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Authors: Graham Masterton

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)

Feelings of Fear (6 page)

BOOK: Feelings of Fear
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“Okay … whatever you say.”

He went over and locked the doors. When he came back, Lolicia was standing by the bed, bare-breasted. Her nipples were stiffening and she had an expression on her face that gave Jack a strange watery feeling in his stomach. She almost looked as if she could eat him alive.

“You have some cord?” she asked him.

“Sure.” He opened his closet door and produced two four-feet lengths of black nylon rope. “How about a plastic bag?”

“Sure. That too. I always make sure that I'm stocked up on household essentials, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, Jack. I know what you mean.”

He approached her with the cord and the bag. He dropped his bathrobe so that he was naked, his penis pulsing with every heartbeat. “Face down on the bed,” he told her. “Come on, face down.”

“No, Jack. It's your turn first.”

“My
turn?”

She held him close so that her breasts were squashed against his hairy chest. She reached around and pulled the cord out of his hand. “You're amazing,” he said, and his breath smelled strongly of Parmesan cheese.

She tied one of his wrists and then turned him around and tied the other. The knots were too tight, but they didn't restrict his circulation too severely and he found the tightness exciting. He was starting to pant and his chest was flushing crimson under his fan of black hair.

“Now then,” said Lolicia. She took the black plastic bag away from him and lifted it over his head.

“We should have a signal,” he said. “Just in case I feel like I'm suffocating.”

She kissed him, very slowly and lasciviously. Her tongue probed around his reconstructed teeth. “If you feel you're in trouble,” she said, “why don't you call out my name?”

“Your name? OK. I'll call out your name.”

Lolicia drew the bag right over his head and twisted it so that it was bound tight around his neck. He took a deep breath in, and the bag crinkled and clung to his face.

She guided him to the edge of the bed and gently pushed him so that he was lying on his back. Then she lashed his ankles tightly together. She climbed on to the white silk bedcover beside him. The bag ballooned, shrank, ballooned, shrank, as Jack breathed in and out. Lolicia caressed his face through the wrinkled plastic. Then she ran her fingernails down his chest, and around his stomach. His penis was so hard that it was curving upward, like a red tusk. Lolicia took it in her hand and slowly stroked it, and inside the plastic bag Jack groaned with pleasure.

“I wonder if Susan enjoyed this so much,” said Lolicia.

Jack said something muffled.

“Didn't you hear me? I wonder if Susan thought this was so exciting. I mean, it was something that she'd never done before.”

Jack panted, “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I can't hear you very well, Jack, with that bag over your head.” She kept on rubbing his penis but it was beginning to lose its rigidity. “I just wonder if she enjoyed being suffocated, like you're being suffocated. I just wonder if she enjoyed being hurt.”

With that, she dug her fingernails deep into his testicles. He let out a stifled scream, and tried to twist himself free, but oddly enough his penis suddenly swelled harder, too.

“For Christ's sake!” he shouted. “I can't breathe! Take this fucking bag off my head!”

Lolicia smiled and kept on rubbing him.

“I can't breathe! I can't breathe! I'm dying in here!”

Lolicia tugged down her thong until it was halfway down her thighs, and climbed on top of him. She took hold of his penis and guided it into her. She rode up and down on him for a while, her back straight, her eyes closed, an extraordinary smile on her face.

“—breathe! Can't—!
” Jack begged.

Lolicia leaned forward and kissed his mouth through the plastic.

“We agreed on a signal, Jack, don't you remember? For all I know you're cheating.”

Jack wheezed for breath, and then he managed to choke out, “Lolicia!”

“You're supposed to say my name, Jack,” she said, very close to his ear.

“Lolicia!” he repeated. His chest was heaving now and he was beginning to shudder.

“Wrong name, Jack. My name's not Lolicia at all.”

“—breathe! Please—!”

“No, Jack. Two years ago I was somebody quite different. But two years ago I discovered that there was no way that I was ever going to be able to get really close to you unless I changed my name. Oh, and changed my looks a little, too.”

“—
please
!
I'll
—”

“I took a course of hormones, Jack, and you'd be amazed what a difference that makes. Then I went to a cosmetic surgeon, and you'd be even more amazed what they can do with silicone these days. I had my hair highlighted and I bought some nice blue contact lenses. Then
last Labour Day I was ready to go to the urologist and leave the last reminder of my old life behind.

“It was worth it, Jack, believe me. It was worth the pain and it was worth the waiting and it was worth every dollar it cost me. I needed to watch you die in the same way that you watched Susan die.”

Jack gave a last terrible rattle in his throat – and then he suddenly ejaculated. Lolicia remained on top of him for a while, to make sure that he had completely stopped breathing, and then she climbed off him.

“I'm sorry, Jack,” she said, “but you didn't call my name.”

She tore open the plastic bag with her fingernails to reveal his bright blue, sweaty face, his eyes still wide open and his tongue lolling out.

“You should have called out, ‘Jeff!'”

Friend in Need

I
had known Jan Boedewerf for over three months before I realized that his friend Hoete (of whom he spoke conversationally almost every day) was imaginary. To say that I was bewildered would be an understatement.

“Hoete and I went to see the Zandvliet Lock on Saturday,” Jan enthused, on Monday morning. “Well, I persuaded him to go. He's not very interested in docks and locks. Afterwards we went to the Djawa Timur restaurant on the Klein Markt. He likes Indonesian food but he wouldn't eat anything. He spat out his rice! I don't know why he gets so angry.”

On Tuesday, he said, “Hoete was still in a temper. Sometimes I think he wants to kill me.”

“Really? Kill you?”

“Well, metaphorically speaking.”

At first, there had been nothing to distinguish Jan Boedewerf from every other accountant at the Bank van België, of whom there were thirty-five. He arrived at work at Schelde Straat at eight a.m., parking his brown Volkswagen Passat in a numbered slot in the staff parking-lot. He wore a brown suit and a brown necktie and tan-colored shoes and carried a briefcase. He was always whistling between his teeth. He hung his coat up on a hanger marked with his name. He sat all morning in front of his computer, and at twelve p.m. he went out for lunch at Les Routiers on Cockerillkaai. Mussels, maybe a breaded veal cutlet, a glass of red wine. At one thirty p.m. he came back and worked until four thirty and then he went home.

He had short sandy hair and dandruff and brown-rimmed glasses and a round pale-freckled face. His weekend hobby was to visit
the docks. He knew everything about the docks and the locks. The Kattendijk maritime dock had been built in 1860 and had a surface area of 139,000 square meters. The Boudewijn Lock was 360 meters long and had a high tide depth of 15.23 meters.

He was unmarried, and had never been married, as far as I could tell. Well – didn't altogether surprise me.

I don't usually have anything to do with accountants of any nationality, especially drones like Jan Boedewerf. To tell you the truth, I'm not much of a businessman, either. I'm an automobile man, not a money man. But Bill Kruse had been ill and we were desperately short-handed: so Randy Friedman sent me over to Antwerp a year ago to set up a new division of Fancy Cars Inc – “The Car You've Always Dreamed Of At A Price You Couldn't Imagine.” We started nineteen years ago in a disused grain repository in Mobile, Alabama, bringing in specialist autmobiles, by which I mean Lamborghinis and Ferraris and suchlike. We went through a pretty sticky beginning, mainly due to the oil crisis, but after six or seven years and $137,000 in extra finance from Randy's grandpa we managed to climb gradually into profit. Then we wanted to expand into Europe, sending Porsches and light-bodied BMWs to America, and bringing Pontiac Firebirds and Chevrolet Corvettes into Belgium.

So that was where the Bank van België came in. Jan Boedewerf and I were supposed to work out a realistic finance package which would enable us to order eleven Maseratis and six Lamborghinis as well as two Bentley Azuras and a Rolls-Royce Silver Something.

To put it mildly, it was an uphill battle, in spite of the fact that Antwerp was one of the flattest places on earth. Jan was practical, straight-laced and completely literal-minded. We had to go through pages and pages of European Union directives and more small print than a Gideon Bible; and I knew that his bosses wouldn't tolerate anything less.

“Emissions?” Jan would say, picking up a sheet of paper and peering at me through those glass-brick lenses. “What about emissions? We have to have percentage guarantees.”

“You're a banker, not a mechanic,” I told him. “What do you care?”

“You can't sell a car if it smells,” he retorted, which was just about the only faintly amusing thing I ever heard him say.

One morning in the second week of January it was so foggy that we could see nothing outside of our twelfth-story window but gray freezing fog, penetrated only by the black knobbly spires of Our Lady's Cathedral and Saint James's Church where Rubens was buried. I was tapping out a row of figures when Jan said, “Why don't you come to lunch today and meet my friend Hoete?”

“I don't think so, Jan. I want to finish up these forecasts first. We're running way over time.”

“You're so eager to go back to Alabama?”

“Do you blame me, for Christ's sake? At least it's warm in Alabama.”

“Still, we have almost completed everything, haven't we? And you will enjoy Hoete's company, I'm sure.”

I sat back in my swivel chair and looked at him. “After everything you've said about him?”

Jan shrugged and made a silly face. Against my better judgement, I switched off my computer. We had almost pulled together a mutually agreeable finance package, and at our last meeting I got the impression that Bank van België were pretty much decided. They were going to go with us, I could sense it. All we needed was $2.75 million and Fancy Cars Inc was on its way to global domination. Today, Antwerp. Tomorrow … who knew? Aston Martins to Azerbajan? De Tomasos to Delhi?

“OK,” I said. “Let's go meet this grouchy pal of yours.”

We walked across the gray cobbles of Schelde Stratt in a fine wet drizzle and hailed a taxi to take us to the old part of Antwerp, to a restaurant called 't Spreeuwke in the Oude Koornmarkt. I was wearing gloves but it was so cold that I had to clap my hands together. That was the trouble with Antwerp: it lay so low that you hardly knew where the land ended and the Schelde River began. And there was always the feeling that ghosts were around, hurrying through the fog. Rubens, and the Rockox, and the Plantin-Moretus family.

'T Spreeuwke was warm and wood-paneled and almost all of the tables were crowded. The maitre-d' produced two enormous menus and led us through the restaurant to the very back, to a circular table beneath a circular window – a table set for three. The place was full
of laughter and the pungent aroma of mussels. Jan said, “What will you have? A glass of beer?”

“OK. Sounds good to me.”

He ordered in Flemish, and the waiter brought three glasses of pils, which he set out on the table in front of us.

“Jack,” said Jan, raising his glass. “Allow me to introduce you to my friend Martin Hoete.”

I lifted my glass, too, but I wasn't at all sure what he meant. “Cheers,” I said, and clinked glasses with him.

Jan clinked his glass with the glass that had been laid at the empty place. “Cheers,” he said. Then he waited – and when I did nothing, he nodded his head toward the glass and said, “You're not going to—?”

“What?” I asked him. I was totally baffled.

“You're not going to say cheers to Hoete?”

“I'm sorry?”

“No, no. It's my fault. I haven't introduced you. Martin – this is Jack Scott. Jack, this is Martin Hoete.”

I stared at the empty bentwood chair. It really was very empty. Then I looked back at Jan. I was beginning to think that this was a practical joke, but Jan's expression was so deadly serious that my confidence began to waver. I had been the victim of practical jokes before, but there was always a give-away, always a smirk. Jan was pale-blue-eyed and totally unsmiling and there wasn't even a twitch of insincerity on his face.

“How do you do, Martin?” I found myself saying.

Jan suddenly beamed. “Martin says he's very well. Very well indeed. He has a strep throat so you'll have to forgive him. He's bought a new flat in Berchem and he's very happy with it. Well – if it wasn't for that woman.”

“What woman?”

“His ex-wife, of course. Maria.”

“What's the problem with Maria?”

“She keeps demanding more money. You know what ex-wives are like. Unfortunately Hoete has just lost his job with Best & Osterrieth.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Yes – well, it has driven him almost to despair, hasn't it, Hoete?
Sometimes he feels like cutting his throat. Sometimes he feels like cutting Maria's throat. What a slut she is. She went off with that Quinten Venkeler, from Atlas Shipping.”

“I see.”

I have to admit that I was close to making my excuses and leaving; but the maitre-d' arrived at that moment to take our order. Both Jan and I asked for mussels, as a starter. Hoete, apparently, wanted chicken soup.

BOOK: Feelings of Fear
13.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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