Free Feelings of Fear by Graham Masterton

of blood down Maria’s left cheek. Then he cut her again, right across the bridge of the nose, so that her bone was laid bare. She moaned and tried to lift her arms in self-defense, but Hoete pulled my hand from side to side, slicing her forearms, slicing her fingers, cutting her shoulders through to the fat. The razor blade quilted the flesh on her face. It turned her lips into bloody ribbons and split open one eye.
    I struggled widly, but Hoete had me in his grip like a marionette. He made me slice her breasts and cut into her stomach. He scored her thighs like joints of white pork. There was blood spraying everywhere, a maelstrom of blood, and it was dripping from both of our faces, as if we were out in the rain somewhere, dancing some intimate and terrible waltz.
    Hoete suddenly stopped. It was obvious that Maria wasn’t dead, but it was equally obvious that she would be facing years and years of surgery, and that she would never be the same striking woman that Jan had showed me in the photograph.
    Hoete released his hold on me and I dropped the razor on to the carpet. I was surprised to find that the television was still on, its screen spattered with drops of brownish blood. The news anchorman was talking quite normally, as if he didn’t know what had happened. I can’t understand why Jan should say that he never talked to me about anybody called Martin Hoete. If you ask me, he’s just trying to cover up for him. Well, yes, I know that Hoete was imaginary. That makes Jan’s explanation even more insane, doesn’t it? I mean you’ve considered the possibility that Jan and Hoete were one and the same person? That it was Jan who attacked Maria that night?
    Did you talk to the maitre-d’ at ’t Spreeuwke? He remembers us together, yes? And he remembers that Jan ordered three beers andthree starters and three entrées? He said that
I
wanted them? Why should I have wanted them? Jan ordered them for Hoete.
    I can tell you something categorically. I have never been married and I certainly don’t know where you found these divorce papers. Anybody can forge anything on computers these days. I came to Antwerp on my own and if a woman called Maria Scott happened to be sitting on the same plane, what does that prove? Scott isn’t exactly an unusual name, after all.
    It was Hoete who was married to Maria and I can understand why he was so angry with her. He turns his back for five minutes and she’s off with some smooth character with a Mercedes and an apartment right in the center of town. And then she squeezed him for money. The sheer naked greed of it. If you ask me she deserved what she got. If you ask me she can count herself lucky that she wasn’t killed.
    My advice to you is, look for Martin Hoete. H-O-E-T-E, pronounced “Hurt Her”. So he’s imaginary, that didn’t stop him cutting her up, did it? Nobody is often the most dangerous person there is, that’s what Jan said, and he should know.
    So, can I go now?

Heroine
    H e propped his bicycle up against the side of The Dog & Duck and went inside. The old oak-beamed pub was hot and noisy, and much more crowded than usual. Bombing operations had been stopped for two weeks to allow the aircrews to rest and the riggers to repair all of the damaged aircraft. Through the haze of cigarette-smoke, he could see McClung, his ball-turret gunner, and Marinetti, his navigator, playing darts on the other side of the bar, and one of his waist gunners getting intense with a ruddy-faced girl from Bassingbourn village.
    He elbowed his way to the bar. As he did so, he jogged the arm of a girl in a rusty-colored tweed suit, and spilled her cider.
    â€œHey, watch it!” she said, turning around.
    He held up both hands in surrender. “I’m sorry, that was clumsy of me. Let me buy you another.”
    â€œOh, don’t worry,” she said, in her clipped BBC accent, brushing down her lapels with her