Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

CHANGELING Graham Masterton

The elevator door opened and there she was, looking directly into his eyes as if she had known that he was standing on the other side. Tall, beautiful, dressed utterly in white. He hesitated for a moment and then stepped back one half-shuffle to allow her to pass.

"Pardon mivrouw," he acknowledged. She smiled briefly but didn't reply. She passed him in a pungent swirl of Calvin Klein's Obsession, and he turned around and watched her walk across the marble lobby and out through the revolving door. Out on the hotel steps her long brunette hair was lifted for a moment by the April wind. Then the doorman came forward to salute her and she was gone.

"You're going up?" asked an irritated American who was waiting for him in the elevator, his finger pressed on the Doors Open button.

"I'm sorry? Oh, no. I've changed my mind."

He heard the man say, "For Chrissake, some people…" and then he found himself hurrying across the lobby and out through the door, just in time to see her climbing into the back of a taxi.

The doorman approached him and touched his cap. "Taxi, sir?"

"No, no, thank you." He stood holding his briefcase, the skirts of his raincoat flapping, watching the woman's taxi turn into Sarphatistraat, feeling abandoned and grainy and weird, like a character in a black-and-white art movie. The doorman stood beside him, smiling uneasily.

"Do you happen to know that lady's name?" he asked. His voice sounded blurry in the wind. The doorman shook his head.

"Is she a guest here?"

"I'm sorry, sir. It is not permissible for me to say."

Gil reached into his inside pocket and for one moment considered bribery, but there was something in the doorman's smile that warned him against it. He said, "Oh, okay, sure," and retreated awkwardly back through the revolving door. The two elderly hall porters beamed and nodded at him as he returned to the elevator. Stan and Ollie, one thin and one fat. They were obviously quite accustomed to eccentric behavior.

Gil stood in the oak-paneled elevator as it took him up to the third floor and scrutinized himself in the brass-framed mirror with as much intensity as if he were a business partner whom he suspected of cracking up. He had never done anything in years as spontaneous as chasing after that woman. What the hell had come over him? He was married, with two children, he was right on top of his job. He had a six-bedroom house in Woking, a new Granada Scorpio, and he had been profiled in Business Week as one of the new breed of "totally committed" young entrepreneurs.

And yet he had hurried after that unknown woman as gauche and panicky as an adolescent autograph hunter.

He closed the door of his suite behind him and stood for a long time in the middle of the room with his briefcase still in his hand, thinking. Then he set the briefcase down and slowly took off his coat. "Pity about Gil, he's thrown a wobbly." He could almost hear them talking about him in the office. "He was absolutely fine until that Amsterdam business. Probably suffering from overwork."

He went to the window and opened it. The hotel room overlooked the Amstel River, wide and gray, where it was crossed by the wide elevating bridge called the Hogesluis. Trams rumbled noisily over the sluice, their bells ringing, on their way to the suburbs. The wind blew so coldly through the window that the net curtains were lifted, shuddering, and Gil found that there were tears in his eyes.

He checked his pulse. It was slightly too fast, but nothing to take to the doctor. He didn't feel feverish, either. He had been working for four days, Tuesday to Friday, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but he had been careful not to drink too much and to rest whenever he could. Of course, it was impossible to judge what effect this round of negotiations might have had on his brain. But he felt normal.

But he thought of her face and he thought of her hair and he thought of the way in which she had smiled at him; a smile that had dissolved as quickly as soluble aspirin; and then was gone. And against all the psychological and anthropological logic in the world, he knew that he had fallen in love with her. Well, maybe not in love, maybe not actually in love, not the way he loved Margaret. But she had looked into his eyes and smiled at him and wafted past in beguiling currents of Obsession, and in ten seconds he had experienced more excitement, more curiosity, more plain straightforward desire than he had in the last ten years of marriage.

It's ridiculous, he said to himself. It's just a moment of weakness. I'm tired, I'm suffering from stress. I'm lonely, too. Nobody ever understands how lonely it can be, traveling abroad on business. No wonder so many businessmen stay in their hotel rooms, drinking too much whiskey and watching television programs they can't understand. There is no experience so friendless as walking the streets of a strange city with nobody to talk to.

He closed the window and went to the mini-bar to find himself a beer. He switched on the television and watched the news in Dutch. Tomorrow morning, after he had collected the signed papers from the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf, he would take a taxi straight to Schiphol and fly back to London. Against ferocious competition from Volvo and M. A. N. Diesel, he had won an order for twenty-eight new buses for Amsterdam's municipal transport system, all to be built in Oxford.

On the phone Brian Taylor had called him "a bloody marvel." Margaret had squealed in delight, like she always did.

But the way the wind had lifted up that woman's hair kept running and rerunning in his mind like a tiny scrap of film that had been looped to play over and over. The revolving door had turned, her hair had lifted. Shining and dark, the kind of hair that should be spread out over silk pillows.

It began to grow dark and the lights began to dip and sparkle in the river and the trams began to grind their way out to Oosterpark and the farther suburbs. Gil consulted the room-service menu to see what he could have for supper, but after he had called up to order the smoked eel and the veal schnitzel, with a half-bottle of white wine, he was taken with a sudden surge of panic about eating alone, and he called back and canceled his order.

"You don't want the dinner, sir?" The voice was flat, Dutch-accented, polite but curiously hostile.

"No, thank you. I've… changed my mind."

He went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he straightened his necktie, shrugged on his coat, picked up his key, and went down to the hotel's riverside bar for a drink. The bar was crowded with Japanese and American businessmen. Only two women, and both of them were quite obviously senior executives, one lopsidedly beautiful, the other as hard-faced as a man. He sat up on a barstool and ordered a whiskey and soda.

"Cold wind today, hmh?" the barman asked him.

He drank his whiskey too quickly, and he was about to order another one when the woman came and sat just one stool away from him, still dressed in white, still fragrant with Obsession. She smiled to the barman and asked for a Bacardi, in English.

Gil felt as if he were unable to breathe. He had never experienced anything like it. It was a kind of panic, like claustrophobia, and yet it had an extraordinary quality of erotic compulsion, too. He could understand why people half-strangled themselves to intensify their sexual arousal, because as he sat there breathless he could feel himself stiffening inside his pants. He stared at himself glassy-eyed in the mirror behind the Genever gin bottles, trying to detect any signs of emotional breakdown. But did it show, when you finally cracked? Did your face fall apart like a broken jug? Or was it all kept tightly inside of you? Did it snap in the back of your brain where nobody could see?

He glanced covertly sideways, first at the woman's thigh, then more boldly at her face. She was looking straight ahead, at the mirror. Her nose was classically straight, her eyes were cobalt-blue, slightly slanted, very European. Her lips were glossed with crimson. He noticed a bracelet of yellow and white gold, intertwined, that must have cost the equivalent of three months of his salary, including expenses, and a gold Ebel wristwatch. Her nails were long and crimson and perfect. She moved slightly sideways on her stool and he noticed the narrowness of her waist and the full sway of her breasts. She's naked underneath that dress, he thought to himself, or practically naked. She's just too incredibly sexy to be true.

What could he say to her? Should he say anything? Could he say anything? He thought dutifully for a moment about Margaret, but he knew that he was only being dutiful. This woman existed on a different planet from Margaret, she was one of a different species. She was feminine, sexual, undomesticated, elegant, and probably dangerous, too.

The barman approached him. "Can I fix you another drink, sir?"

"I — unh —»

"Oh, go ahead" — the woman smiled — "I can't bear to drink alone."

Gil flushed, and grinned, and shrugged, and said, "All right, then. Yes." He turned to the woman and asked, "How about you?"

"Thank you," she acknowledged, passing her glass to the barman, although there was a curious intonation in her voice which made it sound as if she were saying thank you for something else altogether.

The barman set up the drinks. They raised their glasses to each other and said, "Prost!"

"Are you staying here?" Gil asked the woman. He wished his words didn't sound so tight and high-pitched.

"In Amsterdam?"

"I mean here, at the Amstel Hotel."

"No, no," she said. "I live by the sea, in Zandvoort. I only came here to meet a friend of mine."

"You speak perfect English," he told her.

"Yes," she replied. Gil waited, expecting her to tell him what she did for a living, but she remained silent.

"I'm in transportation," he volunteered. "Well, buses, actually."

She focused her eyes on him narrowly, but still she said nothing. Gil said, "I go back to London tomorrow. Job's over."

"Why did you come running after me?" she asked. "You know when — this afternoon, when I was leaving the hotel. You came running after me, and you stood outside the hotel and watched me go."

Gil opened and closed his mouth. Then he lifted both hands helplessly and said, "I don't know. I really don't know. It was — I don't know. I just did it."

She kept her eyes focused on him as sharply as a camera. "You desire me," she said.

Gil didn't reply, but uncomfortably sat back on his bar stool.

Without hesitation the woman leaned forward and laid her open hand directly between his legs. She was very close now. Her lips were parted and he could see the tips of her front teeth. He could smell the Bacardi on her breath. Warm, soft, even breath.

"You desire me," she repeated.

She gave him one quick, hard squeeze, and then sat back. Her face was filled with silent triumph. Gil looked at her with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment and disbelief. She had actually reached over and squeezed him between the legs, this beautiful woman in the white dress, this beautiful woman whom every businessman in the bar would have given his Christmas bonus just to sit with.

"I don't even know your name," said Gil, growing bolder.

"Is that necessary?"

"I don't really suppose it is. But I'd like to. My name's Gil Batchelor."

"Anna."

"Is that all, just Anna?"

"It's a palindrome," she smiled. "That means that it's the same backward as it is forward. I try to live up to it."

"Could I buy you some dinner?"

"Is that necessary?"

Gil took three long heartbeats to reply. "Necessary in what sense?" he asked her.

"In the sense that you feel it necessary to court me somehow. To buy me dinner; to impress me with your taste in wine; to make witty small talk. To tell me all those humorous anecdotes which I am sure your colleagues have heard one hundred times at least. Is all that necessary?"

Gil licked his lips. Then he said, "Maybe we should take a bottle of champagne upstairs."

Anna smiled. "I'm not a prostitute, you know. The barman thinks I'm a prostitute, but of course prostitutes are good for business, provided they are suitably dressed and behave according to the standards expected by the hotel. If you take me up to your room now, let me tell you truthfully that you will be only the second man I have ever slept with."

Gil gave Anna a complicated shrug with which he intended to convey the feeling that he was flattered by what she had said, but couldn't take her seriously. A woman with Anna's style and Anna's body and Anna's sexual directness had slept in the whole of her life with only one man?

Anna said, "You don't believe me."

"I don't have to believe you, do I? That's part of the game." Gil thought that response was quite clever and sophisticated.

But Anna reached out toward him and gently picked a single hair from the shoulder of his coat and said very quietly, "It's not a game, my love."

She undressed in silence, close to the window, so that her body was outlined by the cold glow of the streetlights outside, but her face remained in a shadow. Her dress slipped to the floor with a sigh. Underneath, she was naked except for a tiny cache-sex of white embroidered cotton. Her breasts were large, almost too large for a woman with such a narrow back, and her nipples were wide and pale as sugar-frosting.

Gil watched her, unbuttoning his shirt. He could sense her smiling. She came over and buried the fingers of one hand into the curly brown hair on his chest, and tugged at it. She kissed his cheeks, then his lips. Then she reached down and started to unfasten his belt.

Gil thought: This is morally wrong, dammit. I'm cheating the woman who gave me my children; the woman who's waiting for me to come home tomorrow. But how often does a man run into a sexual dream like this? Supposing I tell her to get dressed and leave. I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what it could have been like.

Anna slid her hands into the back of his trousers. Her sharp fingernails traced the line of his buttocks, and he couldn't help shivering. "Lie down on the bed," she whispered. "Let me make love to you."

Gil sat on the edge of the bed and struggled out of his trousers. Then Anna pushed him gently backward. He heard the softest plucking of elastic as she took off her cache-sex. She climbed astride his chest and sat in the semidarkness smiling at him, her hair like a soft and mysterious veil. "Do you like to be kissed?" she asked him. "There are so many ways to be kissed."

She lifted herself up and teasingly lowered her vulva so that it kissed his lips. Her pubic hair was silky and long, and rose up in a plume. Gil kissed her, hesitantly at first, then deeper, holding her open with his fingers.

She gave a deep, soft murmur of pleasure and ran her fingers through his hair.

They made love four times that night. Anna seemed to be insatiable. When the first slate-gray light of morning began to strain into the room, and the trams began to boom over Hogesluis again, Gil lay back in bed watching her sleep, her hair tangled on the pillow. He cupped her breast in his hand, and then ran his fingers gently all the way down the flatness of her stomach to her dark-haired sex. She was more than a dream, she was irresistible. She was everything that anybody could desire. Gil kissed her lightly on the forehead, and when she opened her eyes and looked up at him and smiled, he knew that he was already falling in love with her.

"You have to go back to England today," she said softly.

"I don't know. Maybe."

"You mean you could stay a little longer?"

Gil looked at her, but at the same time he made a conscious effort to picture Margaret, as if he were watching a movie with a split screen. He could imagine Margaret sitting on the sofa sewing and glancing at the clock every few minutes to see if it was time for him to be landing at Gatwick Airport. He could see her opening the front door and smiling and kissing him and telling him what Alan had been doing at playschool.

"Maybe another day," Gil heard himself saying, as if there were somebody else in the room who spoke just like him.

Anna drew his head down and kissed him. Her tongue slipped in between his teeth. Then she lay back and whispered, "What about two days? I could take you to Zandvoort. We could go to my house, and then we could spend all day and all night and all the next day making love."

"I'm not sure that I can manage two days."

"Call your office. Tell them you may be able to sell the good burghers of Amsterdam a few more of your buses. A day and a night and a day. You can go home on Sunday night. The plane won't be so crowded then."

Gil hesitated, and then kissed her. "All right, then. What the hell. I'll call the airline after breakfast."

"And your wife? You have to call your wife."

"I'll call her."

Anna stretched out like a beautiful sleek animal. "You are a very special gentleman, Mr. Gil Batchelor," she told him.

"Well, you're a very special lady."

Margaret had sniffled: that had made him feel so guilty that he had nearly agreed to come back to England straight away. She missed him, everything was ready for him at home, Alan kept saying, "Where's daddy?" And why did he have to stay in Holland for another two days? Surely the Dutch people could telephone him, or send him a telex? And why him? George Kendall should have been selling those extra buses, not him.

In the end, it was her whining that gave him the strength to say, "I have to, that's all. I don't like it any more than you do, darling, believe me. I miss you, too, and Alan. But it's only two more days. And then we'll all go to Brighton for the day, what about that? We'll have lunch at Wheeler's."

He put down the phone. Anna was watching him from across the room. She was sitting on a large white leather sofa, wearing only thin pajama trousers of crepe silk. Between her bare breasts she held a heavy crystal glass of Bacardi. The coldness of the glass had made her nipples tighten. She was smiling at him in a way that he found oddly disturbing. She looked almost triumphant, as if by persuading him to lie to Margaret, she had somehow captured a little part of his soul.

Behind her, through the picture window that was framed with cheese-plants and ivy, he could see the concrete promenade, the wide gray beach, the gray overhanging clouds, and the restless horizon of the North Sea.

He came and sat down beside her. He touched her lips with his fingertip, and she kissed it. His hand followed the warm heavy curve of her breast, and then he gently rolled her nipple between finger and thumb. She watched him, still smiling.

"Do you think you could ever fall in love with somebody like me?" she asked him, in a whisper.

"I don't think there is anybody like you. Only you."

"So could you fall in love with me?"

He dared to say it. "I think I already have."

She set her drink down on the glass and stainless-steel table next to her and knelt up on the sofa. She tugged down her pajama trousers so that she was naked. She pushed Gil on to his back and climbed on top of him. "You like kissing me, don't you?" she murmured. He didn't answer, but lifted his head slightly, and licked all the way down that liquid crevice from top to bottom, and swallowed.

The house was always silent, except when they spoke, or when they played music. Anna liked Mozart symphonies, but she always played them in another room. The walls were white and bare, the carpets were gray. The inside of the house seemed to be a continuation of the bleak coastal scenery that Gil could see through the windows. Apart from the houseplants there were no ornaments. The few pictures on the walls were lean, spare drawings of naked men and women, faceless most of them. Gil had the feeling that the house didn't actually belong to Anna, that it had been occupied by dozens of different people, none of whom had left their mark on it. It was a house of no individuality whatsoever. An anxious house, at the very end of a cul-de-sac that fronted the beach. The gray brick sidewalks were always swirled with gritty gray sand. The wind blew like a constant headache.

They made love over and over again. They went for walks on the beach, the collars of their coats raised up against the stinging sand. They ate silent meals of cold meat and bread and cold white wine. They listened to Mozart in other rooms. On the third morning Gil woke up and saw that Anna was awake already, and watching him. He reached out and stroked her hair.

"This is the day I have to go home," he told her, his voice still thick from sleeping.

She took hold of his hand and squeezed it. "Can't you manage one more day? One more day and one more night?"

"I have to go home. I promised Margaret. And I have to be back behind my desk on Monday morning."

She lowered her head so that he couldn't see her face. "You know that — if you go — we will never be able to see each other any more."

Gil said nothing. It hurt too much to think that he might never sleep with Anna again in the whole of his life. He eased himself out from under the quilt and walked through to the bathroom. He switched on the light over the basin and inspected himself. He looked tired. Well, anybody would be, after two days and three nights of orgiastic sex with a woman like Anna. But there was something else about his face which made him frown, a different look about it. He stared at himself for a long time, but he couldn't decide what it was. He filled the basin with hot water and squirted a handful of shaving-foam into his hand.

It was only when he lifted his hand toward his face that he realized he didn't need a shave.

He hesitated, then he rinsed off the foam and emptied the basin. He must have shaved last night, before he went to bed, and forgotten about it. After all, they had drunk quite a lot of wine. He went to the toilet, and sat down, and urinated in quick fits and starts. It was only when he got up and wiped himself by passing a piece of toilet paper between his legs that he realized what he had done. I never sit down to pee. I'm not a woman.

Anna was standing in the bathroom doorway watching him. He laughed. "I must be getting old, sitting down to pee."

She came up to him and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. It was a long, complicated, yearning kiss. When he opened his eyes again she was staring at him very close up. "Don't go," she whispered. "Not yet, I couldn't bear it. Give me one more day. Give me one more night."

"Anna… I can't. I have a family; a job."

With the same directness she had exhibited in the bar of the Amstel Hotel, she took hold of his penis and clasped it in her hand. His reaction was immediate. "Don't go," she repeated, massaging him slowly up and down. "I've been waiting so long for somebody like you… I can't bear to lose you just yet. One more day, one more night. You can catch the evening flight on Monday and be back in England before nine."

He kissed her. He knew that he was going to give in.

That day they walked right down to the edge of the ocean. A dog with wet bedraggled fur circled around and around, yapping at them. The wind from the North Sea was relentless. When they returned to the house, Gil felt inexplicably exhausted. Anna undressed him and helped him up to the bedroom. "I think I'm feeling the strain," he said, smiling at her. She leaned over and kissed him. He lay with his eyes open, listening to Mozart playing in another room and looking at the way the gray afternoon light crossed the ceiling and illuminated the pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman entwined together. The drawing was like a puzzle. It was impossible to tell where the man ended and where the woman began.

He fell asleep. It started to rain, salty rain from the sea. He slept all afternoon and all evening, and the wind rose and the rain lashed furiously against the windows.

He was still asleep at two o'clock in the morning, when the bedroom door opened and Anna came in and softly slipped into bed beside him. "My darling," Anna murmured, and touched the smoothness of his cheek.

He dreamed that Anna was shaking him awake, and lifting his head so that he could sip a glass of water. He dreamed that she was caressing him and murmuring to him. @

He dreamed that he was trying to run across the beach, across the wide gray sands, but the sands turned to glue and clung around his ankles. He heard music, voices.

He opened his eyes. It was twilight. The house was silent. He turned to look at his watch on the bedside table. It was 7:17 in the evening. His head felt congested, as if he had a hangover, and when he licked his lips they felt swollen and dry. He lay back for a long time staring at the ceiling, his arms by his sides. He must have been ill, or maybe he had drunk too much. He had never felt like this in his life before.

It was only when he raised his hand to rub his eyes that he understood that something extraordinary had happened to him. His arm was obstructed by a huge soft growth on his chest. He felt a cold thrill of complete terror and instantly yanked down the quilt. When he saw his naked body, he let out a high-pitched shout of fright.

He had breasts. Two heavy, well-rounded breasts, with fully developed nipples. He grasped them in his hands and realized they weren't tumorous growths, they weren't cancers, they were actual female breasts, and very big breasts, too. Just like Anna's.

Trembling, he ran his right hand down his sides, and felt a narrow waist, a fiat stomach, and then silky pubic hair. He knew what he was going to feel between his legs, but he held himself back for minute after minute, his eyes closed, not daring to believe that it had gone, that he had been emasculated. At last, however, he slipped his fingers down between his hairless thighs, and felt the moist lips of his vulva. He hesitated, swallowed, and then slipped one finger into his vagina.

There was no question about it. His body was completely female, inside and out. In appearance, at least, he was a woman.

"None of this is real," he told himself, but even his voice was feminine. He climbed slowly out of bed and his breasts swayed, just the way that Anna's had swayed. He walked across the room and confronted the full-length mirror beside the dressing table. There was a woman looking back at him, a beautiful naked woman, and the woman was him.

"This isn't real," he repeated, cupping his breasts in his hands and staring intently at the face in the mirror. The eyes were his, the expression was his. He could see himself inside that face, his own personality, Gil Batchelor the bus salesman from Woking. But who else was going to be able to see what he saw? What was Brian Taylor going to see, if he tried to turn up for work? And, God Almighty, what was Margaret going to say, if he came back home looking like this?

Without a sound, he collapsed to the floor, and lay with his face against the gray carpet, in total shock. He lay there until it grew dark, feeling chilled, but unwilling or unable to move. He wasn't sure which and he wasn't going to find out.

At last, when the room was completely dark, the door opened, and a dim light fell across the floor. Gil heard a voice saying, "You're awake. I'm sorry. I should have come in earlier."

Gil lifted his head. Unconsciously, he drew his long tangled hair out of his eyes, and looked up. A man was silhouetted in the doorway, a man wearing a business suit and polished shoes.

"Who are you?" he asked hoarsely. "What the hell has happened to me?"

The man said, "You've changed, that's all."

"For Christ's sake, look at me. What the hell is going on here? Did you do this with hormones, or what? I'm a man! I'm a man, for Christ's sake!" Gil began to weep, and the tears slid down his cheeks and tasted salty on his lips.

The man came forward and knelt down beside him and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It wasn't hormones. If I knew how it happened, believe me, I'd tell you. But all I know is, it happens. One man to the next. The man who was Anna before me — the man who took the body that used to be mine — he told me everything about it, just as I'm telling you — and just as you'll tell the next man that you pick."

At that moment the bedroom door swung a little wider, and the man's face was illuminated by the light from the hallway. With a surge of paralyzing fright, Gil saw that the man was him. His own face, his own hair, his own smile. His own wristwatch, his own suit. And outside in the hallway, his own suitcase, already packed.

"I don't understand," he whispered. He wiped the tears away from his face with his fingers.

"I don't think any of us ever will," the man told him. "There seems to be some kind of pattern to it; some kind of reason why it happens; but there's no way of finding out what it is."

"But you knew this was going to happen all along," said Gil. "Right from the very beginning. You knew."

The man nodded. Gil should have been violent with rage. He should have seized the man by the throat and beaten his head against the wall. But the man was him, and for some inexplicable reason he was terrified of touching him.

The man said, quietly, "I'm sorry for you. Please believe me. But I'm just as sorry for myself. I used to be a man like you. My name was David Chilton. I was thirty-two years old, and I used to lease executive aircraft. I had a family, a wife and two daughters, and a house in Darien, Connecticut."

He paused, and then he said, "Four months ago I came to Amsterdam and met Anna. One thing led to another, and she took me back here. She used to make me go down on her, night after night. Then one morning I woke up and I was Anna, and Anna was gone."

Gil said, "I can't believe any of this. This is madness. I'm having a nightmare."

The man shook his head. "It's true; and it's been happening to one man after another, for years probably."

"How do you know that?"

"Because Anna took my passport and my luggage, and it seemed to me that there was only one place that she could go — he could go. Only one place where he could survive in my body and with my identity."

Gil stared at him. "You mean — your own home? He took your body and went to live in your own home?"

The man nodded. His face was grim. Gil had never seen himself look so grim before.

"I found Anna's passport and Anna's bank books — don't worry, I've left them all for you. I flew to New York and then rented a car and drove up to Connecticut. I parked outside my own house and watched myself mowing my own lawn, playing with my own daughters, kissing my own wife."

He lowered his head, and then he said, "I could have killed him, I guess. Me, I mean — or at least the person who looked like me. But what would that have achieved? I would have made a widow out of my own wife, and orphans out of my own children. I loved them too much for that. I love them still."

"You left them alone?" Gil whispered.

"What else could I do? I flew back to Holland and here I am."

Gil said, "Couldn't you have stayed like Anna? Why couldn't you stay the way you were? Why did you have to take my body?"

"Because I'm a man," David Chilton told him. "Because I was brought up a man, and because I think like a man, and because it doesn't matter how beautiful a woman you are, how rich a woman you are… well, you're going to find out what it's like, believe me. Not even the poorest most downtrodden guy in the whole wide world has to endure what women have to endure. Supposing every time that a woman came up to a man, she stared at his crotch instead of his face, even when they were supposed to be having a serious conversation? You don't think that happens? You did it to me, when we met at the hotel. Eighty percent of the time your eyes were ogling my tits, and I know what you were thinking. Well, now it's going to happen to you. And, believe me, after a couple of months, you're going to go pick up some guy not because you want to live like a man again but because you want your revenge on all those jerkoffs who treat you like a sex object instead of a human being."

Gil knelt on the floor and said nothing. David Chilton checked Gil's wristwatch — the one that Margaret had given him on their last anniversary — and said, "I'd better go. I've booked a flight at eleven."

"You're not — " Gil began.

David Chilton made a face. "What else can I do? Your wife's expecting me home. A straight ordinary-looking man like me. Not a voluptuous brunette like you."

"But Margaret's going to know you straight away. You may look like me, but you're not me, are you? She'll know you're not me the minute you walk into the house. So will my dog."

"Bondy?"

Gil felt a prickle of deep apprehension. He had never told Anna that his dog was called Bondy.

David Chilton said, "I've taken more than your shape, Gil. I've taken your memory, too. In the middle left-hand drawer of your desk at home, you have a flashlight, most of your credit card statements, a stapler, and the souvenir issue of Playboy when they stopped putting staples through the centerfold. Your father used to play the bassoon on Sunday afternoons, even though your mother tried to persuade him not to."

"Oh, Jesus," said Gil, shivering.

"You want more?" asked David Chilton.

"You can't do this," Gil told him. "It's theft!"

"Theft? How can a man steal something that everybody in the whole world will agree is his?"

"Then it's murder, for God's sake! You've effectively killed me!"

"Murder?" David Chilton shook his head. "Come on, now, Anna, I really have to go."

"I'll kill you," Gil warned him.

"I don't think so," said David Chilton. "Maybe you'll think about it, the way that I thought about killing the guy who took my body. But there's a diary in the living room, a diary kept by most of the men who have changed into Anna. Read it before you think of doing anything drastic."

He reached out and touched Gil's hair, almost regretfully. "You'll survive. You have clothes, you have a car, you have money in the bank. You even have an investment portfolio. You're not a poor woman. Fantasy women never are. If you want to stay as Anna, you can live quite comfortably for the rest of your life. Or… if you get tired of it, you know what to dp."

Gil sat on the floor incapable of doing anything at all to prevent David Chilton from leaving. He was too traumatized; too drained of feeling. David Chilton went to the end of the hallway and picked up his suitcase. He turned and smiled at Gil one last time, and then blew him a kiss.

"So long, honey. Be good."

Gil was still sitting staring at the carpet when the front door closed, and the body he had been born with walked out of his life.

He slept for the rest of the night. He had no dreams that he could remember. When he woke up, he lay in bed for almost an hour, feeling his body with his hands. It was frightening but peculiarly erotic, to have the body of a woman, and yet to retain the mind of a man. Gil massaged his breasts, rolling his nipples between finger and thumb the way he had done with "Anna." Then he reached down between his legs and gently stroked himself, exploring his sex with tension and curiosity.

He wondered what it would be like to have a man actually inside him; a man on top of him, thrusting into him.

He stopped himself from thinking that thought. For God's sake, you're not a queer.

He showered and washed his hair. He found the length of his hair difficult to manage, especially when it was wet, and it took four attempts before he was able to wind a towel around it in a satisfactory turban. Yet Margaret always did it without even looking in the mirror. He decided that at the first opportunity he got, he would have it cut short.

He went to the closet and inspected Anna's wardrobe. He had liked her in her navy-blue skirt and white loose-knit sweater. He found the sweater folded neatly in one of the drawers. He struggled awkwardly into it, but realized when he looked at himself in the mirror that he was going to need a bra. He didn't want to attract that much attention, not to begin with, anyway. He located a drawerful of bras, lacy and mysterious, and tried one on. His breasts kept dropping out of the cups before he could fasten it up at the back, but in the end he knelt down beside the bed and propped his breasts on the quilt. He stepped into one of Anna's lacy little G-strings. He found it irritating, the way the elastic went right up between the cheeks of his bottom, but he supposed he would get used to it.

Get used to it. The words stopped him like a cold bullet in the brain. He stared at himself in the mirror, that beautiful face, those eyes that were still his. He began to weep with rage. You've started to accept it already. You've started to cope. You 're fussing around in your bra and your panties and you're worrying which skirt to wear and you've already forgotten that you 're not Anna, you 're Gil. You 're a husband. You're a father. You're a man, dammit!

He began to hyperventilate, his anger rising up unstoppably like the scarlet line of alcohol rising up a thermometer. He picked up the dressing stool and heaved it at the mirror. The glass shattered explosively, all over the carpet. A thousand tiny Annas stared up at him in uncontrollable fury and frustration.

He stormed blindly through the house, yanking open drawers, strewing papers everywhere, clearing ornaments off tabletops with a sweep of his arm. He wrenched open the doors of the cocktail cabinet, and hurled the bottles of liquor one by one across the room, so that they smashed against the wall. Whiskey, gin, Campari, broken glass.

Eventually, exhausted, he sat down on the floor and sobbed. Then he was too tired even to cry.

In front of him, lying on the rug, were Anna's identity card, her social security papers, her passport, her credit cards. Anna Huysmans. The name that was now his.

On the far side of the room, halfway under the leather sofa, Gil saw a large diary bound in brown Morocco leather. He crept across the floor on his hands and knees and picked it up. This must be the diary that David Chilton had been talking about. He opened it up to the last page.

He read, through eyes blurry with tears, Gil has been marvelous… he has an enthusiastic, uncluttered personality… It won't be difficult to adapt to being him… I just hope that I like his wife Margaret… She sounds a little immature, from what Gil says… and he complains that she needs a lot of persuading when it comes to sex… Still, that's probably Gil's fault… you couldn't call him the world's greatest lover.

Gil flicked back through the diary's pages until he came to the very first entry. To his astonishment it was dated July 16, 1942. It was written in German, by a Reichswehr officer who appeared to have met Anna while driving out to Edam on military business. Her bicycle tire was punctured… She was so pretty that I told my driver to stop and to help her…

There was no way of telling, however, whether this German Samaritan had been the first of Anna's victims, or simply the first to keep a diary. The entries went on page after page, year after year. There must have been more than seven hundred of them; and each one told a different story of temptation and tragedy. Some of the men had even essayed explanations of what Anna was, and why she took men's bodies.

She has been sent to punish us by God Himself for thinking lustful thoughts about women and betraying the Holy Sacrament of marriage…

She does not actually exist. There is no "Anna," because she is always one of us. The only «Anna» that exists is in the mind of the man who is seducing her, and that perhaps is the greatest condemnation of them all. We fall in love with our own illusions, rather than a real woman.

To me, Anna is a collector of weak souls. She gathers us up and hangs us on her charm bracelet, little dangling victims of our own vicissitudes.

Anna is a ghost…

Anna is a vampire…

If I killed myself would it break the chain? Would Anna die if I died? Supposing I tried to seduce the man who was Anna before me… could I reverse the changing process?

Gil sat on the floor and read the diary from cover to cover. It was an extraordinary chorus of voices — real men who had been seduced into taking on the body of a beautiful woman, one after the other — and in their turn had desperately tried to escape. Business executives, policemen, soldiers, scientists, philosophers — even priests. Some had stayed as Anna for fewer than two days; others had managed to endure it for months. But to every single one of them, the body even of the plainest man had been preferable to Anna's body, regardless of how desirable she was.

By two o'clock Gil was feeling hungry. The icebox was almost empty, so he drove into Amsterdam for lunch. The day was bright but chilly, and so he wore Anna's black belted raincoat, and a black beret to cover his head. He tried her high heels, but he twisted his ankle in the hallway, and sat against the wall with tears in his eyes saying, "Shit, shit," over and over, as if he ought to have been able to walk in them quite naturally. He limped back to the bedroom and changed into black flat shoes.

He managed to find a parking space for Anna's BMW on the edge of the Singel Canal, close to the Muntplein, where the old mint building stood, with its clock and its onion dome. There was an Indonesian restaurant on the first floor of the building on the corner: one of the executives of the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf had pointed it out to him. He went upstairs and a smiling Indonesian waiter showed him to a table for one, overlooking the square. He ordered rijstafel for one and a beer. The waiter stared at him, and so he changed his order to a vodka and tonic.

The large restaurant was empty, except for a party of American businessmen over on the far side. As he ate his meal, Gil gradually became aware that one of the businessmen was watching him. Not only watching him, but every time he glanced up, winking at him.

Oh, shit, he thought. Just let me eat my lunch in peace.

He ignored the winks and the unrelenting stares; but after the business lunch broke up, the man came across the restaurant, buttoning up his coat, and smiling. He was big and red-faced and sweaty, with wavy blond hair and three heavy gold rings on each hand.

"You'll pardon my boldness," he said. "My name's Fred Oscay. I'm in aluminum tubing, Pennsylvania Tubes. I just couldn't take my eyes off you all during lunch."

Gil looked up at him challengingly. "So?" he replied.

"Well," said Fred Oscay, grinning, "maybe you could take that as a compliment. You're some looker, I've got to tell you. I was wondering if you had any plans for dinner tonight. You know — maybe a show, maybe a meal."

Gil was trembling. Why the hell was he trembling? He was both angry and frightened. Angry at being stared at and winked at and chatted up by this crimson-faced idiot; frightened because social convention prevented him from being as rude as he really wanted to be — that, and his weaker physique.

It was a new insight — and to Gil it was hair-raising — that men used the threat of their greater physical strength against women not just in times of argument and stress — but all the time.

"Mr. Oscay," he said, and he was still trembling. "I'd really prefer it if you went back to your party and left me alone."

"Aw, come along, now," said Fred Oscay, still grinning. "You can't mean that."

Gil's mouth felt dry. "Will you please just leave me alone?"

Fred Oscay leaned over Gil's table. "There's a fine concert at the Kleine Zaal, if it's culture you're after."

Gil hesitated for a moment, and then picked up a small metal dish of Indonesian curried chicken and turned it upside-down over Fred Oscay's left sleeve. Fred Oscay stared down at it for a very long time without saying anything, then stared at Gil with a hostility in his eyes that Gil had never seen from anybody before. Fred Oscay looked quite capable of killing him, then and there.

"You tramp," he said. "You stupid bitch."

"Go away," Gil told him. "All I'm asking you to do is go away."

Now Fred Oscay's voice became booming and theatrical, intended for all his business colleagues to hear. "You were coming on, lady. You were coming on. All through lunch you were giving me the glad-eye. So don't you start getting all tight-assed now. What is it, you want money? Is that it? You're a professional? Well, I'm sorry. I'm really truly sorry. But old Fred Oscay never paid for a woman in his life, and he ain't about to start just for some sorry old hooker like you."

He picked up a napkin and wiped the curry off his sleeve with a flourish, throwing the soiled napkin directly into Gil's plate. The other businessmen laughed and stared. One of them said, "Come on, Fred, we can't trust you for a minute."

Gil sat where he was and couldn't think what to do; how to retaliate; how to get his revenge. He felt so frustrated that in spite of himself he burst into tears. The Indonesian waiter came over and offered him a glass of water. "Aroo okay?" he kept asking. "Aroo okay?"

"I'm all right," Gil insisted. "Please — I'm all right."

He was standing on the corner of the street as patient as a shadow as David Chilton emerged from his front door right on time and began walking his cocker spaniel along the grass verge. It was 10:35 at night. David and Margaret would have been watching News at Ten and then South East News just as Gil and Margaret had always done. Then David would have taken down Bondy's leash and whistled, "Come on, boy! Twice round the park!" while Margaret went into the kitchen to tidy up and make them some cocoa.

He was wearing the same black belted raincoat and the same black beret that he had worn in Amsterdam; only now he had mastered Anna's high heels. His hair was curly and well-brushed and he wore makeup now, carefully copied from an article in a Dutch magazine.

Under his raincoat he carried a stainless-steel butcher knife with a twelve-inch blade. He was quite calm. He was breathing evenly and his pulse was no faster than it had been when he first met Anna.

Bondy insisted on sniffing at every bush and every garden gatepost, so it took a long time for David to come within earshot. He had his hands in his pockets and he was whistling under his breath, a tune that Gil had never known. At last Gil stepped out and said, "David?"

David Chilton stood stock-still. "Anna?" he asked, hoarsely.

Gil took another step forward, into the flat orange illumination of the streetlight. "Yes, David, it's Anna."

David Chilton took his hands out of his pockets. "I guess you had to come and take a look, didn't you? Well, I was the same."

Gil glanced toward the house. "Is he happy? Alan, I mean."

"Alan's fine. He's a fine boy. He looks just like you. I mean me."

"And Margaret?"

"Oh, Margaret's fine, too. Just fine."

"She doesn't notice any difference?" said Gil bitterly. "In bed, perhaps? I know I wasn't the world's greatest lover."

"Margaret's fine, really."

Gil was silent for a while. Then he said, "The job? How do you like the job?"

"Well, not too bad," David Chilton said with a grin. "But I have to admit that I'm looking around for something a little more demanding."

"But, apart from that, you've settled in well?"

"You could say that, yes. It's not Darien, but it's not Zandvoort, either."

Bondy had already disappeared into the darkness. David Chilton whistled a couple of times and called, "Bondy! Bondy!" He turned to Gil and said, "Look — you know, I understand why you came. I really do. I sympathize. But I have to get after Bondy or Moo's going to give me hell."

For the very first time Gil felt a sharp pang of genuine jealousy for Margaret. "You call her Moo?"

"Didn't you?" David Chilton asked him.

Gil remained where he was while David Chilton went jogging off after his dog. His eyes were wide with indecision. But David had only managed to run twenty or thirty yards before Gil suddenly drew out the butcher knife and went after him.

"David!" he called out, in his high, feminine voice. "David! Wait!"

David Chilton stopped and turned. Gil had been walking quickly so that he had almost reached him. Gil's arm went up. David Chilton obviously didn't understand what was happening at first, not until Gil stabbed him a second time, close to his neck.

David Chilton dropped, rolled away, then bobbed up on to his feet again. He looked as if he had been trained to fight. Gil came after him, his knife upraised, silent and angry beyond belief. If I can't have my body, then nobody's going to. And perhaps if the man who took my body — if his spirit dies — perhaps I'll get my body back. There's no other hope, no other way. Not unless Anna goes on for generation after generation, taking one man after another.

Gil screamed at David and stabbed at his face. But David seized Gil's wrist and twisted it around, skin tearing, so that Gil dropped the knife on to the pavement. Gil's high heel snapped. He lost his balance and they both fell. Their hands scrabbled for the knife. David touched it, missed it, then managed to take hold of it.

The long triangular blade rose and fell five times. There was a sound of muscle chopping. The two rolled away from each other, and lay side by side, flat on their backs, panting.

Gil could feel the blood soaking his cotton blouse. The inside of his stomach felt cold and very liquid, as if his stomach had poured its contents into his whole abdominal cavity. He knew that he couldn't move. He had felt the knife slice sharply against his spine.

David knelt up on one elbow. His hands and his face were smeared in blood. "Anna…" he said unsteadily. "Anna…"

Gil looked up at him. Already, he was finding it difficult to focus. "You've killed me," Gil said. "You've killed me. Don't you understand what you've done?"

David looked desperate, "You know, don't you? You know."

Gil attempted to smile. "I don't know, not for sure. But I can feel it. I can feel you — you and all the rest of them — right inside my head. I can hear your voices. I can feel your pain. I took your souls. I took your spirits. That's what you gave me, in exchange for your lust."

He coughed blood, and then he said, "My God… I wish I'd understood this before. Because you know what's going to happen now, don't you? You know what's going to happen now?"

David stared at him in dread. "Anna, listen, you're not going to die. Anna, listen, you can't. Just hold on, I'll call for an ambulance. But hold on!"

But Gil could see nothing but darkness. Gil could hear nothing but the gray sea. Gil was gone; and Anna was gone, too.

David Chilton made it as far as the garden gate. He grasped the post, gripped at the privet hedge. He cried out, "Moo! Help me! For Christ's sake, help me!" He grasped at his throat as if he were choking. Then he collapsed into the freshly dug flowerbed, and lay there shuddering, the way an insect shudders when it is mortally hurt. The way any creature shudders, when it has no soul.

All over the world that night, men quaked and died. Over seven hundred of them: in hotels, in nouses, in restaurants, in the back of taxis. A one-time German officer collapsed during dinner, his face blue, his head lying in his salad plate, as if it were about to be served up with an apple in his mouth. An airline pilot flying over Nebraska clung to his collar and managed to gargle out the name Anna! before he pitched forward on to his controls.

A sixty-year-old member of Parliament, making his way down the aisle in the House of Commons for the resumption of a late-night sitting, abruptly tumbled forward and lay between the Government and the Opposition benches, shuddering helplessly at the gradual onset of death.

On I-5 just south of San Clemente, California, a fifty-five-year-old executive for a swimming pool maintenance company died at the wheel of his Lincoln sedan. The car swerved from one side of the highway to the other before colliding into the side of a 7-Eleven truck, overturning, and fiercely catching fire.

Helplessly, four or five Mexicans who had been clearing the verges stood beside the highway and watched the man burn inside his car, not realizing that he was already dead.

The civic authorities buried Anna Huysmans at Zandvoort, not far from the sea. Her will had specified a polished black-marble headstone, without decoration. It reflected the slowly moving clouds as if it were a mirror. There were no relatives, no friends, no flowers. Only a single woman, dressed in black, watching from the cemetery boundary as if she had nothing to do with the funeral at all. She was very beautiful, this woman, even in black, with a veil over her face. A man who had come to lay flowers on the grave of his grandfather saw her standing alone, and watched her for a while.

She turned. He smiled.

She smiled back.