Free Fortnight of Fear by Graham Masterton Page B

“Will you just get the hell out and let me change!”
    â€œI want to know where you’ve been!” I demanded.
    Without hesitation, she slammed the bedroom door in my face, and when I tried to catch the handle, she turned the key.
    â€œJill!” I shouted. “Jill! What the hell is going on?”
    She didn’t answer. I stood outside the bedroom door for a while, wondering what had upset her so much; thenI went back to the kitchen and reluctantly started to cook dinner.
    â€œDon’t do any for me!” she called out, as I started to chop up the onions.
    â€œDid you eat already?” I asked her, with the knife poised in my hand.
    â€œI said, don’t do any for me, that’s all!”
    â€œBut you have to eat!”
    She wrenched open the bedroom door. Her hair was combed back, and she was wrapped in her toweling bathrobe. “What are you, my mother or something?” she snapped at me. Then she slammed the door shut again.
    I stabbed the knife into the butcher-block and untied my apron. I was angry now. “Listen!” I shouted. “I bought the wine, and the swordfish, and everything! And you come home two hours late and all you can do is yell at me!”
    She opened up the bedroom door again. “I went to Mr Willey’s, that’s all. Now, are you satisfied?”
    â€œSo you went to Willey’s place? And what were you supposed to be doing at Willey’s place? Collecting your books, if my memory serves me. So where are they, these precious books? Did you leave them in the cab?”
    Jill stared at me and there was an expression in her eyes that I had never seen before. Pale, cold, yet almost
shocked
, as if she had been involved in an accident, and her mind was still numb.
    â€œJill…” I said, more softly this time, and took two or three steps towards her.
    â€œNo,” she whispered. “Not now. I want to be alone for just a while.”
    I waited until eleven o’clock, occasionally tapping at the bedroom door, but she refused to answer. I just didn’t know what the hell to do. Yesterday had been idyllic; today had turned into some kind of knotty, nasty conundrum. I put on my raincoat and shouted through thebedroom door that I was going down to the Bells of Hell for a drink. Still she didn’t answer.
    My friend Norman said that women weren’t humans at all, but a race of aliens who had been landed on earth to keep humans company.
    â€œImagine it,” he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing out smoke. “If you had never seen a woman before tonight, and you walked out of here and a woman was standing there … wearing a dress, with blonde hair, and red lipstick, and high-heel shoes … and you had never seen a woman before – then,
then
, my friend, you would understand that you had just made a close encounter of the worst kind.”
    I finished up my vodka, and dropped a twenty on the counter. “Keep the cha-a-ange, my man,” I told the barkeep, with a magnanimous W.C. Fieldsian wave of my hand.
    â€œSir, there is no change. That’ll be three dollars and seventy-five cents more.”
    â€œThat’s inflation for you,” Norman remarked, with a phlegmy cough. “Even oblivion is pricing itself out of the market.”
    I left the bar and walked back up to 17th Street. It was unexpectedly cool for July. My footsteps echoed like the footsteps of some lonely man in some 1960s spy movie. I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drunk, either. I wasn’t very much looking forward to returning home.
    When I let myself in, the loft was in darkness. Jill had unlocked the bedroom door, but when I eased it open, and looked inside, she was asleep. She had her back to me, and the quilt drawn up to her shoulders, but even in the darkness I could see that she was wearing her pajamas. Pajamas meant we’re not talking, stay away.
    I went into the kitchen and poured myself the dregs from