Glamour Girl

The party was in full swing, all the girls were dancing, some of the boys were too, though most stood propping up the bar and looking at the makeshift dance-floor with that kind of detached amusement guys always have before being dragged onto it by booze, pills or the occasional demanding woman. Kay and I had arrived half an hour before which became the subject of several dirty looks and whispered bitchiness. It was understandable, Kay was hot, gorgeous and wearing a thin tight red dress that left little to the imagination while it clung to her bountiful, perfectly placed curves. She was over six foot in those killer heels she wore and had long, gleaming, straight black hair which was woven into a plat. She looked like a supermodel, like someone who should be in a five star hotel or a luxury yacht. She looked completely out of place amongst all us chain-store frumps that hired out places like the bowling club for our friends birthdays.

It was Doreen's night, her thirtieth birthday and I got the feeling that despite me arranging the whole thing, she felt a bit miffed that I'd brought Kay along, as if I was trying to upstage her. She never said as much but her sister Maggie made some catty comments but I put them down to her own jealously as much as anything else.

Yes, Kay was a fabulous creature that was for sure and it wasn't long before that jealousy among my female friends disappeared as they warmed to my charming gorgeous plus 1.

Sheila -who is always too nosey for her own good- couldn't let it go. She asked me if Kay was an escort, had I turned lesbian, was this some joke or some plan to get back at Henry. She was always asking questions was Sheila, but with her last one she wasn't far from the mark.

The final straw was when he broke my jaw, Henry, that is. A full fisted smack one night when he was, as usual, pissed and belligerent. He thought I'd never leave him, that he'd broken my spirit. It turned out he was wrong, he'd only broken a few bones and perhaps, perhaps, my heart. I packed my stuff and moved in with Doreen for a few weeks until I got a place of my own. He stalked me for a while until a restraining order deterred him and then, finally I was rid of the bastard. Most people would be relieved to be out of such a situation, I wasn't. I wasn't satisfied at being free from him. I wanted him to pay, wanted him to suffer, to stop him from ever treating another human being the way he treated me and, in retrospect, his sister Katherine.

Katherine was the one saving grace in my relationship with Henry, because she knew. She knew he was a cruel, brutal child in a man's body. She warned me off in the beginning but I didn't listen, she was a junkie, who ever listens to them? Katherine didn't care. She told me about the things he would do to her as a child, nasty vicious things as psychologically cruel as he was violent. She told me that was the reason she ended up out on the streets and on smack. She'd put up with him for twelve years, I could not tolerate two. In hindsight it was probably her overdose and death that made Henry so angry in those last weeks, it was definitely the main motivator for me to leave the repugnant shithead.

It had been four months since I'd heard from him. I spent most of them trying to plot and thought long and hard about it. I thought about paying some thugs to kneecap him, thought about running him over in my car as he staggered out of the pub at closing time. I even thought about torching his house while he slept. None of these were satisfactory to me, since I knew there would be a chance that I'd end up in jail. No, if I was to get revenge I would do so in such a way as to never be suspected.

Hence the party.

Frankly, I never really cared about Doreen enough to make such an effort, which was why the party seemed such a surprise. It wasn't really for her, it was for Henry, I knew he'd turn up, after all it was dippy Doreen that introduced us.

The dance-floor was almost full. Most of the boys had been dragged from the bar by Kay's gorgeous gravity. She was like some elegant, lithe horse, firm, muscular and entirely too sexy for the place. She stood out like a diamond in a coal bunker. I was pleased to see the effect she was having. I was more pleased to see Henry skulk through the door. He was wearing that dark blue suit that was too small for him. He said to me once it made him feel like one of the guys from “Goodfellas”. That should have been a warning sign right there. My eyes locked on him the moment he entered, he was looking around, looking for me and upon seeing me, frowned, gave a small nod of recognition and looked away guiltily before heading directly towards the bar.

He clocked Kay as he walked past, couldn't keep his eyes off her, almost walked into a table. Kay was still dancing, this time with Doreen's old uncle who must have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. The old bloke's dentures nearly fell out he was grinning so much. Henry positioned himself at the bar, holding a pint and staring at the dance-floor. He was a good looking guy, pity he was such a shit.

I sat at a table half-listening to Maggie go on about the trials and tribulations of being a new mother but I wasn't paying attention, Kay spotted Henry and from the dance floor beckoned him seductively as best one could in a social club bar. Henry grinned and raised his pint, took a sip and strutted across the place, negotiating a few tables and soon he was dancing with Kay. That was a sight for sore eyes. He always said dancing was for “poofs”, really he just had two left feet, both of which seemed to belong to disabled people. It was amusing to watch his blithering attempts to flirt with Kay. The night, it had to be said was going exceedingly well.

There is a shop, in town, up the back end of the High Street. It's a bookshop called Hecksen and Malison, I never knew it was there until one day I was happening to walk by and out of the corner of my eye I see the word “curse” on one of the books in the window display. I stopped for a moment to see the place was a tacky occult store, replete with crystal ball and skull in the window, purple velvet covering the shelving and books on the Tarot and the Illuminati and one called “Seven Curses: A Wiccan's Plight.”

I scoffed at the display and moved on but as I did I watched a woman enter. She was tall, perhaps in her forties. She had short red hair and wore a red business suit with a yellow blouse and thin black scarf. She looked more like an executive of a finance company than some hippy-dippy tree worshipping dyke. For some reason this convinced me to go in, just for curiosity's sake. The woman was having a heated conversation with the girl behind the checkout about someone called Shadrac. She was demanding to know where he was. The fat Goth girl behind the counter seemed bemused. She was exactly the type of person who I thought would frequent such an establishment. She had the uniform, right down to the nose ring, sleeve tattoos and those ugly cat-eye glasses frames. Eventually the woman growled a quiet threat, as I was looking at a book called C.I.A.: Conspiracy International America.

The woman stopped me as she marched towards the door and handed a business card. “You will find nothing of use in here.” She said. “You can't expect real results from a £14.99 paperback going half price in the bargain bin.”

That was how I met Dystopia or to give her her full title as printed on her business card.

Soror Dystopia

Imprecator Matron

Adepta Major: House Hymenoptera

Black Temple of Niré Yehezatu

Daughter of the Abyss.

There was a mobile phone number to call. I sat with the card in my hand all afternoon, mulling it over and eventually after I got home and had three glasses of wine I decided to call it. She was very curt. She said she knew it was me, addressed me by name, even though I did not tell her my name and said if I wished her services she would require only that I repeat a long phrase that she recited. I think it might have been in Latin, I'm not sure.

I repeated the phrase and she hung up.

I wondered what had happened, had I failed, offended her? I wasn't sure this wasn't just a prank not until she arrived at my door less than an hour later, even though I had not given her my address. I knew then I was not dealing with a normal person. She stood at the door and would not come in until I invited her, not with a gesture but verbally. I asked if she was a vampire, to which she replied such things did not exist, not as we considered them, whoever “we” was. Dystopia, what can be said about Dystopia? Well, I guess in the simplest terms she could be called a witch, but that is like calling an astrophysicist a stargazer. She asked me what it was I really wanted and I told her revenge. Together we concocted a plan that Henry would not forget for a very long time.

The dancing was cut short by an announcement from Mike, Doreen's boyfriend. He got down on one knee and proposed to her, which none of us saw coming, least of all Doreen. She was in tears as she accepted on the spot. Good on her, she deserves Michael, he's a decent bloke. During this I noticed Kay had vanished with Henry. I never saw them leave and hoped Dystopia managed to place the dirty shovel and get out of his flat before the two of them arrived. I knew the drill, he'd lured me back to his place that first night too. He made it so easy to just be swept away. I had to get away, things were all falling into place but I didn't want to seem rude. Mike's unforeseen improvisation had given me the perfect opportunity to split too. I claimed I had a headache and left the bowling club. Easy as pie.

What was not easy was what Dystopia made me do. At first I thought it was just a mean joke but she soon made it apparent that if I wanted to punish Henry then there would be no half-measures. She wanted him to suffer as much as I did, so it seemed. It took some convincing but eventually I did as she suggested.

Digging up the corpse however was hard. It was more than just the physical labour, more than the stench, more than the annoyance of watching Dystopia sit on the gravestone chain-smoking and listening to her I-pod. It felt like I was intruding on something sacred, something precious. I suppose that was the point. In the dead of a cold winter's night, I pulled open the grave, tore open the coffin and looked at the emaciated husk of a young woman. Thankfully Dystopia helped me pull the girls remains into the back of my car. In comparison to that, the rest was comparatively easy, though no less horrible.

I wasn't too happy with having the corpse propped up on my new sofa but Dystopia had to work her magic somewhere. The sound that the body made when it awoke was terrifying, not only the cracking creaking sounds of the dried, atrophied muscles nor just the grinding of bone against bone but the howl; that tormented groan that seemed to come directly from Hell. Dystopia told me not to worry, the thing was not conscious. It was a mannequin, a puppet of desiccated and mouldering flesh upon which Dystopia cast the most sophisticated glamours. With chants and gestures, blood and spit, lipstick and cloth, she, over a period of a week or so conjured, from that ugly nothing, a glorious beauty. Kay was born, a fantasy woman, so desirable, so stunning that the models in the pages of glossy magazines looked like half-witted and deformed tramps by comparison. Between us we invented what I knew would be Henry's heart's desire. He fell for it hook line and sinker.

I drove to his street and parked outside his house. I had a good view of his bedroom window and so I sat there waiting, I could hardly keep the smile off my face. Through the closed curtains of his living room I could see their silhouettes, bodies crushed against each other, kissing as they danced. Oh was he in for a surprise when he finally got her upstairs. I could hardly wait for his reaction. They sat downstairs for less than twenty minutes.

About five minutes ago, the bedroom light went on upstairs. Henry looked out the window with the biggest grin on his face. He started undoing his shirt before he turned, I caught a glimpse of Kay just before he pulled the curtains shut. It would only be a matter of moments until both of them were naked. I admit I started to laugh as Dystopia walked back towards the car. She also had a grin on her face.

She planted the shovel for the police to find when they were eventually called. He'd have quite the bit of explaining to do. Dystopia entered the car and told me what I needed to do to end the spell, to disenchant the glamour, to burst Henry's bubble for once and for all, it was quite an easy task.

Two minutes ago the light upstairs went off. He's in bed with her now. If I know him he's already worked his way down to her groin, sliding his tongue inside her all I have to do is click my fingers three times. One… Two… Three. And now the spell is broken. Kay has vanished leaving him, hopefully, inside the cold, stinking, rotted corpse of his sister Katherine.

I can hear his screaming from here, my laughter doesn't drown it out at all.