. Mrs Bristow remained by the wardrobe door, her housecoat fluttering in the roaring draft, expressionless, waiting for me to leave.

  I took one last look at that hideous naked creature in the wardrobe with its heads twisting and changing, one after the other, and then I hoisted Simon up against me shoulder and I hurried out of 5a Bedford Row and out into the windy, brine-smelling night. I didn’t realize that I was crying out loud until I was well past West Buildings.

  I suppose I should have gone to the police right away. But I was too frightened and too numb, and too worried about Simon. God knows how much cough medicine Nancy had given him, but he flopped in my arms like a little hot doll. I carried him up to Sandra’s flat in Surrey Street; up three flights of stairs, sweating and gasping, and pressed the doorbell with my elbow.

  Sandra came to the door in a striped man’s shirt and long socks. “David?” she frowned. “What on earth’s the matter?”

  I spent the night drinking coffee and keeping a lonely watch over Simon. Around seven he stirred and opened his eyes and frowned at me. “Uncle Dave? Where’s mummy?”

  I returned to 5a Bedford Row about eleven o’clock the next morning, accompanied by two police officers. As we drew up outside the house, I was just in time to see a black pickup truck disappearing around the corner on to the seafront. I couldn’t be sure, but in the back of the pickup truck, I thought I glimpsed a large wardrobe, half-covered with a sheet of tarpaulin.

  On the other side of the road, next to the bus garage, a black Daimler hearse was parked without any consideration for any other traffic that might have wanted to get past.

  The police officers rang the doorbell. One of them said, “D’you hear about Chalky collaring that JP for drunken driving? Laugh?”

  The door was opened. It was Mrs Bristow. She looked at me sharply, and then at the two policemen. “Mr Moore? Is anything wrong?”

  “You know bloody well what’s wrong,” I told her. “Where’s Nancy?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Moore; but old Miss Bright passed away this morning, in the early hours. We think it was probably her heart.”