She’d run into a cul-de-sac. There was no way out from this end of the cinema, and judging by the come-ons she was giving him, she knew it. She turned and flattened herself against the wall, feet spread a little.
He was within a couple of yards of her when a breeze out of nowhere billowed her skirt up around her waist. She laughed, half-closing her eyes, as the surf of silk rose and exposed her. She was naked underneath.
Ricky reached for her again and this time she didn’t avoid his touch. The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at the part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.
There was blood there. Not much, a few fingermarks on her inner thighs. The faultless gloss of her flesh was spoiled slightly. Still he stared; and the lips parted a little as she moved her hips, and he realised the glint of wetness in her interior was not the juice of her body, but something else altogether. As her muscles moved the bloody eyes she’d buried in her body shifted, and came to rest on him.
She knew by the look on his face that she hadn’t hidden them deep enough, but where was a girl with barely a veil of cloth covering her nakedness to hide the fruits of her labour?
‘You killed him,’ said Ricky, still looking at the lips, and the eyes that peeked out between. The image was so engrossing, so pristine, it all but cancelled out the horror in his belly. Perversely, his disgust fed his lust instead of killing it. So what if she was a murderer: she was legend.
‘Love me,” she said. ‘Love me forever.’
He came to her, knowing now full well that it was death to do
so. But death was a relative matter, wasn’t it? Marilyn was dead in the flesh, but alive here, either in his brain, or in the buzzing matrix of the air or both; and he could be with her.
He embraced her, and she him. They kissed. It was easy. Her lips were softer than he’d imagined, and he felt something close to pain at his crotch he wanted to be in her so much.
The willow-thin arms slipped around his waist, and he was in the lap of luxury.
‘You make me strong,’ she said. ‘Looking at me that way. I need to be looked at, or I die. It’s the natural state of illusions.’
Her embrace was tightening; the arms at his back no longer seemed quite so willow-like. He struggled a little against the discomfort.
‘No use,’ she cooed in his ear. ‘You’re mine.’
He wrenched his head around to look at her grip and to his amazement the arms weren’t arms any longer, just a loop of something round his back, without hands or fingers or wrists.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.
‘Look at me, boy,’ she said. The words had lost their delicacy. It wasn’t Marilyn that had him in its arms any more: nothing like her. The embrace tightened again, and the breath was forced from Ricky’s body, breath the tightness of the hold prevented him from recapturing. His spine creaked under the pressure, and pain shot through his body like flares, exploding in his eyes, all colours.
‘You should have got out of town,’ said Marilyn, as Wayne’s face blossomed under the sweep of her perfect cheek-bones. His look was contemptuous, but Ricky had only a moment to register it before that image cracked too, and something else came into focus behind this facade of famous faces. For the last time in his life, Ricky asked the question:
‘Who are you?’
His captor didn’t answer. It was feeding on his fascination; even as he stared twin organs erupted out of its body like the horns of a slug, antennae perhaps, forming themselves into probes and crossing the space between its head and Ricky’s.
‘I need you,’ it said, its voice now neither Wayne nor Monroe, but a crude, uncultivated voice, a thug’s voice. Tm so fucking weak; it uses me up, being in the world.’
It was mainlining on him, feeding itself, whatever it was, on his stares, once adoring – now horrified. He could feel it draining