Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. Brian Stableford
to Howard.
He took it.
‘Now, Howard darling,’ I said, as sweet as sweet could be, ‘I want you to do exactly as I tell you to. When Barbie answers, tell her who you are and where you are—and then describe, as neatly and as accurately as you can, exactly what I’m doing.’
I picked up the Barbie doll, and I drew out the next needle from the pack. Only the thicker ones were left, but there were plenty of them.
Howard looked at me as if I were mad—but only for a second. Then he saw the logic of it.
He could have refused, of course. Barbie was, after all, his wife, and they were both civilized people, who tolerated one another’s little adventures. As I’d already told him, though, it doesn’t really matter what you believe; what matters is how you feel. He had a bitter taste in his own mouth, which hadn’t come from the Bloody Mary, and it was his royal blue carpet too.
‘Barbara,’ he said, ‘it’s me. I’m in Rose’s upstairs room. She has a Barbie doll in her left hand, which has a photograph of you mounted on its face, and a needle in her right hand. Now she’s resting the point of the needle on the doll’s stomach, and....’
He had the tone of voice exactly right, but he wasn’t entitled to any credit for that. For the moment, just like his effigy, he was all my own work.
When Howard had finished I took the receiver back and replaced it in its cradle. I didn’t bother to listen to the strangled sounds that were coming from the other end. I knew that the power of suggestion had done its work, and done it well.
I picked up the figurine that had Howard’s face and passed it over to him; he took it meekly.
‘It’s up to you to keep it safe, Howard,’ I told him. ‘For as long as it exists, it’s the only image of you that has any power. If you look after it, no witch will ever be able to do you harm—but if you break it, or allow it to become distressed, you’ll suffer. Whether you believe in it or not, you’ll suffer. Do you understand that?’
He nodded, like a child confronted with the earnest admonition of a trusted parent. Later, no doubt, he’d tell himself that he’d been foolish, and that of course the makeshift doll had no power to harm him—but he’d keep it safe anyway. He wouldn’t dare to test the proposition by running a needle through the effigy’s waxen flesh, or breaking it in two, because he’d figure that it was best to be on the safe side.
Howard was the kind of man who always figured that it was best to be on the safe side. He’d married Barbara Schiff instead of somebody capable of loving him, but even that, in its way, was a matter of being on the safe side.
‘You’d better go now,’ I told him. ‘They might need an ambulance, and they might not have the guts to call for one themselves.’
I wasn’t absolutely sure, at that particular moment, whether the suggestion I’d planted might even be powerful enough to destroy them. I’d demonstrated to Barbie that Marlow wasn’t quite as far from the dark heart of Africa as she had assumed, and even I couldn’t be sure how much margin there really was.
Howard got up to go, carrying the figurine as if it were the most precious thing he owned.
If only I’d had such confidence in my art at nineteen, I thought, the whole farce might have been unnecessary. If only I’d had the courage and the imagination, I might have spoiled Barbie’s spell and claimed Howard for myself. As I heard the front door close behind him, though, I wondered whether the situation might not have reproduced itself anyway, with Flasher Fletcher as the errant husband of poor Rag Doll and Coldheart Coulthart as the hapless Mister Mischief.
Reflexively, I reached out to hit the PLAY button on the mini-system, starting Funeral Nation yet again. It was playing far too loudly for that hour of the night, but I needed the oppressive rhythm and the dark sentiment of the words. I had no rhymes of my own to serve as incantations, so I had to borrow some.
I picked up the last of the four dolls: the rag doll to which I’d attached my own photograph, about whose neck I’d placed a noose woven from my own black-dyed hairs. Then I opened a little plastic box of dressmaker’s pins: the kind that have little colored spheres in place of flat no-nonsense heads.
I began to take pins from the box, one by one; I pushed them into the head of the doll, so that the colored spheres marked out the arc of a halo. As I pushed them in I exerted every atom of my will to the magical task in hand. I commanded the points of those pins to delve into the depths of my own tortured mind, to kill the terrible thoughts and cauterize the horrid feelings, and give me the strength not to care.
I wouldn’t have minded paying a price for what I wanted, in ordinary pain. Any pure and simple headache would have been preferable to the kind of hurt I actually felt: the hurt compounded out of raging jealousy, the sense of my betrayal and the awful awareness of my own implicit worthlessness. I was perfectly prepared to wear a crown of thorns, and to endure its pricking, provided that I could be free of ire and guilt and dreadful self-pity.
But it didn’t work.
Witchcraft had worked on John, with a little help from one of Mum’s grimoires, and it had worked on Barbara, with a little help from John’s awful example, and it had worked on Howard, with a little help from my own dark intensity, but it still wouldn’t work on me.
I just couldn’t take it seriously.
In spite of my newfound power, my proven authority, I simply couldn’t take it seriously.
That was the manner in which my curse rebounded on me—or, at least, the manner in which it began its rebounding. I don’t believe that the crown of thorns actually intensified or prolonged my misery, but that’s not the point. The point was that hurting John and Barbara—and showing them that I had the power to hurt them—didn’t make me feel the least bit better. It simply didn’t help
John was discharged from hospital two days later, having made a complete recovery. He didn’t tell the doctors there the truth about what had happened to him; he just kept on assuring them that it must have been something he ate. Barbara was released the following day, having steadfastly made the same assurances. If the doctors knew or thought differently, they made no public declaration of the fact; all that mattered to them, it seemed, was that their patients had got better.
John came home to pack his things, and then left again. Barbara went home with Howard, and they resumed their lives, sensibly putting the incident behind them. I stayed where I was, alone.
And so the curse unwound, and kept on unwinding.
I threw the effigies of John and Barbara away, with all the needles sticking in them. They were only dolls, and only needles. The last needles I’d inserted—the ones I’d stuck into the dolls’ eyes—had only deprived Coldheart and Mischief of the ability to see clearly enough to repent what they had done. I hung on to my own doll, as Howard presumably hung on to his, but I couldn’t keep it safe.
I still look at it occasionally, and reflect on the foolishness that inspired its ridiculous crown of thorns. Sometimes, I’m a little rough with it. I just can’t seem to help myself.
Unlike Barbies, rag dolls come apart at the seams.
RENT
At first, Jez thought that the vamp was just another freak, just another weirdo, just another shit with a screwed-up soul.
Jez knew lots of freaks. Some people—including the female whores who strutted their stuff on the King’s Cross meat rack with the rent boys—would have said that all his johns were freaks, but that was just naked prejudice. Jez was a liberal, and he didn’t give a damn where his johns wanted to squirt their semen, as long as they paid the going rate for the location in question; but even he had to concede that more than a few of the guys were seriously weird and definitely freaky.
At first, he thought the vamp was one of those.
The vamp drove a black BMW, polished so assiduously that it gleamed. Jez couldn’t imagine the neatly manicured