The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

good.
Now, in their little apartment, as Jason chopped vegetables for dinner and his
mind floated on some other plane talking to a thing which could not possibly
exist but somehow did, his wife’s voice broke through the perfection of the
moment. It felt like fingernails scratching on slate.
“Jason!”
He sighed. He blinked. The alien landscape faded. The creature with the eyes
like steel faded, too.
“Yes?” he said, looking at her for the first time that night.
“At last.” She struck her classic Angry Woman pose: hands on hips, feet set,
neck tense. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder if you’re all here, Jason. And
sometimes I know you’re not. What do you think this is?” She held out her hand.
In it, crumpled but still recognizable, lay his paycheck.
“Money, dear,” he said. He went back to chopping. “We’ve gone over this
before.”
“Only twenty-two dollars! Where’s the rest?”
“I took it in merchandise. Dueling knives, a matched set. They’re the best I’ve
ever seen, with ivory hilts and scrimshaw on the—”
“How could you?” she cried. She waved one hand at the racks of cutlery over
the cabinets, at the knives under the counters, at the spray of axes mounted on
the wall, at the guillotine in the corner. The guillotine was his prize. He’d built
himself, and the blade (he had a letter of provenance saying so) had actually
snicked off several aristocratic heads in those wondrous days of the La
Revolution.
“Enough is enough!” she cried.
“It makes sense,” he insisted. “Weapons hold their value. They’re an excellent
investment.”
“Try pearls,” Joanne said bitterly. She turned and stalked from the room. A
second later, Jason heard the front door slam.
He winced. And turned back to his knifes. And in a moment stood on that
barren plain with his only friend.
When Joanne’s father, a prominant local lawyer, filed the divorce papers two
weeks later, Jason felt the loss more keenly than he wanted to admit. His wife’s
leaving left a hole like a missing tooth, and as he probed the edges he felt a dull
unfocussed pain. Realizing she wasn’t coming back, he cried himself to sleep for
the first time in his life.