Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

painted on. When first cut open her pale skin pinkened, as if suffused with a new liveliness, then the tiny beads of blood oozed out on to the surface, and Jane found the look and smell of them oddly comforting, like milk for a baby, confirming for her that this life was, indeed, real. Although beneath the surface pleasure a profound terror lurked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jane! Watch out!’

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

Someone had put a pillow under her head. The whispers of her co-workers grew harsh and garbled above