Page 19 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
4
Lover, Come Back to Me
I picked up the new horror novel by Cass Leigh, Nocturnally Yours,out of a spirit of curiosity. Then I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t keep any food down for three days either …
Exposé Magazine:
‘On the Shelf’ with Lisa-Mona Bevore
As I drove through the twisty dark lanes to deliver the Crypt-ogram, Clive the rubber vampire bat dangling from the sun visor, my twistydark mind began to take over, rudely elbowing my real-life problems into the bottom drawer.
This often happens, since I was a creature of the night. All my best writing was done in the graveyard shift between about midnight and four in the morning, that spooky time when nothing seemed quite real. You could punch your fist through the reality around you then, and it would give like Cellophane,which I suppose pretty well sums up what I did.
Strangely enough, it’d always annoyed the hell out of Max to wake up in the night and find me hammering the keys in the back room, but he forgot that I had to write to eat. (Unless you count his occasional hamper contributions, but I found all those tasty little goodies much too rich for my taste.)
Besides, I was a writer: ergo, I wrote. And ifmy most creative time was in the middle of the night, so be it.
The way I slid in and out between the two parallel universes of my life and fiction without conscious volition, the one adding substance to the shadows of the other, unnerved him.
‘Where are you, Cassy?’ he would often say, which was about as much a conversation stopper as: ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Chapter Sixteen ofLover,Come Back to Me’ is still giving me problems, Clive,’ I said, as he bobbed and flapped against the windscreen. ‘It just isn’tchillingenough. Listen to this:
Keturah returned to the grave again and again each night, to fling herself like a penitent across the freshly mounded pall of earth that separated her from her lover, hot tears searing down through the cold clay.
She yearned to feel hispresence there with her, for that illusion of comfort was all she could hope for now that the old woman’s childish resurrection mumbo-jumbo had failed her, as she had known in her heart it would.
But she had done what she’d promised Sylvanus in his last throes: she’d tried every possible means to call him back to her and all had been fruitless.
Perhaps it was her fault, for not truly believingit could happen? Or deeply dreading that if itdidwork, what came back would be some horrible travesty of her lover…
‘The dead don’t come back, Sylvanus,’ she whispered, too blinded by tears to see the pale fingers clawing out of the earth towards her, like new shoots to the sun.
She was about to find just how wrong she was.
‘Butwhat, exactly, is coming back, Clive?’
I wasn’t sure, andmy publisher’s deadline was approaching faster than that grisly set of suppurating fingers.
The only way I’d ever get it finished was to pay a littlegraveyard visit later that night after the pub shut andscaremyself into the next chapter. If I was very lucky the conditions would be right for that strange, low, smoky mist to hang about at tombstone level like an old horror movie: sometimesit did.
First, though, there was the little matter of the singing telegram to deliver – if the thread of country lane I was currently driving along was really the one I thought it was, that is?
It was, and with relief I turned into a marginally wider road and pulled up outside a brightly lit pub with a full car park.
I hooked Clive’s elastic over my arm, checked my greenish pallor in the mirror,and added another layer of crimson lipstick. Then I took a deep breath and issued forth to sing for my supper.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
That was absolutely the last Crypt-ogram I’d do, because the money could never be enough to compensate me for what I’d just gone through!
Evensupply teachingwould be preferable.
I mean, I knew it was a stag night, but no one warned me that the said stagswould be huge, burly, drunken rugby players, all of whom wanted me to bite them, at the veryleast.
One of them even kept trying to stick his finger in my mouth to test the sharpness of my fangs, until I bit him. (Fangs for the Memory?)
I was lucky to escape with little more than shredded drapery, though I feared my bat would never have been the same again, even had I stopped long enough toretrieve him. (Poor Clive: although I knew his body was hollow, I hadn’t realized quite how stretchy it was. Sort of symbolic of the whole thing really – a hollow mockery.)
