Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Sharp Edges STEVE RASNIC TEM

Jane spent hours shaving her legs, despite the fact that the act tangled her in anxiety. Even in her nervousness, however, the results never failed to fascinate: the warm pink smoothness of the legs, the skin scraped so thin one might have seen the blood pulsing just beneath the surface. Then there were the occasional nicks: in particular the granular abrasions around the heel and ankle, where the skin came so close to the bone it appeared painted on. When first cut open her pale skin pinkened, as if suffused with a new liveliness, then the tiny beads of blood oozed out on to the surface, and Jane found the look and smell of them oddly comforting, like milk for a baby, confirming for her that this life was, indeed, real. Although beneath the surface pleasure a profound terror lurked.

Jane had many such terrors, and her psychotherapist believed that if she faced the smallest among them first, the grip of her more dramatic fears might begin to loosen. She wasn’t sure about this, but would never think of arguing with him. Besides, shaving her legs was important to her appearance.

So when she shaved with the razor she held her breath. It steadied her hand. But there were still the inevitable slips, the skin torn, the pale flesh of the calf washed with a translucent spread of blood. She’d gasp and run to the mirror: staring eyes dilating rapidly in the high polish of the glass. And each time, behind her in the clouds of steam from the shower, she could see the knife blade easing aside the crisp plastic curtain.

Maxwell sawed carefully through the hollow handle of the cane, inserting the narrow knife in one opening and carving out the other end to create a close, smooth-fitting sheath for the blade. He supposed you could purchase such a device, but he felt more comfortable making his own. He doubted his particular version could kill, but killing wasn’t what he was after with this instrument. It was intended merely to probe, to produce seemingly accidental scratches, evidence of all the sharp edges a young lady might discover in the standard urban environment.

In the park, conveniently crowded that afternoon, he created a long vertical tear in a young woman’s calf as she passed him jogging. Because of her exertions, the shrouding effect of oxygen depletion, he imagined it was several seconds before she felt the pain and by then he was safely around the bend and stepping briskly down another pathway.

In the local supermarket, obscured behind an elaborate tropical fruit display, he was able to spear a much larger woman in her left buttock. He left the store halfway through a long harangue as she threatened the manager and anyone else in view with legal action. Maxwell had been pleased by the symmetry of the blood stain flowering across the back of her dress.

In similar fashion he continued into the evening, poking, prodding, raising the vaguest signature of blood on women of all ages. Although his escape was uncomfortably narrow at times, he felt no real threat to himself during these activities, for he was simply playing the flirtatious tease, the bashful lover. He was seeing who bled and who did not, and how much. Later, much later, and after extensive courtship, he might open their many mouths for a bright red kiss. But such revelations had to be approached slowly. He had always understood that women were shy creatures, reluctant to give up their secrets, which made what they withheld all the more important. Women were men’s complement, their supplement, their completion and their explanation. Open up a woman and you might finally know her, and find the missing pieces of yourself.

Maxwell had left his special cane in the car during dinner at Catalina’s, a local restaurant sporting an atypical European diner theme, when he saw the young woman he would soon know as Jane enter and take a booth a few feet away. As was his habit, he looked to her fingers first, which were a brighter pink near their ends than on the shafts, with very little nail. He assumed she must chew on her fingers to an obsessive degree, and later observations only confirmed this. He would often wonder during their ensuing relationship whether her fingers bled much, and if she sucked this blood, and whether she waited for a large amount to well up before licking, or sucked her fingers constantly, taking the blood before it had the opportunity to stain her pale skin.

Although there was nothing particularly dazzling about this young woman in her twenties, she had a pleasant face, long reddish-brown hair which was immanently touchable, and people noticed her. He had no immediate explanation for this, but patrons turned their heads when she entered, looked up at her and smiled, and invariably she smiled back, even to the scruffiest of diners. This was dangerous behaviour on her part, he concluded after watching these exchanges for several minutes. Obviously people could see that she was the sort of person who would sit down next to a Charles Manson to chat if a Charles Manson were only to smile at her with even vague politeness. She had this pitiable need to please everyone she met. She was soft, vulnerable, a pale Riding Hood in the woods. She was the kind who walked barefoot on a beach strewn with broken glass, not out of bravery or even foolishness really, but simply out of a sense that this is the way one behaves, however wrong-headed her senses might be. Maxwell was immediately drawn to her.

The music in the restaurant was high-pitched, discordant. For some time Jane had intended to eat here — it was only a few blocks from her apartment building. Now she was sorry she’d ever set foot in the place, but lacked the will to turn around and leave. What would people think if she did such a thing? People smiled at her, their eyes reddened by the harsh, crimson neon that was a major component of the decor, neon in primary greens and blues casting mutant shadows around their hunched forms. Some colours might have been surgically removed from the spectrum here: yellow, orange, other tones she couldn’t quite put her finger on, making flesh tones darker than they should be, shadows deeper, the air thicker. The acoustics in the restaurant could not have been more harsh. A loud, screaming song underlaid with raspy, asthmatic whispering filled her head. She kept smiling, as if to distract her face’s need to wince from the pain.

She sat where the blank-faced host directed her, only his teeth gleaming in his dark blue and green face. He led her through a series of patios, past several sets of sliding doors with knife-like edges. Her silverware looked wrong, as if designed for a slightly different species of human being. She sorted through the eating utensils looking for familiar instruments as the music rose to a bleeding screech in the background.

Bright red and green clouds of light descended around the table. Softer whispers swarmed out of the night, drawn into the bright colours. A man in a dapper dark suit rose at a table a few feet away and began making his way towards her. Nearing her, he looked down and smiled. He leaned over. And stole the knife from beside her plate, slipping it into his coat pocket. She was too shocked and embarrassed to say anything. He grinned a sharp-toothed grin and leaned closer. She imagined she could smell the blood welling to the surface of his warm, pink tongue. He clicked his teeth as if he was going to bite her. Her teeth sawed on the inner surface of her lower lip. His tongue was like a snake’s. Her face suffused with heat so quickly she thought she might faint. She closed her eyes. And felt the caress of a blade gliding up her upper arm and slipping just under the edge of her short sleeve, pausing there to tease before turning and gliding out again. She did not realize he had cut her until the sharp stinging began that snatched her breath away. When she opened her eyes again the man was gone.

In the car Maxwell fingered the edge of the table knife. A session with the whetstone would make it much keener. He brought it up to his nose and sniffed: the rusty bouquet of blood, mingled with perfume reminiscent of lilacs, and a heady, day-old sweat. This was his first gift from her, but he knew there would be many others. And he had many gifts for her as well. She was so naive, so. uninformed. She did not know, yet, that human bodies were thin-walled, fragile, prone to leaks, vulnerable to even the mildest prick from earrings, the rough edge of a necklace, the awkward slip of a comb. A few cuts across the eyeballs would make her see the things she always ignored.

He waited until she left the restaurant, then followed her to her building. The angular trees outside the entrance provided him with cover while he observed which of the mailboxes just inside the door she opened for her mail. A quick peek at the box after she’d gone upstairs, and he knew her exact name and address.

Jane worked as an entry-level secretary in a large corporate law office downtown. It was a job which did little to alter her basic anxiety at being in the world. People were so demanding there, so difficult to satisfy. Every day she felt like more of a failure, less able to please the people she worked for and the people she worked with. She didn’t understand what they wanted from her. She didn’t know what she had to do to get them to like her.

She might have enjoyed her job more if it hadn’t been for all the paper cuts she kept getting, criss-crossing her fingertips in delicate, almost beautiful patterns. Their number increased with her fatigue, certainly, but there were days in which sharp edges seemed intent on her, lying in wait on tabletops, in letter trays, and in her desk drawers.

‘Jane! Watch out!’

Jane screamed once in shock and pain. The dangling earring on her left side had caught in the file drawer, pulled through the hole, ripped through the ear. The file room went dark, highlighted in shades of red.

Someone had put a pillow under her head. The whispers of her co-workers grew harsh and garbled above her. They seemed to rise and fall in volume with her pain, eventually blending into an overwhelming, physically-based melody.

A man in a bright blue coat crouched over her. His smile was too broad and thin to be natural. She was embarrassed to have him see her like this. She worried about her dress, her hair. He held up a syringe as if measuring it with his eyes.

As if on its own the needle reached out and pricked her.

The needle was so thin it became invisible as it entered her flesh. If all edges were so very sharp perhaps she wouldn’t have minded. She wondered with the pleasant vagueness of dream if sunlight had such a supernormally sharp edge, if in fact it stabbed you to release your darker colours.

She fantasized asking one of her friends in the office to drive her home, but then realized she didn’t have any friends.

At home she lay back into her pillows and stared out the window which pressed against the side of her bed. Her ear was covered by a small oval bandage like a cap. These clear glass panes were her only safe windows to the world. And yet if they were to break she’d surely slash her throat on their edges.

Altogether the room felt less safe than at any time she could remember. Shadows in the room seemed somehow keener than they should have been, even when cast by soft, rounded objects such as pillows and bed corners. She dozed off and on, and every time she opened her eyes the room felt sharper-edged. The surfaces of the pillows were dusty, grittier with each new awakening. She turned her head: angular edges of ceiling littered their primary-coloured cases. She glanced up: cracks in the ceiling, edges peeling, falling.

A hard, rhythmic scraping was working its way through the bed and into successive layers of her skin. She glanced down at her hands: her fingers frustrated, attempting to rip the sheets with her chewed-away nails.

The sudden screech of the doorbell cut through the thick bedroom air. She staggered into her robe and down the stairs. Her ear felt wet, as if it had started bleeding again, but when she raised her hand to the stiff bandage her fingers came away dry.

She became acutely aware of small details as she passed through her apartment: the triangular pattern on the dishes, the swirling topography left by the vacuum in the rug, the coloured bits in a teddy bear’s glass eye. After a long day away she focused on such things with every return trip to her apartment, but this afternoon they seemed to be demanding increased attention.

On the other side of the door was a man in a cap, a bundle in his arms. The peephole brought her a reassuring slice of him: bland, sunshiny, smiling face, a florist’s symbol on the cap, a bundle of flowers in his hand. She opened the door a minimal amount. ‘Miss Jane Akers?’ She nodded, and took the flowers.

It was after she closed the door firmly behind her that she felt the pricking around the stems, and discovered that sharp wire bound the flower arrangement together, short sections of it twisted together as on a barbed wire fence. Her fingers grew sticky where they’d been punctured; juice from the stems made them sting. There was no card.

She thought she heard a throaty whispering in the apartment which disappeared every time she tried to focus on it. But for several weeks there had been a continuous thread of barely detectable whispering, murmured beneath taped music, within the background static of phone conversations, between the lines of television commercials, so to hear it today, after so much trauma, should not have been surprising.

She didn’t want the flowers — she despised them. But she couldn’t just throw them in the trash. You weren’t supposed to throw flowers away; you were supposed to put them in water. So she did. She wondered if the barbed wire would rust. Feeling she could not stay here another minute she got on her coat and opened the door, intent on walking out of her anxiety.

Maxwell watched the florist’s van pull away from the front of her apartment building. It had been easy enough to find a young man eager to make the extra money, without asking embarrassing questions. Maxwell had stood by the outside door and witnessed the entire transaction, and had been touched by the way she’d pulled the flowers into her arms so desperately, as if starved for affection. It made him love her even more.

She was shy, yet eager for love — he could sense this about her. She was his discovery. He was sure he could make contact with a woman like this — he was convinced she was reachable, unlike so many other women who frightened him. He could make contact — if not with his heart, then with his knife.

Now she was leaving the building, walking briskly down the street, her chin pushed forward as if in defiance. He smiled and checked the Polaroid camera on the seat beside him, the extra film cartridges in the box beside it. He started the car.

Jane had no particular destination in mind, but she would know where she was going when she got there. She stared at the far away trees, the grey outlines of buildings reaching into the dark city mists. On the face of a distant tower giant clock hands sliced through the heavy air, releasing its toll like a damp explosion.

She passed a black metal fence, its vertical bars spinning by her like film frames. The sharp points along the top of the wrought iron leaned in her direction, aiming at her soft flesh.

People lounged along the edges of the sidewalk and on the grassy verge of the park spreading out in front of her. Were they waiting for her? Their noses showed the sharp profile of cartilage. Their jaws were blades, their chins the points. They stared at her with their thin, sharp smiles. She wanted to say something that would make them like her, but she didn’t know the right words.

A lizard crawled out of the grass directly in front of her, as if to divert her attention. She thought of stepping on its back, shuddered, and moved away from it.

At the north gate of the park a man had set up a table and was selling brushes and combs. A succession of combs lined a tray covered with black velvet. He grinned at her as he brushed his fingers across their fine teeth. ‘A lovely comb for the lovely lady?’

He scared her, but it would be rude to hurry past. ‘They’re so pretty,’ she said, looking down at the pitiful selection. ‘How much is that one?’ she asked, pointing to the cleanest-looking one.

‘For you, a buck.’

She gave him a dollar at the end of trembling fingers. He touched the dollar, but then his whole hand moved up to clutch her arm. ‘Such a pretty girl.’ She smiled nervously, on the verge of tears. She wanted to scream, but what if he was really nice? He bent down and kissed her fingers with lips that felt slick and oily. ‘Have a nice day,’ he said, letting go of her arm and handing her the comb. She made herself smile again, then walked away, rubbing the back of her hand on her coat, trying to wipe away the feel of his lips.

She approached a row of storefronts. Soft explosions of brilliant light occurred behind her, but when she turned around there was nothing there. She looked up at the sky: dark clouds were piling one atop the other, their edges rubbed shiny where lightning had gathered.

She looked into the window of a hardware store: an axe, shovel, shears. Then several clothing boutiques: black gloves, black lace. Sexless beings dressed completely in black: hats, gloves, black leather coats.

She imagined she could hear the sounds of zippers snagging flesh from deep inside these shops, the customers weeping softly.

She was vaguely aware of someone taking photos of her, but when she turned around no one was there.

She had to step over an old man in dark glasses, lying with his German shepherd, both of them sprawled across the middle of the sidewalk. The old man’s cane came up, pointing at her like an arrow. The dog turned and bared its teeth, then lunged for the pasty flesh of the man’s wrinkled hand. The man yelled. Blood sprayed in a mist across the sidewalk.

She looked past the wounded man at another man standing in a doorway. His damp lips. His glistening eyes watching her. His hands clutching, as if they held the stolen tableknife. But she knew this wasn’t the same man.

Thunder crashed behind her. For a second the city skyline appeared to be on fire, a giant camera scorching it as picture after picture was taken. Rain began, then suddenly became a downpour.

Even through the heavy rain she could see them all staring at her. Jane found sanctuary beneath a large store awning. On the other side of the glass an elderly woman was cutting shapes out of black paper, demonstrating silhouette portraiture. Jane thought she recognized the profile the old woman was working on as her own.

The woman looked up, gasping as she peered into Jane’s face. The scissors slipped and cut through the face of the silhouette.

Jane ran back out into the rain. Music crashed inside her head. The storm sounded like the same music. She gazed past the grey buildings, searching, intent on returning to her apartment. The rain slackened some. She entered the park. Blades of leaves, blades of grass. Children had gathered by the north gate and were playing with a lizard. There was no sign of the man selling combs. Another bright, soft explosion, but Jane didn’t bother to look up this time. She gazed more closely at the children. Their lizard wriggled madly, nailed through its neck to a board. She suddenly burned hot with shame.

The centrepiece of the park was an arrangement of giant metal sculptures with razor-thin planes, broad fields of metal. At first glance the sculptures appeared curvilinear, but closer examination revealed hidden points, sharp edges residing within the folds of illusory soft steel and brass.

She ran past the sculptures as another bright flash almost blinded her, and suddenly a pigeon was flapping at her side, caught on the huge button of her coat sleeve. Its claws came out and dug a ridge into the flesh covering the back of her hand.

She finally shook the bird loose, crying loudly as it pecked her. No one came to her aid. The world was full of too many sharp edges. It was pointless to get too deeply involved. You risked your own death. She ran the few remaining blocks, the rain beating the blood away as it struggled to escape her cuts.

She slammed the apartment door behind her. Someone had dropped a shiny, brightly-coloured magazine through her mail slot. She picked it up. Inside, nude photos of women had been scored horizontally repeatedly with a razorblade, turning their flesh into Venetian blinds.

Maxwell used up all his film, and he would have loved to have had several more packs. The passion in her face as she ran away from the man with the cane, the trapped bird — he would have given anything to have had such passion directed at him. He loved her more with each stolen glimpse of intense emotion. He hoped the magazine he had left for her demonstrated just how much she made him feel, how badly he wanted to reach her, make contact, and banish his loneliness for ever.

When Jane threw the magazine to the floor a note fell from its pages. She ripped the envelope open frantically, jerking the folded letter out with shaking fingers. His handwriting consisted of thin, jagged uprights, virtually unreadable. Love. sharp. you. reach: these were the only words she could make out.

A crashing in the alley. Garbage can lids banged out a crazed musical. She crept to the back door that led to the fire escape and pulled it open. The alley was silent, empty.

She closed the door and turned back into the hallway which ran the length of her apartment. She stepped on something soft and pliant. She reached down and picked up the worn leather glove. A man’s glove: who was responsible for it? It was stained here and there a dark colour, a shade of red like ancient rust.

Bright neon from the hotel sign outside the window at the end of the hall washed the walls a more brilliant red. At the end of the hall the tall curtains on either side of the window swept the floor, gliding in and out as if the window were a mouth, breathing. She knew there were sharp blades behind the billowing curtains, an erect penis behind the soft gabardine swaddling the crotch of the man who might be hiding-there.

She could not stay here any longer. In her make-up mirror she paid particular attention to the jagged patterns in her eyes, but no cosmetic could smooth these. It was all a part of being in the world, she supposed, but now she did not know if she wanted to be a part of the world or not. She glanced at her clock: impossibly, it said she had been back in her apartment for hours.

She finally gave up on returning a semblance of normalcy to her face, put on her coat again, and left her apartment to go see a movie. At least she could be assured that in the movie theatre, nothing is real.

Maxwell wondered if Jane had read his note yet, if she had glanced through his magazine, if she had discovered his intentionally dropped glove. Simple things, but they had the power to agitate the imagination of those vulnerable enough to suggestion. The innocent knew that the world was a dangerous place, but they were incapable of fully appreciating the implications.

In the two hours since he had left Jane’s apartment he had been quite busy. The close proximity of her things had aroused him so he immediately went out looking for a substitute for her.

The woman hadn’t wanted to return home with him, but it never ceased to amaze him how easily obstacles could be got rid of by means of a simple act of murder.

He enjoyed dancing. It was the only time he could hold a live woman with safety. But death made this one an even better dancing partner than he was used to. He had to tie her body to his waist and legs, but once this had been accomplished she followed him perfectly, now and then rolling her head on to his shoulder in affection. A pity he was already taken.

He hadn’t caught her name before, but he preferred making up his own names anyway. ‘Janice,’ for this one, as she was to be Jane’s substitute for the moment. With the wound in her face Janice was completely possessable: a marred masterpiece, a ‘second’ available for a reduced price, reduced effort. But she remained a great work of art for all that.

As the music rose to a crescendo he recalled the moments of Janice’s creation: how he had heard her heart in his head, beating, struggling to escape the point of his knife (but not Jane’s knife — he would never betray Jane in that fashion), how again and again he had thrust the point into the centre of her beating, until the sound had faded from his head.

She had struggled, but all too briefly. She had kicked a bit; as if in a dream he had felt her high heels puncturing his flesh, marking him in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Now the dance was over. The music ran down. Maxwell grasped the knife handle still protruding from Janice’s chest. He pulled down on the knife. Her flesh split like rotted silk. He gasped with pleasure as the blade sliced through blouse, slip, skin.

He gasped again and again, louder than the music screaming in his head.

As she walked to the movie the passers-by whispered amongst themselves, too loudly for comfort, in fact far more loudly than was possible.

She might have gone to the police, but what could she tell them? She’d received a garbled note, a damaged magazine, and someone had lost a glove, someone had stolen a knife from a local restaurant. Her co-workers would be questioned, and they would talk about how nervous ‘Poor Jane’ had always been, how high-strung, how no one in the office really liked her. She would be embarrassed in front of the police; they would be disappointed in her.

She put on her glasses before entering the movie, intending to wear them for the rest of the night. She’d always felt protected behind the thick lenses. Even when she witnessed something terrible — a workman’s hand slashed open on a dagger of glass, a young boy stabbed just above the groin in a schoolyard fight — she felt shielded by that thickness from the full weight of these incidents. They could not touch her on the other side of the glass. The images would not adhere to the filmy surface of her eyes.

But there was also this accompanying sense of danger: glass that so shielded her might break if the images came too close.

The theatre darkened; the previews came up with amplified colour and volume. What little light remained reflected off all the sharp edges hidden in the theatre. A few minutes into the movie she realized she had seen it before, but she knew she wouldn’t be watching the screen anyway. Instead she gazed at the backs of people’s heads, the placement of their arms on companions’ shoulders, their small open displays of affection, and observed how they reacted to the murders taking place on the screen. Maxwell had always enjoyed the company of mannequins. So intent on looking a certain way for their male customers, they did not speak back. He envied their makers.

He bundled Janice, the mannequin he had created, into a bag and brought her back to Jane’s apartment during the movie — he had passed Jane on the way over, and followed her until he was sure of her destination. If he worked quickly, he knew he could be outside the movie theatre when the film ended.

The lock on the apartment door had jimmied easily. Poor, naive Jane. Her lack of informed caution filled him with a renewed tenderness towards her. On the bed, blood dripped down the mannequin’s arm, paused in the openness of the relaxed palm, then leapt from the forefinger to the carpet below.

He took the Polaroids he had made of Jane and spread them carefully across her dining-room table. He laid one against the other, matching patterns, shadows, stances, expressions. He permitted one image of her to kiss another image of her. His fingers lingered over her glossy surfaces. He meditated on the silkiness of her image. He took a pair of scissors from the drawer and laid one blade across a photograph, bisecting her face. He moved the blades together until her head disappeared. He raised one of the photographs, poised the twin points of the scissors over the image of her breasts, and pierced them simultaneously with one quick jab. He then began cutting through each of the photographs, disassembling each image of her until he had a large pile of shiny pieces. A bottle of bright red nail polish, retrieved from her dressing table, sat poised on the edge of her fragmented poses. He took this and began painting the pile of clippings with red swirls, arrows and bright red hearts.

He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it to dismember the graceful lines of the bedstead, the side table, the dresser. He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet. He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then seeing himself in the mirror of the dressing table, the glittering blade in his upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.

Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh-so-grey emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.

A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.

Soon she was at the edge of the park, an unusually bright streetlight mounted on the entrance above her. The sharp edges of light dropped painfully through the narrow, dark tree branches. In the distance, she could see women running away from the park. Beyond the sharp sculptures, Jane thought she could hear women screaming in windows.

He saw her stumbling through the park towards him, drawn along like a fly in the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin, scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the tableknife from his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly, ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.

Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her tableknife, the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.

His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment, away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.

She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.

She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.

She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke through a flimsy door, into a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked windows, the only such lighting on the block.

Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain coat. A stocking mask.

She ran through an open door, into a bedroom. Several lamps affixed with coloured bulbs burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly across piles of broken plaster towards her. It seemed to have unusually short hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the coloured lights the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and stroked it — it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins labouring just under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.

Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she thought), their tiny throats cut.

And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for her.

She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups — smeared with dark, blood-like stains — littering the grey linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare, scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects of generations of rot.

She passed through another door into a hall slightly more barren than the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved jigsaw pieces crunching under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges gleaming under the remaining yellow light.

A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.

She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down towards the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.

She jerked her head around, searching for the next escape. A staircase led downwards. She hobbled over and stumbled down the steps.

Animal teeth scattered on the floor, rats in the corners, nesting. A Polaroid of a sliced eyeball had been nailed to the wall beneath a precisely mounted spotlight. Below this was the body it had been taken from: she thought she recognized him as the man who had sold her a comb earlier that day.

Another body lay at the end of the short, subterranean hallway: maggots had blunted the sharp planes of the face and made a curlicue border along the dark hairline, but it still bore a startling resemblance to a woman who used to sell tickets at the movie theatre.

In a small, clean room she found another woman’s body, razor blades embedded in cheeks and neck tendons. A scratching at the small window near the ceiling made her turn her head. The glass broke, as if in slow motion, across her face. It showered down before her like frozen, glittering, magical tears.

First arms, then a head, burst through the rainbow-sheened glass. The man from the restaurant grinned at her through the blood washing over his face. He looked down at the cement floor, where he had dropped his knife.

She stooped and picked up the knife off the floor. She stroked its smooth handle. She imagined using it, slipping it through clothing into flesh and beyond. She imagined making love to the man’s body with it, kissing him all over with it, until he cried. It made her feel strange, imagining a man’s tears, imagining a man’s submission.

Maxwell stared at his lover through a dull red filter. Her constant screams of passion had receded as they blended with the loud music in his head, until eventually he could not distinguish the two melodies. He desperately wanted her to join him with the knife, to make of them one creature, to blend their blood streams until they were, finally, one single, gaping wound.

But then he found himself falling the rest of the way through the basement window, glass and blood descending with him as he flew away to regions of dream.

Only when her voice finally gave out into a raw, bleeding whisper did she realize she had been screaming constantly since her discovery of the first body. The scream joined the frantic music which still filled her head.

She struck out against him even as he crashed into her, but in the course of their struggles dropped the knife. She was surprised to find him naked but for his bright red uniform of blood — at some point he had stripped away all pretension. His toenails felt like metal against her body, but his fingernails were so sharp she did not feel them at all when they slid beneath the surface of her skin.

He brought the edge of his hand down on her cheekbone, filling her vision with bright, blinding flashes of light. He grinned at her, and dipped his finger into the blood covering his face, and drew a bright red line across her neck.

She rose on to her knees and rolled, and he rolled with her, his teeth biting her ear as he whispered her name. They crashed into the door, closing it firmly on the hall and the little light it had provided.

A glint in the dark, a flat surface catching any available light. His hand was on it, and raising it high above her head.

The knife passed through her hand, nailing it to the door. She spat into his face and he pulled the knife out and thrust it at her again. The point passed through the surface of her right cheek. She stretched out her arms to ward off the blows: the blade bit at the fleshy areas of her palms, her fingers, releasing exclamations of blood. She jerked forward, catching him off-guard, jamming the webbing of her damaged hand into his throat. He fell back and she was on her feet again, slamming open the door and running back into the hall. She turned and scrambled up a pile of crates to a screened window, her hands leaving red prints on everything she touched.

Then he was behind her, pushing her face roughly into the large squares of wire mesh. She could feel the chequerboard pattern etching into her soft skin. Getting her feet beneath her, she pushed back against a crate launching them both backwards through the air. She could feel something breaking beneath her, something in the man’s body, as they slammed into the floor. But he simply groaned and said, ‘Darling.’

Across the hall there was the open door to a dingy bathroom. She crawled up off the man and scrambled through the door on her hands and knees, locking it behind her. She stood up. The bathroom was brightly lit by six huge incandescent bulbs mounted in the ceiling. Judging from the heat they gave off she imagined they had been burning for some time. Blood like red greasepaint smeared the fixtures. On the other side of the door a high-pitched man’s voice — imitating a woman — began chanting her name.

She screamed back at him, ‘What did I do? I’m a nice person!’ Then she laughed huskily, the laughter bringing bile up her raw throat.

A knife blade slipped through a crack in the door panel, moving back and forth first in a sawing motion, then a chiselling one. She grabbed a piece of broken pipe off the floor and started swinging at the blade, finally snapping it off. She released a strained whoop of victory. ‘What kind of lover would you be?’ she screamed through the door.

‘I loved you!’ the man shouted on the other side.

Jane collapsed into bleating laughter. The loud music faded from her head, exhausting her. ‘No one can make love to me,’ she said, finally, quietly. ‘I am too afraid of all these sharp edges.’

A thundering on the other side of the door, and then the door disintegrated in rage around her. Clouds of dust floated in brilliant crimson light.

Maxwell saw himself in the bathroom’s mirrored, bloodstained wall. Jane’s face floated at his knees, gazing up at his reflection in a way which resembled longing, but which he knew might be any emotion at all. He realized, now, that he could never know what Jane really felt about anything. With a scream he plunged the blade into his own belly. He looked down at what he had done to himself, examining the knife handle curiously, as if it were his umbilical cord suddenly reappeared after all these years.

He sank to his knees behind her, touching her torn shoulder with one hand.

‘I am too afraid,’ she said.

‘We’re all afraid,’ he said.

‘Am I going to die now?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he replied, gazing down at the blood seeping from his belly. She did not move away. He would always be thankful for that, as he closed his eyes, and in his long dream carried her back upstairs and into his bed.