Walkers (17 page)

She dried herself, and sat at her
dressing-table naked, dusting herself with iris-scented talc, and smoothing her
face with Clinique cream. Look at me, she said to herself. Twenty-six years
old, fashionable, good looking, intelligent. Big green eyes, sensual lips, a
model-girl figure. What is it about me that proves irresistible to all the
wrong men? Why am I sleeping alone tonight, for the
one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh time this year? I don’t even know why I bother to
take the pill.

She cupped one hand over her left
breast. If you touch me, am I not aroused? If you kiss me, do I not respond?
I’m a woman, a fully equipped highly emotional woman, with all the passions of
a fully equipped highly emotional woman, and more. Yet I expect to be treated
like a human being, too, not the way that John Bream tried to treat me. Not the
way that Ronald DeVries treated me, either. Why do men blame me for everything?
John, for being sexually ungrateful for a Carte Blanche bill of $78.25, including
gratuity. Ronald, for some inexplicable hardship he had suffered down in San
Hipolito, Mexico.

She tied a scarf around her hair,
and went to the closet to take out a clean shirt. She always slept in men’s
shirts; partly because they made comfortable nightwear, and partly because she
liked to go into Sears’ menswear department and buy them, as if she had a
husband, or a steady boyfriend. She climbed into bed with the book she had been
reading for the past seven months, never progressing more than two or three
pages a night,
An Analysis of
Contemporary Advertising.
She wound her Minnie Mouse alarm-clock, and then
tugged the cord which switched off the ceiling light.

‘Ogilvy’s 1958 advertisement for
imported Rolls-Royces contained nothing but facts, without adjectives...” she
began to read. But then she thought about the statuette of Pan, and Ronald’s
voice saying, ‘Nobody – ever – has accused me of trying to frighten them. Of
trying
to frighten them.’ She tried to
concentrate harder on her book. ‘The agency was faced with an antiquated public
image of Rolls-Royce as a box-like car that sold for $20,000 and over, and
required a chauffeur to drive it. . .’

‘Nobody –
ever...’

She read about a page and a half,
and then she yawned and put the book aside on the night table. She switched off
her bedside lamp, and wriggled herself down beneath the covers. She lay on her
side for a while, watching the patterns of light dancing on the wall. They
danced there every night: the streetlights shining through the yuccas in the
back yard. On stormy nights they flickered wildly, but tonight was temperate
and calm and only slightly breezy, and their dance was more sedate.

Nancy’s eyes closed. She jerked
once, and frowned, but then she slept.

Her sleep was dreamless at first,
but then she found herself somewhere on a windy hill, miles from anywhere. In
the distance, she could see the red-and-white lights of traffic, flowing along
the freeway, but something told her that it was the wrong freeway, and that she
was walking in the wrong direction. She tried not to panic, but she knew that
she was lost, and that it would take her hours to find her way back home.

She reached an old-fashioned house,
standing on its own, silent and derelict. She glided up the steps, and found
that the door was open. Glancing to the side, she saw that there was a
wicker-seated rocking-chair lying on its side on the derelict verandah, and
that grey rats were tugging at the wicker seat with their teeth.

‘Someone has died,’ she thought to
herself; and a thick feeling of darkness and claustrophobia came over her. She
knew she would have to enter the house, and try to find a telephone.

She opened the door. The interior of
the house was gloomy and suffocating. There was a tall display cabinet standing
by the side of the stairs. Its glass windows were obscured with grease and dust
and the patina of hundreds of neglected years. She glided towards it and tried
to peer inside. She could make out dark and twisted shapes, but even when she
wiped her hand across the greasy glass it was impossible to see what they were.
For some reason, she found them frightening.

‘Nobody – ever – ‘ whispered a
voice. A voice as cold as the drip of a tap, in a long-abandoned bathroom.
‘Nobody –
ever –
has accused me of
trying...’

She ascended the staircase without
even moving her legs. She passed a lighted window, halfway up, in which a
bronze statuette of the Great God Pan was dancing.

The statue remained motionless, but
she was sure that it would pursue her, once she had turned her back on it. It
seemed for some reason to be poisonously evil, the essence of corruption and
terror.

‘To frighten them –
to frighten
them...’

She rose to the second-floor
landing. She tried to turn around to make sure that the Great God Pan wasn’t
following her, but she found it impossible to turn her neck around. She felt as
if all her muscles had seized up, and that she was powerless to prevent herself
from gliding across the landing, not quickly, but steadily and silently and
irresistibly -towards the door of her own apartment.

The apartment door dissolved, like
brown fog, and she passed through it into the living-room. She suddenly thought
of the naked portrait of herself, by the telephone.

Supposing somebody saw it and was
scandalised? Supposing somebody saw it and thought that she was immoral, and
that she would have sex with any man who asked her? She tried to turn around to
see if the portrait was still there, but her neck remained locked in a painful
muscular cramp. She forgot that she was supposed to be looking for a phone.

She went gliding into the bedroom.
It was dark in there, impenetrably dark, and the door closed behind her, soft
and airtight. She strained her eyes to see where her bed was, but the darkness
was complete, and she had to make her way cautiously across the room with her
hands outstretched, feeling her way. She found it at last, and climbed into it;
but she had the strangest sensation now that this was no longer a dream, that
what she felt was real. She reached across thebed and she could feel the
wrinkled sheets. She could hear the alarm-clock ticking. All that was missing
was the streetlight, dancing on the wall.

Then she heard a sound. It was a
scraping, rustling sound – very faint, but sufficient to convince her that
there was somebody or something in the room with her. She lay stock-still, her
eyes wide, her ears straining to listen, her breath caught tight. Was that
somebody breathing, down at the foot of the bed? Or was it simply the echo of
her own breath?

She waited. The hands of the clock
crept towards half-past eleven.

Silence, except for the rushing of
her own blood.

Then there was another scraping
noise, louder this time. She held her breath again, and lifted her head off the
pillow, holding it up so that her neck ached, peering and peering into the
darkness to see what was there.

I’m dreaming, she thought. This is a
dream. All I have to do is wake up.

But then supposing
I
wake up and find out that it’s
real, that it’s still happening, that
there’s
something in the room with me?

A wind began to blow, very softly,
lifting one of the raffia blinds away from the window, so that the very
faintest of lights penetrated the room. It was so dim that Nancy couldn’t see
anything she recognised. Either that, or the room was completely different,
completely changed. She propped herself cautiously up on her elbows.

Was that a mirror, where the door
should have been? Was that a chair, standing in the corner? And next to the
chair, that curving shape looked like the side of a large terracotta vase.

Scrape, rustle.

Nancy jerked her head around, to the
other side of the bed, to the side where the shadows were. And suddenly he was
standing there, right next to her, white and naked as a corpse, his eyes
glowing dull red in the darkness, his teeth catching the light: Ronald DeVries,
or a creature that looked like Ronald DeVries. The wind died down, the blind
fell back, the room was buried in darkness again. Nancy clutched herself close,
pulled her legs up under her, squeezed her eyes tight shut and screamed,
‘No!’

Something clawed for her, in the
blackness. She felt fingernails lacerate her thigh.

She tried to twist over, out of the
way, but two powerful hands gripped her wrists, and forced her on to her back.
She felt a sharp knee, forcing itself between her thighs; then one of the hands
that was gripping her wrists adjusted itself, so that her upper arm was pinned
against the bed by an elbow, and the hand snatched an agonising, eye-watering
handful of hair. She screamed, or thought she screamed; but how could anybody
hear her screaming, if this was a dream?

Her shirt was pulled open at the
front, the buttons twisted off. Then she felt a heavy, cold, bristly body lying
on top of hers; a body like a dead pig. She tried to scream again, but she
didn’t seem to have the breath for it, and when she looked up into the darkness
she could see those two dimly glowing eyes, like torches shining through a
thick blanket, and she could smell winey breath and some other unutterable
odour that tightened her throat and knotted up her stomach and made it almost
impossible for her to speak.

‘Don’t,’
she
begged, in a strangled whisper.
‘Don’t!’

The creature on top of her dragged
at her hair even harder, and said something deep in its throat. Strange,
guttural words that she was unable to understand, but which sounded obscene.
She thought of John Bream, shouting at her down the stairwell. She thought of
all the men who had turned and looked at her, a thousand pairs of eyes, all of
them calculating, all of them remorseless, all of them wanting nothing at all
but to relieve the urgency of their lust inside her.

‘Oh no,’ she whimpered, as the
creature’s calloused hands began to twist her breasts. She tried one last furious
struggle, throwing herself from side to side, tossing her body backwards and
forwards, clutching and tugging at everything she could reach. But the creature
was far too heavy, and far too strong. It loomed above her, chilly and rank,
its eyes hovering only inches away from her face, and it pronounced those
incomprehensible words again, and she could feel them reverberate against its
hairy ribcage.

‘Please let me wake up,’ she cried.
‘Please, dear God,
please
let me wake
up!’

But now the creature was leaning
forward on to her shoulders, and she could feel its tangled beard scratching
against her neck and her cheek. She could feel it pushing itself against her
vulva, as if somebody was forcing a clenched fist up between her legs.

‘Please, it’s too big,’ she wept.
‘Please, you’re going to kill me. Please!’

She felt pain so intense that she
thought that her pelvis had broken apart. Her head jerked upward involuntarily,
and her spine arched. She was hurt too badly to do anything but shudder and
gasp, and she had to cling on to the creature’s shoulders to prevent it from
thrusting itself too far inside her.

There was nothing she could do to
save herself, she was powerless. She couldn’t even wake herself up. All she
could do was hold on tight to the very creature that was hurting her so much,
and keep her legs stretched as wide apart as she possibly could, and pray, and
pray, and pray.

The creature suddenly cried out
Sabazius!’
and roared, and she felt its
muscles bunch and wriggle like snakes smothered in cold lard. It cried out
again, and then again; and then immediately it drew itself out of her, with a
noise that she would never forget, liquid and viscous.

She lay where she was, in the same
position, as the creature climbed up off the bed.

She heard the mattress springs
crunching together under its weight. She said a silent prayer to the Lord
Almighty that it wouldn’t take it into its head to kill her.

Oh God, oh God, please don’t let it
kill me. Please let it go away now. Please, God, let me wake up. She babbled
and babbled like a mad and penitent nun.

It seemed as if she remained hunched
up on her bed for hours. She opened and closed her eyes, never knowing for sure
whether she was asleep or awake.

Gradually, the raffia blinds began
to lighten, and after a while the sun was filling the room. She sat up, and
tugged her hands through her hair. Had it been a dream? She looked down at
herself. Her shirt was unbuttoned, but not torn, and when she turned her hands
this way and that, there were no scratches on them, no bruises, nothing to bear
witness to a furious struggle with a sharp-nailed beast. She stood up, and
walked through to the bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes
were a little puffy, as if she hadn’t slept very well, but apart from that, she
looked quite well.

Just to make certain, she reached
one tentative hand down between her legs. She was moist, as she usually was
when she had been dreaming about sex. But there was no trace of the spurting
liquid flood with which the creature had filled her. Nor was she sore.

She stared at herself in the mirror.
‘A dream,’ she said, out loud. ‘It was nothing but a dream. Can you
believe
it?’