Festival of Fear Read online

  Baba Jaga screamed again, and the freezer chest tilted dangerously to one side, but Grace managed to brace one leg against the wall and push it back upright.

  After that, the witch was silent. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, then an hour. After an hour had passed, Grace thought she heard a soft crunching noise inside the freezer chest, but that was all.

  It was nearly three thirty in the morning before she dared to turn the key and ease open the lid.

  The witch was crouched inside, unmoving, and her black sacking dress was thickly coated with sparkling white rime.

  ‘Is she dead?’ asked Daisy, peering anxiously over the edge of the freezer chest.

  ‘I don’t know. I hope so.’

  Very cautiously, Grace reached out and touched the witch’s twig-like hair. It was so brittle that three or four strands of it snapped off.

  She hesitated, and then she took hold of the witch’s bony arm. She twisted it around, and as she did so it cracked, sharply, and broke. She dropped it on to the floor, and it shattered into even more fragments.

  Feeling emboldened, she plunged both of her hands into the freezer chest and seized the witch’s body. It collapsed, with a crunch, as if it were made of nothing but layers of burned, frozen newspaper. Her skull broke apart, too, and her pelvis, until Grace was left with nothing but a freezer strewn with black ashes.

  ‘I think we’ve killed her, sweetheart,’ she told Daisy, smacking the ash from her hands. ‘I think we’ve gotten rid of her for good and all.’

  She closed the lid and locked it, and then she picked up Daisy and carried her back upstairs to her bedroom.

  ‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ Daisy asked her.

  ‘I was going to ask you the same question. But I don’t think I want Anka in the room.’

  ‘But she’ll be so lonely!’

  ‘No, she won’t. She can spend the night in your closet, with all of your other dolls.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, Daisy. I think she still needs some more disinfecting. The place where I found her . . . well, it was very germy. They had an outbreak of pneumonia, not long ago, and I don’t want you to catch that.’

  She tucked Daisy into her bed and kissed her. ‘It’s OK. I’ll leave the landing light on. And I’ll go down and lock the door to the utility room, OK?’

  ‘Tell Anka I’ll see her in the morning. Give her a kiss.’

  ‘OK, sweetheart.’

  Grace went downstairs. She paused in the kitchen doorway, and then she went through to the utility room. The freezer chest was still firmly locked, and when she rapped her knuckles on top of it, there was no response. She didn’t know how she was going to get rid of Baba Jaga’s ashes, but she would think about that in the morning.

  Meantime, she went through the living room and opened the front door. It was a quiet night, cold and clear, with a three-quarter moon shining through the oaks. She walked across the front lawn, and then across to the other side of the street, where there was nothing but trees and tangles of briars.

  She held up Anka in front of her and now she could clearly see that the doll was giving her a narrow-eyed look of expectancy, as if she were saying, what are you going to do with me now, Grace? Maybe that was why Gabriela’s grandmother had warned her never to allow anybody to take photographs of Anka. Anybody who saw them would have realized that the doll was capable of changing her expressions, and some superstitious nun might have taken it away from her.

  Anka had been Gabriela’s only protection against Baba Jaga, but her protection hadn’t lasted indefinitely. Anka now had so many nightmares swarming inside her that she was more dangerous to children than a plague-carrying rat.

  There were still so many unanswered questions. Why had Baba Jaga killed Gabriela – if it had been Baba Jaga who had dragged her into the woods and half eaten her body? Had she done it simply because she was hungry? Or had she done it so that Grace would take her away from Cienisty, inside Anka, and give her the chance to feed on healthy children, instead of the sick and the schizophrenic and the chronically undernourished?

  After all, what more innocent way could she have found of getting close to young children, than hiding inside a china doll?

  Grace didn’t know if any of this could possibly be true. Logically, it was all madness. It was the stuff of fairy stories. But the witch in her freezer was madness, and if there was any trace of Baba Jaga left inside Anka, Grace wasn’t going to give her the chance to re-emerge.

  ‘Dobranoc, Anka,’ she said. Then she swung back her arm and threw the doll into the briars as far as she could.

  Over a week later, Mike Ferris came back from his morning walk, let his boxer Ali off the leash, and came through into the kitchen.

  ‘Boy!’ he told Margaret, peeling off his windbreaker. ‘It’s cold enough to freeze a squirrel’s nuts off.’

  ‘Mike,’ Margaret protested. ‘Not in front of Abby.’

  Abby, three, was sitting up in her high chair, making a mess with a bowl of cream of wheat. ‘Nuts off!’ she repeated, and kicked her feet. ‘Nuts off!’

  ‘See?’ said Margaret. ‘Children have an instinct for anything rude.’

  ‘Rude!’ Abby repeated. ‘Rude!’

  ‘Oh, well, here,’ said Mike. ‘This will take her mind off it.’

  He held up a doll with wild white hair and a white china face. Her ragged gray dress was sodden, but she looked strangely knowing and serene.

  ‘Found her in the woods,’ said Mike. ‘Or at least Ali snuffled her out. She looks like she could be antique.’

  ‘She’s filthy.’

  ‘Sure. But you could make her a new dress, couldn’t you, and wash her hair for her? Maybe she’s worth a few bucks.’

  Abby held out both hands for her. ‘Dolly!’ she cried out. ‘I want the dolly!’

  ‘There you are,’ said Mike. ‘Love at first sight.’

  Margaret came over and took the doll out of Mike’s hands. She turned her over, and looked under her dress, to see what she was made of. ‘Well . . . she’s all china. She could be antique. I wonder what she was doing in the woods?’

  ‘Jestem głodny,’ whispered a voice.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Margaret, turning around.

  ‘I’m starving,’ said Mike, picking up an English muffin.

  Margaret frowned, and looked around the kitchen again.

  ‘That’s strange. I’m sure you said something else.’

  Mike came up and kissed her. ‘You’re imagining things, as usual.’

  But while he was kissing her, the doll was staring over her shoulder at Abby, and suddenly her eyes gleamed, as if there were a light inside her. Abby stopped kicking her feet and stared back at her, unblinking, open mouthed, bewildered.

  None of her dolls had ever looked at her like that before, as if they were thinking of eating her.

  Dog Days

  OK, Jack was much better looking than me, but I was funnier than he was, and women love to laugh. That was how I picked up a girl as stunning as Kylie, when Jack was still dating Melanie Wolpert.

  Melanie Wolpert might have been a judge’s daughter and she might have screamed like Maria Callas whenever she and Jack did the wild thing together, but she had masses of wiry black curls and millions of moles and she thought that The Matrix was an art movie. Apart from that, she was a Scientologist and she smelled of vanilla pods.

  I met Kylie in the commissary at Cedars-Sinai. We were standing in line with our brown melamine trays, and both of us reached for the last Cobb salad at the same time.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘You have it. Please. I shouldn’t eat Cobbs anyhow, I’m allergic.’

  She peered into the salad bowl. ‘I don’t even know what a Cobb is.’

  ‘You’re having a Cobb salad for lunch and you don’t even know what a Cobb is?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m Australian. I’ve only been here for two weeks.’

  Yowza, yowza, yowza, she was amazing. She was tall,
nearly as tall as me, with very short, blonde hair, sun bleached and feathery. She had strong cheekbones and a strong jaw and wide, brown eyes the color of Hershey’s chocolate. Her lips were full and cushiony, and when she smiled her teeth were dazzling, so that you wanted to lick them with the tip of your tongue, just to feel how clean they were.

  She had an amazing figure, too – beachball-breasted, with wide surfer’s shoulders, and long, long legs, and those wedge-heeled Greek sandals that tie up with all those complicated strings. I realized almost instantaneously that I was in love.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I’ll have the Five-Bean Surprise.’

  ‘OK . . .’ she said. ‘What’s the surprise?’

  ‘Well, it’s not really a surprise, if you eat that many beans.’

  We sat down together in the far corner of the commissary, and I pointed out John G. Dyrbus MD, the proctologist, and Randolph Feinstein MD, who specialized in aggressive kidney tumors, and Jacob Halperin MD, who could take out your prostate gland while he was playing Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out on the harmonica.

  ‘I’m a physiotherapist, myself,’ said Kylie. ‘Children, mostly, with muscular disorders.’

  ‘Kylie, that’s an interesting name.’

  ‘It’s Aboriginal. It means “boomerang”.’

  ‘You know something?’ I told her. ‘I don’t believe in boomerangs. All that ever happens is, one Aborigine throws a stick, and it hits this other Aborigine right on the bean, so this other Aborigine gets really pissed and throws it back. So the first Aborigine thinks, “that’s amazing . . . I throw this stick and five minutes later it comes flying back”.’

  Kylie laughed. ‘You’re crazy, you know that?’

  And that was how we started going out together. I took her to The Sidewalk Café at Venice Beach and bought her a Georgia O’Keeffe omelet (avocado, bacon, mushrooms and cheese). I took her to Disneyland, and she adored it. She met Minnie, for Christ’s sake, and I still have the picture, although it’s wrinkled with tears. I took her bopping at The Vanguard and I bought her five kinds of foie gras at Spago. We drove up to see my cousin Sibyl in San Luis Obispo in my ’75 Toronado, with the warm wind fluffing our hair, and Sibyl served us chargrilled tuna and showed Kylie how to throw a terracotta pot.

  Idyllic days. Especially when we went back to my apartment on Franklin Avenue, cramped and messy as it was, and fell into my bed together, slow motion, with a full moon shining through the open window, and Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto tinkling in the background, and Juanita next door clattering saucepans in the sink like a Tijuana percussion band.

  For a beautiful girl, Kylie was a strangely clumsy and inexperienced lover, but what she lacked in experience she made up for in strength and energy and appetite. I’ll tell you the truth: there were some nights when I almost wished that she’d leave me alone, and give me a couple of hours to get some sleep. Just as my eyelids were dropping, her hand would come crawling across my thigh and start tugging at me, like I was some kind of bell rope, and much as I liked it, I used to wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been expertly beaten up.

  I should have counted my blessings. We had been together only eight and a half weeks when the inevitable happened and we ran into Jack.

  We were strolling along the beach eating ice-cream cones when I saw him in the near distance coming toward us, with that monstrous mutt of his bounding all around him. Even if you hated his guts, which I didn’t, you had to admit that he was a great-looking guy. Tall, with dark, brushed-back hair, a straight, Elvis Presley nose, and intensely blue eyes. He was wearing a black linen shirt, unbuttoned to reveal his gym-toned torso, and knee-length khaki pants.

  While he was still out of earshot, I turned to Kylie and said, ‘Why don’t we go for a latte? There’s a great little coffee-house right on the boardwalk here.’

  ‘Oh, do we have to?’ she pleaded. ‘I just love the ocean so much.’

  ‘I know. The ocean’s great, isn’t it? So big, so wet. But I’m really jonesing for a latte and the ocean will still be here when we get back.’

  ‘How can you feel like a coffee when you’re eating an ice-cream cone?’

  ‘It’s the contrast. Cold, hot – hot, cold. I like to surprise my mouth, that’s all. I believe in surprising at least one of my organs every single day. Yesterday I surprised my nose.’

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I tried to walk through the balcony door without opening it. But – come on, how about that latte?’

  I glanced quickly toward Jack, trying not to make it obvious that I was looking in his direction. I was growing a little panicky now. Apart from Brad Pitt, Jack was the only person in the world I didn’t want Kylie to meet.

  ‘Well . . .’ she said reluctantly, ‘if you’re really dying for one . . .’

  But then Jack’s dog ran into the surf, barking at a trio of seagulls, and Kylie turned and saw it, and said, ‘Look! Look at that gorgeous Great Dane! My parents used to have one just like it! Oh, it’s so cute, don’t you think?’

  ‘That dog is bigger than I am. How can you call it cute?’

  ‘Oh, it just is. Great Danes are so lovable. They’re intelligent, they’re obedient, and they’re so noble. I adore them.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I could really use that latte.’

  But I don’t think that Kylie was even listening to me. She clapped her hands and called out, ‘Here, girl! Here, girl!’ and the stupid Great Dane came galloping across the beach toward her, wagging its stupid tail, and then of course Jack recognized me and shouted out, ‘Bob!’ and ze game vas up.

  ‘Bob! How’s it going?’

  ‘You two know each other?’ asked Kylie, kneeling down in the sand and tugging at the Great Dane’s ears with as much enthusiasm as she tugged at my bell rope. ‘Oh, you’re a beautiful, beautiful girl, aren’t you? Oh, yes you are! Oh, yes you are!’ God, it was enough to make me bring up my Cap’n Crunch.

  ‘Sure we know each other,’ said Jack, hunkering down beside Kylie and patting the Great Dane’s flanks. His grin was ridiculously dazzling and his knees were mahogany brown and he even had perfect toenails.

  ‘Jack and I were at med school together,’ I explained.

  ‘We were the Two Musketeers,’ said Jack. I was beginning to wish that he would stop grinning like that. ‘Both for one and one for both, that’s what Bob always used to say.’

  ‘But – we went our separate ways,’ I told her. I chose oncology because I wanted to alleviate human suffering and Jack chose cosmetic surgery because he wanted to elevate women’s breasts.’

  ‘You’re a cosmetic surgeon?’ Kylie asked him, and I could tell by the way she tilted her head on one side that Jack had half won her over already. A dishy cosmetic surgeon with a beautiful dog and mahogany knees. What did it matter if he didn’t know any one liners?

  ‘How’s Melanie?’ I asked him. ‘Still as voluptuous as ever?’ I gave him a sassy wiggle and winked. Come on – I was fighting for my very existence here.

  ‘Oh, Melanie and I broke up months ago. She met a divorce lawyer. A very rich divorce lawyer.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’ Jesus – Kylie was even kissing that goddamned dog. ‘You – ah – who are you dating now?’

  ‘Nobody, right now. It’s just me and Sheba, all on our ownsome.’

  Kylie stood up. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘Bob and I were just going for a latte. Why don’t you and Sheba join us?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to go for a latte,’ I told her. ‘I thought you wanted to stay on the beach.’

  Kylie didn’t take her eyes off Jack. ‘No . . . I think I could fancy a latte. And maybe one of those cinnamon donuts.’

  The three of them walked up the beach ahead of me – Jack, Kylie and Sheba – and all I could do was trail along behind them feeling pale and badly dressed and excluded. Thank you, God, I said, looking up to the sky – Ye who giveth with one hand and snatcheth away with the other. Kylie turned aroun
d and smiled at me and just as she did so a seagull pooped on my shoulder.

  The café was called Better Latte Than Never which I thought was bitterly appropriate. I sat at the table with Jack and Kylie and tried to be witty but I knew that it was no use. They couldn’t take their eyes off each other and when I came out of the bathroom after rinsing the seagull splatter from my shirt, I saw that Jack’s hand was resting on top of hers, as naturally as if they had been friends all their lives.

  ‘What a great guy,’ said Kylie, as we drove back along Sunset. ‘He’s so interesting. You know, not like most of the men you meet.’

  ‘He’s multifaceted, I’ll give you that. Did he tell you that he knits?’

  ‘No, he didn’t! Maybe he could knit me a sweater!’

  ‘I don’t think so. He only knits blanket squares. They’re not very square, either. I think it’s some perceptual weakness he inherited from his mother. Did he tell you that his mother played the glockenspiel? She only knew one tune but it could reduce strong men to tears.’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ said Kylie. Her eyes were hidden behind large Chanel sunglasses – the same large Chanel sunglasses that I had bought for her on Rodeo Drive.

  ‘Jealous? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I can tell when you’re jealous because you belittle people. You always make it sound like a joke but it’s not.’

  ‘Hey, Jack and I go way back.’

  ‘And you’re jealous of him, aren’t you? I’ll bet you always have been.’

  ‘Me? I’m an oncologist. You think I’m jealous of some tit doctor? Besides, his breath smells of cheese. That was one thing I always noticed about him, but I never liked to tell him. His girlfriends always used to call him Monterey Jack, but he never figured out why.’

  ‘You’re jealous.’

  I looked at her acutely, but all I could see was two of my own reflection in her sunglasses, in my crumpled lime-green T-shirt with the damp patch on the shoulder.

  ‘Do I have anything to be jealous of, do you think?’ I asked her.

  At that moment I almost rear-ended a dry-cleaning van and her answer was blotted out by the screaming of tires, so I never heard it.