Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [93]
The comic books are drawn in great detail and garishly colored, with green and purple and sulfur-yellow prevailing. Cordelia reads a story about two sisters, a pretty one and one who has a burn covering half her face. The burn is maroon-colored and wrinkled like a dead apple. The pretty one has a boyfriend and goes to dances, the burned one hates her and loves the boyfriend. The burned one hangs herself in front of a mirror, out of jealousy. But her spirit goes into the mirror, and the next time the pretty one is brushing her hair in front of that mirror, she looks up and there’s the burned one looking back at her. This is a shock and she faints, and the burned one gets out of the mirror and into the pretty one’s body. She takes over the body and fools the boyfriend, she even gets him to kiss her, but although her face is now perfect, her reflection in that one mirror still shows her real, ruined face. The boyfriend sees it. Luckily he knows what to do. He breaks the mirror.
“Sob, sob,” says Cordelia. ‘Oh, Bob … it was … horrible. Never mind, my darling, it’s all over now. She’s gone … back … to where she came from … forever. Now we can truly be together, without fear. Clinch. The End. Oh, puke!”
I read one about a man and a woman who drown at sea but find they aren’t dead exactly. Instead they are enormously bloated and fat, and living on a desert island. They don’t love each other any more because of being so fat. Along comes a ship and they wave to it. “They don’t see us! They’re passing right through us! Oh no … that must mean … we’re condemned to be this way forever! Is there no way out?”
In the next picture they’ve hanged themselves. The fat bodies are dangling from one of the palm trees, and their previous thin bodies, wispy-looking and dressed in falling-apart bathing suits, are holding hands and walking into the ocean. “Clinch. The End.”
“Oh, double puke,” says Cordelia.
Cordelia reads one about a dead man coming back out of a swamp, covered with dripping, peeling-off flesh, to strangle the brother who pushed him into the swamp in the first place, and I read one about a man picking up a beautiful girl hitchhiker who turns out to have been dead for ten years. Cordelia reads one about a man who gets cursed by a voodoo witch doctor and grows a big red lobster claw on his hand, which turns on him and attacks him.
When we get to Cordelia’s house, Cordelia doesn’t want to take the horror comics inside with her. She says someone might find them and wonder where she got them. Even if they think she bought them, she’ll be in trouble. So I end up taking them home with me. It doesn’t occur to either of us to throw them out.
Once I get them home, I realize I don’t want them in same room with me at night. It’s one thing to laugh at them in the daylight, but I don’t like the idea of them lying there, right in my bedroom, while I’m asleep. I think of them glowing in the dark, with a lurid sulfur-yellow light; I think of curling wisps of mist coming out of them and materializing on top of my bureau. I’m afraid I’ll find out that there’s someone else trapped inside my body; I’ll look into the bathroom mirror and see the face of another girl, someone who looks like me but has half of her face darkened, the skin burned away.
I know these things won’t really happen, but I don’t like the thought. Nor do I want to throw the comics away: that would be letting them loose, they might go out of control. So I take them into Stephen’s room and slide them in among his own old comic books, which are still there, stacked up under his bed. He never reads them any more, so he won’t find these ones. Whatever emanations may seep