Aftershock & Others Read online

  “Now that’s—”

  She held up her free hand. “Please don’t tell me anything about it. Just the price.”

  He told her. She repressed a gasp. That would just about empty her account of the money she’d put aside for all her fashion bargains. On one item. Was it worth it?

  She reached into her old pocketbook, the now dowdy-looking Fendi, and pulled out her gold MasterCard. Rolf smiled and lifted it from her fingers.

  Minutes later she was back among the hoi polloi in the main shopping area, but she wasn’t one of them. She’d been where they couldn’t go, and that gave her a special feeling.

  Before leaving Blume’s, Denise put her Fendi in the store bag and hung the new foet bag over her arm. The doorman gave her a big smile as he passed her through to the sidewalk.

  A cold wind had sprung up in the dying afternoon. She stood in the fading light with the breeze cutting her like an icy knife and suddenly felt horrible.

  I’m toting a bag made from the skin of an unborn child.

  Why? Why had she bought it? What had possessed her to spend that kind of money on such a ghoulish…artifact? Because that was just what it was—not an accessory, an artifact.

  She opened the store bag and reached in to switch the new foet for her trusty Fendi. She didn’t want to be seen with it.

  And Brian! Good God, how was she going to tell Brian?

  “What?”

  Brian never talked with food in his mouth. He had better manners than that. But Denise had just told him about Helene’s bag and at the moment his mouth, full of sautéed spinach, hung open as he stared at her with wide eyes.

  “Brian, please close your mouth.”

  He swallowed. “Helene? Helene had something made of human skin?”…not human…at least according to the Supreme Court…

  “It’s called foet, Brian.”

  “I know damn well what it’s called! They could call it chocolate mousse but it would still be human skin. They give it a weird name so people won’t look at them like they’re a bunch of Nazis when they sell it! Helene—how could she?”

  …they’re already dead, Denise…

  Brian’s tone became increasingly caustic. Denise felt as if he were talking to her.

  “I don’t believe it! What’s got into her? One person kills an unborn child and the other makes the poor thing’s skin into a pocketbook! And Helene of all people! My God, is that what a big pay raise and moving to Greenwich does to you?”

  Denise barely heard Brian as he ranted on. Thank God she’d had the good sense not to tell him about her own bag. He’d have been apoplectic.

  No doubt about it…she was going to return that bag as soon as she could get back into the city.

  Denise stood outside Blume’s, dreading the thought of facing Rolf in that tiny showroom and returning her foet, her beautiful foet.

  She pulled it out of the shopping bag and stared at it. Exquisite. Strange how a little extra time could alter your attitude. The revulsion that had overwhelmed her right after she’d bought it had faded. Perhaps because every day during the past week—a number of times each day, to be honest—she’d taken it out and looked at it, held it, caressed it. Inevitably, its true beauty had shown through and captured her. Her initial infatuation had returned to the fore.

  But the attraction went beyond mere beauty. This sort of accessory said something. Exactly what, she wasn’t sure. But she knew a bold fashion statement when she saw one. This however was a statement she didn’t have quite the nerve to make. At least not in Fairfield. So different here in the city. The cosmopolitan atmosphere allowed the elite to flash their foet—she liked the rhyme. She could be so very in here. But it would make her so very out with her crowd in Fairfield—out of her home too, most likely.

  Small minds. What did they know about fashion? In a few years they’d all be buying it. Right now, only the leaders wore it. And for a few moments she’d been a member of that special club. Now she was about to resign.

  As she turned to enter Blume’s, a Mercedes stretch limo pulled into the curb beside her. The driver hopped out and opened the door. A shapely brunette of about Denise’s age emerged. She was wearing a dark gray short wrap coat of llama and kid over a long-sleeved crepe-jersey catsuit. She held a black clutch purse with the unmistakable stitching of foet. Her eyes flicked down to Denise’s handbag, then back up to her face. She smiled. Not just a polite passing-stranger smile, but a warm, we-know-style smile.

  As Denise returned the smile, all doubt within her melted away as if it had never been. Suddenly she knew she was right. She knew what really mattered, what was important, where she had to be, fashion-wise.

  And Brian? Who said Brian had to know a thing about it? What did he know about fashion anyway?

  Denise turned and strode down Fifth with her new foet bag swinging from her arm for all the world to see.

  Screw them all. It made her feel good, like she was somebody. What else mattered?

  She really had to make a point of getting into the city more often.

  1991

  A double strikeout in the awards department this year: “Pelts” lost the Bram Stoker award for novelette, and “The Barrens” lost the World Fantasy Award for novella. I took solace in the election of An Enemy of the State to the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

  Mike Hill called from DC Comics in the spring and asked if I’d be interested in contributing a thousand-word introduction to Preludes and Nocturnes, the first collection of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. I wrote an insouciant piece complimenting the Brits for reinvigorating our music and our comic characters. My intro lasted through a few printings but then was replaced with a much more reverent piece—a virtual genuflection, you might say—by Karen Berger.

  Meanwhile I was working away on Freak Show and cursing the amount of time it was eating up.

  The Dark Harvest hardcover of Reprisal, the fifth volume in the Adversary Cycle, was published in July, but Jove didn’t have the paperback scheduled until the following year.

  Dark Harvest then published the hardcover of Sibs; I was still waiting to hear Putnam’s decision on whether or nor they wanted to publish a paperback edition. I assumed they would…but never assume.

  In November I heard from Mike Hill of DC again and wrote an introduction to Batman: Gothic for him on Thanksgiving morning. (My wife and I have agreed that it’s better for all concerned if I avoid the kitchen during the early half of Thanksgiving.)

  Shortly after that Marty Greenberg requested a story for a new Batman anthology but I couldn’t come up with anything.

  Although I didn’t hear it at the time, a lunch with Susan Allison, my longtime editor at Putnam (Reborn, Reprisal, and Nightworld were being published through their Jove imprint), struck an ominous note. She’d had Sibs for a long time without making an offer. She seemed receptive to the novel but told me she couldn’t talk money until after Reprisal was published the following March. I couldn’t pull a good reason out of her. I could have yanked the book and gone elsewhere, but I wasn’t looking to burn any bridges with the publisher who had all my major work on its backlist.

  I closed out the year writing the early chapters of a novel I was calling The Ingraham. Over the past few months I’d come up with this idea for a medical thriller—more like a medical school thriller. I liked the story, but it wasn’t horror. I was a horror guy. I was also a doctor who used writing as a break from medicine—my golf game, so to speak. Writing a straight medical thriller would be like going to the office. Or would it? With the Adversary Cycle finished and Sibs in limbo, maybe a brief vacation from horror might be a good thing. And it wouldn’t be that much of a vacation: The book as I envisioned it would be plenty creepy, just no supernatural elements.

  I had no idea what an enormous impact the novel would have on my life.

  “PLEASE DON’T HURT ME”

  This baby clocks in at barely over 2,000 words, but even then I almost missed the deadline.

  The late J. N. Willi
amson called me looking for a story for Masques IV. I’d been in the first anthology and Jerry wanted me back. I said yes, then regretted it because I had to squeeze it out at odd moments between revising Nightworld, finishing the wraparound story for Freak Show, checking the copyedited manuscript for Berkley’s Reprisal, outlining Virgin (more on that later), introing the Sandman collection, and afterwording the “Buckets” paperback for Pulphouse. Lucky for me, other authors were late, so the deadline was extended.

  As a challenge to myself (and as a way to cut the story’s word count) I decided to write it as pure dialogue—not one word of narrative. It didn’t save me the time I thought it would. In fact it took me longer because I had to find ways to convey setting and action via the gab. And that’s not easy to do without creating dialogue that sounds like, “Oh, just toss your herringbone tweed coat on that Louis XIV love seat under the Chagall.”

  A lagniappe (I’m told I overuse that word) is that the story works beautifully at readings.

  Please Don’t Hurt Me

  “Real nice place you’ve got here.”

  “It’s a dump. You can say it—it’s okay. Sure you don’t want a beer or something?”

  “Honey, all I want is you. C’mon and sit next to me. Right over here on the couch.”

  “Okay. But you won’t hurt me, will you?”

  “Now, honey—Tammy’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Tammy Johnson. I told you that at least three times in the bar.”

  “That’s right. Tammy. I don’t remember things too good after I’ve had a few.”

  “I’ve had a few too and I remember your name. Bob. Right?”

  “Right, right. Bob. But now why would someone want to hurt a sweet young thing like you, Tammy? I told you back there in the bar you look just like that actress with the funny name. The one in Ghost.”

  “Whoopi Goldberg?”

  “Oh, I swear, you’re a funny one. Funny and beautiful. No, the other one.”

  “Demi Moore.”

  “Yeah. Demi Moore. Why would I want to hurt someone who looks like Demi Moore? Especially after you were nice enough to invite me back to your place.”

  “I don’t know why. I never know why. But it just seems that men always wind up hurting me.”

  “Not me, Tammy. No way. That’s not my style at all. I’m a lover not a fighter.”

  “How come you’re a sailor, then? Didn’t you tell me you were in that Gulf War?”

  “But I didn’t see battle. Don’t let the uniform scare you. Like I said, I’m really a lover at heart.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “My father used to say he loved me.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’m talking about that kinda love.”

  “Good. Because I didn’t like that. He’d say he loved me and then he’d hurt me.”

  “Sometimes a kid needs a whack once in a while. I know my pop loved me, but every once in a while I’d get too far out of line—like a nail that starts working itself loose from a fence post?—and so he’d have to come along every so often and whack me back into place. I don’t think I’m any the worse for it.”

  “Ain’t talking about getting ‘whacked,’ sailor man. If I’d wanted to talk about getting ‘whacked’ I woulda said so. I’m talking ’bout getting hurt. My daddy hurt me lotsa times. And he did it for a long, long time.”

  “Yeah? Like what he do to hurt you?”

  “Things. And he was all the time making me do things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Just…things. Doin’ things to him. Things he said made him feel good. Then he’d do things to me that he said would make me feel good but they never did. They made me feel crummy and rotten and dirty.”

  “Oh. Well, uh, gee…didn’t you tell your mom?”

  “Sure I did. Plenty of times. But she never believed me. She always told me to stop talking dirty and then she’d whack me and wash my mouth out with soap.”

  “That’s terrible. You poor thing. But let’s forget about all that. Here…snuggle up against me now. How’s that?”

  “Fine, I guess, but what was worse, my momma’d tell Daddy and then he’d get mad and really hurt me. Sometimes it got so bad I thought ’bout killing myself. But I didn’t.”

  “I can see that. And I’m sure glad you didn’t. What a waste that would’ve been.”

  “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Daddy. He’s gone and I don’t hardly think about him anymore.”

  “Ran off?”

  “No. He’s dead. And good riddance. He had a accident on our farm, oh, some seven years ago. Back when I was twelve or so.”

  “That’s too bad…I think.”

  “People said it was the strangest thing. This big old tractor tire he had stored up in the barn for years just rolled out of the loft and landed right on his head. Broke his neck in three places.”

  “Imagine that. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Yeah. My momma thought somebody musta pushed it, but I remember hearing the insurance man saying how there’s so many accidents on farms. Bad accidents. Anyway, Daddy lived for a few weeks in the hospital, then he died.”

  “How about that. But about you and me. Why don’t we—?”

  “Nobody could explain it. The machine that was breathing for him somehow got shut off. The plug just worked its way out of the wall all by itself. I saw him when he was just fresh dead—I was first one in the room, in fact.”

  “That sounds pretty scary.”

  “It was. Here, let me unzip this. Yeah, his face was purple-blue and his eyes were all red and bulgy from trying to suck wind. My momma was sad for a while, but she got over it. Do you like it when I do you like this?”

  “Oh, honey, that feels good. That feels wonderful.”

  “That’s what Daddy used to say. Ooh, look how big and hard you got. My momma’s Joe used to get big and hard like this.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah. Pretty soon after Daddy died my momma made friends with this man named Joe and after a time they started living together. Like I said, I was twelve or so at the time and Joe used to make me do this to him. And then he’d hurt me with it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Don’t stop. Don’t…stop.”

  “I won’t. Yours is a pretty one. Not like Joe’s. His was crooked. Maybe that’s why his hurt me even more than Daddy’s.”

  “Hey, don’t squeeze so hard.”

  “Sorry. Joe liked me to—”

  “Do we have to talk about this Joe?”

  “No, but…”

  “Hey, don’t stop.”

  “But I feel like talking about him.”

  “Okay, okay. So how’d you finally get away from him?”

  “Oh, I didn’t. He got hurt.”

  “Really? Another farm accident?”

  “Nah. We weren’t even on the farm no more. We was livin’ in this dumpy old house up Lottery Canyon way. My momma still worked but all Joe did was fiddle on this big old Cadillac of his—you know, the kind with the fins?”

  “Yeah. A fifty-nine?”

  “Who knows. Anyways, he was always fiddlin’ with it. And he always made me help him—you know, stand around and watch what he was doin’ and hand him tools and stuff when he asked for them. He taught me a lot about cars, but if I didn’t do everything just right, he’d hurt me.”

  “And I’ll bet you hardly ever did everything ‘just right.’”

  “Nope. Never. Not even once. How on earth did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. What finally happened to him?”

  “Those old brakes on that old Caddy just up and failed on him one night when he was making one of his trips down the canyon road to the liquor store. Went off the edge and dropped about a hundred feet.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yeah, but not right away. He got tossed from the car and then the car rolled over on him. Broke his legs in about thirty places. Took a w
hile before anybody even realized he was missing, and took almost an hour for the rescue squad to get to him. And they say he was screamin’ like a stuck pig the whole time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Uh, no. Not really. I guess he deserved it.”

  “Damn right he did. Never made it to the hospital though. Went into shock when they rolled the car off him and he saw what was left of his legs. Died in the ambulance. But here…let me do this to you. Hmmmmmmm. You like that?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  “You’d better believe that means yes!”

  “My boyfriend used to love this.”

  “Boyfriend? Hey, now wait a minute—”

  “Don’t get all uptight now. You just lie back there and relax. My ex-boyfriend. Very ex.”

  “He’d better be. I’m not falling for any kind of scam here.”

  “Scam? What do you mean?”

  “You know—you and me get started here and your boyfriend busts in and rips me off.”

  “Tommy Lee? Bust in here? Oh, hey, I don’t mean to laugh, but Tommy Lee Hampton will not be bustin’ in here or anywheres else.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s dead too.”

  “No-no. Tommy Lee’s still alive. Still lives right here in town, as a matter of fact. But I betcha he wishes he didn’t. And I betcha he wishes he’d been nicer to me.”

  “I’ll be nice to you.”

  “I hope so. Tommy and Tammy—seemed like we was made for each other, don’t it? Sometimes Tommy Lee was real nice to me. A lot of times he was real nice to me. But only when I was doin’ what he wanted me to do. Like this…like what I’m doin’ to you now. He taught me this and he wanted me to do it to him all the time.”

  “I can see why.”

  “Yeah, but he’d want me to do him in public. Or do other things. Like when we’d be driving along in the car he’d want me to—here, I’ll show you…”

  “Oh…my…God!”

  “That’s what he’d always say. But he’d want me to do it while we was drivin’ beside one of those big trucks so the driver could see us. Or alongside a Greyhound bus. Or at a stoplight. Or in an elevator—I mean, who knew when it was going to stop and who’d be standing there when the doors open? I’m a real lovable girl, y’know? But I’m not that kind of a girl. Not ay-tall.”