sheet-shrouded form for that of a ghost. The very idea! She must remember to tell Jim as soon as she saw him. She couldn’t wait to hear him laugh again.
The taxi cruised to a halt and Sally stared in amazement at the Macmillan family home. Her time away had somehow seemed to invest the humble semi-detached property with a new vitality. It looked warm, inviting—safe. Nothing evil could ever happen here. Looking at it now was like seeing it for the first time. She remembered their wedding night so many years ago, how Jim had gamely carried her over the threshold. Huffing and puffing, but above all laughing. Sally smiled at the memory, and felt a sudden warmth welling deep inside her, a faint echo of the lust of that long-ago night. Well, they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, Sally thought philosophically. So why shouldn’t other parts of the body be similarly affected?
Sally hurried to the front door, eager to see her husband again, desperate to feel the warmth of his embrace after so many loveless nights. She slipped her key into the lock and crept quietly into the house. He wanted to surprise her? Well, she’d surprise him! She’d creep through the house, find him and throw herself upon him before he even knew what was happening. No time for words now. Only love.
And yet, despite her best intentions, Sally Macmillan’s efforts were in vain. Her husband was nowhere to be found. Jim wasn’t in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom or spare. In a flash of inspiration, Sally raced to the garage, but only the bulk of his car waited silently in the gloom. He must have gone out on some errand, Sally thought, and contented herself with this for several hours. But when darkness fell, she checked the house again and found something that stopped her cold.
His shoes. His size-nine leather shoes, slightly worn with age but polished with all the dedicated care that only an ex-army man could bring. They sat there, next to his slippers, in the front hall. How had she not noticed them earlier?
Sally had shoes. She had an entire cupboard filled with assorted colors and styles, for every possible season and event. But Jim, sensible and spendthrift Jim, had only the two pairs: his indoor slippers, and his outdoor shoes. She was looking at them both. So how could he have left the house without them?
Perhaps he’d simply bought a new pair, she thought. Yes, that was it. Obvious, really. Sally tried to ignore the other voice in her head. The quieter voice, but the one whose whisper was so much more insistent. The voice that said Jim had slipped down the stairs, broken his neck and been carted off to the hospital in his pyjamas. She really didn’t need negative thinking like that.
In the end, Sally found her husband’s corpse strung up in the bedroom wardrobe.
Jim was hanging up amongst the shirts and trousers, as though his body had been just another garment to discard at the end of a tiring day. One of her stockings was tied tight about his neck, whilst the other end of it looped about the coat-hanger rail. Another stocking ligatured Jim’s hands together behind his back. Sally couldn’t see Jim’s face. It was partially hidden behind a semi-transparent
Apart from the bag over his head, Jim was completely naked. Sally stared at her husband’s corpse with a growing sense of hysteria. At least one part of his surprise plan had worked. His erect penis pointed at her like an accusing finger, rigid and cold.
In the days that followed, Sally drifted through life like a ghost. She went through all the daily motions of life—shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning—yet she felt increasingly disconnected from her surroundings. Her senses had been numbed. Anaesthetised. In some curious way, it was as if it had been she who had died, not her husband.
Sally thought about Jim constantly, her mind replaying the discovery of his death time and again, as if by doing so she could somehow undo what had been done. She tried to banish these thoughts, to think pleasant thoughts instead, to remember the good times. But her husband’s smiling face was obscured in her memory, his features occluded by a semi-transparent plastic bag.
All she could think of, time and again, was his strangled body bucking in the air. Jim’s hips thrusting forwards in a cruel parody of sex as his air-starved body fought for life. His erect penis thrusting violently at nothing, impotent at the last, dying in the very moment of its new-found life.
Despairing of reality, Sally tried to find solace in drug-induced sleep, but no refuge was to be found. Her husband waited for her even in this unreal state, his final moments in her presence cruelly replayed as a mocking farce.
In Sally’s dream, as in life, Jim’s body had been laid out for formal identification at the police morgue, a plain-clothes officer waiting at a respectful distance to one side. However, in life, where his face had been the only part of him uncovered, the opposite was true in her dream. Jim’s body was naked, but his face still remained hidden behind plastic, one of Sally’s tights still tied about his neck like a too-tight cravat.
In her dream, Sally tried to look closer, to make out the man behind the mask, but her husband’s features resolutely failed to resolve. It was as if Jim’s face had become void in her memory, as if this were some insignificant trifle unworthy of remembrance. Only his penis seemed worthy of that accolade, its proud head jutting aimlessly up at her its final resting place.
In Sally’s dream, it seemed entirely logical for her to disrobe. After all, wasn’t this why she was here anyway? Not to identify the body, which any idiot could do, but to honor it? Sally turned to stare at her police escort as if daring her to object. The bereavement officer met her eyes for a brief second, then shyly turned away.
Sally focused her attention back on Jim. She clutched at him as she climbed atop the corpse, twisting and pulling to gain purchase on his meat. Jim felt so real. How could he be dead? The thought that all these years of growth would soon be reduced to ash, to a mere handful of dirt to scatter on the wind, it all seemed wrong. Far more wrong than the act she was about to perform.
Sally gripped the familiar length of her husband’s cock and guided it inside. His penis was as cold as death, but she would warm him on his way. She began to ride up and down upon his shaft, their bodies punctuating each meeting with a meaty slap. Soon Sally was panting with exertion, her efforts gifting his corpse with the illusion of warmth.
In her dream, Sally closed her eyes and gently rocked her way towards orgasm. And suddenly, she felt him. Jim’s corpse was clutching gently at her buttocks, his spiny fingers kneading into her flesh. Rock-a-bye baby, she thought, willing a mother’s gift of life upon this lifeless corpse. Her husband’s body began to buck and jerk beneath her, pushing itself into her with an urgent need of its own.
Sally laughed and opened her eyes. Her husband was here with her, pulled back from the brink by the strength of her love. His recently deceased body seemed to glow with a healthy vitality, droplets of sweat peppering and sheening his flesh. More than that, Jim seemed to be regressing through time. The wiry grey hair upon his chest became blackened and coarse, whilst long submerged sandbanks of muscle were exposed by a rapidly departing tide of flab. Still riding her husband, Sally reached her hands up to her own face, and felt the wrinkles of age being swept clean by the backwards hand of time.
Sally smiled down at her now youthful lover and reached down to remove his mask. Jim was moaning within its suffocating embrace, his sexual exertions transformed into a single word repeated over and over: a plea, a prayer to his one true Goddess: “Sal! Sal! Sal! Sal!”
When Sally awoke, the bedroom was dark. With a guilty start, she realized she had been touching herself, clutching at the warmth of her body, the only heat left in this cold night. The ghost of a nightmare fluttered by her —something about Jim—only to slip from her grasp before she could fully catch hold of it.
A sound from downstairs brought her back to reality. It sounded like someone calling. Someone a thousand miles away, the voice muffled and faint.
Sally sighed and tried to get back to sleep. But the moment was lost. Her mind, now awake, fastened upon the distant sound as though awaiting some prearranged signal. And there it came again, a muffled syllable repeated over and over, but closer this time. Now it sounded like it was coming from inside the house. Downstairs, in the hall. Rising slowly now, the voice was punctuated by the muffled creak of foot against stair.
Angry at her own overactive imagination, Sally sat up in bed and flicked on the bedside light. She pulled herself from beneath the covers and flung her dressing-gown about her. Rising to her feet, she threw open the
