Black Rock Page 11
Essenjay made what looked like a magical pass with her right hand and spoke some words. Then she frowned and waited. Then she repeated the process.
And then the image vanished.
But the ice block in Martin’s brain remained. Either he’d gone bananas, or there was such a thing as telepathy and he was getting a demonstration. And telepathy was easier to accept than madness.
Fuck the phone, he thought, and tried to contact Essenjay by the power of his mind, concentrating just the way a character in one of the books he edited might have done. He even put the tips of his fingers to his temples.
Essenjay, can you hear me? he asked. Or broadcast, or whatever you did when sending mental messages.
He tried again, raising the volume this time. Essenjay, are you all right? he asked.
Contact was not made.
Then he quit. It was all so stupid. Telepathy was for hack writers and film-makers. If the imaginary ice block in his mind wouldn’t go away, it wasn’t because Essenjay was trying to contact him, but because a part of him didn’t want it to go away.
Or maybe it was a kind of conscious dream state. The reason he felt Essenjay was in danger had nothing to do with the part of his mind that was dreaming. It had everything to do with the fact that Essenjay had told him herself that she needed an ambulance. The rest was imagination.
Even the picture of Black Rock he’d had before he first called her meant nothing in psychic terms. His mind might have stripped a cog, OK, but it hadn’t suddenly become imbued with the mystical power of ESP. It was mere coincidence that he’d imagined she was in trouble and had then phoned her only to find she was.
She didn’t say she’d fallen half-way down something almost steep enough to be called a cliff, did she? he asked himself. She didn’t say she was hurt either. Which meant the whole thing had been a gigantic misunderstanding, caused purely by the mental cog he’d somehow stripped.
Not convinced, Martin phoned her again.
And almost suffered a heart attack when her line clicked open.
He had already started to blabber how relieved he was that she was OK when he realized he was engaged in conversation with her answering machine which said, ‘Sarah-Jane cannot come to the phone at this precise moment because she is currently in her boudoir being entertained by several members of the Chippendales. If you would like to leave a message and your number, she will call you back as soon as possible - if she isn’t too tired, that is.’
Martin listened, fighting his rising anger at her whimsy, and after the tone left a message asking her to call and let him know if she was all right.
If Bude had been a couple of hours closer to London, he would have leapt in the Ferrari and driven down to find out for himself exactly what was going on.
Martin shivered. At some point during the day, his clear and incisive mind had turned into something akin to mashed swede. He was no longer sure who or what his anger ought to be directed at. He didn’t know if he was angry at Essenjay for not taking his calls when she could have done, or angry at Angie for trying to entrap him again, or what. All he knew was that he was livid.
And that there was a sure fire way to assuage his anger.
He stood up, went into the lounge, pointed at the children and said, ‘You and you, bed!’
He didn’t expect any complaints and he wasn’t disappointed; even though it was only eight o’ clock and it was a Friday, their staying up late evening, neither child complained. Both of them looked up at him with something in their eyes which might have been fear and might have been hatred. He preferred to think it was fear.
The children got up, gathered up their belongings and headed for the door.
‘And when you get upstairs, tell your mother I want her.’
Martin sat down and waited. Angie would understand the summons, that was a certainty, but there was a chance that she would either refuse point blank to come down, or she would waltz in with a list of things she wanted him to do to her: touch here, stroke there, kiss this, lick that.
And that kind of thing he could do without.
He grinned when she did come in. She had showered and was wearing only her bathrobe.
‘They said you wanted me,’ she said, sounding both hopeful and beaten.
‘And they were right,’ Martin said.
The combination of his anger, his sexual frustration and the anticipation he’d felt while awaiting her arrival almost drove him over the edge. He was iron-bar hard and throbbing.
‘You want to make love,’ she said.
Martin shook his head, standing up. His penis tented his trousers. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to fuck you*. Now take off your robe and lie down.’
Angie seemed to want the same thing, and lay down on the carpet on her back, knees raised, legs spread.
Martin looked at her and for a moment despised himself. Then he shed his trousers and boxers, went to her, knelt between her legs and entered her. She was warm and wet and a little loose - exactly as he had anticipated. He positioned himself on his elbows, looking down into her face and he thrust at her, hard. Angie winced.
‘This doesn’t mean anything,’ he told her, thrusting again, harder this time. ‘It doesn’t mean I love you and it doesn’t mean I want you back. It just means I want to fuck you.’
Angie shut her eyes and bit her bottom lip as he whacked himself into her for a third time. A gasp escaped her and Martin thrust again, so hard his pubic bone was going to be bruised in the morning.
Angie’s arms came up and tried to enfold his neck; Martin caught them and pressed them back to the floor, squeezing her biceps as he drove himself into her.
After the fifth angry thrust, he realized that the ice block in his brain had gone. After the sixth he thought of Essen jay, who wouldn’t just lie there and be fucked, but who would fuck him in return, and even rake skin from his back like an animal. After the seventh he realized that this was the right way: the man on top proving his dominance, proving his masculinity.
After the eighth violent thrust, Angie gave a little squeal which either meant it hurt or she’d come. Martin didn’t know which.
And from then on he was a furious pile-driver until the moment of his orgasm approached, drawing closer with each stroke. And just as his muscles were strained tight and he closed in on the exorcism of his rage, the telephone began to ring.
Martin was out of Angie and into the hall before it had rung three times. He snatched the receiver off the base and held it to his ear.
‘Martin?’
Martin looked down at his throbbing penis. ‘Essenjay?’
The line went dead.
‘COW!’ Martin shouted. And flung the’ phone back into the cradle. It bounced out again and he left it swinging by its cable and strode back into the lounge.
Angie had got up and put on her robe.
‘Get back on the floor,’ he commanded.
; Angie shook her head. ‘Enough,’ she stated. ‘I’m finished.’
‘Enough? What do you mean, enough?
‘You heard me, Martin. I’m not prepared to compete with that girl. You either want me or you want her. I’ll have you back if you want me, and you can stay here. Or if you want her, you can go. You can’t stay here and have both. You can’t stay here and have us both.’
Martin’s anger reached fever-pitch. There was life in the old girl yet. ‘It’s ultimatum time, is it?’ he said, keeping his voice calm, the way he did when he explained to his authors what was wrong with their crappy books.
Angie nodded. ‘You’ve had your fling and it’s about time you began to realize that it’s over. She doesn’t want you.’
Martin nodded. She was right of course. That was what angered him even more.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still biting down on his rage. ‘I’ve been the world’s champion arsehole over the past couple of years. You’re right, it’s over between me and Sarah-Jane. Has been for six or seven months, really. We were just raking over the embers towards the end. It’s you I want. That’s why I came back here. I’ve been hoping we can get together again. I’d like you to take me back. What else can I say?’
Martin supposed he ought to feel like a lying toad, but he didn’t feel any guilt whatsoever. All he felt was a raging anger which could only be fucked away.
Angie nodded wordlessly.
8 - Escape from Black Rock
It was during the frantic drive away from Black Rock that she hit the black dog, Diamond Ambrose Anstey.
It just appeared before her on the track, suddenly and without warning. It didn’t solidify out of a shimmering haze or unfold itself the same way as Mr Winter had folded himself up… One moment the track was empty, and the next, the dog stood there. Pointing at her.
S’n’J didn’t have time to react. The car was only moving at around twenty miles an hour, but by the time she’d found the brake and clutch, it was all over.
The sound of the impact was not the soft thud S’n’J anticipated. It was closer to the metallic hammer-blow you heard when one car bumped another car from behind at low speed. A solid thonk!
What happened next was that the car skidded to a precarious halt on the very edge of the track. Cursing, S’n’J backed up.
The dog should have been in front of her. When you ran over things, they either came up the bonnet at you, or got pushed along by the car.
But the dog wasn’t lying at the edge of the track, dying or dead.
It wasn’t there at all.
S’n’J climbed out of the car. The dog was not in the road behind her. She got down on her hands and knees on the wet ground and peered under the car. It wasn’t there either.
Which meant it had to have been knocked down into the valley.
Except that the dog was not in sight anywhere in the valley. Neither was it up on its trailer on the other side of the valley.
I’m sorry, Diamond Ambrose Anstey, she thought. If that was you I ran over and killed, I’m truly sorry. You didn’t hurt me and I’m sorry I had to hurt you.
Then, no longer feeling like Miss Hanging-on-to-her-Sanity, but rather like Miss Lost-it-Completely, she returned to the car and drove away.
Up on the main road through Tintagel, she had to pull over to allow an ambulance to pass. She stared at its flashing lights as it squeezed by and didn’t realize until it had gone that it was the one she had summoned.
That’s one more false alarm for them, she told herself. They weren’t going to find any customers down there now, that was for sure.
By the time she was half-way back to Bude, S’n’J was a little less mentally frazzled. As she got further away from Black Rock she began to think more clearly.
She realized she was driving in one shoe and decided it might be better, all things considered, if she was to take that shoe off and drive barefoot. She pulled in to a lay-by, turned off the car’s engine, removed the shoe, nodded to herself that this was going to be more comfortable and that she was going to be okay now, and just as she thought she had everything under control, suffered a five-minute-long attack of what her mother would have called the tremblies.
Except that she didn’t just tremble, she shook violently.
S’n’J breathed deeply, tried to relax and told herself it was only to be expected. She had almost fallen to her death; she’d seen an injured man fold himself up and vanish and she’d run over a dog that didn’t seem to exist. And that wasn’t even counting the hallucinations of the frost on the window, the brilliant lights or what had happened to the sea and the sky.
Funny stuff carbon monoxide, she told herself, opening the window a little further, and tried on a grin. It didn’t fit and when she checked it in the rear-view mirror, what stared back at her looked more like a killer clown in a cheap horror flick than good old Sarah-Jane. She fought back the tears which wanted to visit and rode out the tremblies.
When they’d ceased, she felt sane again. Shocked but sane. As far as she could see, the problem was not going to be getting the image of Black Rock out of her head, but coming to terms with the half-hour period of insanity she had experienced. It hung there in her mind like a gaping hole in her previously seamless reality.
You’ll look back on all this soon, she thought, and you’ll see what a dummy you were. Really you will.
She needed to clean herself up if she was going to visit James at Cars Inc. and have the exhaust replaced. She opened her handbag and found a tissue to use on her smeared face, then used her brush to tease the tangles from her hair. After she’d cleaned mud and blood off her knees and removed her soaked and torn jacket she looked a little less like a woman who had almost lost her life and a little more like a woman who might have recently tripped up some steps. That would be far easier to explain.
She got back in the car, spotted the single shoe and told it goodbye.
Then she threw it out of the window.
Twenty minutes later, S’n’J sat in the reception area of Cars Inc. with a cup of weak tea and a pile of Trucker magazines to leaf through while she waited.
But S’n’J didn’t read. She took an A5 size sheet of note-paper from her handbag and folded it in half across the middle.
One, she counted.
Then she folded it in half the other way. Two.
Then she repeated the process.
The sheet of paper now measured somewhere in the region of three inches by two inches.
S’n’J folded it again. Four.
Someone had once told her that it was impossible to fold a sheet of paper more than six times. No matter how big it was to start with, or how thin.
She had made quite a tight wad after five folds, and the sixth turned it into a deep letter U rather than a neatly folded piece of paper. It was impossible to make another fold.
S’n’J spotted a price list on the reception area’s counter, picked it up and took it back to her seat. This was A4 size. Twice the area of her notepaper. When you folde
d it once and the A5 size once, the resultant area was still two to one. And so it remained, right down to the sixth fold. But she was unable to make a seventh. A strong man might have managed it, almost.
S’n’J shrugged. She didn’t know what she was trying to prove. Mr Winter’s vanishing trick had happened to a real man, not a piece of paper.
She glanced down at her origami, feeling a little sorry for herself and began to reconstruct the afternoon.
When she thought about it with a clear mind, it became glaringly obvious what had taken place.
When she had left the car park in Falmouth after eating her lunch-time pasty, she’d had the windows up and the heater off. There had been no fresh air getting into the car. Only the dreaded CO. By the time she’d arrived at the King Arthur Hotel in Tintagel, she had been well and truly wiped out. She didn’t know whether or not she had actually spoken to the builder who was working there, but she suspected she had. He hadn’t necessarily said any of those things which seemed to have a dark undertone to them though. He’d probably just pointed her in the right direction for the track down to the sea.
And the twenty-four pages of manuscript that had seemed so alive inside her head had provided the rest. Sure, the rock was there and the track led to it, but S’n’J had just wanted the house to be there too. And had hallucinated it into being. Along with the fastest dog in the West and the origami man.
‘All done!’ James said, striding back into the office. He was smeared black from head to toe and looked more like he’d been mining coal than fitting an exhaust.
Thanks James,’ S’n’J said, searching in her bag for her credit card, ‘I was beginning to feel a bit sleepy when I was driving.’