The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

STEPHEN VOLK IS THE creator/writer of ITV’s award-winning paranormal drama series Afterlife and the notorious, some say legendary, BBC-TV “Hallowe’en hoax” Ghostwatch.

His other credits as screenwriter include Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, The Guardian, directed by William Friedkin, and Octane. He also won a BAFTA Award for The Deadness of Dad, an acclaimed short film starring Rhys Ifans. His latest feature script, The Awakening, is now in production starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.

Volk’s first short-story collection, Dark Corners, featured the story “31/10”, which was nominated for both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award, and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection. More recently, he has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for his novella Vardøger. He is also a regular columnist for the British horror and dark fantasy magazine Black Static.

“The notion of ‘what happened next?’ following a classic monster movie – probably the biggest and best – was an intriguing one to me,” says the author, “and not only the initial considerations of public health issues.

“Somehow kicking this off and shadowing its development was reading somewhere that King Kong was Hitler’s favourite film. Why?

IT WAS DIFFICULT for her to function with any kind of normality. Not when her lover was lying below, crisscrossed by ropes like Gulliver, people hacking out the insides of his body like whalers from Nantucket.

She’d taken to having her first cigarette while still horizontal, sucking in her already sunken cheeks, drifting into the penumbra of being fully awake. The morning newspaper was always lying outside the door but she didn’t read it any more. Always full of stuff she didn’t want to hear. Stuff that made her feel angry and sickened. Him. Herself. The lies. The legend. The jungle. What did they know about the jungle? They hadn’t been there. None of them had.

In time the salty soreness of her tears compelled her to sit up in the cold of the hotel room, icy shoulders trembling, tiny arms frozen and white.

Doll eyes stared from the mirror. She hadn’t set foot outside for how many days now? How many weeks?

She didn’t care: the room was safe. She was untouchable there, alone with her menagerie of thoughts and memories. Sometimes she wondered if she left or was made to leave those thoughts and memories might remain, like ghosts, her misbegotten soul haunting the building while her physical body was wheeled away on a gurney, nothing left of her but a soft-focus studio publicity shot and an obit in Variety. Somehow she knew how the headline would go.

That was the Bowery girl talking. That’s what she was, after all, down to her raggedy-ass bones. And none of the glamour and pearls and platinum curls of Hollywood could cover that up for her in the end. Once a bum, always a bum.

Prohibition. Joke. There were ways. The tumbler told her it hated to be half full.

The numb, plummeting wash of it brought up an acid reflux that hauled her monstrous hangover with it, dispelling any faint illusion her head was clear. Still, she was grateful for a taste of oblivion. Oblivion was her prime concern, of late. Any other concern – eating, sleeping, dressing – fell poor second. What could you do, when the hangover felt like it would kill you? Keep drinking. Truth is, she barely even tasted it any more.

On her wrist a gift from a producer who had a taste in watching instead of doing said eleven forty-five. Hell. Not that she’d missed anything – just that so much of the goddamn day loomed ahead of her. These days she despised being awake, because being awake meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.

Twig fingers tweaked at the drapes. She knew sunlight was going to be painful on skeleton skin, but managed to let a gap of a few inches illuminate the scrunched-up sheets, the full ash trays, the dirty glasses, the scattered shoes, the half-hung clothes, the latest Paris fashion fur coat strewn on the floor – where it would lie forever if she had her way.

Last time she listened to the radio it was saying they were giving tours of him now. Taking folks on tours inside him, now. She pictured his chest cavity lit by strings of lamps like Jewel Cave in Custer, South Dakota she remembered visiting as a frightened, inexpressive, barefoot child. She knew they’d take out her insides too, if they could. The birds of prey of the Herald and Times, the graveyard worms and rats in raincoats with Underwoods where their morals should be.

And sometimes in the darkness of night and nicotine with the shakes and spiders (Giant! Huge!) it was oh so appealing sometimes to say “Here I am you sons of bitches, do with me what you will – here I am, chained, naked, shrieking – and then it’ll be over and I’ll have peace.”

But this wasn’t just about her. It was about the special thing that she and her lover had found and lost in a heartbeat, a great heartbeat like a jungle drum, and it was that they wanted to stamp all over with their dirty thoughts and bad jokes and fabrications, and she wouldn’t let them. It was too precious. Too rare. Too wonderful. Too strange. Too romantic. Too scary. She wouldn’t let them abuse it and she wouldn’t let them have it to do with as they pleased. It belonged to her. It was all she had left. That and the feeling as she slumbered that once again her lover’s giant fingers were closing warmly around her body and she was safe again. It was the one thing, the giant thing they could never, ever destroy. Not with airplanes. Not with anything.

She heard the beeping of taxi cabs from the street far below. The traffic was moving. The traffic always moved.

She wanted to open the window but she daren’t. The streets of Manhattan still ran sweet with blood. The oceanic stench of decay – a graveyard up-ended, said the radio – hung heavy in the air, and even as the lumberjacks and slaughter-men changed shifts day in, day out, nothing could be done to diminish it. It was a brave tourist indeed among the throng of sightseers from every state in the Union who wouldn’t hold their nose or cover their lower face with a handkerchief when viewing the colossal remains. This Wonder of the World. This hairy Behemoth. This Goliath slain by David.

She picked up her dressing gown embossed with the hotel’s elaborate crest and wrapped it around her shoulders. It gave her the warmth of a surrogate embrace. The bourbon – telling her, don’t be shy – gave her another.

It didn’t improve on the first. Instead made her feel sour and queasy, mingling with the disquiet she felt in her nerves and, far from acting as an anaesthetic as she prayed, made her even more anxious with the hermetic silence of the room.

Not suddenly, but with conviction, she realized the very real possibility that she’d go mad here, and be carted to the nut hatch, or end up howling at the wallpaper, or running out into Fifth Avenue, half-naked like Mrs Partigan, who lost her brain and took to going shopping on icy winter nights wearing nothing but her undies, and would be chauffeured home by Rolly Absolom, the local deputy, with admirably sanguine regularity.

That was in Marshall, Nebraska, where she grew up, cold and unhappy, raised under the jurisdiction of her Aunt Jelly after Ma’s last illness. She wished she’d seen her mother before she died – but Brice was on the scene by then and Brice and her didn’t get along, which was like saying the War in Europe was a difference of opinion. So doll-face, porcelain and pure, skipped off school (never did like it, got beat a lot) and hopped on a cattle train to New York like a hobo, but her Ma was already in the ground and Brice was damned if he’d pay the return fare, so she earned that singing on street corners and in various other manners, with a pair of goodish legs and a singing voice that got her by.

It was a tough climb and mostly she counted herself lucky if she made it to the soup kitchen every day. Hoofer. Chorus girl. Arm candy for a rich guy. Good-time Annie for the distracted and misunderstood. Wasn’t too choosy. Couldn’t afford to be. When you’ve slept on a doorstep in the pouring rain, you didn’t ask to see a resumé. If the collar was clean, or if there was a collar, the feller was plenty good enough for you. For a night, anyhow: especially if he was paying for a bed. They started saying she should be in movies, and she heard that so many times it turned out to be true. She was good at acting. Every day of her goddamn life.

Tired of her own prehistory, she sat on the side of the bed and rang down for room service. The hotel operator’s voice was chirpy and infantile, making her wonder if the girl was retarded: nobody could be that happy – unless maybe she was on the bourbon too.

She had a difficult time with the words so she stayed monosyllabic: ham, bread, eggs. The girl repeated back her order, making it sound much more coherent and said it would be twenty, twenty-five minutes.

The actress spooled through a list of requests in her mind: a life, happiness . . . but said: “No. Just that.”

Hung up, thinking, did she know? Of course she knew. They all did. Probably snickering up her sleeve right now. Calling her boyfriend, eager with the gossip. Guess who we’ve got staying? No! Guess!

The idea of food made her think of the slabs of meat being shorn off her lover’s corpse. The two-man saws at work under the same hefty spotlights the studio wheeled out for the big night at that Broadway theatre when he was shown to the public for the very first time. Before all hell broke loose. She thought of the massive steaks being packed in ice trucks and sent to the deprived, the poor, the needy. There were placards out there saying it was near as God to cannibalism, but the Hungry didn’t care. The Homeless didn’t debate. The Jobless didn’t grumble. Her lover had died and his flesh was being used to feed the poor. There was something desperately Christian in that, but wholly blasphemous at the same time.

Another glass since the phone call (pointless but effortless), she tucked her breasts inside her robe and tightened the belt with a tug. By the time she opened the door her fringe had drooped over one eye, her belt had loosened and her left tit was about to poke out and say Howdy if she hadn’t rescued it.

Focusing before her stood a kid with short blond hair, his ears razored islands on the side of his head, standing to attention like a marine. He wore the white jacket with the horizontal epaulettes that was the hotel staff uniform, and first impression was the whole guy seemed as starched as it was. Black slacks straight as ramrods. Black polished shoes at six thirty. The whole package making her feel even more sluttish and trashy.

The clockwork soldier entered with the tray. “Where would you like, please?”

“Very good, ma’am.” Clipped. She tried to pinpoint his accent. European for sure. Hungarian? She should be able to tell. Plenty of those at the studios. Fleeing the old country. Fleeing their wives, too, mostly. Now he was running out of ideas, she could tell.

He balanced it on a footstool at the bottom of the bed, uncertainly, and wiped his hands on his behind as he backed away.

She located her purse and spilled out some coins, picked up a few with her thumb and forefinger and dangled them towards him until he held out his palm. He nodded his thanks for the tip and, swear to God, a click of the heels went with it. In the mirror she’d seen his eyes on the bottle of ruin.

As his hand touched the door handle she said: “Can I interest you in an illicit beverage by any chance?”

The kid turned back, painfully polite and not a little nervous. “Thank you, but I do not drink.” Eyes anywhere but on her.

His cheeks flushed a little red, which she thought was sweet, and a curse. A display of his un-worldliness which must be a burden to carry into adulthood, poor sap. A kind of affliction.

“Come on. Live a little. You’re a long time dead. You don’t get any prize in the hereafter for being stone cold sober. Not according to the churches I go to.”

“I’m sorry. I should explain. The hotel, yes? I will be in a lot of trouble. In USA this is against the law.”

“Oh, get the lead pipe out of your ass and enjoy yourself, kid. What’s the worst that can happen? Nobody’ll know. I won’t tell. Promise.” She put on a Shirley Temple voice: “Cwoss my heart and hope to die.” She genuflected and he noticed her fingernails made little white lines in her skin as they brushed it just above the bra-line of her nightgown. Her skin seemed soft and still had the sheen of sleep. He looked away.

Turning from him she filled her glass, then turned back to him and drank from it as if demonstrating the procedure.

He looked at the coins in his hand and put them deep in the pocket of his slacks and didn’t leave. She thought he was holding his breath, and maybe he was.

She sat on the unmade bed and crossed her legs, positioning the glass on her knee. The hem of her nightdress rode up her bare, shaved calf.

“Ditto.” She smiled to put him at his ease. “You’re doing fine.” She wanted him to smile back and he did. “Where you from?”

“Bavaria. Munchen. Munich.” He pronounced it moon-itch, like something you’d scratch. “In the south. Close to the mountains.”

Aged about eighteen, she guessed, he had a good ten, twelve years on her. She liked that. She liked the young. There was something optimistic about them. They didn’t know what was to come.

He laughed uneasily. “You are a very nice lady, but I don’t want to lose my job.”

“You won’t lose your job. I’m a guest. You’re attending to the requirements of a guest. You won’t lose your job. Sit down. Relax. Oh please fucking relax, Peter.”

Her language shocked him. That wasn’t the way women spoke. Not what he was used to. It was another thing that surprised him about America. It made him feel a little sickened and a little excited at the same time.

He could see what was attractive about her. Even now, here, in this state, like some bedraggled bird with a broken wing she had some quality. Downstairs he had wondered if he would be able to tell that by meeting her, and he could, in an instant. It was true what they said, when they called them stars because they shone.

“Oh, surprise me.” The arm that propped her up slid down the bed. “I haven’t had human contact in seven days. I’m adrift. I’m shipwrecked. Do you know what shipwrecked means?”

Baby was an American expression. He told himself she didn’t mean anything by it. It was a term made by a boyfriend to a girlfriend in this country. It was strange, but it was okay.

“That’s not what I mean.” She flicked ash on to the carpet. “I mean trees with coconuts on. Big green leaves as big as this carpet. Beaches where no white man has ever trod. You get the idea? Tribes with plumes in their hair and bones through their noses who live in fear of their god. Who sacrifice humans to him with the beating of dinosaur-skin drums.” She sipped her poison, her eyes not leaving him the whole time. “That kind of island.”

The kid didn’t know how to answer. Instead he looked around the room – away from her – as if taking it in for the first time, or pretending to.

“Sit down for Christ sakes, Peter. I want company, that’s all. I’m not going to eat you.” For some reason she laughed. For some reason this tickled her and she said it again while she was still laughing like a mule: “I’m not going to eat you!”

He smiled so that she didn’t laugh alone, but he didn’t know what was so funny. He looked at her where she lay. Her flat stomach under the silk night gown shook with mirth until she felt foolish and ceased. He was still looking down at her in silence and she let him.

The room was dark. Sirens broke the air like wild beasts in the distance. It made them both remember where they were, and why.

“Don’t do that. People can see in. I don’t want them to see in. Talk to me.” She bent her elbow to prop up her head. Moved the glass to rest on the pinnacle of her hip bone. “Talk to me.”

She cocked her head to where the light was trying to get in. “Tell me what’s happening outside.”

She took a mouthful of liquor and swallowed: “What’s happening to my lover.”

She blinked her eyes once, dreamily. He wasn’t sure if it was the drink. She looked very sad and alone; he couldn’t remember ever seeing someone looking so sad and alone. Her eyes hid back in their sockets like his grandmother’s eyes.

Her breasts were tiny, like a girl’s, and the space created by the fall of the night gown was too big for them.

Afraid to go closer – touch her, break her – he leaned back against the wall as if, if he pressed hard enough, he might escape – but did he want to escape? A pencil-line of sunlight from behind the drapes cast down his cheekbone, his throat muscle, one bicep, one golden button. The rest was in shadow.

“The traffic is flowing again,” he began tentatively. “People are returning to work. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a speech yesterday that this great city might be bloodied but was most certainly unbowed.”

He raised a fist but she didn’t look at him and he wasn’t sure she was listening as he spoke, but he spoke anyway, as he’d been bidden, hiding the fist again self-consciously behind his back.

“They are writing names on the walls of buildings. The relatives. Parents. Husbands. Wives. Writing the names of their loved ones. The ones who died in the slaughter.” He saw her flinch a little at the word, and kept his voice low. “There were many, I think. Over seventy on the subway train alone. Many, they say in the bulletins, are missing. Still – what are the words? – unaccounted for. The parents and wives and sons sleep on the streets now, asking anybody passing for information. For hope, I guess. Or peace, when the bodies are found. It is a funny word – peace.” For a moment he was lost for something to add. He looked at her face as if it might offer him a hint, but it didn’t. “The rubble from the destroyed buildings has not all been removed. The trucks come and go through the night but they are hills that do not seem to get smaller. It is a huge job of course. The public services work like crazy around the clock to make stable the buildings they think might collapse and cause more destruction. Oh and dust. Yes. Dust still hangs in the air out there. It doesn’t go away. It clings to your clothes. You go outside in a black suit and in five minutes it is white. Even funerals look like they have been sprinkled with icing sugar. Figures from a candy shop. It’s not right.”

“Meanwhile the giant . . . he pays the price. The authorities, they are cutting and peeling off the skin from his arms in long strips, and rolling it up like carpet, taking it away to turn into leather – so the rumour goes – for use as upholstering in government limousines. I don’t know if you should believe the rumours.”

“There is a beggar,” he said, filling the silence. “A bearded old Ashkenazer who sells souvenirs outside Macy’s. You know the wind-up monkeys who play . . . clish! clish!” Not knowing the word in English, he mimed clapping his hands.

He nodded. “He has taken the – clish-clish off them, so they look like little replicas of the monster opening and closing his arms. But if you look closely you can see the little holes in the middle of their hands. I talked to him about the attack. He just shook his head and said it’s biblical. ‘It’s biblical,’ he kept saying.”

A memory returned to him and he recounted it quickly and with enthusiasm. “Yesterday when I walked past the scene I saw gang of children bouncing a basketball to each other then tossing it high in the air, trying to get it to land in the dead beast’s nostril. Younger kids, on a dare, were plucking out the monster’s hair – it took quite a tug, I could see! – and flicking them at each other like bullwhips.” He chuckled.

The actress said nothing and hardly moved. But she wasn’t chuckling, he could tell that. His heart tightened in his chest.

She looked up. “Do I look like the photographs?” Aware of her appearance, she swiftly added: “Don’t answer that question.”

He laughed, shook his head in disbelief. “I am in the same room as the woman who was held in the hand of a damn monkey.”

He could see the curve of her thighs so clearly it was as if she was naked. He wanted to feel the silk and feel her skin. If it was cold he wanted to warm it for her. If she was cold all over he could hold her to his body. He was not cold.

“Greek Scottish on my father’s side,” she said. “Norwegian English on my mother’s. Coat of many colours.”

“Bella – she’s a Pole who works downstairs washing dishes. She went with her sister and brother-in-law to see it. She was very excited. They all were. Hopping up and down like they were going to a Broadway show. Wrapped up in their scarves. She thought it would be somehow frightening, like a fairyground ride.”

“She said it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all.” Eyes downcast, he looked unsure whether to continue. “When she came back she was real quiet. Just put her frozen hands in water and got to work. Later I asked her what happened and she said the head of it was as high as two tram cars on top of each other. Huge. As big as a house. You could live in it, she said.”

Don’t give them ideas, the actress thought, blowing cigarette smoke then waving it gently from her face.

“They looked up and they saw something catching the light. They couldn’t work out what it was. Big. Glassy. Round. Then they realized. It was a tear. Frozen. Turned to ice on the creature’s cheek. Big as a glitterball in a dance hall, they said. Like I say, they weren’t laughing. They came back, like I say, real quiet.” He shrugged. “Then the kitchen got busy. A hundred covers. We didn’t have time to think about it after that. I don’t know.”

He sighed. “Captain O’Rourke and his men, the pilots of the biplanes, had dinner at the White House.” He heard her make a little snort of disdain. “Well, they are heroes, no? They risk their lives for the sake of the Motherland.”

Shivering, she picked up the fur coat from the carpet and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Then you don’t understand,” she said without any note of accusation, hardly louder than a whisper.

Her throat was dry and needy. She struck a match and the lit cigarette dangled from her pale, dry lips, its tip bobbing as she spoke. “Tell me about you. You have a family?”

She laughed into a cough. “Once upon a time. This room sure is dark.” (She wanted to ask him: Was I pretty before I was famous?) “Do you have a girl, Peter?”

“That’s not what I mean. Sit next to me. You’re a long way away. I can’t see you over there in the gloom.”

When he did, she patted the mattress next to her for him to move closer. Then did it again for him to move closer still. She placed her hand on his thigh and saw him shudder.

He didn’t say no, so she held up the bottle of bourbon and pressed it against his lips. She tilted it up like it was a baby’s bottle. Without moving his body he took a mouthful and swallowed, and when the bottle was taken away, with a sucking noise, he gulped air.

“That’s it, now. You’ll lose your job. They’ll smell it on your breath. You’ve broken the rules, chum.”

“I don’t care,” he said, tugging the bottle from her and swigging from it a second time, longer and deeper. She was astonished, and had to take it – snatch it – from him before he demolished the whole bottle. Greedy little—

“What’s it for, eh? Booze?” She stared at the label. It swam. “Just a way to get back to the animal: that’s all, when you think about it. Look at us. Human fucking beings. We’ve got hundreds, thousands of years of fucking civilization. We’ve got intelligence and progress coming out of our ears. We’ve got motor cars and fashion and society and welfare and adding-up machines and rotivators. And what do we need? When a man and woman get together we need something to evaporate all that. To get us back to the jungle. To wipe out history, to tear up books and wisdom, shed William Shakespeare, Homer, Jesus Christ and Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln, Greta Garbo, Thomas Edison. To be what we were. Are. Animals.” She rose to unsteady feet in the middle of the swamp of sheets and pillows. “What’s a bed if it’s not an island in the room? The island where we return to the past, the scary past, the exciting past, where we live or die on our instinct, on the blood pumping in our veins; not the whim of some bank manager or casting agent. We’re at the mercy of the beasts that can eat us or save us or take us or raise us up to the – shit, the heavens!” The bed undulated under her.

“And you don’t drink enough. You better catch up. I’m waaay ahead of you.”

She did. On her back, legs up from under her. Landed flat, breathless, next to him. Her hair dancing as the bed springs whined like an orchestra tuning up. He leaned over and plucked each strand of hair from her face individually, an archaeologist carefully revealing a piece of precious treasure.

He placed his hand on her belly and let the warmth spread out from him into her body.

She didn’t move, kept staring at the ceiling. She’d had plenty of men touch her before. Boy, and how. Hock Sinnerd who took her to the creek and read to her from the Book of Genesis and told her if she held it a while it would get bigger and guess what? It did. Three guys from Winslow who told her how come babies got cooked up, and illustrated, one of them with a hoard of pimples on his neck jumping out at her like frogs. The sweat and beer-breath of a married guy named Ivan Ives: he quoted from the Bible too, as he hitched up his forty-four-inch pants, as if to convince himself of the fact. Grass stains on your summer dress, carpet burns and hickeys: such a catalogue. The infections and insertions. All kinds, all ways, pleading, threatening, all wanting it then wanting you gone just as fast. Life as a receptacle. That’s the way you know it’s going to be. Learn pretty fast in this world.

She thought: That wasn’t love. Not the love he gave me. How could you compare?

He who owned all he surveyed. Who knew no other of his kind. Who stood alone, Lord of Creation, as far as the eye could see. He saved me from monsters. Took me in his hairy hand and wouldn’t let go. Wouldn’t let the demons get me, even when they buzzed him and stuck him with their beaks and claws and drew blood. Carried me through the vitriolic swamp like a cannonball – miasma smell making me heady and giddy as a child taking their first sip of champagne. He never let me fall. Held me up to his face, that big dark wall, carnage breath wrapping me like a gift, eyes black tunnels with a freight train coming. Swatted a pterodactyl. Picked my clothes off one by one. Peeled me like a grape. Examined me under the Hollywood chiffon naked and white to see me as I really was. Rolled me to and fro so he could look me over back and front. Blew at my hair. Gazed at me in wonder. Took me to his home in the clouds.

And it wasn’t about sex for once because sex was impossible. And that made her so, so safe. And so, so happy then, in a lost world, far away, but found.

She said: “I was dreaming of him when his hand came through the window of my apartment. Shards of glass rained down over my bed and he hauled me out into the night sky. I thought I was still dreaming because I was floating. I could hear the wailing traffic a million miles below and the police cars whining and the thunder of his growl getting louder in his chest as he climbed and climbed—” She stopped. “. . . Do you want to hear this?”

She said: “I can still smell his hand, like a big black leather couch, the smell of a hothouse, of the Bronx Zoo, of a Mississippi swamp, of alligator gumbo, of nuts and palm trees and oil and dates and the blood of unsuspecting prey. And if I close my eyes I can see my own reflection right now, frightened and amazed, pinned there in his big brown eyes.”

Her own unblinking eyes became baubles of tears. Lost again. From the lost land to lost love: her perilous journey, and now ashore where the rivers were brake lights and the cliffs were Wall Street, and the toucan-calls were Extra, Extra.

“He was a wonderful thing. He was a god,” she said. “I couldn’t escape then and I can’t escape now. Because he died for me. I know he did. He placed me down in a place of safety so that I wouldn’t get killed when they came in that last figure of eight.” She shuddered and hugged the fur tighter around her. “He knew what he was doing. He died for love. And nothing can ever be the same, because that day, when the stream of bullets from the airplanes tore into his skin, I died inside too.”

The kid touched her shoulder. She sat up briskly and unexpectedly and threw her arms around him and held him tight. At first he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he wrapped them around her. He could feel her ribs, her shoulder-bones. He could feel her heart beating, like a frightened bird’s you’d pick up in your hand, a damaged thing you’d want to save.

His fingers sank into her, shocking her. He held her by the shoulders and pressed his lips on to hers, into hers, forcing her head back sharply and mouth open and his mouth over it, hard. Sucking the breath out of her he twisted her and pushed her down on to her back on the bed. She was weak and frail and it didn’t take a fraction of his strength to overpower her. Was he overpowering her? No, because she wasn’t resisting in the least. She simply lay there before him, her cage of a chest rising and falling quickly through the shimmering silk of the night gown to catch her breath, eyes flickering like a doe deer brought down by a predator. Startled, afraid – but the kind of fear, he thought, that meant excitement and desire and longing and lust and not Stop, not No. If she meant No she would say No.

He knelt across her, Colossus – (or so he thought. Men!) – taking her hand and putting it on his full erection coiled and pressing against the cloth of his slacks. She didn’t like to take it away and hurt his feelings. Without a sound he furiously unbuttoned his jacket from the bottom to the top. In the dark the golden orbs popped and flew. She watched the vest come up off over his head and saw that his emaciated chest had hardly any hair on it. Saw the smoothness, the pinkness of him. All she could think was, he shone. Then his pants were down and her nightdress slid up in almost the same moment, as his weight dropped down on her. His back made a bridge and he wriggled his hips till the tip of his thing breached her and went deep so fast she uttered a cry and dug her fingernails into his cold, doughy flesh – not an expression of pleasure, but she’d learned that the male of the species liked this kind of thing. Her knees dropped aside. Memories tumbled on her in a barrage of the past; a wall crumbling on top of her she couldn’t stop. He gripped her face and pushed it back into the sheets, smothering her with fingers and thumbs as she struggled to gulp air down her throat. She grunted and sobbed – another requirement, thinking Why? What? How? And he was stabbing into her: a noble act, a heroic act, he thought – a Redemption, a Resurrection, yes – ja, jawohl. It was time she entered the world of the living again, and he was the man to do it. (Do it! Do it!) She would thank him. She would worship him. He’d be a God. And she’d be renewed and whole again and perfect and pretty and famous and fucked. And just as she was thinking, Oh God, I wonder if it’s possible to enjoy this, and not the pounding sweat of it, the grunting bourbon breath of it, the slow, numbing death of it, the disgust of it – it was over.

And he felt the heat of fame washing over him, like reporter’s flashbulbs going off, like Valentino’s smile, like a tuxedo on fire.

And she only felt the weight of him, the dead weight of him. And not that she didn’t want it, but not that she did. And the Grand Canyon like someone had hollowed her out with a big spoon. And the Grand Canyon being full of trash, which was where she belonged, said Poppa, because that was what she was, and that’s what she would always be – you hear me?

He slid his penis out of her, thinking that behind her closed eyes and smiling lips she’d rediscovered love.

But she was thinking of the ape’s tree-trunk finger pressing against her belly atop the Empire State Building, his ebony fingernail a tarnished mirror. His caress so gentle for a big guy.

They want the Story, she thought. Well you know what the Story is? The Story is: no man has ever come close to how I felt with him. On that mountain top, on that skyscraper, with him at my side, towering so high, roaring as they came out of the sun.

Then she remembered the blood in her lover’s fur, cloying, clammy, clotted. How he swayed from side to side in startled puzzlement. Ageless. A Sequoia hacked down. A century collapsing, a world destroyed, a country eradicated. How she wanted to communicate, but could not. How she wanted to forgive him, but could not. Save him, but could not. How she wanted to be scared but fear was gone. His majesty. His Highness. His – gone.

She turned over and saw the German boy’s head against the pillow and thought of the giant’s head against the pillow of the sidewalk below, at the same angle, eyes non-focused in death.

He smiled and lit one of her cigarettes and sat up – you could easily count his vertebrae – and stretched over to pick up his vest and hotel staff jacket, and dressed with his bare back to her as

Her insides congealed. There was something inside-out about the feeling. The nausea of stepping off a carousel, which was supposed to be an enjoyable experience but wasn’t – and yet the relief of being off. She didn’t want to think about it.

He handed her his cigarette and lit another for himself. She considered the action unbearably familiar and unbearably arrogant. She wanted to cry again.

He stood up, his shadowy cock, now shrunken and unattentive, dangling under the rim of his white jacket, and peeked behind the drapes at the afternoon sunlight. “Damn monkey.” He chuckled as he buttoned up his collar. “We socked him good, huh?”

He got on to the bed on all fours and kissed her with puckered lips, which she endured. His grin was horribly self-congratulatory and she wondered how much of this had been his purpose: to screw the actress in 7205? Perhaps he had announced it to the others as he picked up her tray. Perhaps he’d brag about it tonight in a bar. He had not been violent and hadn’t hurt her, even, as others had done – that was exactly it: she felt nothing. Nothing at all. There was a gaping hole inside her where he’d been and it was as if it hadn’t happened at all, and she knew with great clarity that was the way it would always be from now on.

She sat up in bed with her breasts and knees covered. “I hope you don’t lose your job.”

He was a different person now, as they always were. And it was never a surprise to her, but it always hurt.

“You know what they call me in the kitchen? Sauerkraut. This was supposed to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, of democracy and opportunity. I came expecting bright, clean Americans like bright clean American automobiles, not sweaty Turks tweaking my ass and blowing me kisses and Italians barking and cursing at me, sticking my hand into boiling water for dropping a plate, a Jew begrudgingly giving me my stinking wages at the end of the week. I expected New York to be like an elevator, going up, always up, like the tall buildings, taller, higher, always higher. A place of money, a place of glamour and power and gasoline. Not foreigners and perverts.”

He held his stomach in, puffing his hairless chest as he pulled on his slacks. “My father sent me here to learn the hotel trade. One year, he said; you will learn more than in any university. He owns three of the biggest hotels in Munich, one in Frankfurt, two in Berlin.”

He tucked in his genitals. “I always thought the United States would be great, but it is not so great. I expected a strong country, but it is not strong. It is weak. A cripple, like your President. You have no work – no good work. Thirteen million unemployed. Almost every bank is closed. People are losing their farms, homes, businesses. You have no money, no hope . . .”

He snorted. “Which is what? Nothing but a sign of decadence.” Threading his belt buckle, tugging it to the right hole and poking the pin through. “I have read the history books. This is the way empires fall. Look around you from your high buildings and what do you see? The poor rewarded for doing nothing, immigrants like me given opportunities while patriotic Americans struggle. Your country is sick and your men are standing by watching it happen. They are not fighting for what they value. They are not fighting for the future. They do not have a leader powerful enough to make things change.”

The actress held her cigarette vertically with her fingertips and blew on it so that the tip glowed red.

“I’m going back home. Not to Munich. To Potsdam,” he said. “I have an uncle there, an industrialist. I know there is always a job there open for me.” He waited for a reaction from her but all he saw was a long glowing red puff on her cigarette. The blue smoke hung flatly in the air between them. He crushed his own cigarette out on the plate of cold, untouched food.

“Come with me. A new life. A good life.” he said. “America – it is a place for dreams. But for some dreams you have to return to Germany.”

As the jungle drums began pounding in her heart, she imagined marrying this man. She could, so very easily. After all he thought she was a star. He knew she was a star. You could see it in his eyes. He wanted that radiance of fame, of anecdote, of fable, to fall on him. He wanted to be larger than life too. He wanted to have her on his arm, to show her off to bosses and officers and leaders. Own her forever and have her obey his orders. She could see herself making home with him in some little cuckoo-clock house with deer buck heads on the wall, with parties hunting boar or gnawing chicken legs and swilling beer. Or a trophy wife in Los Angeles. She a star – the parts would come knocking (“No jungle pictures!”) – him a screenwriter, or producer, or both. Kids, several. Nannies, English. Stern, but not too stern. He’d slap her occasionally, but only when she’d deserve it. He’d have affairs, but then so would she. He’d find some younger, prettier version. So would she. The divorce would be expensive. She’d get the children and dogs. He’d get fat, bitter and twisted, not necessarily in that order.

He gave a broad grin exposing his white, so-perfect teeth. The parenthesis grin of a football player with a chiselled jaw. So American.

Everyone wants to love you, said Poppa, on the boat, during the voyage to the island. And you know what? Let them.

When the kid had gone and the door was closed and she was alone again in the room she imagined her lover’s gigantic skull, polished and white in the lobby of the Smithsonian, surrounded by a party of eager schoolchildren, any one of them smaller than his pointed teeth. The skeletons of dinosaurs keeping a respectful distance. The stare of aeons in the space where his beautiful eyes used to be.

She got out of bed and took a sheet of hotel notepaper from the drawer. Sitting with her reflection in front of her – who was that woman with ribs in her chest you could count? Pale, gaunt, frightening: why would anyone make love to that? – she changed her mind and rummaged in her purse. She spiralled out her lipstick and wrote on the mirror:

Thanking him for making it clear. Even if he wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. Could anyone? Then she signed her name. Her autograph. Maybe it would be worth something one day.

She had to hurry now. It would only take so long for the elevator to descend and return.

Light flooded the room like a bomb blast so bright she had to cover her eyes. When she opened them again, blinking, her surroundings took on a different aspect, washed with colour anew. It seemed she was in a different hemisphere now. A different latitude. The world up-ended, transformed, and rare. And she felt no longer weak and fragile and worthless: she felt strong and excited and loved.

She knelt, then stood. Bare feet. Bare legs. Goosebumps. White skin. (The kid with the whitest skin in school – so poor she couldn’t afford shoes.) Silk dressing gown (silk – how she’d moved up in the world) clinging, a goldy sheen over the dark nipples and black vee of her gender – invisible.

As it had to be – falling like he fell. Seventy floors, sixty, fifty – then the numbers floated away, irrelevant like everything else. Wind raked through her frizzled hair, an ice-blonde blur as she dropped, pinioned by her plummeting. All her senses peeled away to reveal a peculiar kind of freedom, a strange kind of pleasure that life would not be there to torment her very much longer, and that was fine, that was okay. A euphoric surge enraptured her: Thank God for that, and she prepared to enjoy her last few seconds on this earth, unencumbered by the future. And all she could think of was the smallness of it all. And the air rushing past. And that his mighty hand might catch her, even now. And his mighty roar might yet echo in the canyon of the skyscrapers with the mighty beating of his chest. And he would save her. And they would be together on the mountaintop. Because it wasn’t like the papers said, oh no. It wasn’t “Beauty killed the Beast.” It was Romeo and Juliet. Of course it was. And that was how all great love stories ended, didn’t they? . . . Like this.

What is the ape to Man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And Man shall be just that for the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. Once you were apes, and even now, too, Man is more ape than any ape . . . Behold, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the Earth. Let your will say: the Superman shall be the meaning of the Earth!

– Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra