Danse Macabre

Aunty Maureen bought Maddie a diary for her fifteenth Christmas. It felt like a thoughtless gift for a digital creature unused to paper and pen.

In Year 10 she had been forced to read extracts of Anne Frank’s Diary. How could Maddie, a foolish child, begin to understand the mind of a less foolish child? The teacher said that keeping a diary was good for you, and Maddie had replied that it did not appear to have done Anne Frank much good in the long run. That didn’t go down so well. Much of what Maddie said never did. Maybe that’s why Aunty Mo bought the diary: to settle the wayward mouth, and by extension the thoughts, into something more introspective.

On Boxing Day she turned over the flyleaf. The first page called to her like a siren's song. She responded, just once, to the beckoning.

Ten Things I Hate

1. Bananas

2. Chewing/bubble gum.

3. Lychees

4. Marshmallows

5. Sex scenes

6. Folk Music

7. D.H. Lawrence

8. Night Clubs

9. Big ruined buildings.

10. Horror.

And that was all she wrote.

*****

Eddie was a nascent prowler. He was more of a summer guy when the tits were out and the legs were long, but he was also quickened by Halloween and Christmas, the strange static in the air when the sense of a body being hidden was just as alluring as a sweating, unclad tart. It would escalate, of course, from the peeping to the creeping and then to something worse, but he had not yet plucked the wings from a butterfly. He lived an urban life and so the paths had rarely crossed.

Moths would come, of course. He could see them in the corners of his rooms, lit up by the neon lights of the fast food outlets. Tired of their kamikaze habits with light bulbs, they would rest in the intermittent dark, safe with Eddie. They were too dumb and plain to be otherwise.

She was not quite beautiful, although she made the most of what she had. The thing that fascinated Eddie was her rudeness. She was callous, dismissive. They say you can tell a person by how they treat waiting staff, and if that was true, then Maddie was an oven-ready bitch. As he followed her, he was endlessly fascinated by her complete lack of respect for others. Did she wear a label? Get off working by finding a place on the spectrum? Or did she just have a rich daddy?

Maddie had a rich daddy. No mummy though. She ran off years ago, whereabouts unknown, sight unseen. He had another family fifty miles north, but they have never been introduced. They don't matter. They’re not part of the story, beyond saying that daddy would have loved them all to live together for financial reasons, but he was not entirely proud of his firstborn. She lived in ignorance of them, although they were very aware of her. A sharp little shock for Maddie further down the line.

She is nineteen now, in her own world, oblivious to being followed. She had left her phone on the chair of an upmarket shoe shop. The screen was still lit when Eddie picked it up and noticed the dating site she’d recently been scrolling. She had a certain physical type and Eddie was the type. Good. He left the phone with the staff. A girl of her age would be back within minutes to reclaim it.

Eddie dressed like an Italian serial killer. His dark hair was slick, his eyes brooding and his shoulders slightly hunched, like a scholar. His manner polite but distant. Clued-up women could smell the predator on him. Other women learned the hard way. At this time of year he wore loose trousers, almost louche, with a tight polo-neck. He was out of time and place and yet he was cool, he was cold, like a walk-in freezer that wouldn’t open when it closed on you.

Maddie was having lunch with a friend she air-kissed before she sat. A French restaurant on Lysander Road, whose waiters will match her hauteur and toss some more in the bread basket while they’re at it.

A disdain that cannot be equalled.

When she was tucking into her duck confit, Eddie drove to her house. He knew where the spare key was kept. It was spotless, smelled uninhabited. As he drifted up the stairs he followed the perfumed scent, stronger with each riser, which spoke of a teenage girl. Her room was a mess. The cleaner had clearly been ordered to keep out. This is the truth of her, he thought, as he observed the disarray.

He rifled through the drawers, took a drift of lace underwear and a sex toy, which he sniffed and then pocketed.

In the bottom drawer was a diary from four years earlier. He could tell it was all but empty of thought and recollection, but the fly page, the only entry, was interesting.

Ten Things I Hate.

She was drawing the spite even then. Such innocuous things for the most part.

He took a photo of it and left.

On the way back to his flat he bought a Siamese fighting fish for his tank. He watched as it systematically ate all the Black Molly babies. Violence deferred. He was merely the voyeur. He had the news on low but the world was going to hell in a handcart so he switched to a nostalgia channel where the motives were clear and the manners were comforting.

He had created a profile on Maddie's site, and watched with one eye as a succession of hopeful, pouting women pinged on his screen. A period of left swipes.

And then, there she was. Maddie, who was not looking for love but was interested in a good night out.

Well, wouldn’t you know it.

They made plans without speech, the curious shyness of the age. Fingers and thumbs, tipping and tapping.

Four days later, Eddie borrowed a Porsche Taycan from a friend. The price of a decent house. Eddie’s prowling targets were not exclusively women. Men were good for blackmail, and so the friend lent the keys. The car would be returned by morning and the tank would be full.

Manners maketh man.

Maddie was impressed by the vehicle. Her father looked down from an upstairs window, instinctively approving of the car but not, perhaps, the driver of it. He was clearly a man who picked up women at symposiums and cocktail bars. Online dating, to such a man, was the equivalent of the lonely hearts page, an act of self-flagellation.

An admission of failure.

Eddie could not disagree.

She was wearing a tailored dress. This girl did not like ribbons and bows. The severity of it highlighted her features, which were perfectly well-arranged within a mask of porcelain skin. A handsome woman but not a Baywatch woman. A bauble, but not the best on the tree. No matter. It was all about the takedown, the slow degradation of the bitch.

She slid into the heated leather seats. ‘I’m so glad we’re not doing Halloween,’ she said. A poor opener. A sign of nervousness.

He looked at her and smiled. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Maddie.’

An air freshener, almost static in the smooth Porsche ride, yet still announced its presence. It was in the shape of a banana and the heat exaggerated the smell of it. Oh, how she disapproves! Eddie, driving with one hand on the wheel, leaned forward and opened the glove compartment.

‘Would you mind getting out the chewing gum,’ he said. ‘Juicy Fruit. Take one for yourself.’

Eddie noticed the little puff of her cheeks as he noisily chewed the stick, talking to her, making sure the smell of it reached her. ‘Could you open the window a bit?’ she asked.

He rolled it down an inch. Her slightly elongated nose reached towards the gap.

‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.

‘Have you not eaten today?’

‘Well of course not!’

And there she was, the Maddie of his dreams. She had, of course, eaten today, in a Korean on Kent Road.

That’s my girl.

Eddie let out a little sigh that blew more banana and Juicy Fruit her way.

‘If you get peckish,’ he said, nodding his head towards the back of the car, ‘there’s a bag of snacks behind your seat. Nothing much, just my favourites. Lychees and marshmallows.’

Maddie didn’t reply. She might be rude to lesser beings but Eddie was a brown-eyed handsome man in a ruinously expensive car, and she was just shallow enough to hold it in.

‘On our second date, I thought we might go to the pictures,’ he mused. ‘There’s that new one I’m interested in. The Roman orgy scene? Apparently it’s really hot.’

Speechless Maddie, maybe connecting some dots. He shook his head like a foolish boy caught out in ineptitude. It was a charming gesture if Maddie had been looking.

‘Sorry. You don’t like sex scenes?’

‘No.’

‘I’m so sorry, Maddie! I’m not used to this at all, but I promise you I’ll get better. Next time we’ll go to a restaurant. I hear the French one on Lysander Road is very good. Ever been there?’

‘No.’

‘Great! It's a date.'

He sensed a thaw. ‘I thought we’d go to a pub for our first time. It just seems more natural to me.’

‘Fine.’

Not out the freezer yet, Eddie Boy.

He ushered her through the door of The Miner’s Arms, whose name and exterior belied the interior. The place where a miner would now be accused of blackface. A vegan menu, the usual flag behind the bar, patronising flat caps, keffiyehs, goatees, craft beer and decaf coffee. Not Maddie’s kind of place. Not Eddie’s either, but Friday night was folk night, and not a pumpkin in sight.

She drank her wine quickly, the distaste on her face making her appear far more beautiful than she was. Half way through All Around My Hat she stood up and said she’d like Eddie to take her home. Enough already.

‘I just don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘How two people can be so entirely incompatible! I hate bananas, I hate chewing gum, lychees, marshmallows, sex scenes, folk music …’

That little outburst didn’t go down well with the punters. Way to go, Maddie!

He sensed her discomposure, that she was outside her ordered world and in some wild hinterland her father’s money couldn’t buy. Maddie’s derisive self-possession was leaving her, and Eddie had to check his arousal before he stood up and escorted her out.

The entrance was lined with second-hand books, ones that you could take for free and maybe replace with another. Eddie held Maddie’s wrist lightly while he scanned the shelves. ‘Do you like reading?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes.’

‘D H Lawrence is my favourite. Out of luck, though.’

Eddie took the car in the right direction until he didn't. She was really unsettled now, her back rigid in the seat, her thighs clamped together like that would somehow help. How she misunderstood the game.

‘How about a night club?’ he suggested, just to break the unholy silence.

She whispered something under her breath. It sounded like a prayer.

Halfway home, Eddie swerved the car and took it down a dismal lane, overgrown with foreign trees that dipped and swayed in the Halloween wind, out of their climate and liable to fall, their roots not established despite all the years. He sensed a little hyperventilation coming from his date. She would know of this place. Everyone knew of this place. The blackened ruin of a gothic country pile, no roof, forbidding turrets, soot-soaked sandstone. Enormous, compellingly appalling in its decay.

‘Bank Hall, she whispered.

‘They used to film Hammer House of Horror here,’ he said, with the light touch of an innocent. ‘I just thought, you know, Halloween!’

He pulled up so close, so close that the perspective was the end of the world. From a distance it was a shiver. Up close it was a psychotic break.

‘I have megalophobia,’ she said, panting, scratching her thighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Deep breaths, eh? I thought we could roast some marshmallows.’

She looked at him then. Really looked at him. ‘I need to go.’

‘Yes, I see that.’ He laughed, relaxing in the seat. ‘You know, Maddie, I have just got everything wrong this evening. If you think about it logically, there is no way I could ever repeat that! The next time, we’ll do everything you love. I promise.’

She looked at him again. ‘No, I mean I need to go.’

She put on gloves. He put on gloves. Chilly night. She took her handbag with her.

‘Watch me,’ she commanded, as she tore into an overgrown rhododendron. Skeletal flower heads, obdurate even in their half-life, did not drop a dessicated petal when she pushed them aside.

She heard the rustle of bat wings. In the far distance she could hear kids larking. The place to be on All Soul's Eve. The confines of the shrub was infinitely better than the crazy building, but then a footstep intruded upon the pacifying notion.

That at least is how Eddie read her thoughts.

Mid-stream, a Scream mask peered into the bush. It was fleeting, but enough to make her scream. She pulled up her tights, pulled down her dress, feeling the flow seep through.

Eddie tossed it and pulled off his gloves. It had never been near his face.

Her imperative voice travelled beyond the bush. ‘Get in the car, Eddie!’ Start it up and take me fucking home!’

He got in the car, rolled the window down and lit a cigarette. What a night, what a night, what I mighty good night.

His head was turned to the building when the knife struck his carotid. His last breathing moment was the sight of an Ed Gein corpse-mask.

*****

Two Days Earlier

Eddie went to the joke shop and bought a Scream mask. He was wearing gloves. He asked the shop assistant to try it on for effect. On the way home, he asked a couple of willing kids to try it on too. Clever Eddie. If you can't beat DNA, you can confuse the living crap out of it.

Three Days Earlier

Shortly after Maddie’s fifteenth Christmas, items went missing from her room. She was a mean girl with mean girl friends, difficult to know which particular one. She confided in her father, who installed a spy-camera in the eye of a stuffed toy she had long discarded. It sat on a shelf overseeing the bed and the two cabinets bestriding it. That's how she found out which friend it was.

That’s how she knew what Eddie was. And the more she looked at Eddie on the screen, the more she realised that he had been following her. A striking man, after all, a man who walks into a women’s shoe shop and peers through restaurant windows.

When Eddie was rifling through her things, Maddie paid the bill in the restaurant and went straight to the joke shop. Such a roaring trade at this particular time of year.

All of those things she hated when she was fifteen she still did. But they, in all their cumulative horror, was nothing at all like the way she hated him.

It had been so hard not to laugh when he played out her diary list. What a child. What an amateur.

She burned the Gein mask. Went up in the smoke along with her phone. And Eddie's phone. She threw the remains in a deep industrial canal which hid many such secrets.

She walked the five miles home, keeping to the verges, the urine chafing her legs, the blood a plausible costume at this particular time of year.

Eddie never got the chance to escalate. Plenty of time for her, though.

Nascent days.