The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (31 page)

“No, none, not even a romance.”

“I see. Sorry to ask these rather personal questions but the reasons are obvious. However, I think it is only fair that I reciprocate. So, Miss Templeton, I can tell you that I am forty-eight and do not give a damn who knows it. Like yourself, my parents also died when I was young, and like yourself, I am also an only child. Because of that I was already fairly wealthy in my own right even before I married, and my husband had money as well. We were married for ten years before he ran off with a younger woman.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

“To be candid so was I. It was a good marriage, or so I thought, even though there were no children.”

“Why did he leave?”

For a brief moment a look of bleak hatred crossed her eyes. “Let us say that the girl in question used her physical assets to good effect. So I, too, am quite alone with no attachments whatever. Did the agency tell you the salary?”

“Yes, the money is fine.”

“Good.” Again those gray eyes surveyed her critically. “Well, Miss Templeton, I think we will get on very well indeed. I’ll leave you for a few minutes to think about it. By all means have a look round the house. Your rooms are the first two on the right at the top of the stairs. There is a bedroom with your own bathroom attached, and a small sitting room with a connecting door. I’m sure you will be comfortable. When you are ready you’ll find me in the garden,” and she turned and walked out on to the patio.

Deborah Templeton continued to sit there in the sun lounge for a few moments. What a curious woman, she thought, and what an extraordinary interview. It was the sort of interview that a man might have conducted, not a woman. For a brief moment the thought crossed her mind that Mrs. Bates might have unusual tastes, hence the reason perhaps why her husband had left her for a more normal woman and hence the reason perhaps why she was so insistent that her employee be young and attractive, but she dismissed the idea almost as soon as it arose. The woman might be odd but that oddness certainly didn’t stem from Sappho.

She rose and walked through the house. She had not exactly come from penurious circumstances herself, but she had never lived in such luxurious surroundings as this. The kitchen was enormous and fitted with just about every labor-saving device on the market, and the main lounge was a superb room of elegance and grace. She walked up the main staircase and directly she entered what was to be her bedroom she knew that she simply had to have this position, for there was the most gorgeous four-poster bed curtained in woven tapestry of gold and red like something out of a fairy tale. It was silly, she knew, to let such a trivial thing as a bed clinch the decision, but it had always been a fantasy of hers to sleep in a four-poster.

She looked at herself in the tall cheval mirror and pulled a wry smile. Pretty but not beautiful. An accurate but deflating description. There had been a time, oh so many years ago now, when she had been stunningly attractive, in the days when she had deliberately dressed for that effect, but the image that stared back at her from the mirror was suburbanly “mumsy” and hardly likely to stir the male libido.

She walked over to the window and stared down into the garden to where Mrs. Bates was busy weeding the flowerbeds. The woman was certainly an autocrat, but if it was true that she would not see her for most of the time then that was no real problem. And yet there was still something odd about the whole thing. It was all too good to be true. Or perhaps the oddness had more to do with Mrs. Bates herself than the position she was offering. Anyway, she would be a fool to turn it down.

The name on the list of duties that the agency had given her was Mary Elizabeth Bates, followed by an indecipherable signature. The name, Mary, was really quite apposite. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” she murmured, “how does your garden grow?” and the answer was that it grew very well, though Mary Bates herself was certainly contrary, contrary indeed.

The girl left the room and went downstairs into the garden. “I think I will be very happy here,” she said simply.

The woman smiled. “When I read your letter and saw your photograph I was already half certain, but when I saw you standing at the door I knew that you were going to be the one. When can you come?”

“Would Monday be too soon?”

Mrs. Bates held out her hand. “Monday will be fine. I’ll see you then.”

Deborah had said Monday just to give herself the weekend should she wish to change her mind, but by Saturday lunch time she had given the landlady of her bedsit a week’s rent in lieu of notice and was already packed and eager to go. Saturday evening and all day Sunday stretched to a seeming eternity but at last the Monday came and the taxi delivered her to her new home by noon.

Mrs. Bates, still in the same old pair of jeans, welcomed her kindly but not effusively. “You know where your rooms are. Use today to get settled in. Cook yourself a meal when you feel like it. I’ll talk to you more fully, and go over the house accounts with you, tomorrow,” and she turned and went back into the garden. Deborah smiled wryly and lugged her suitcases up to her rooms, and by two o’clock she was unpacked and ready to explore the house.

Her mother had always said that you could know almost everything there was to know about a woman’s environment, temperament, and character by the contents of her kitchen cupboards, her wardrobe, and her laundry bin. The kitchen harbored no surprises, in view of the evidence of wealth in the rest of the house. The tins and jars and bottles in the cupboards revealed a highly expensive epicurean taste that promised a future of delightful cuisine, though no doubt it would prove a disaster to any calorie-controlled diet, and the wine rack contained a dozen or more bottles, mostly German hocks, though in amongst the array of white wine there were two bottles of Nuit St. George. Mrs. Bates obviously dined well.

The girl did not dare go into her employer’s bedroom to see her wardrobe, but she did make a quick examination of the contents of the laundry bin and there met with a surprise that almost bordered on shock. There were two suspender belts, one of black and purple and one of black and scarlet, and five pairs of the scantiest briefs that she had ever seen, again in scarlet, black, and purple, and all of them lacy and highly revealing. And in addition there were two bras, one black and one red, so brief that they simply had to be quarter-bras that would make the point quite clear on any normally endowed woman. It was puzzling. These were the underclothes of a young Soho showgirl, not those of a forty-eight-year-old rural semi-recluse. Mrs. Bates was proving to be something of an intriguing mystery.

At four o’clock it began to rain and Deborah rushed to her sitting room window to see what Mrs. Bates would do. The woman hurried into the conservatory and emerged a few minutes later dressed in Wellington boots, oilskin trousers, and a waterproof anorak with the hood pulled up over her head, and calmly went back to work. She really did look quite ridiculous bent over the flowerbeds with the rain drumming on her back. As it was late June the weather was still quite warm despite the rain, and if you are suitably waterproofed then there was no logical reason why you should not work in the rain, and yet it seemed ludicrous. People didn’t tend their gardens in the pouring rain. It simply wasn’t
done
. And how on earth could you equate that comical and eccentric figure down there in the rain with the sort of woman that wore lurid and provocative underclothes? It was delightfully mysterious.

Deborah did not see Mrs. Bates that evening, but on the following morning she found a note in the kitchen asking her to come into the library after breakfast to go over the house accounts. Well at last Deborah would see Mrs. Bates in something other than jeans, but when she entered the library the result was oddly disappointing. She was dressed in pale blue slacks and a white high-necked blouse. The outfit was simple, tasteful, and hardly in keeping with the erotic contents of the laundry bin. And Mrs. Bates proved to have a good brain, neat, precise, and logical. The house accounts were all neatly annotated and filed in alphabetical order in a proper filing cabinet in the library, and within half an hour the familiarization talk was over and Mrs. Bates changed back into her jeans and returned to the garden.

In accordance with her instructions Deborah Templeton kept out of her employer’s way for the rest of that Tuesday and all day Wednesday, though Mrs. Bates in the garden was constantly in her view from the house. And it was this constant view of her employer that revealed yet another oddity. It was true that Mary Bates gave her attention to all parts of the garden, but again and again she returned to that same flowerbed where Deborah had first seen her. If she moved to another part of the garden it would only be a matter of minutes, ten at the most, before she returned to what was obviously her favorite spot.

The flowerbed was a low mound some twenty feet long and six feet wide, and it would have been called a rockery but for the fact that it had no rocks. Deborah Templeton was no gardener and could scarce put a name to any particular plant in that blaze of color except for the tulips and aubretia, and indeed to her untutored eye some of them seemed very unusual and thus probably quite rare, but it was certainly a beautiful bed and obviously thrived on the loving care that Mrs. Bates lavished upon it. “With silver bells and cockleshells,” she murmured as she saw Mrs. Bates move back to her favorite spot for the umpteenth time.

On Thursday she went shopping in the village and there discovered yet another oddity, one that was rather disquieting. “Well, I will say this for Mrs. Bates,” said the butcher, an enormous man with fat red cheeks, “she certainly knows how to pick ’em!”

“How do you mean?”

Fortunately the shop was empty, otherwise the man might not have been so forward and thus the oddity would have remained hidden a little longer. “Well, you’re a very attractive young lady, Miss Templeton, if I may say so, but then all of Mrs. Bates’s girls have been good lookers.”

From the later viewpoint of hindsight Deborah decided that it was at that precise moment that the first warning bell began to sound inside her. “All of them?” she said. “Why, how many have there been?”

The butcher pursed his lips. “You’re the seventh, I think.”

She signed the bill and was just about to leave when on impulse she said: “Do you remember their names?”

“Of course,” he said, and rattled off six names. “And you’re the best looking one so far,” he added gallantly.

Once outside the shop she wrote the names in her pocket diary before she forgot them and then began the mile walk home, but before she left the village she placed a call from the public telephone box. It was not a call that she would have cared to make from the house.

The agency was polite and apologetic but not very forthcoming. Yes, she was indeed the seventh. Yes, the six names were correct. No, they had not told her about her predecessors because of Mrs. Bates’s instructions to that effect. As far as they understood, all the girls had quickly grown bored with the job, having little to do, and had left. No, they had not seen any of the girls after they had left. In each case they had not known that the girl had left until Mrs. Bates had contacted the agency for a replacement. No, they did not think it particularly unusual.

Deborah did not see Mrs. Bates to speak to that Thursday, nor the Friday. It was not until the Saturday morning that her employer sought her out. “I do trust you have not forgotten that today is Saturday.”

“No, of course not. Dinner will be at eight.”

At seven o’clock, with everything prepared and going nicely, Deborah went up to dress. She took a quick shower and then combed her hair down long and full. She then tried on her only full-length evening gown. She had not worn it for several years and it still fitted surprisingly well. She had not put on as much weight as she had feared. The gown was black with a simple flowing line. It was a cross-over halter-neck that left half her breasts exposed and all her midriff to below the navel. Not content with that the dress was slashed up the front to midthigh and fitted so tightly around her hips and bottom that any underclothing at all, even the merest wisp, always spoiled the line of it, and she wondered how on earth she had ever had the courage to wear it. She looked at herself critically in the cheval mirror and shook her head. It was a great dress, and she would love to wear it just to disprove that “pretty but not beautiful” tag, but it really wasn’t suitable for this occasion. Reluctantly she stripped and folded it away, put on underclothes and a simple, calf-length cocktail dress that did not reveal anything, and left the room to go downstairs.

As she was closing her bedroom door she saw her employer going down the stairs, and the sight almost made her gasp. Her own black evening gown would have been declared modest by comparison to the creation that Mrs. Bates was wearing. It was a pure white gown cut in a Grecian style of a material so fine that she trailed wisps of it behind her as she moved, and it was quite staggering how little of Mrs. Bates it covered. The contrast to the wellington-booted figure in the garden was so startling that it was scarcely believable that it was the same woman.

Without even thinking about it Deborah went back into her bedroom, stripped off her cocktail dress and her underclothes, put on her evening gown, and went downstairs to serve dinner.

Neither gown was mentioned during dinner, indeed little was said at all. Mrs. Bates made an appreciative comment about the prawn cocktail, was quite complimentary in respect to the Tournedos Rossini, and said that she found the lemon sorbet to be delicious. It was only when they withdrew to the main lounge for coffee that the first mention was made. “An excellent meal, my dear,” said Mrs. Bates, “and I completely withdraw my earlier remark about being merely pretty. You look quite stunning. I doubt that any man could keep his hands off you.”

The girl smiled. “With you in the room I doubt that he would even see me.”

Mrs. Bates looked down at herself. “Yes, men are quite stupidly physical. With a dress like this, or one like yours, a man’s every instinct prompts him to reach out and remove what little there is. All female virtues are as nothing compared to the power of a revealing gown, as I know to my cost.”