Festival of Fear Read online

  I didn’t really know what to do next. The only sensible alternative was to go back home, and try to talk to Jack some other time, although I seriously doubted that he would ever agree to it. I crept crabwise back down the steps, and groped my way back along the side of the house, in the shadows.

  But then I thought: what I need here is an intermediary, a go-between, somebody who can speak to Jack on my behalf, and explain how remorseful I feel. And who better to do that than somebody he’s obviously very fond of? Who better, in fact, than the blonde woman on the couch?

  Women understand about guilt, I reasoned. Women understand about remorse. If I could convince this woman that I was genuinely sorry for what I had done to Kylie, maybe she could persuade Jack to forgive me.

  I climbed quietly back up the steps again. I didn’t want to startle her, especially since she might well have had a gun, and I was technically trespassing. I didn’t know how fierce Sheba could be, either, if she thought that I was an unwelcome intruder (which, to be honest, I was).

  The living room was already in darkness, although the hallway and several other rooms were still lit. I could hear samba music, and water running.

  I crossed the veranda and went up to the sliding door. I hesitated, and then I called out, ‘Excuse me! Is anybody home?’

  This is crazy, I thought. I know there’s somebody home.

  ‘Excuse me!’ I called out, much louder this time. ‘This is Bob, I’m an old friend of Jack’s!’

  Still no answer. I waited and waited, and below me the lights of Los Angeles sparkled and shimmered like the campfires of a vast barbarian army.

  I should have gone back down those steps and gone home and forgotten that I had ever seen Jack again. Sometimes we do things for which there is no possible forgiveness, and all we can do is go on living the best way we can.

  But I slid the veranda door a little wider, and stepped inside the living room. It was chilly in there, severely air conditioned, and it smelled of dried spices, cinnamon and cloves. I crossed to the center of the room. On the wall there was a strange painting of a pale blue lake, with ritual figures all around it.

  I heard the woman singing in one of the bedrooms. ‘She walks with a sway when she walks . . . she talks like a witch-lady talks.’ She sounded throaty, to say the least.

  ‘Hallo?’ I called, although I was aware that my voice was still too weak for her to hear me. ‘This is Bob, I’m a friend of Jack’s!’

  I heard the clickety-clacking of Sheba’s claws on the hardwood floor. I prayed that the next thing I heard wouldn’t be ‘kill!’

  I glanced down at the brown leather couch where the blonde woman had been sitting. Six or seven scatter cushions were strewn across it, with bright red-and-yellow covers, and fringes. On one of the cushions lay a ski mask, in a brindled mixture of black and brown wool. I picked it up and stared into its empty eye-sockets. There was something about it which really gave me the willies, as if it was a voodoo mask.

  ‘Put it down,’ said a harsh woman’s voice.

  ‘Hey – I’m sorry,’ I said, lowering the ski mask, and turning toward the hallway. ‘I was just—’ It was then that I literally sank to my knees in shock.

  It was Sheba, the Great Dane. But Sheba didn’t have Sheba’s head any more. Sheba had Kylie’s head.

  She walked toward me and stood in front of me. There was no question about it, it was Kylie. Her face was haggard, with puffed-up lips, and her jaw looked lumpy, as if it had been smashed and rebuilt. But those Hershey-brown eyes were still the same.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Jesus, I’m having a nightmare.’

  ‘You think you’re having a nightmare?’ she croaked.

  I struggled to my feet and sat on the couch. Kylie/Sheba stayed where she was, staring at me.

  ‘Christ, Kylie. This is unreal.’

  ‘I wish it was, Bob. But it isn’t. How did you get in here?’

  ‘I – just climbed over the fence. What happened to you, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I died, Bob. But I was brought back to life.’

  ‘Like this? This is insane! Was it Jack? Did Jack do this to you?’

  Kylie closed her eyes to indicate ‘yes.’

  ‘But how could he do it? I mean, why?’

  Her voice was very strained, but she hadn’t lost her Australian accent. ‘Jack says that he was so much in love with me, he couldn’t bear to lose me. That crash – my entire body was crushed. Legs, pelvis, ribcage, spine. I wouldn’t have survived for more than two or three days. So that was when Jack decided to sacrifice Sheba, in order to save me.’

  ‘But how did he get away with it? Doing an operation like that – it must be totally illegal.’

  ‘Jack has his own clinic, remember, and three highly-qualified surgeons. He persuaded them that they would be making medical history. And he paid them all a great deal of money.’

  ‘But how about you? Didn’t you have any say?’

  ‘I was unconscious, Bob. I didn’t know anything about it, until I woke up.’

  I have never fainted, ever – not even when my cousin Freddie ripped off three of his fingers with a circular saw. But right then I could feel the blood emptying out of my brain and I was pretty darn close to it. The whole world turned black and white, like a photographic negative, and I felt like I was perspiring ice-water.

  ‘What do you feel about it now?’ I asked her. ‘How can you manage to live like this?’

  She gave me a sad, bruised smile. ‘I try to treat myself with respect, and I try to treat Sheba with respect. That’s why I go out running, to give her body the exercise she needs. We always go out at night, and I always wear that ski mask, so that nobody can see my face and my hair.’

  ‘But you can talk. Dogs can’t talk.’

  ‘Jack transplanted my vocal chords. I still get breathless, but I don’t find talking too difficult.’

  She came up closer. I didn’t know if I could touch her or not. And if I did, what was I supposed to do? Kiss her? Put my arm around her? Or stroke her? I still couldn’t believe that I was looking at a huge brindled dog with a human woman’s head.

  ‘Most of all,’ she said, ‘I try to be Kylie. I try to forget what’s happened to me, and live the best life I can.’

  I looked her straight in her Hershey-brown eyes. ‘You can’t bear it, can you?’

  ‘Bob – I have to bear it. What else can I do? How does a dog commit suicide? I can’t shoot myself. I can’t hang myself. I can’t open bottles of pills. I can’t even get out of the house and run out on to the freeway. I can’t turn the door handle and I can’t jump over the fences at the sides.’

  ‘But how can Jack say that he loves you when you’re suffering like this?’

  ‘He’s in total denial. He says he loves me but he’s obsessed. He’s always bringing me flowers and perfume. He bought me that painting by Sidney Nolan. It must have cost nearly quarter of a million dollars.’

  I sat on that couch staring at her, but I simply didn’t know what to say. The worst thing was that I was just as responsible for this monstrous thing that had happened to her as Jack was. I had killed her. Jack had given her life. But what a life. It made me question everything I had ever felt about the chronically sick, and the paraplegic, and the catastrophically injured. At what point is a life not worth living any more? And who’s to say that it isn’t?

  For the first time ever, I couldn’t think of any wisecracks. I could only think that tears were sliding down my cheeks and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  Kylie said, ‘My grandma had a dog she really loved. He was a little fox terrier and his name was Rip. After my grandpa died, Rip was the only companion she had. She used to talk to him like he was human.

  She coughed, and took a deep breath.

  ‘Rip got sick. Cancer, I think. As soon as he was diagnosed, my grandma asked the vet to put him down. She held my hand on the day we buried him, and she said that if you truly love someone, whether it’s a person o
r a pet, you never allow them to suffer.’

  ‘What are you saying to me, Kylie?’

  She came even closer. I reached out and touched her cheek. She was very cold, but her skin felt just as soft as it had before, when we were lovers.

  ‘Help me, Bob. I’m sure that it was fate that brought you here tonight.’

  ‘Help you?’ I knew exactly what she was saying but I had to hear it from her.

  ‘Let me out of here. That’s all you have to do. Open the door and let me run away.’

  ‘Oh, great. So that you can throw yourself in front of a truck?’

  ‘You won’t ever have to know. Please, Bob. I can’t bear living like this any longer.’

  I stroked her hair. ‘You’re asking me to kill you for a second time. I’m not so sure I can do that.’

  ‘Please, Bob.’

  I stood up and walked across to the Sidney Nolan painting over the fireplace. ‘What does this mean?’ I asked her. ‘These figures . . . they look kind of Aboriginal.’

  ‘They are. The painting’s called Ritual Lake. It represents the mystical bond between men and animals.’

  I looked down at her. She looked exhausted. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll help you. But I’m damned if I’m going to let you get yourself flattened on the freeway.’

  ‘I don’t care what you do. I just want this to be over.’

  I led her through the hallway to the front door, and opened it. Just as I did so, Jack’s Audi SUV swerved into the drive, its headlights glaring, and stopped.

  ‘Hurry!’ I said, and began to run down the steps, with Kylie close behind me.

  But Jack must have seen that the front door was open and he was quicker than both of us. As we reached the bottom step, he opened the door of his SUV and jumped down in front of us.

  ‘Bob! Bob, my man! What a surprise!’

  ‘Hi, Jack.’

  Kylie and I stopped where we were. Jack came up to me and stood only inches in front of me, his eyes unnaturally widened, like those mad people you see in slasher movies. He was holding Kylie’s metal-studded leash in his right hand, and slapping it into the palm of his left.

  ‘Taking Kylie for a walk, were you, Bob? I’m amazed she trusts you, after what you did to her.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Jack, I came round to talk to you.’

  ‘You came round to talk to me? What could you possibly have to say to me, Bob, that I would ever want to listen to?’

  ‘Well – maybe the word “remorse” means something to you.’

  ‘“Remorse”? You’re feeling remorse? For what, Bob? For mutilating the woman I love so severely that this was her only chance of survival? Ruining her life, and my life, and ending Sheba’s life, too?’

  ‘Jack,’ said Kylie, in that high, harsh whisper. ‘Nothing can change what’s happened. All the rage in the world isn’t going to bring me back the way I was. I forgive Bob. And if I can forgive him, can’t you?’

  ‘Get back in the house, Kylie.’

  ‘No, Jack. It’s over. I’m going and I’m not coming back.’

  ‘Get back in the house, Kylie! Do as you’re damn well told!’

  Kylie turned on him. ‘I’m not a dog, Jack! I’m not your bitch! I’m a woman, and I’ll do whatever I want!’

  Jack swung back his arm and lashed her across the face with her leash. She cried out, and cowered back, just like a beaten dog. I grabbed hold of the leash and swung Jack around, trying to pull him off balance, but he punched me very hard on my cheekbone, and I fell backward into the bushes.

  ‘Now, get inside!’ Jack snapped at Kylie, and lashed her again.

  This time, however, Kylie didn’t cringe. She leaped up on her hind legs and pushed Jack with her forepaws. Even though she was a female, she must have weighed at least a hundred and thirty pounds. He collided with the door of his SUV, and then dropped on to the driveway.

  ‘You bitch!’ Jack yelled at her, trying to climb to his feet. But she pushed him down again, and then she ducked her head sideways and bit him – first his nose and then his cheek. I saw blood flying all across the front of his pale blue shirt.

  ‘Get off me!’ Jack screamed. ‘Get off me!’

  But now Kylie bit into the side of his neck, viciously hard. He bellowed and snorted, and the heels of his shiny black shoes kicked against the bricks, but she refused to open her jaws.

  ‘Kylie!’ I shouted at her. ‘For Christ’s sake, let him go!’

  I clambered to my feet and tried to pull her away from him, but Sheba’s body was so smooth haired and muscular that I couldn’t even get a proper grip. I took a handful of Kylie’s blonde hair, and pulled that instead, even though I was irrationally worried that I might pull her head off. But she kept her teeth buried in Jack’s neck until his blood was flooding dark across the driveway, and his shoes gave a last shuddering kick.

  Eventually, panting, she raised her head. The lower half of her face was smothered in blood, but her eyes looked triumphant.

  ‘You’ve killed him,’ I said, flatly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was his punishment for keeping me alive.’

  I checked my watch. It was almost a quarter of midnight.

  ‘We’d better get going,’ I told her.

  We drove west on Sunset, not speaking to each other. There was a full moon right above us, and its white light turned everything to cardboard, so that I felt as if we were driving through a movie set.

  We looped around the Will Rogers State Park and then we arrived at the seashore. I parked, and opened the passenger door, so that Kylie could jump out.

  I walked out on to the sand, dimpled by a million feet. Kylie followed me, panting. We reached the shoreline and stood together at the water’s edge, while the surf tiredly splashed at our feet.

  There was a warm breeze blowing from the south-west. I looked down at Kylie and said, ‘Here we are, then. Back at the ocean.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus Christ. I don’t know what for.’

  ‘For helping me to end it, that’s all.’

  She trotted a little way into the water, and then she turned around. ‘You’re right about boomerangs,’ she said. ‘They don’t really come back. Ever.’

  With that, she began to swim away from the seashore. Looking at her then, you would never have known what had happened to her, because all you could see was a blonde girl’s head, dipping up and down between the waves.

  I stood and watched her swimming away until she was out of sight. Then I threw her leash after her, as hard and as far as I could.

  The Scrawler

  Peter was standing on the westbound platform of Piccadilly Circus tube station, eating a Mars Bar, when he noticed the words HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY, PETER? scratched into a Wonderbra poster on the opposite side of the track.

  He glanced right and left, embarrassed, as if everybody else on the crowded platform knew that his name was Peter. But everybody else was talking, or eating, simply staring tiredly at nothing at all. After a minute there was a warm rush of wind and his train arrived, and he stepped aboard. The carriage was jam-packed, but he elbowed his way to the window on the other side of the train so that he could look at the inscription more closely.

  The letters were nearly two feet high, irregularly spaced, and they had been gouged so deeply into the poster that they had gone right through to the brick underneath. He couldn’t imagine how anybody could have managed to cut them, especially since the poster was more than ten feet above the track, and the track itself carried 650 volts of alternating current.

  But there they were: HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY, PETER? And he couldn’t help feeling that somehow the message was meant for him.

  The train pulled away with a jolt, and he staggered into the bosom of a large, middle-aged black lady who didn’t complain but gave him a smile and a wink. He said, ‘Sorry . . . sorry.’ He didn’t want her to think that he had done it on purpose.

  He got out at West Kensington and
walked south on North End Road. It was only five thirty but it was already dark, and the streets were glistening with home-going traffic. As he passed the Seven Stars pub, he noticed that somebody had scrawled a message on its cream-colored tiles, in the same kind of jagged, scratchy lettering that he had seen on the tube. ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TRUST HER, PETER?

  He went back a few paces and stared at it. This was ridiculous. The message was cut right into the ceramic surface of the tiles, as if it had been inscribed with a narrow-bladed chisel. But it couldn’t refer to him, surely. There must be hundreds of Peters in West Kensington. Thousands. But how many of them would have been likely to pass first one message, in Piccadilly, and then a second one, here? And what was the writer trying to say about ‘trusting her’?

  He turned into Bramber Road, a narrow street of Victorian terraced houses, opposite the scrubby little triangle of Normand Park. It was starting to rain again, and he began to hurry. He reached number nineteen and forced open the wrought-iron gate, which sagged on its hinges, and made it to the shelter of the porch. He took out his key and was just about to insert it in the lock when the lights went on inside the hallway and the door opened. A tall young man with dark curly hair and a leather jacket stepped out, and said, ‘Hi. Thanks.’

  Peter stood and watched the young man as he went out through the gate and walked down the street, his collar turned up against the rain. He was sure that he recognized him, but he couldn’t think why, or how. He stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, just as the time switch plunged him into darkness.

  He climbed the steep staircase. There was a strong smell of frying onions on the first-floor landing. Mr Chowdery was cooking one of his curries again. He passed Flat Three, where Neighbours was playing at top volume on Mrs Wigmore’s television. Then he went up to the top floor and let himself into Flat Four.

  Peter had lived here for seven months before Gemma had moved in with him, and it still looked like a single man’s flat, even though it was cluttered with feminine debris like shopping bags and make up and hairbrushes and discarded bras. The floors were carpeted in plain, oatmeal carpet, and the furniture was mostly Ikea, pale pine and chrome. All of Peter’s CDs were neatly arranged in a pine tower, next to his Sony stereo equipment, and all of his paperback books were shelved in alphabetical order.