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rooms. The bed looked freshly made. Yiorgio was clearly a class act.
     
    I closed the door, and Maisie stood there looking at me, not blinking. Yiorgio had told me that whenever I spoke to her, I needed to begin the command with her name or she might not listen. I said, ‘Maisie, sit down on the bed.’
     
    She sat.
     
    There I was in that small room with Maisie. She sat on the side of the bed, her face empty and her eyes as unblinking as a doll’s. She was all but naked, but totally oblivious. She’d been beautiful when she was alive, I knew, and she was still beautiful in death - if you liked that sort of thing. But even though I felt the surprising heat of her proximity, I had no intention of having sex with her - with it. She was a dead thing, a corpse made active by some mysterious mad science, and that did not get me all worked up. Plus there was the guilt. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who would both kill a woman and then fuck her dead body. That wasn’t how I saw myself.
     
    ‘Maisie,’ I said. ‘Do you know who I am?’
     
    She did not react.
     
    ‘Maisie, do you remember ever seeing me before?’
     
    Again, nothing. It was better than getting an answer, but it didn’t put my fears to rest. Ryan said it all came out during sex, and I knew I was procrastinating. I was looking for some other way to find out what I wanted to know, but I didn’t see it. Taking in a long, deep breath, I told her to take off her G-string and lie on the bed. She did that.
     
    I took off my clothes. I’d been afraid I was not going to be able to perform, but I think her nudity and mine were enough to get things going. Her body was strangely warm, almost hot, but it didn’t feel like body heat. It was more like there was a chemical reaction happening just below her skin. And the texture was all wrong. It didn’t feel like skin, and her flesh didn’t feel like flesh. Lying on top of her felt like lying on top of a water balloon. I didn’t want to lick or suck or bite or even run my hands over her. I just wanted to do what I had to do and see what happened.
     
    It was like Ryan had said: she was into it. Really into it. She bucked wildly, grabbed onto me, she grunted, groaned, and murmured. And in the middle, she began to speak. ‘God damn it,’ she said, ‘you killed me. I’m fucking you, and you killed me. Walter Molson, you killed me.’
     
    I pushed myself off her and staggered backward to the wall. It was worse than I thought. Far worse. By arranging to have sex with her, by putting her in a position where she could learn my name, I had made it worse. I was going to have to do something about this, and I was going to have to do it soon.
     
     
    The real beginning of the story was two years before all this. Tori’s sister was going through a bad patch with her husband, was maybe thinking of getting divorced, and Tori wanted to go out to California to be with her for a few days. We hadn’t been married all that long, and this was going to be my first time alone in the new house. I loved my wife, and I loved living with her, but I was also excited for the solitude, which I missed sometimes. You get to thinking about it and you realize you can’t remember the last time you spent more than an hour or two without someone else around.
     
    The first night she was gone I was exhausted from work, and basically fell asleep right away. The second night, a Saturday, was something else. I thought about calling up a couple of friends and going out, but somehow it seemed a waste of an empty house to leave it. I was in it for the quiet, for the privacy, and I didn’t want to waste it with socializing. I ordered a pizza, turned on a baseball game, and prepared to enjoy a night of not picking up after myself, of leaving the pizza box on the coffee table until morning.
     
    I took out my bottle of Old Charter, and I swear I only planned to do one shot. Two at the most. I wasn’t interested in getting drunk, and I