Stone Mattress (24 page)

Once Violet was out of the room, the Hand rummaged through her writing desk. It discovered her distinctive pink notepaper, embossed with her initials. Then, with her own silver fountain pen, it wrote a note, using the handwriting of the departed William, which needless to say it remembered.

I will love you forever, my darling Violet. Even after death. Yours everlastingly, William
.

It placed this note on Violet’s pillow along with a red rose it had plucked from the bouquet on her dressing table. The bouquet was fresh, since Alf of the Alfa Romeo sent her a dozen red roses every day.

Then the Hand scurried into Violet’s closet and hid in a shoebox to await developments. The shoes in that box were the very same audacious red high heels Violet had been wearing while heartlessly spurning William, and the symbolism was not lost on the Hand. It ran its dried-up, long-nailed fingers over the red shoes in a manner both gloating and fetishistic. (This scene has come in for much analysis in the academic articles – largely French, but also Spanish – that have treated the film – the original, not the remake, which is dismissed with scorn by European cinéastes – as a late example of Puritanical American Neo-surrealism. Jack could give a fuck about that:
he’d just wanted a dead hand getting it off with a pair of hot shoes. Though he’s willing to admit it might amount to the same thing.)

The Hand waited for hours in the shoebox. It did not mind waiting: it had nothing else that it wanted to do. In the film (the original, not the remake), it occasionally drummed its fingers, indicating its impatience, but this was an afterthought, added at the request of the director – Stanislaus Ludz, an odd duck who thought of himself as a sort of Mozart of horror, and who later jumped off a tugboat – in the belief that watching a hand in a box doing nothing was not suspenseful.

In both of the films, the action cut back and forth between the Hand in the shoebox and Violet and Alf in a nightclub, dancing cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh, with Alf fingering Violet’s jewel-bestrewn neck in a possessive way while whispering, “Soon you’ll be mine.” Jack hadn’t written the nightclub scene in the book, but he would have if he’d thought of it; and he did think of it when he was writing the screenplay – both screenplays – so it was almost the same thing.

After enough of this dancing, fingering, and waiting in a box, Violet returned to her room, having swilled down several glasses of champagne with close-ups of her neck swallowing, and threw herself into bed without even a glance at the Hand’s carefully composed love note and the rose on her pillow. She had two pillows, and the note and the rose were on the other one, which is why she neither saw the note nor got stuck with rose thorns.

What emotions was the Hand feeling, now that it had been overlooked once more? Sorrow or anger, or some of each? Hard to tell with a hand.

Stealthily it sidled out of the closet and made its way up via the carelessly flung bedspread to Violet in her lacework nightie as she lay in dishevelled slumber. Was it going to strangle her?
Its gruesome fingers hesitated above her neck – screams from the film audiences here – but no, it still loved her. It began to stroke her hair, tenderly, longingly, lingeringly; then, unable to restrain itself, it stroked her cheek.

This wakened Violet, who, in the shadowy but moonlit room, found something like a huge five-legged spider on her pillow. More screams, this time from Violet. The startled Hand made itself scarce, so by the time that Violet, gibbering with fright, managed to turn on the bedside lamp, it was cowering under the bed and thus nowhere in sight.

In tears, Violet phoned Alf and babbled incoherently, as a girl does under such circumstances, and Alf manfully soothed her by telling her she must have been having a nightmare. Comforted, she hung up and prepared to switch off the light; but then, what should catch her eye but the rose, and then the note, written in William’s unmistakable and once beloved handwriting?

Wide eyes. Terrified gasp. This could not be happening! Not daring to remain in the room long enough to phone Alf again, Violet locked herself in the bathroom, where she spent a restless night huddled in the tub, covered inadequately with towels. (In the book she had some torturing memories of William, but it was decided not to show these in either of the films, so their place was taken by an episode of anguished finger-biting and stifled sobbing.)

In the morning, Violet cautiously emerged into a room flooded with cheerful sunlight. No pink note was to be seen, the Hand having done away with it. The rose was residing once more in its accustomed vase.

Deep breath. Sigh of relief. Only a nightmare, after all. Nonetheless Violet was spooked, and cast several nervous backward glances as she and her expensively sheath-skirted haunches prepared to go off for lunch with Alf.

Now the Hand busied itself once more. It riffled through Violet’s diary and practised copying her writing. It stole several more sheets of her pink notepaper, and penned a torrid and obscene love letter to another man, proposing yet one more pre-marriage tryst at their usual meeting place, a seedy hooker-frequented motel on the outskirts of town right beside a wholesale carpet outlet. “Darling, I know it’s a risk, but I can’t stay away,” it said. It made disparaging remarks about Alf and his inadequate lovemaking, with particular reference to the size of his dick. The note concluded by anticipating the delights in store once rich Alf had been married to Violet and then disposed of. A little antimony in his martini should do the trick, said the note, before ending with a paragraph of hot-blooded longing for the moment when the invented lover’s electric eel would slide once more into Violet’s moist and palpitating nest of seaweed.

(You couldn’t use such euphemisms now, you’d have to name the names; but there was a limit in those days as to which unprintable words you could actually print. Jack regrets the lifting of those old taboos: they spurred inventive metaphors. With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring. Is he becoming a fogey? No: objectively speaking, it is boring.)

The pretend lover was called Roland. There was a real Roland, who had been an earlier admirer of Violet’s, though an unsuccessful one. Violet had preferred handsome William to him, and no wonder, because Roland was not only a yawn-making economist, but a mean-minded, shrivel-souled, corkscrew-hearted prick, sort of like Rod with his greenish-brown notebook. He was a dork, a dink, a dong …

This sounded too musical, so Jack scratched it out. Then he went into a caffeine-induced reverie: why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own
dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth. He should brush up this thesis and haul it out for display purposes at the next house party when the intellectual sparring got too irksome.

That way procrastination lay. Jack had pages to type before he slept. He had blood to spill.

“I brought you some soup,” said Irena, who’d come silently up the stairs to Jack’s crow’s-nest. She slid a plate and bowl onto the bridge table Jack was using as a writing desk. The soup was mushroom, and there were crackers.

“Thanks,” Jack said. This was more like it in the nurturing department. He thought about making a grab for Irena’s be-aproned torso, overcoming her with impetuous and urgent élan vital, and pinning her to the floor, where she would swoon in surrender. But now was not the time: Roland needed to be massacred, Alf destroyed, Violet terrified out of her wits. First things first.

Over the next few days, Jack had to go back in the manuscript and insert Roland towards the beginning, now that he was needed for the plot. When asked for some scissors and Scotch tape, Irena briskly supplied them: anything that showed the novel project was moving forward was prompting new displays of helpfulness in her.

The Hand tucked its deceptive missive to Roland in among Violet’s frothy underthings. Then it printed an anonymous message on another sheet of pink notepaper –
Alf, you’re a fool. She’s two-timing you, look in the frillies, second bureau drawer
– after which it scampered down the ivy-clad wall and across town to Alf’s luxury penthouse pad, where it climbed the elevator shaft to the rooftop, holding the anonymous letter between pinky
and ring finger. It slid the accusing note under the door, then capered back to Violet’s house and concealed itself in a potted philodendron.

Violet returned from lunch and – a deft touch here, thought Jack – was trying on her wedding dress with the aid of a pudgy, sycophantic, comic-relief dressmaker when red-faced Alf stormed in, hurled wild accusations, and began flinging underpants out of Violet’s bureau drawers. Had he gone mad? No! For look – here was the torrid letter, on Violet’s own notepaper, in Violet’s own handwriting!

Weeping touchingly, Violet – towards whom the film audiences were, by now, feeling sympathetic – protested that she had never, ever written such a thing, nor had she seen Roland for – well, for a very long time. Then she told the story of the night before, and the frightening billet-doux she herself had discovered on her pillow.

It was clear now that the two of them were the victims of a vile hoax, perpetrated no doubt by that scoundrel and jealous rat, Roland, who was attempting to break them up so he could have Violet for himself. Alf vowed he would get to the bottom of this: he would confront Roland and make him confess, and the sooner the better.

Violet pleaded with him not to do anything rash, which, however, only made Alf distrust her. Why was she trying to defend Roland from his righteous fury? If she was not telling the truth, he’d twist that beautiful neck of hers, he growled, and anyway, where was that note she’d claimed was on her pillow? Was she lying? He took tearful Violet by the throat and kissed her viciously, then threw her roughly onto the bed. By now, both reader and Violet were beginning to fear that Alf was unbalanced. The scarlet-winged Angel of Rape hovered in the air, but Alf satisfied himself with some cursing and with
the flinging of his latest bouquet of roses onto the floor, where the vase shattered in a manner that gave both the Jungians and the Freudians much food for thought later.

No sooner had Alf stormed out than Violet found another note on the dressing table where no note had been just moments before:
You shall belong to no one but me. Death cannot part us. Watch your neck. Eternally yours, William
.

Violet’s mouth opened and closed like that of a beached grouper. She was beyond screaming. Whoever was writing these notes was right in the house with her now! And she was all alone, the dressmaker having departed. It was too horrible!

The more horrible it became, the faster Jack wrote. He mainlined instant coffee, gobbled packaged peanuts, and snatched only a few hours of sleep per night. Irena, fascinated by his manic energy, brought him plates of noodle casserole in aid of his creative efforts. She even went so far as to do his laundry for him, tidy up his room, and change his sheets.

It was shortly after the change of sheets that Jack succeeded in wrestling her into bed. Or did she succeed in wrestling him into bed? He’s never been sure. In any case his bed was where they’d ended up, and he didn’t much care how they’d got there.

He’d looked forward to such an event for a long time, he’d fantasized about it, he’d strategized; but now that the opportunity had come he was rapid in the execution and inattentive in the aftermath: he’d neglected to murmur any terms of endearment, and he’d zonked off to sleep almost immediately. He admits that wasn’t too suave. But there were reasons: he was young, he was overtired, he had a lot on his mind. His energies were needed elsewhere, because he was almost up to the dénouement in
The Dead Hand Loves You
.

Alf was about to batter Roland to a pulp in an insane rage. Then, covered with blood, he would stagger off to his Alfa Romeo, where the Hand was lurking in the custom leather upholstery and would attempt to throttle him from behind. This would cause Alf to lose control of the car and crash it into a viaduct, incinerating him in the process. The Hand, though badly singed, would crawl out of the wreckage and limp over to Violet’s house.

The unfortunate girl would just have been informed by the police about the murder of Roland and also the fatal accident; she’d be emotional rubble. The doctor would prescribe a sedative, and Violet would be drifting into an irresistible sleep when she would see, blistered, scarred, and charred to a crisp, the unstoppable Hand, dragging itself painfully but relentlessly towards her across the pillow …

“What are you writing about?” said Irena from Jack’s own pillow, or one of them. He now had two, the second having been supplied by Irena herself. Her visits to his attic cubbyhole were becoming a habit. Sometimes she brought cocoa, and more and more frequently she stayed overnight, though her rump was not skinny, and Jack’s old-fashioned double bed was a tight squeeze. Thus far she’d been content to cast herself in the role of handmaid to greatness – she’d even offered to retype the manuscript for him, being a fast and efficient typist, unlike Jack – but he’d fended her off. This was the first time she’d been inquisitive as to the nature of his project, though she’d assumed he was writing Literature; she had no idea that he was spinning a cheap and tawdry horror yarn about a dried-up hand.