Bev brought over another poppyseed cake.
“Have you noticed all the crazy people lately?” Anna asked. “There are a lot of maniacs out there.”
“Yeah? They’ve always been out there.”
“No, I would have noticed,” Anna said.
“I tell you they’ve always been there,” Bev said, cracking her gum. “Haven’t you heard? The entire world has been slowly going crackers since the industrial revolution. Losing touch with the earth or something.”
Bev nibbled at her cake and looked bored. Anna stared at her. She had never noticed how harsh Bev looked before. She wore too much makeup and looked bored most of the time.
“I would have noticed,” Anna said again. She wrapped the poppyseed cake in tin foil and put it in the refrigerator. This marked the end of Bev’s visit.
Anna’s blood buzzed louder as her neighbor left the room. That night she squeezed her eyes shut and put her fingers in her ears, trying to stop the noise. That only shut out the other sounds, and all she could hear was her heart pounding and the blood coursing through her veins, talking to her, talking to her.
Her blood began telling her to do things. Bad things. She called her doctor, but she was out of town.
Anna sought solace in the papers. Perhaps she could find an answer there. The Cramer Building man had been in an auto accident before he began shooting. The man in the park had had his appendix removed a week earlier. She hurried through the papers, looking back, trying to find more clues. Maybe they had all been in the hospital; they could have all gotten blood. Maybe it had belonged to just one maniac and now it had spread and they were all going crazy. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy. Some other country was trying to sabotage the U.S. through the blood supply. Of course! She read the papers; she listened to the news. She knew there were plenty of people out there trying to get her and everyone else.
She picked up the phone and began dialing the subscription departments of several newspapers, one on the East Coast, one on the West, and one in the Midwest. She blocked out the sounds of her blood and waited for the papers.
When they arrived, she read them greedily. She knew, after she had finished, that the bad blood had gotten everywhere. People out there were listening to their blood, telling the police afterwards that they hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. They had to do what the voices told them to do.
Anna called her father.
“Anna, you were always crazy,” she heard him say. “Even as a child. Especially as a child. It’s no wonder you’re having these crazy ideas.”
She hung up on him, wondering why she had not seen earlier how cruel he was to her. In fact, she had not noticed a lot of things. She hadn’t been paying attention and look what had happened to the world.
She asked Bev over but when she saw her she had an overwhelming desire to do something bad to her, so she shoved a half-eaten poppyseed cake at her and told her to leave and never come back.
Anna sat alone in her apartment, waiting for the voices to stop. They kept telling her where she could get a gun or a knife. Be like the man in the Cramer Building, the blood said. Or go to the park. Find a politician. The voices pounded and flowed through her.
She chewed her fingernails. She could do what the voices said. Bad things. But then she would be like all the rest. And who was to say that that would make the voices stop? They might ask her to do other things.
There was only one thing to do. She went into her bathroom and took out a package of razor blades. She nicked her pinkie with one to make certain the razor was sharp. Then she sat in the living room, surrounded by her newspapers, with the evening news on in the background. Beginning at her wrists where her talking blood pulsed, she made two long deep lines down her arms.
It was time for a bloodletting.
FLYING INTO NAPLES
by Nicholas Royle
Born in Manchester in 1963, Nicholas Royle now lives in London. In very few years he has established himself as one of England’s foremost horror writers, scattering some seventy or more stories throughout the small press and the major markets. His first novel, Counterparts, appeared from Barrington Books this last autumn. I had the pleasure of attending its launch party at The Nellie Dean pub in Soho, but had to help escort a suddenly legless Irish artist back to his flat before I could snag a copy. Royle has also edited two original horror anthologies, Darklands and Darklands 2. New English Library will be reprinting these in a mass-market format, and with any luck perhaps they will reprint Counterparts as well, as it’s out of print and I never did manage to snag a copy.
Royle reports: “I’m still working as a freelance journalist to pay the bills but am being more selective about the work I take on.” He then advises me: “Watch out for the Genitorturers and their album ‘120 Days of Genitorture’ (they’re crap but the cover photos are interesting).” Yes. Rock music again. The conspiracy thickens.
Flying into Naples the 737 hits some turbulence and gets thrown about a bit. It’s dark outside, but I can’t even see any lights on the ground. I’m a nervous flyer anyway and this doesn’t make me feel any better. It’s taking off and landing that bother me.
But when we’re down and I’m crossing the tarmac to the airport buildings, there’s a warm humid stillness in the air that makes me wonder about the turbulence. I wander through passport control and customs like someone in a dream. The officials seem covered in a fine layer of dust as if they’ve been standing there for years just waiting.
No one speaks to me and I get on the bus marked “Centro Napoli.” I’m on holiday. All I’ve got in Naples is a name, a photograph, and a wrong number. The name is a woman’s—Flavia—and the photograph is of the view from her apartment. The phone number I tried last week to say I was coming turned out to belong to someone else entirely.
I’ve worked out from the photograph and my map that the apartment is on a hill on the west side of the city. There’s not much more to go on. It’s too late to go and look for it tonight. Flavia won’t be expecting me—beyond occasional vague invitations nothing has been arranged—and she could take a long time to locate.
I knew her years ago when she visited London and stayed in the hotel where I was working the bar. We knew each other briefly—a holiday romance, if you like—but something ensured I would not forget her. Whether it was the sunrise we saw together or the shock of her body in the quiet shadow of my room over the kitchens, or a combination of these and other factors—her smile, my particular vulnerability, her tumbling curls—I don’t know, but something fixed her in my mind. So when I found myself with a week’s holiday at the end of three difficult months in a new, stressful job, I dug out her letters—two or three only over eight years, including this recent photograph of the view from her apartment—and booked a last-minute flight to Naples.
I’d never been there though I’d heard so much about it—how violent and dangerous it could be for foreigners, yet how beautiful—and I would enjoy the effort required to get along in Italian.
I’m alone on the bus apart from one other man—a local who spends the 20-minute ride talking on a cellphone to his mistress in Rome—and the taciturn driver. I’ve come before the start of the season, but it’s already warm enough not to need my linen jacket.
I’m divorced. I don’t know about Flavia. She never mentioned anybody, just as she never revealed her address when she wrote to me. I’ve been divorced two years and a period of contented bachelorhood has only recently come to a natural end, and with the arrival of spring in London I have found myself watching women once again: following a hemline through the human traffic of Kensington, turning to see the face of a woman in Green Park whose hair looked so striking from behind. It may be spring in Berkeley Square but it feels like midsummer in Naples. The air is still and hot and humid when I leave the bus at the main railway station and begin walking into the center of the city in search of a cheap hotel. I imagine I’m probably quite conspicuous in what must be one of the most dangerous areas but the hotels in the immediate vicinity—the pavement outside the Europa is clogged with upturned rubbish bins; the tall, dark, narrow Esedra looks as if it’s about to topple sideways—look unwelcoming so I press on. It’s late, after 10:30 pm, and even the bars and restaurants are closed. Youths buzz past on Vespas and Piaggios unhelmeted despite the apparent dedication of the motorists here to the legend “live fast, die young.” I hold my bag close and try to look confident but after 15 minutes or so the hotels have disappeared. I reach a large empty square and head deeper into the city. I ask a gun-holstered security guard if there is a pension in the neighborhood, but he shrugs and walks away. I climb a street that has lights burning but they turn out to be a late-night bar and a fruit stand. Two boys call to me from a doorway and as I don’t understand I just carry on, but at the top is a barrier and beyond that a private apartment complex, so I have to turn back and the two boys are laughing as I walk past them.