A Nest of Nightmares Read online

  ‘It’s better this way, for all of us,’ Susie said almost prayerfully.

  They were both stroking the dog, on either side of some invisible property line, when it died.

  The woman burst into tears and snatched up the body, keening over it while Ellis pulled at her arms, trying to get the body for himself.

  Disgusted, the vet called in his assistant and managed to get the dog’s body away from the weeping pair. ‘City health regulations,’ he said, as the assistant carried it out to dispose of it.

  Ellis looked at the vet through a glaze of pain and tears and suspected that he lied, but it didn’t matter. There was no point in fighting over the body now. Gonzo was gone.

  ‘Some people,’ said the vet bitterly as they turned to leave, ‘shouldn’t be allowed to have pets.’

  They sat in the car; Susie weeping inconsolably, Ellis too drained to start the car. His grief had dissolved the hatred he felt for his wife. He no longer blamed her, any more than he blamed himself. The dog’s death now seemed some unavoidable, senseless tragedy, some act of God which had destroyed the life they had built together.

  Susie was sobbing the dog’s name like a prayer. After a moment he joined her, weeping without shame. He forgot where they were, he forgot how Gonzo’s death had come about, he forgot how much he hated his wife, forgot everything except this immense, dreadful loss which united them. He put his arms around her and they rocked back and forth in their shared grief, their tears running together.

  Later, in the house they no longer officially lived in, the house largely stripped of furniture and soon to go on the market, they shared a bottle of plum brandy that had been left behind, unwanted or unnoticed, in a cabinet.

  All they could think of was Gonzo. The memory of the dog still made Susie break out in fresh tears from time to time, but Ellis was through with his crying. He thought about Gonzo deliberately, testing himself, probing at the sore memory as if it were a wound just starting to heal.

  ‘I loved that dog more than anything,’ he mused aloud. ‘Much more than I care for most people. I’d have given up anything for that dog.’

  ‘You!’ She was shocked out of her tears. ‘You think you were the only one? How about me? Don’t you know how I loved him? He was just like a child to me – the child you didn’t want.’

  He remembered then just why they had taken Gonzo, the dog that had become so much a part of their lives that it was hard to remember a time without him.

  Ellis had been laid off, bringing in $68 a week in unemployment while he looked for another job. She was making $125 a week as a receptionist, and complaining bitterly about having to work. They were quarrelling a lot – not always about money – and the subject of divorce had come up more than once.

  Then Susie had got pregnant. Worse – she wanted to quit her job and have the baby. It would make them a family. It would keep the marriage together. On $68 a week.

  Ellis had, after more hair-raising scenes and threats than he cared to remember, finally convinced her to have an abortion.

  Three days after the abortion, while she was still lying in bed weeping and using up her sick leave, Ellis had gone to the pound and picked out the cutest puppy he could find.

  It had been intended as a gift to cheer his wife up. He hadn’t expected how much he would come to love the flippantly named Gonzo, how important the dog would become to both of them.

  ‘I should never have let you make me have that abortion,’ Susie said. ‘If I’d had a baby I’d still have it – and we might not even be getting divorced. Somebody else would have taken Gonzo from the pound and he’d still be al-l-l-l-l-live.’ She burst into tears yet again.

  He moved across the couch to comfort her. Just then, he would have done anything to get Gonzo back. But that was one thing he could not do. He felt very close to Susie, knowing that she was feeling the same sorrow and loss that he felt. Suddenly he wanted her, more than he had in a very long time.

  He began unbuttoning her blouse, consoling her with his flesh. She forgot her tears and began responding to his urgency.

  Sprawled across the couch she suddenly whispered, ‘I don’t have anything – I stopped taking the pill when I moved out.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said recklessly, suddenly seeing the answer to their irreplaceable loss. ‘I love you; I want to be with you. We were crazy to think about a divorce.’

  ‘We’ll start all over again,’ she murmured happily.

  ‘We’ll have a baby,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a baby as we should have before. We’ll start it right now.’

  One photograph angered him the most. It showed Susie with little Jessica on her lap, as smug as she could be about having the child all to herself. Doling out the minutes to him only when it pleased her, while she could be with Jessica whenever she wanted.

  ‘Of course, if you think you’ve got a case,’ his lawyer had said. ‘But I’d better warn you – the court nearly always lets the child stay with the mother, unless we can provide some compelling reason why not.’

  He would find a compelling reason. Ellis flipped through the photographs again. All harmless. The first detective hadn’t been able to get anything on her. She was keeping clean – at least until the divorce was final. But that careful morality wouldn’t last long – she’d soon be sleeping around. He would keep a detective on her – a really good one, this time – until he had the proof he needed to get his child away from her.

  He stared at the photograph. He wouldn’t let that bitch get the better of him.

  The house, community property, would be sold. They each had a car and their personal belongings, and the rest of the property had been divided up after many arguments and consultations with both lawyers. Neither was entirely happy about the result, but it was fair, they agreed, a fair division of property.

  But how could you divide a child? You couldn’t. Somebody had her, and somebody didn’t. Unless nobody had her.

  He looked across the room at his gun rack and crumpled the photograph in his fist.

  FLYING TO BYZANTIUM

  The steady noise and pressurized atmosphere inside the plane made everything seem slightly unreal. Was she really going back to Texas?

  She thought of flat, coastal plains, mosquitoes whining in the humid night air, dirty white plumes of smoke rising from industrial stacks, her mother’s house, and the dreary brightness of the Woolco, and a familiar misery possessed her.

  No. Her hands clenched in her lap. She was going back to Texas, but not to the stagnant little town on the Gulf Coast where she had grown up; she was flying to Byzantium.

  The name of the town made her smile: how the dreams of the pioneers became the lies of property developers! She didn’t know Byzantium. She had never heard of it before the invitation to spend the weekend as a guest of honour at a science fiction convention held there. According to the map, Byzantium was more than five hundred miles west of the southeastern swamp where she had grown up. West Texas to her meant deserts and dust, cowboys and rattlesnakes, rugged mountains etched against postcard sunsets: it was the empty space between Houston and Los Angeles, traversed by air.

  She lived in Hollywood now, and Texas was no longer home. She was Sheila Stoller, author of Moonlight Under the Mountain, and her fans were paying for the privilege of meeting her.

  Sheila pulled her traveling case from beneath the seat and took out her notebook, thinking of Damon. He had been impressed by her invitation to Byzantium, more than she was herself. But then he was an actor. Public appearances were something he understood, a sign of success. It had never occurred to him that Sheila might not accept – perhaps that was why she had. Away from him, though, she felt her confidence flag. She knew nothing about science fiction. Wouldn’t the others at the convention see her as a fraud? She had written a speech in her notebook, the story of how she had written Moonlight Under the Mountain,
but the speech was a fraud, too, a carefully constructed fiction. She stared down at the page wondering if she would have the nerve to read it.

  The notebook had been a gift from Damon. ‘For your next novel,’ he had said, giving it to her with his famous, flashing smile. And she had taken it, unable to tell him that there would not be a next novel.

  Ordinary people had ordinary jobs in Hollywood, as they did everywhere else, as sales assistants, as waiters, as secretaries and caretakers, but in Hollywood the jobs were always temporary; the people in them were really actors, directors, dancers, singers, producers, writers waiting for the main chance. Damon had been an actor working as a waiter until his pilot took off: now he had a minor but regular role in a weekly comedy series. He was the wise­cracking roommate’s best friend. Viewing figures and audience response were both good, and he was on his way up.

  He thought that Sheila was on her way up, too. It was true she made her living doing temporary secretarial work, but she’d had one novel published, and surely it was only a matter of time until she was well-paid and famous: all she had to do was to keep on writing.

  But Sheila didn’t write anymore. She no longer felt the need.

  Writing, for Sheila, had always been a means of escape. It took her out of herself, away from loneliness, dull school classes, and the tedium of working behind a counter at the local Woolco. When she was writing she could forget that she wasn’t pretty, didn’t have a boyfriend or an interesting job, had no talents and no future. She’d had no friends because she never tried to cultivate any. Girls her own age thought she was a weird, stuck-up bookworm – she thought they were boring, and didn’t bother to hide her opinions. Her quirky intelligence made her reject most of the people and things around her, but did not make her special enough to be forgiven. Despite her reading, she was an indifferent student, lazy in the classroom and inept at sports. She tried to write for the school magazine and newspaper, but after several cool rejections she learned to keep her writing to herself.

  She wrote another world into existence. It was a fairy-tale world full of monsters and treasures, simpler, starker, and more beautiful than the reality she felt suffocating her, and she escaped into it whenever she could. Her universe contained a vast and dangerous wasteland spotted with small, isolated villages. One of the settlements had a mountain rising from its centre, towering over everything, dominating the landscape and the lives of those who lived there. For beneath the mountain was a series of maze-like tunnels where dwelt the evil, powerful grenofen. They kept the townspeople in terror until a young girl, Kayli, won her way through a series of adventures, battles, and enchantments to triumph over the grenofen and steal their sacred treasure for herself.

  Sheila shared her world with no one, and never thought of publication, except as a vague fantasy. It was her mother who brought it about, indirectly. Sheila knew she was a disappointment to her mother – she almost took pleasure in it. Something in her seemed to compel contradiction, and as long as her mother nagged her about her appearance Sheila would eat too much, forget to wash her hair, and dress in unattractive, poorly fitting clothes. Her mother thought scribbling in notebooks was a waste of time, and it was her disparaging comment on a ‘writers’ weekend’ being held at a local college which made Sheila consider attending. And it was there that Sheila met the editor who ultimately published Moonlight Under the Mountain.

  She didn’t make a lot of money from the book – the reality wasn’t like her fantasy – but it gave her enough to leave Texas, to fly to Los Angeles and buy a used car and find her own apartment before she had to look for work. On the West Coast, in the sunshine, far from her mother’s nagging, Sheila blossomed. She took an interest in the way she looked, bought fashionable clothes, joined a health spa, had her hair permed, and exchanged her heavy, smudged glasses for a pair of tinted contact lenses.

  Damon met her while she was temping in his agent’s office. He admired her clear, emerald eyes, her smooth, tanned skin, and slim figure, but those things were the norm in California – it was her book which caught his attention. He admired writers, and liked the idea of dating one so much that Sheila didn’t know how to tell him the truth. She had written a book, but that didn’t make her a writer in the way that he was an actor. Writing was one of the things – like baby fat, acne, and bad manners – she had left behind her in Texas.

  They were like ghosts of her past, standing there waiting for her in the Campbell County Airport. Sheila knew them at once, without any doubt, and knew she had been wrong to come.

  ‘Sheila Stoller?’

  They knew her, too, and that was another bad sign; like calling to like. She wished she could deny her name, but she nodded stiffly, walking toward them.

  There were two of them: a fat one swathed in purple, and a thin one in a lime-green polyester trouser suit and teased, bleached-blonde hair. She knew them – they were the unwanted. They were the sort of people she had been lumped in with at school, always the last to be chosen for teams or dances. Her mother had pushed them on her, inviting them to parties, but Sheila had preferred loneliness to their company. She always shunned them rather than admit that she was like them.

  ‘How do you do,’ said the thin one. ‘I’m Victoria Walcek, and this is Grace Baxter.’

  Victoria would be smart, Sheila knew. Too smart for her own good. A bookworm with a sharp tongue and too many opinions, no one would like her, but she would exert a special influence over one or two followers; dull, timid outcasts like her fat friend.

  ‘Your plane was late,’ said Victoria.

  The tone was reproving and before she could catch herself Sheila said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Victoria smiled. ‘That’s all right. We didn’t mind waiting. Do you have much luggage coming?’

  ‘Only this.’ She indicated the small case.

  Victoria gave a dainty shriek. ‘That’s all? How do you manage? I couldn’t possibly . . . my hot-curlers and makeup would just about fill that little bag. I always need a big garment bag whenever I go anywhere. I suppose I worry too much about the way I look . . . I like to have everything just right. It’s much more sensible to travel light and just not think about that.’

  ‘Sheila looks very nice,’ said Grace with so much emphasis that it sounded like a lie. Sheila tried not to mind, but she wished Grace hadn’t felt obliged to defend her. She knew how she looked: more fashionable and far more comfortable in her pink and grey tracksuit than Victoria in her ugly green polyester and high-necked ruffled blouse.

  ‘Of course she does,’ said Victoria. ‘I didn’t mean to imply otherwise! Only with that little bag . . . well, there can’t be more than one change of clothes in there.’

  ‘I’m only staying the weekend.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Grace, sounding surprised. ‘We thought you’d want to stay . . . being from Texas, and all.’

  ‘I only came for the convention. I can’t afford – I need to get back.’

  ‘To your writing?’ asked Grace.

  The lie came easily. ‘Yes, I’ve started a new book.’

  ‘Oh, please tell us about it!’

  ‘Wait until we get to the car,’ said Victoria – her sharpness might have been directed at either of them or both. ‘We’ve still got a long way to go.’ She turned with a twitch of her narrow shoulders which said she didn’t care if she was followed or not, and Sheila felt trapped into hurrying after.

  ‘How far are we from Byzantium?’

  ‘Fifty miles,’ said Grace, huffing and puffing beside her.

  ‘Fifty! I had no idea – ’

  Victoria glanced over her shoulder. ‘I thought you came from Texas?’

  ‘Not this part.’

  Victoria exhaled sharply. It sounded like disbelief, but Sheila couldn’t imagine why.

  Outside, the darkness and heat disoriented Sheila, who remembered the cool, blue Los Angeles evening she ha
d so recently left. She knew nothing about this place, she thought as Victoria steered the big car away from the lights and out into the unrelieved blackness of the vast country night. There was nothing on which she could focus but the stars winking in the distance, or the bright, white line down the centre of the highway.

  ‘Now tell us about your new book,’ said Grace from behind her. ‘Is it a sequel to Moonlight Under the Mountain? I loved that book so much!’

  ‘No, how could it be? Kayli escapes at the end – she’s found the secret of the grenofen and can travel. She’s free at last. How could there be a sequel?’

  ‘Well, she might have to go back. Maybe there could be a friend she wants to rescue. Or she could be kidnapped . . . most of the grenofen are still under the mountain.’

  ‘It would just be boring to send her back,’ said Sheila. ‘The new book will be something completely different.’

  ‘Grace writes too,’ said Victoria. ‘Maybe you would be kind enough, while you are visiting here, to read something of hers and critique it.’

  Sheila stared into the blackness, wondering what sort of landscape the night concealed. Suddenly the headlights swept across a small herd of jackrabbits by the side of the road. One of them was sitting up on his haunches and gazing, with dazzled eyes, directly at her. A thrill of strangeness made her smile. Here was something to tell Damon!

  ‘Of course I will, if Grace wants me to. How about you Victoria – do you write, too?’

  ‘Oh, no. My talents lie in another direction,’ said Victoria primly. ‘In my own small way I am something of an artist. My interests are in painting, sketching, and in fashion and costume design. You’ll see my latest efforts at the convention.’

  ‘Wait’ll you see!’ cried Grace, bouncing hard on the back seat.

  ‘Sit still!’

  Grace subsided as if bludgeoned. Sheila felt sorry for her, and yet contemptuous, for she invited such treatment by allowing it. As mile after dark mile passed and Sheila felt civilization – even if only represented by the Campbell County airport – growing more distant, she realised that she was even more dependent upon Victoria’s goodwill than Grace was. She could be trapped here in this strange desert, with no car, no money, no friends, no knowledge of her surroundings if Victoria decided Sheila wasn’t deserving of her attention. It was a crazy notion, sheer paranoia, and yet she knew nothing about these people. Why had they invited her? Why had she come?