Walkers (27 page)

She wondered if there was anything
about the killing on the news. She slowly turned her head towards the television.
The screen was flickering blue-grey, and all she could hear was the muffled
sound of waltz music.

As she stared at the television,
however, freckles and speckles of coloured light began to fly off the screen,
into the room. Gradually, they assembled themselves into a blurred shape,
standing in the centre of the white fluffy carpet. A body, a ribcage, a pelvis,
a head, two muscular legs, all slowly created out of flying particles of light.

The waltz music went on and on, dim
and crackly, like a shellac record from the 1930s.

Jennifer sat up in fascination and
terror. The shape that was slowly manifesting itself in front of her was tall,
at least eight feet tall. Its head almost touched the ceiling. It was
broad-shouldered, and as it became more distinct, she could see that it was
muscular and lean, with skin as purplish brown as if it had been stained with
dogberries. Its face was pointed and malevolent, with slitted eyes that gleamed
the same blood red as the landscape outside the window, and two horns slanted
back from the top of its head. Its thighs were thick with fur, and out from
between them reared a huge reddened phallus below which hung two purple
testicles as big as oranges.

The creature stank. It stank of
sweat and greasy fur and foul breath and sex; an odour so overwhelming that
Jennifer retched. She thought, in mounting horror, how can I smell this smell,
when I’m supposed to be dreaming?

How can I see this creature so
clearly? It’s so clear! I can see every hair of its beard; I can make out every
wrinkle around its eyes! My God, it’s just like the Devil out of fairy-stories,
but it came out of the television and it’s here in front of me and it’s
real.

She heard a voice inside her head
coax,
‘Jennifer. This is what you wanted,
isn’t it?

This is what you were longing for, all today? You wanted to take him to
bed, didn’t
you, Jennifer? You wanted him on top of you!
You wanted sweat and pain and the
feel
of another man’s body! This is what you wanted, you whore! This is what you
wanted, you slatternly bitch!’

Jennifer clutched at the sheets and
screamed. But the scream didn’t seem to come out of her mouth at all. She felt
as if her face had been smothered by a pillow, and that it was impossible for
her to breathe or to say anything. The creature approached the bed, and it was
so grotesque that she kept on screaming, even though no sound was coming out.

It sat down on the edge of the bed.
It must be real, I can feel the comforter pinned under it. I can feel its
weight. Then it slowly pulled back the top part of the covers, revealing
Jennifer in her baby-doll nightdress.

‘Don’t kill me!’ she begged. Her
screaming had stopped now; her voice was hurried and low and erratic, like
water tumbling down a dry creek bed for the very first time. ‘I beg you in the
name of the Holy Mother, please don’t kill me.’

The creature’s eyes appeared to
flare a little as Jennifer mentioned the name of the Blessed Virgin. It reached
out its hand and touched her cheek with its left hand. The skin on its fingers
felt as hard and shiny as the skin on the paws of a dog.

‘Silence,’
said
the voice, inside her head.
‘I am your
Master One and your Master
Many. You
will do whatever
I
say.
I
have come to you today in two guises, the
guise
of your friend and the guise of
the goat, but
I
have as many
different faces as the
ocean has
waves, and each one changes as the waves change. ‘
For one liquid second,
Jennifer thought that she could see Bernard’s features flowing across the
creature’s face. Then it returned to its narrow, pointed, ill-intentioned self,
with its eyes that were filled up with blood.

‘You see the Devil you believe in, my love,’
the voice continued.
‘Did you not wish
today that you could lie with the Devil, rather than your husband?
Well, this, my filthy
dear, is what
you can do.’

The creature took hold of her just
behind the knees, gripping her with bruising strength, and spreading her legs
so wide apart that she heard the ligaments crack.

Then it reared up over her, heavy
and huge and evil smelling, and glared down at her with a face that was so old
and so wicked that she found herself unable to speak, unable to cry out, unable
to do anything but lie on the bed and shiver.

‘Now, you will be my little mother,’
the voice whispered; and Jennifer stared down
at herself in freezing disbelief as the creature’s massive member slid into
her, right up to the shaggy fur which clung to the lower part of its
protuberant stomach.

She closed her eyes. It was pain,
solid pain, wall-to-wall agony, but it was also something else. Deep down
underneath the pain there was a dark-running rivulet of pleasure; a rivulet
that trickled through the forbidden recesses of Jennifer’s mind, and down her
spinal column, and into the nerves which were feeling the size and the power of
the creature’s penis.

The creature began to thrust in and
out of her, slowly at first, but then faster and faster, and even more
brutally, like a mindless mechanical piston. The dark rivulet flooded the lower
chambers of her brain, and then began to rise up from beneath, flooding chamber
after chamber, until all of her body and all of her brain seemed to be
darkness. The creature let out a guttural, indistinct shout, and held itself
rigidly still for a moment, pumping itself deep inside her. Jennifer was a
hair’s-breadth away from a climax, clinging to the very edge of it, her eyes
tight shut, her face clenched, her chest flushed. Her nipples protruded, and
the muscles in her pelvis were tightly bunched in readiness for her final
release.

But the final release never came. She
opened her eyes, and the creature was gone.

Slowly, inch by inch, as she looked
around her in mystification, her muscles began to relax. But she was still
shaking, and her mind was still contracted for that ultimate moment of orgasm,
and at first she couldn’t understand what had happened, or even if anything had
happened at all. The television was tuned to
The Rose Tattoo.
Her drink remained untouched on the night-table.
Outside, in the darkness, a dog was barking, endlessly and hopelessly.

Jennifer touched her body. The
covers had been dragged back, and her baby-doll nightie had been pulled up to
bare her breasts, but had there really been anything here? A creature? A Devil,
with horns and hair? It didn’t seem possible. She sniffed, once or twice, but the
rancorous smell, if it had ever been there, had completely vanished. She
touched herself tentatively, between her legs. She was wet, and a little sore,
but no wetter and no sorer than she would have been if she had been urgently
masturbating.

She pulled down her nightie, and
covered herself up again. Dreaming, she thought, I must have been dreaming. I
was
dreaming. The house is locked,
nobody could have been inside. And there is nothing and nobody in this whole
wide world which can manifest itself from out of a television. Not seriously,
not for real.

She thought of the dream about her
father. Somehow, that must have got all mixed up with a dream about Bernard.
She had wanted to take Bernard to bed, and so her unconscious mind must have
created the Devil for her, the real live hairy Devil, to express what she
really felt about adultery. Pleasurable, exciting, dangerous, frightening – and
wrong. In the old days, adulterers had been stoned. These days, God sent them
bad dreams and nervous breakdowns.

Jennifer went to the bathroom, took
two Valium, and washed them down with warm Perrier. Then she switched off the
television, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed. She lay with her head
against her pillow for a long time, not sleeping, listening to the dog.

Had that Devil really been a
nightmare? God, it must have been. Even if the Devil actually existed, which
she knew that it didn’t, it certainly wouldn’t have horns and fur and eyes that
gleamed red in the dark. Not unless it appeared to people the way that they had
always expected it to look. No, that was ridiculous; it hadn’t appeared at all.

Nonetheless, she switched on her
light again, and sat up in bed, and wondered whether she ought to call Father
O’Hare. She looked at the time. Two-twenty-five.

Too late to call anyone and try to
explain that she thought she had been raped by Satan.

And apart from that, she felt more
than a little guilty about what had happened – or what she had dreamed had
happened. It was one thing to explain to Father O’Hare that the Devil had
appeared in her bedroom and forced her to have sex. It was quite another to say
that although she had been frightened, although she had been shocked, she had
taken out of it some wild and perverse pleasure; a pleasure that was as urgent
as the human appetite for self-destruction, and as deep as sin itself.

She turned out the light again. She
slept, but didn’t dream.

S
usan told her grandmother that she
was feeling nauseous, and went to bed early.

She was too excited about what was
going to happen tonight to stay in the living-room watching television and
listening to her grandfather’s interminable drolleries about every single
programme that came on. He was a devotee of that kind of humour they used to
call ‘ribbing’, the sort of pointless dead-pan tall-story humour favoured by
those old men who sit in rockers outside of small-town general stores.

‘That Jack Lord, do you know how
he-keeps his hair so thick? He insists as a condition of their contract that
every guest star who appears on
Hawaii
Five-O
gives him a plug of their scalp, to add to his hair transplant.’

Susan closed her bedroom door behind
her, and wondered whether she ought to lock it. She didn’t know what would
happen if her grandmother came in to see her when she was asleep, and her
Samena personality was away somewhere, out in the night. She knew that it was
supposed to be dangerous to wake a sleep-walker, but she wasn’t at all sure if
waking a Night Warrior amounted to the same kind of thing.

Perhaps she wouldn’t wake up at all,
and then her grandmother would panic and call an ambulance. On the other hand,
if she locked her door, her grandmother would almost certainly start banging on
it, and if Susan failed to reply she would almost certainly try to force it
open.

It was probably better to leave it
unlocked, and hope that her grandmother didn’t disturb her while she slept, or
that it wouldn’t affect her Night Warrior personality if she did.

She tugged off her tee-shirt, and
was just about to takeoff her shorts when her grandmother knocked at the door
and came straight in.

‘How are you feeling?’ she wanted to
know. ‘Would you like some Pepto-Bismol? Is it that kind of nauseous? You
haven’t been eating those chili-dogs again, have you, the ones that made you sick
the last time?’

‘It’s not that, grandma,’ said
Susan. ‘I think it’s just my period coming on.’

‘You ought to see the doctor, if
you’re feeling nauseous.’

‘I’m okay, grandma. It’s just my
period, that’s all.’

‘So long as it
is
your period.’

‘I’m not pregnant,’ Susan smiled.

Her grandmother was flustered. ‘I do
try to look after you the best I can.’

‘Grandma, I know you do, you’re
wonderful. Don’t worry about it.’

Her grandmother blinked behind her
spectacles. It had been a long time since Susan had said she was wonderful.
Pleased, disarmed, she retreated to the door, and gave Susan a little
finger-wave. ‘You can have some tea later, if you’d care to.’

‘I don’t think so, grandma. I’ll
just get some sleep.’

‘Okay, then. I’ll see you in the
morning.’

Susan finished undressing, rummaged
around in her drawer for a clean tee-shirt, put it on, and jumped into bed. It
was twenty after ten. In ten minutes or so, her grandfather would reach over
and lay his hand on her grandmother’s knee, and say,

‘Well, then, Dolly, I think it’s
time to strangle the chickens.’ That was what he always said, when he was
suggesting that they turn off the television and retire to bed. Why going to
bed should have anything to do with strangling chickens, Susan never found out,
but then she never asked, either, just in case it referred to something
personal, like the noise that her grandmother made, once or twice a month, when
her grandfather fulfilled his conjugal duties.

Susan lay in bed with the light on
for a while, her hands clasped behind her head.

Then she switched off the light, and
lay in the dark. She could hear the traffic along Camino del Mar, and the
cicadas chirping, and the steady blowing of the air-conditioning through the
vent in the ceiling. After a while, the television in the living-room was
switched off, and she heard her grandmother and grandfather walking past her
door. They were murmuring something about doctors, and hepatitis, and how
Hispanics never washed their hands after going to the bathroom.