The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

WEEK WOMAN by Kim Newman

“You must be Mad?”

The girl looked up from her green-jacketed Virago modern classic, and smiled a plain, unembarrassed smile at him.

“I’m Peter Mysliwiec.”

He sat opposite her. They were at a table in Mildred’s in Greek Street. Everyone else in the small room was a woman. That didn’t bother him. Karen was always telling him how tolerant he was. A hostile waitress—almost spherical and with a U.S. Marines haircut—took his order, and brought him a small expresso. He bought Mad a coffee, too.

They had never met before, but next week they would be married.

In the last month, he’d been forced to readjust most of his life. This was hardly stranger than the discovery that not only was he not British, as he’d always been told by his deceased parents, but that he was two years older than he’d thought, born not in London in 1947 but Warsaw in 1945.

Mad was late twenties/early thirties, and pretty obviously butch. Peter mentally rebuked himself for stereotyping people, but he was a commercial artist and often traded in stereotypes. Mad wore dungarees over an off-pink sweatshirt, shoulder-straps fastened with badges for causes he didn’t recognize. Her hair was cropped not quite so close as the waitress’, and dyed an early-Bowie orange. She had a faint mustache, bright eyes, and the first hints of a chubbiness she’d have to exercise as rigorously as Karen to avoid in the next few years.

“Well,” she said, “isn’t this strange?”

Peter was worn ragged. Maybe his parents had been wrong to lie their son’s way into British nationality. After all the letters and interviews, it was hard to imagine Poland as any more of a police state than the United Kingdom.

“I’ve never been married before,” Peter admitted feebly.

“Me neither. Obviously.”

Mad was the ex-girlfriend of someone Karen knew at the agency. Peter knew almost nothing about her. Karen, inextricably still married to the Dreaded Stanley, was the kind of agent who could get anything given a week or so. A roll of discontinued wallpaper, a particular back issue of National Geographic, an aviation expert with photographs of a Sopwith Camel, a marriageable lesbian.

“What do you do?” Mad asked politely.

“I’m an artist. Book covers, mostly. Ads, sometimes. A movie poster, once in a blue moon. And you?”

“Different things. I’m sort of changeable.”

“Um.”

They didn’t really have much more to say, but he felt it important to meet the girl. He’d seen the Gerard Depardieu film about the couple in the arranged marriage who were persecuted by U.S. immigration agents, but Karen had ascertained that someone with his history of residence and skin coloring would be unlikely to suffer much. “Remember,” she had said, “you’re a white, middle-class, house-owning, male heterosexual. In the lottery of life, you’ve won already.”

Peter got his checkbook out.

“I suppose we should, um, do the business? We agreed on five hundred pounds?”

Mad’s face didn’t change.

“-leine or -line?”

“Madeleine, e before i and no c in sight.”

He asked her surname, and she told him. Peter wrote out a check to Madeleine Waters, and gave it to her.

“No one’s ever paid for me before,” she said. Peter wondered if she had something in her eye.

“Here are the details,” he said, giving her a sheet of paper on which Karen’s male secretary had typed the address of the Registry Office and the time of the wedding.

She pressed the check between the pages of her book and stuffed it into her shoulderbag. Then, she stood up to leave. She wore Doc Martens.

“See you in church,” she said, leaving him to finish his expresso.

A week later, Peter was outside the Registry Office in Camden. Karen was to be the witness, and Tony Weldon, his accountant, was the best man. He’d worn a suit, but there was no dress code for a sham wedding. Karen wore a suit, too, and was reminding him about the deadline for the Bloomsbury cover. She’d bought him a boutonniere, and fixed it to his lapel.

“Is this her?” Tony asked. Peter looked. A girl was walking down from the tube station, combat boots clunking, hands in the pockets of fatigue pants, green braces over a nondescript T-shirt. When she was close enough for them to make out her face, he knew it wasn’t Madeleine.

“I hope she won’t be late,” Karen clucked. “Jeannie said she wasn’t always reliable.”

“You’re talking about the woman Peter’s going to marry,” Tony said in mock outrage. Karen humphed elegantly at him.

She squeezed Peter’s arm, and got close to him. She’d been a pillar of the proverbial during the harassment.

“Nice day for a white wedding,” Tony hummed.

“Most important day of your life,” Karen said, unable to resist it.

“What was yours like?” Tony asked.

“Very romantic,” Karen deadpanned, “with the moonlight gleaming on the Dreaded Stanley’s brass knuckles.”

Peter grinned. He would get used to the jokes. Karen had already started calling him “adulterer” in bed.

“This must be her,” Tony said as a taxi stopped directly outside.

“Thank Christ for that,” Karen said. Then her jaw dropped.

The door opened and a flurry of white gauze blossomed out of the cab, with a girl inside it.

“Would someone pay the driver?” a voice said from under layers of veil. Astonished, Tony fished out the necessaries.

Madeleine wore a bridal gown, tight in the bodice and sleeves, vast and puffy below the waist, exploding into lacy flounces at the wrist. In her white gloves, she held a posy of white flowers. Under her veils, Peter could make out the rough lines of the face he remembered, but she was either wearing a wig or had had her hair extensively restyled because she seemed to have a Grace Kellyish blonde permanent.

“Jesus fuck,” breathed Karen.

Behind them, as Tony helped Madeleine negotiate her way to the curb, the Registry office doors opened, and an official poked out his head.

“Mysliwiec Waters?”

Madeleine took his arm, and guided him into the building. Karen, astonished, was left beyond the banging doors.

When the registrar told him he could kiss the bride, Peter lifted the veil and thought he had the wrong woman.

Then, he saw it was the same Madeleine. The planes of her face were subtly altered, but that could be because she was wearing makeup and the different hair gave her head a whole new shape. The eyes were the same. Just.

He kissed her mildly, and she responded with startling enthusiasm, warm tongue invading his mouth. Peter wondered how Karen would take this.

This, he supposed, was why her friends called Madeleine “Mad.”

They had arranged to go out for a meal at a pizza place afterward. Tony was supposed to be Madeleine’s date, but the new Mrs. Mysliwiec wasn’t to be separated from her husband.

Karen hadn’t recovered from the shock.

Madeleine was chattering inconsequentially, drinking the champagne Tony had arranged as a joke, and never letting go of his arm. In her white thunderstorm, the bride was attracting quite a lot of attention. Peter imagined this was how the young Miss Havisham must have looked.

The restaurant, bribed beforehand by Tony, was playing nothing but romance through their speakers. Frank’s “Wee Small Hours,” Bing’s “True Love,” Julie’s “Laura,” Dean’s “That’s Amore.”

Funnily enough, Peter did feel as if the moon had just hit his eye like a big pizza pie.

“It’s a shame we don’t have time for a honeymoon,” Madeleine said, “but we can catch up later. Paris, perhaps. Or Rome.”

Peter toyed with his garlic bread.

Peggy’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” the Crickets’ “Love is Strange,” Nat’s “Just You, Just Me,” Ella’s “The Tender Trap.”

Peter imagined the jaws of the tender trap meeting around his crushed shin.

“I’m so glad it was white,” Madeleine said, gripping harder. “It’s more special.”

Karen looked as if she were about to scream at her Hawaiian Extra-Spicy, but instead just said, “Miss Waters, please take your hands off my boyfriend.”

Madeleine smiled enchantingly, and tutted at Karen. “You’re forgetting yourself, Karen dearest. It’s Mrs. Mysliwiec, now.”

Then, Karen screamed.

A week later, the nightmares were fading.

At first, he couldn’t close his eyes without being drawn back to the knock-down, drag-out cat-fight in the pizza place. Karen had screamed and screamed, Madeleine had cried and cried. There’d been no way of explaining it to the proprietor, or the police.

Eventually, they had all escaped. Somewhere, one of the women had attacked him, leaving now-faded rake-marks on his cheek.

Alone in his double bed in the Highbury flat, he quickly got conscious. His heart hammering, he realized he’d been dreaming again, the bridal-gowned Madeleine assaulting him like a harpy, Freddy Krueger fingers sprouting from her lace gloves.

As he shook himself out of the fug of sleep, he heard noises. Someone was in his kitchen, humming. The radio was on to a station he’d normally avoid. Bobby Darin was talking about things.

“Karen?”

He thought she’d not been there last night. She still kept her place in Muswell Hill. Mainly to annoy the Dreaded Stanley, but also because—hey—she was an independent woman. This was the 90s.

Tying a robe over his pajama bottoms, he staggered out of the bedroom. Since his marriage, things had been getting fuzzy. He thought he’d been drinking with Tony last night.

In his tiny kitchen, a woman was cooking breakfast. Bacon sizzled in the pan next to a pair of sunny-side up eggs.

“Darling,” she chirruped, “you shouldn’t have gotten up. I was going to bring you a tray in bed. You work so hard, you deserve the rest. You need to be looked after.”

The smell brought him fully awake.

She wore a blue housedress, with a checkered pinafore. Her hair was worn in a Doris Day helmet, and most of her face was smile.

“Mad? Madeleine?”

She angled her head to one side, eyes shining. Her cheeks had rosy patches like a ragdoll’s, and her pinafore was so starched it crackled.

“Petey’s Maddie,” she said. “OJ, hon?”

She poured a measure of freshly-squeezed orange juice into a tumbler, and handed it to him.

“We’ll soon cure you of those unhealthy bachelor habits. Do you realize how deprived your fridge is? And you have no oregano. Men never have any oregano.”

Peter’s head began to hurt again.

“Look at this kitchen surface,” she said, drawing a finger through a layer of dusty grime. “Never mind, it’ll be clean in a jiffy. Clean right through to the squeak, a shine your mother could be proud of.”

Giving in, Peter sipped his juice. It shocked his tongue, and settled his stomach. A cooked breakfast—something he’d not had since school—seemed weirdly appropriate.

Karen came over for dinner, and Maddie cooked for the three of them. She was the perfect hostess, preparing everything from the hors d’oeuvres through the meat course to the cheeseboard and sorbets, finally delivering coffee the like of which Peter had never suspected could be produced from his old caffetiere.

Karen was determined to be calm this time. She hadn’t been able to get in touch with Jeannie, and was taking a methodical, careful, tactful approach to the insanity spilling into their lives. She had started to use phrases like “multiple personality” and “schizoid compulsive.”

“Peter’s so grateful for all you’ve done for him,” Maddie told Karen. “Especially since the trouble with the nationality people.”

Peter had told Karen everything. Maddie didn’t, at least, expect him to share a bed with her. In fact, one of the disturbing things was that she only seemed to need the occasional cat-nap in front of an afternoon soap opera. Otherwise, she was constantly busy, cooking, tidying, arranging, fussing, vacuuming, rearranging, humming, shopping, fluttering…

He thought the woman—his wife, he corrected himself—had a problem with her short-term memory. Like a goldfish, she had an identity—several, in fact—but no moment-to-moment consciousness. She lived in an eternal present, unchanging and perfect.

Karen said it was like being smothered by Nanette Newman.

The evening wore on, and Peter’s knots tightened. How would Maddie react when Karen and he went to bed? The kitchen she’d made her home was fully equipped with weapons. Sometime last year, Karen had bought him a set of Sabatier steak knives, with wicked, serrated edges.

In the event, Maddie ignored them, humming and clattering as she washed up, refusing all offers of assistance, and telling them to enjoy themselves while she worked. “My poor little brain isn’t up to business,” she told Karen, “so you talk figures and deadlines and schedules with Petey while my elves and I clean up.” She had permanent smile lines—like scars—etched in under her rosy patches.

Stunned, Karen allowed him to take her to bed and pull most of her clothes off. Maddie had the radio on again. Connie Francis’ “Lipstick On Your Collar,” Julie London’s “Cry Me a River,” the Ink Spots’ “Don’t Get Around Much Any More,” Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do?,” Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry.” The noise of plates and cups and crockery being cleaned accompanied the songs, and seemed to fill the bedroom.

Neither of them were up to it and they lay together, hugging. Maddie hummed along to “Stand By Your Man.” Karen shook her head, gave up, and got out of bed. She dressed in the dark, and left the flat.

Peter lay in bed, listening to washing-up.

A week later, while Peter was at his easel finishing up a rough for a Pan thriller, a blast of noise came from his CD.

He turned around, shaking. The broken doll he had been sketching fell off its stand.

WASP’s “Fuck Like a Beast.”

Madeleine was naked in the mid-afternoon, but for insectile dark glasses and a pair of high-heeled black patent leather pumps. Her face was more oval, lines better defined. Long, tangled hair—darker than last week—hung around her shoulders and breasts. Her body was off a 70s Mickey Spillane cover, and not what he had expected under the pinnies and dresses she’d been wearing.

The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man.”

She came for him, fingers like hooks ripping his shirt and trousers apart. They didn’t make it to the bedroom for hours, and then they didn’t make it to sleep for nearly a day.

A week later, Peter woke up, still drained from the night before, to find Madeleine had locked herself in the bathroom and was sobbing.

He had to break in, wrenching his shoulder, and found her curled up between the sink and toilet bowl, clutching her stomach, a scattering of open and emptied pill bottles around her, a sweated-in T-shirt ridden up around her belly, stringy hair wrapped around her neck like a noose.

He slapped her semiconscious and walked her around the flat until the drowsiness wore off. Then he made her drink salt water until she spewed into a bucket. Undissolved pills clustered like frogspawn in her mainly clear vomitus.

She wouldn’t say anything coherent, but rambled dark and self-hating drivel at him. From somewhere, she found an Einsturzende Neubauten cassette and played “Der Tod ist ein Dandy” over and over, banging her head against the floor in time to the pounding rhythms until she was covered in blood from superficial cuts.

He phoned Karen but got an answering machine message saying she was out of the country for a week.

Madeleine started in on Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Where did she get these records from?

There was a noise in the kitchen and he got there in time to wrestle the steak knife away from her. She inflicted a shallow cut through his shirt.

A week later, exhausted and bruised, he found she’d gotten up early and left the flat. He used the time to tidy a little, washing some of the long-neglected crockery and scraping at the stains on the carpet. The flat was musty and he opened all the windows to air it out.

He was beginning to recognize the cycle. It lasted almost precisely a week. Peter wondered if there was such a thing as a serial multiple personality.

Perhaps she might not come home?

At six-fifteen precisely, she let herself in, and put her briefcase down on the sofa. She was wearing one of Karen’s suits, severe but sexy, cut tight on the hips and high on the thighs, with prominent shoulders and a don’t-fuck-with-me-jack tie.

“I had to screw them until they bled, but Futura is coming through with your market value price for the next covers. They specified more maggots for the Hutson job.”

She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, and flipped a silver lighter open, sucking flame through the tobacco tube then exhaling a cloud.

“This place is a tip, Peter. I expect to come home to better than this.”

She pulled her tie off with an expert gesture, and began unbuttoning her blouse.

“I’ve set us up with a table at Alistair Little’s for eight with the commissioning guy from Harper-Collins. Try to make a good impression. There might be a dekalogy in it.”

She slipped her skirt over her legs, and stepped out of it. She wore no underwear.

“And I fired your accountant. Weldon’s been robbing you blind for years. There’s no room for that kind of wimpery in the business. Like your ‘friend’ Karen. She’s sweet and lovely, but sweet and lovely just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

She gave him fifteen minutes to bring her to orgasm, then criticized his broken doll covers until the minicab came.

A week later, she wanted a baby. She talked of nothing else, and even bought baby clothes in pink and blue, made a start on redecorating the spare room as a nursery, and worked out on the calendar which were the best days to try. By the time the days came around, she had changed her mind…

A week later, she stole his credit cards and ran up nearly a six figure bill on compulsive purchases. She bought more furniture than could fit into the flat, a car neither of them could drive, a complete wardrobe of flashy clothes not in his size, enough food to give Godzilla a three-day bellyache. And she discovered gambling.

A week later, she went into what he thought of as her Annie Hall phase, becoming at once terminally absent-minded and cuttingly witty. Of them all, this was the one he liked the most. When she was funny, they were better in bed. She would pull faces, and remind him of his mother’s old theme tune, “if the wind changes, it’ll stick like that.” That didn’t seem such an awful fate just now. The wind changed, but…

A week later, she brought home a Siamese kitten and lavished her entire attention on it twenty-four hours a day, reading books on cat-care and attending to Mitten’s every need. She treated Peter as if he were an intruder in her idyll with the pet. When Mitten put its claws through a half-finished Jeffrey Archer cover, Madeleine spent an hour cooing over it and spitting at him that her precious better not get blood-poisoning from the lead in the paint or else…

A week later…

A week later…

… and a week and a week and a week…

A week later, he got out of the flat while she was gorging herself on chocolates in front of Anne Diamond on the television. She was bulimic in this cycle, and would stuff herself until she was sick. That left him to look after Mitten, who was fast becoming as startled and neurotic as he was. Madeleine had been anorexic a few turns back, between her poetic consumptive week and her Australian soap opera phase.

They met in Capucetto’s. He could see Karen was shocked by the change in him. He’d clearly made up the two extra years, and was galloping into his biological future.

“I’ve seen Jeanne,” she said.

“And…”

“Your lesbian waited all afternoon and went home.”

“What?”

“Her name was Madeleine Keele.”

“Then who is she? Our Madeleine?”

“Your Madeleine, you mean. Ask her.”

“She doesn’t know. Karen, it’s even weirder than you think. She doesn’t just change her personality. Her hair changes, the shape of her face sometimes, her body…”

“You’ve been sleeping with her?”

He had to tell her. “Some of her.”

“Fuck you, Peter,” Karen said. “You can either live with it, or get a divorce and be deported to Warsaw. I don’t care any more.”

She left him to pay for the coffee and cheesecake.

A week later, he got back from a meeting at the new agency to find the flat filled with a burned stink. Mitten was in the microwave. Smoke filled the kitchen.

“Madeleine?”

There was one Sabatier missing from the magnetic rack. The world turned around again and Peter was filled with caution. He took a matching knife down and gripped it.

It had been inevitable. Sooner or later, Madeleine would turn dangerous.

He explored, cautiously.

The front room was anally perfect, cushions just so on the drum-tight sofa-bed, his framed Graham Greene Penguin covers neatly aligned on the walls, all the magazines tidied away and stacked up. The television was on, and one of a stack of videotapes was playing.

On the screen was a blotchy image of a razorblade sinking into a girl’s eyeball, ketchupy gore welling up around the halved olive as a synthesized drone rose in a shriek.

Peter held out his knife as if it could protect him from the picture.

There was a stack of cassette boxes on top of the television, neatly squared, photocopied covers yelling tides. The Cincinnati Flamethrower Holocaust, They Eat Your Eyes, Black and Decker Orgy, Rapist Cult.

He shut off the video, but the slasher music still came from his sound system.

He stepped into the bedroom and found it perfectly tidy. Except for the headless doll on the bedspread, its torso sawed open and stuffed with red rags. It was his much-used prop, even more abused than usual.

She came quietly out of his closet and got his arm up behind him, forcing him down on the floor. She wore a black leotard and an IRA ski mask, and her body was hard and skilled as she battered him against the carpet. He lost his knife with the first slam and yelped as she hauled him up.

She threw him onto the bed, then let him go and took the time to peel off her mask, shaking out her wing of night-black hair. He knew she was going to kill him. She put the Sabatier to his throat, and smiled. First, she was going to torture him. For a long time.

Pain had been constant for all his life. He wouldn’t have believed pain could be prolonged so long without the subject dying.

Madeleine worked efficiently, tirelessly, dispassionately. She hurt him. With her hands and household implements, she hurt him. She had been methodical about it, skinning the insulation from wires and using low-wattage electricity, wetting him down with water from the bathroom sink between each jolt.

As she worked, she played two singles over and over and over, Little Jimmy Osmond’s “Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool” and Aled Jones’ “The Snowman.”

Even pain became boring after a while.

Finally, she was ready to end it. She picked up one of his steak knives, and pulled back for a neat thrust.

Before he died, he wanted to hear Brahms, the “Ode to Joy,” Chuck Berry, Eric Satie. Not Little Fucking Aled Osmond’s Long-Haired Snowman From Jones.

Madeleine’s elbow kinked and she paused. Throughout it all, her face had been a paper blank. Now, he saw an expression…

Could it have been a full week?

Night had come and gone several times. There had been periods of sleep and rest between the busy-work. She had been taking care to keep him alive.

He had never seen her change before.

Her hair might be bleaching. Her skin might be tanning. She might be wriggling inside uncomfortable clothes.

She dropped the Sabatier and stood away from the bed. Knowing this chance might never come again, he picked up the knife with nailless fingers and worked it into her unresisting throat.

A week later, Madeleine was still on his bed, in a circle of dried blood. He’d taken out the knife, cleaned it, and clanged it to its rack in the kitchen. There were flies in the bedroom, and her skin was already yellow in patches and starting to give, suggesting the skeleton beneath useless meat.

He had stayed in the flat with her, recovering slowly. He’d used up all the iodine and bandages in the bathroom cabinet. He daren’t go out. And he didn’t even like to leave the bedroom.

Madeleine must not be left alone.

She was the broken doll now. He’d made many sketches of her, and the bedroom was carpeted with them. He would draw her slack, empty face as it was, and then try to superimpose one of her personalities on it.

Madeleine, Maddie, Mad.

He had to stay with her for more than a week. He had to. It must be a week now. Something was moving under her face.

Peter waited for the next change.