The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror by Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, David A. Riley Page B

type, if you get my meaning. I always parted my hair down the middle and I would brush it with Brylcreem till it shone and though my blue stripe suit was a wee bit threadbare about the elbows, it was nonetheless clean, as were my brown brogues and my shirt collar. One thing my mother always taught me… no matter how shabby your attire, if it was clean the world would respect you. Mind you, I never got much respect from the world. Not in general. If they’d thought I was rich… well… they wouldn’t have laughed at me like they did… but they didn’t think I was rich so they just kept on and on. Whispering.
    In the office of Baldry and Blacker, the Cornhill seed merchants where I worked before Mummy and Daddy passed on, the clerks used to call me Squinty instead of Rupert, which is my true name. And the typists used to laugh at me a lot. Because of my limp, and also because of a big, brown birthmark which stuck to one side of my face like some giant, furry beetle. They never knew that I could see them laughing. But I did. Oh yes. Lizzie never laughed at me. She told me that she could see in me the soul of a poet and I explained that this was probably because my heart was bent on a literary career rather than that of a pen pusher in a seed factory. I courted her for several months and when the first warm days of spring skipped in to cheer the year, I proposed that we be married. Lizzie was delighted and for the first time since we met she kissed me. Not a long, soft, passionate kiss but a sweet, ladylike touch upon my birthmark, an action which caused my blood to run cold and my heart to beat wildly in my chest.
    I’ve never understood why she went and eloped with this bloke Georgie Milford out of Dingwell’s garage in the Fulham Palace Road. I do realize that a lot of it was due to my Mummy and Daddy. They only met her once, but they hated her on sight and said she was nothing but a slut… a gold-digging slut… but Lizzie did love me, she told me so often… so why she went off the way she did completely bamboozles my imagination.
    It was so sudden. One minute she was my betrothed… and the next she was hot-footing off with this excuse for a garage mechanic. He was six feet odd, blond and bearded and apparently he used to try a spot of this weight-lifting caper in his spare time. The man was an ox. An illiterate, ill-bred ox. Lizzie met him at Further Education classes apparently and Lord only knows what lies he told her to entice her away from me but they wound up flitting off to some new town in Herefordshire where they were given a council house, garden back and front at the expense of rate-payers like muggins. I can tell you truly I was very upset. Very upset indeed because I always thought that Lizzie was the perfect lady. But she was nothing less than a two-timing, underhanded little hussy and I can tell you I was in half a mind to go down to that there Herefordshire and do something. Pay her back. Throw a drop of acid at her or something. You know, throw it in her face. Scar her a bit. Make her pay. The vicious, ungrateful little hussy.
    Still, I was well rid of that little tramp. I decided in my heart that I would not ally myself with any such painted hussies again but I would search for… well, a plainer, more reliable type. Someone you could trust. Put your faith in. A kind of perfect lady if you like.
    I met Daphne in the Hammersmith Bingo Hall. She was a Midlands girl from. Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. About forty. She had blue eyes and a thin face and little hairs curling from her chin and she possessed a distinct body smell which was in its own way quite attractive. Yet there was about her one thing which reminded me of that slattern, Lizzie. Her hair. It was soft and natural blonde and hung about her shoulders like silken bubbles. Very nice. We got talking and after Bingo we walked slowly together through the back doubles towards her digs in Greyhound Road. She didn’t stop talking for one second. Talk,