“Martha?”
She seemed to be humming, putting on makeup. He walked around the edge of the bed.
“Martha?” God, was she all right? “Martha?”
Martha turned to face him, her slack mouth reddened with lipstick and fashioned into a warped smile.
“Leon!”
He took one look and ran for the bathroom, falling to his knees and throwing up everything, his life, his love, his faith, in great heaving gobs of bile. When there was nothing left to come up, he looked toward the door and saw her feet standing in the doorway. He couldn’t look at the face. He couldn’t look at the face, but in spite of himself, his disbelieving eyes betrayed him and they went directly to her face, to her nose, that huge atrocity that dominated her face, and that thing that hung on it.
He stared, revulsion sweeping him again.
“Leon? Whose sofa?” she asked as she turned to look into the living room.
He retched again, sobbing, crying, not understanding, feeling he’d been cheated in life, cheated out of everything worthwhile, he’d never be the same, never look at things through fresh eyes, he’d been changed, he’d been tainted, he’d been . . .
She kneeled next to him and handed him a tissue to wipe his mouth.
Was it really? He couldn’t look. It couldn’t be, but his damned eyes again moved directly to her face, and there it was.
Priscilla’s nose, once cute and pert, with freckles dancing across it, was now a meaningless, scraped square of gray flesh, tacked somehow to Martha’s own impossible nose. Lines of heavy caked makeup surrounded it, even stuck it down in places, but it was beginning to curl and warp from her body heat.
“Oh, Martha,” he wailed.
She looked at him, trying to understand, cocking her head back and forth as he stared in disbelief. Then she looked at the sunlight on the floor and guilt crossed her face.
“Oh no,” she said, standing up. “Never fed the chickens.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Engstrom grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois (a Chicago suburb where she lived with her father) and Kaysville, Utah (north of Salt Lake City, where she lived with her mother). After graduating from high school in Illinois, she ventured west in a serious search for acceptable weather, eventually settling in Honolulu. She attended college and worked as an advertising copywriter.
After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, found a business partner, and opened an advertising agency. One husband, two children, and five years later, she sold the agency to her partner and had enough seed money to try her hand at full-time fiction writing, her lifelong dream. With the help of her mentor, science fiction great Theodore Sturgeon, When Darkness Loves Us was published. Since then, she has written fifteen additional books and taught the art of fiction in Oregon colleges and at writers’ conferences and conventions around the world.
Engstrom moved to Oregon in 1986, where she lives with her husband Al Cratty, the legendary muskie fisherman. An introvert at heart, she still emerges into public occasionally to teach a class in novel or short story writing, or to speak at a writers’ convention or conference. Learn more at www.elizabethengstrom.com
ABOUT THE COVER
Cover: The cover painting by Jill Bauman originally appeared on the cover of the 1986 Tor paperback edition. Bauman got her start as a paperback horror cover artist with a cover for Charles L. Grant’s A Quiet Night of Fear, then with Kit Reed’s The Attack of the Giant Baby. Since then, she has painted covers for everyone from Harlan Ellison to Ramsey Campbell, as well as dozens of magazine covers and illustrations. She’s also the original scary doll painter, a trope that would soon transform paperback racks into a veritable toy store of terror. Refusing to paint the dead bodies and severed limbs her art directors demanded, Bauman used dolls instead, and as the genre got more bloodthirsty, her covers became littered with them. Her first dead doll cover was for Alan Ryan’s The Kill (1982).