New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  Then of course there were the sketchbooks themselves, enough to fill a sizeable wardrobe and many of them in dubious condition.

  If it had been Lee Krasner or Joan Mitchell the place would have been swarming with art experts and their legal executives already, sealing everything into strongboxes and trying to prevent anyone from sneaking out the odd sketch while no one was looking. But Beck had died while she was still in the process of becoming someone. She had a course mapped out, a small but significant following of those in the know. But the real movers and shakers—those with the money—barely knew Rebecca Hathaway existed, much less that she was dead.

  There was no team of experts, no archive. If we—or rather, if Ben—decided he was going to keep this stuff, he would have to find somewhere to store it until the higher echelons of the art world decided that Beck was someone worth making a fuss about. At which point the scavenger- curators would descend, and make Ben feel like an arsehole for accepting money for what they would happily have shovelled into landfill just six months before. Because he would accept the money they offered; he’d be an idiot not to.

  Beck would have thought so, anyway. She would have wanted him to have it.

  * * *

  The cottage wasn’t in too bad a state. I’d suffered waking nightmares about what I might find—blocked toilets and soiled sheets, the kitchen sink overflowing with dirty dishes—but in fact there was just dust and drabness, an exited cocoon. A house where someone had lived but lived no longer.

  There had been whispers in the last years of her life that Beck might end up in an old people’s home, stinking of urine and brain like cheese. None of these grim predictions had come true. She had merely deteriorated, or so it seemed, to the point where she had no further use for life.Where she had, to all intents and purposes, moved beyond it.

  “She’s not eating much,” her carer Gaby had told me over the phone two weeks before Beck died. “I don’t think she realises I’m here, most of the time. But she seems comfortable enough.”

  Gaby was solidly built, broad-shouldered and slab- cheeked, thick-legged from the hundreds of miles of cycling she did every week, a professional carer who worked for a local charitable organisation called Pro-Nurse, the epitome of competence and practical caring without a sentimental bone in her body.

  Under normal circumstances, Beck would have admired her, whilst feeling daunted by her own utter lack of an entry point into Gaby’s world. She would have tiptoed round her. Which, I suppose, is what she did do in any case.

  I used to call and speak to Gaby every ten days or so, both of us managing to avoid the embarrassing subject of my physical absence, a failure of nerve on my part, professional tact on hers. Beck stopped speaking to me—or to anyone—about a fortnight after Gaby arrived. The first time this happened I heard Gaby calling Beck to the phone, then a long silence, then Gaby again.

  “I don’t think she feels like talking just now, do you, my pet?” she said. “I wouldn’t worry, she’s fine otherwise. Try again tomorrow?”

  In a way it was business as usual. I remembered the long, dismal months following Beck’s first, pre-Marco breakdown, when I’d call and have to listen to the ring tone going on and on, until finally the technology gave up on me and sent a piercing, remorseless weeeeee sound deep into my ear. I always knew Beck was there at the other end, though, sprawled on her bed and not giving a shit about anyone, least of all me.

  I liked to think that just hearing the phone ring might make a difference, knowing that I was trying to get through to her, that someone cared. But she never referred to the unanswered calls afterwards—when she was better, I mean—so how would I know?

  Gaby told me that Beck weighed less than six stone when she died.

  “She was transparent. No point forcing her, though, not when she was so peaceful. She knew her time was up, that’s all. Best to let her go.”

  Transparent.The word sounded strange, coming from Gaby, fanciful almost. I wondered if she’d said the same to Ben.

  Ben had arranged to have Beck’s body shipped back to Oxford for cremation. At some point during the late afternoon of that first day, when we’d been sifting and sorting for what seemed like aeons, I asked him how she had looked.

  Ben glanced up at me briefly then went back to what he’d been doing.“Like a child,” he said.“Or a very old lady. Curled on her side. Completely—absent. Her hair was so thin.”

  I was looking down at something I’d found, an A3 sketchbook, filled with detailed anatomical drawings of the common garden spider, Araneus diadematus as she was labelled in drawing after drawing, as Beck had pointed her out to me in the back garden of the cottage the summer I visited.The drawings were skilful and technically accomplished, the kind of thing you might expect to find in one of those beautiful scientific textbooks from the nineteenth century: part myth, part forensic examination, rendered lovingly by hand then transferred to an etching plate and inked into reproduction for the reading masses.

  Beck loved those old textbooks. She told me she’d first learned to draw by copying the illustrations in her father’s copy of W. S. Bristowe’s The World of Spiders.

  The drawings in the sketchbook took the art of copying to another level, working outwards from closely observed line studies towards cloudy ecstatic conflagrations of shading and light.

  I was looking at the preliminary studies for her diadem series.

  “What have you got there?” Ben said.

  I passed him the pad, trying to make the gesture seem offhand, as if the sketchbook meant nothing, as if it were just one more stick of flotsam in an endless sea of it, trying to hide the fact that I did not want to relinquish it, not even for a moment.The drawings were too precious, too much Beck.

  I was thinking what a crime it would be to dump this stuff, whatever it was worth, or not worth. What mattered was the quality of the work, and although I had frequently doubted Beck’s sanity I had never once questioned her talent.

  I think that was the moment—going through those sketchbooks with Ben—that I first admitted to myself that I meant to write about Beck, I mean seriously, that my personal grief was already being transcended by the bigger picture.

  “Look,” I said to him. “We can box these things up and store them at mine, if you like.There’s all that space over the garage. It’s not being used.”

  “Are you sure?” His voice leaped upwards, like a cricket from grass.“That would be such a huge weight off my mind, you have no idea. Ros—well, she’s not too keen on having Beck’s stuff at our place. She says we don’t have the space and she’s right really but…”

  “It’s fine. Honestly.”

  At around six-thirty we knocked off and went back to the pub. We sat at the same table, even ordered the same food, though in other ways that second evening together was very different. It was as if sorting through Beck’s things had unlocked something in both of us, finally allowing us to talk properly to each other—to swap memories, to share confidences—in a way that had not seemed possible before. As the evening wore on and our intimacy deepened, I could not help thinking about the closeness Ben and I might have shared—as friends, as comrades—had Beck been balanced and well, the kind of person who spent time with her family like everyone else.

  We arrived back at the cottage just after closing time. I knew we were going to have sex, had known it for the whole of the walk back, mainly because by then we’d stopped talking almost entirely, yet our connection with each other remained intense.Without wholly intending to, we had become fixated on one another, temporarily at least. Shit happens.

  We went straight upstairs.

  “Not in there,” was all I said, meaning not in Beck’s room. Horny as I was, the idea was horrifying. We used my room instead, the guest room.The curtains were still open but that didn’t matter because we didn’t put the light on. I watched Ben undressing in the glow from the streetlamp, thinking how this should feel like unfinished business, only it didn’t. I hadn’t though
t of Ben in that way for years—decades.The idea that I’d been harbouring fantasies all that time was so wide of the mark it was almost laughable.

  We were simply two people who happened to want the same thing at the same time and were determined to make best use of that opportunity. I hadn’t had sex since a short-lived and ill-advised affair with a postgraduate student eighteen months before, and from the way Ben grappled and drove I guessed he hadn’t had much to do with Ros in that department—or she with him, more likely—for some time, either.

  There were no complications afterwards. Not only did we both know the score, we were both old enough and sensible enough not to need to discuss it. We talked about Beck instead, I mean really talked about her. Mad things she’d done as a kid. How loopy she’d been at university. How Ben had never really got on with Marco and how devastated I felt by my own inability to deal with her illness and all it entailed.

  The more we talked, the more I couldn’t help noticing how we both seemed to be skirting around the subject of Jennie.

  If I don’t ask him now I never will, I thought, then told Ben the story Beck had told me soon after we met, about how all the women in their family were part-spider.

  “What was it with Beck and spiders?” I said. “Would your mother really have said something like that? To a ten-year-old?”

  Ben sighed.“You never knew Mum that well, did you?”

  “I met her at your wedding. And at that party for Beck’s twenty-first.”

  “God.” He flopped backwards onto the pillows. “That seems like another world now, like an old TV series. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course. It feels like that to me, too.”

  When does the past become properly the past, inaccessible to us except through the most urgent application of memory? The schedule varies, I suppose, depending on how completely that past has changed us.

  “I think I was Mum’s favourite, you know? I’ve always felt bad about that. Mum was hard on Beck in all sorts of ways. Because they were so alike, probably, although neither of them would ever have admitted it.”

  “While you’re more like your dad, you mean?”

  He nodded. “We’re not that close either though, not any more. Probably because we both feel guilty.”

  “What about?”

  “For being basically okay. Mum was—well, I can’t really remember a time when she wasn’t ill. And Beck was always shut off somewhere in her own world. I used to tell myself that was just the way she was, that she was happy that way. Away with the fairies, Dad used to say. I think now she was probably lonely.And scared. Of ending up like Mum. Or worse.”

  He turned to me abruptly, the planes of his face made strange by the orange lamplight through the window. “That spider story is exactly the kind of weirdness Mum would come up with. Mum was always terrified of getting ill—physically ill, I mean, of things going wrong with her body. She saw that as the ultimate humiliation, the ultimate loss of control. When she was bad she sometimes used to imagine that her hands were rotting away, or that her hair was falling out. It was awful. Especially at the end, when she began to waste away for real, just like she always said she would.”

  “Beck once said she thought the spider story was probably just Jennie’s way of telling her about puberty.”

  Ben laughed. “She could have been right, you know. That’s Mum all over.”

  Could Jorōgumo simply have been Beck’s way of trying to resolve the conflicts and tensions between herself and her mother? The spider-mother, the black widow?

  As a theory it seemed plausible enough. I lay there in the darkness, thinking about how Beck had weighed next to nothing when she died, and wondering if she had contracted the same disease that had killed her mother, after all. Gaby had told me the weight loss was normal, that people with the strain of Alzheimer’s Beck had eventually stopped eating almost entirely.

  “It’s the body’s way of letting go,” she had said.

  Like my theory about the jorōgumo, it sounded plausible enough.

  But what if Jennie’s fears for her daughter were grounded in fact? A hereditary disease, passed down through the female line.

  When spiders die, their bodies shrivel away to nothing, too, I thought.Whenever you find a dead spider it looks like a little ball of unravelled string.

  Desiccated.

  Curled on her side like a child, or a very old lady.

  Ben’s breathing evened out and then deepened, snores catching at his throat like the dreams of cats. I began a desultory chain of thought in which I wondered if shagging him had been a good idea after all. Sod it, I thought, too late now. I fell asleep myself soon after.

  * * *

  The last time I spoke to Beck on the phone, she was already spiralling downhill into what would become the final phase of her illness, although even at that stage it was still difficult to tell what was sickness and what was just Beck.

  She started talking to me in what sounded like the beginning of a sentence, as if returning to a conversation we’d just broken off from, even though it had been at least a week since we’d last spoken.

  “You remember Mita, Issie—Mita Bomberg?You will ask her about it, won’t you? I sent her the drawings.”

  I had a feeling Mita Bomberg was a niece or cousin or something of Marco’s, although why Beck was so keen for me to contact her I had no idea. I said yes anyway, of course I would, Beck shouldn’t worry.

  “It’s happening,” Beck said then, very quietly. Her voice seemed to have shrunk—it was like listening to a child speaking, the child-Beck I had never known but who had always been there, underneath, all along. “I’m not afraid though, not any more, because it means I’ll be free.”

  What do you say in response to something like that? I found I couldn’t speak. I thought it was death she was talking about, which she was in a way, but not entirely, not really.

  * * *

  When someone falls ill, and there is no hope of recovery, a gulf opens up.They are on one side, you are on the other, and there is no closing it.You don’t want to close it.You would never admit this, and you don’t have to, but all you can think, feel, intuit as you switch off the light at night is that you are alive, that you still have a chance to do all those things you meant to do and you mean to take it.The other person—the person you once loved as an equal—is already gone, or as good as. In a real and secret way, you have washed your hands of them.

  * * *

  If you walk along Hartland’s Fore Street and into Springfield you’ll come to a gate, and then to a path that will take you all the way down to the cliff edge if you follow it far enough. Long before you reach the sea you’ll find yourself in a narrow valley, bursting with flowers and foliage and so secluded you will find it hard to believe you’re standing less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the village centre.

  When I first went there with Beck, it was summer, a day of scorching yellow heat and that blissful species of lassitude you remember from childhood. The valley thrummed with insects, anaesthetised with the scents of clover and wild garlic. We stood together in the waist-high grass, enchanted, and I caught a glimpse of what it was that had drawn Beck to such an isolated outpost in the first place. The idea of a nature cure—a concept I would not normally have dwelled upon for long enough even to despise it—began seeping into my brain like pot smoke.

  “And you say the rents are really cheap here?” I heard myself saying. A cottage, I thought.Whitewashed walls and window box geraniums. Basic provisions from the crummy yet nonetheless charming village store. Radio 4 left on all day long and no need to lock the door when you went to the post office.

  Wasn’t it at least worth considering? It was only once I was back in London that I began admonishing myself for letting my desire to “show Eddie” threaten to overrule my logic. Radical gestures are all very well, but had I forgotten how absurdly long the journey time was, how slow the broadband speed. Now, sneaking out of Beck’s cottage in the chill of a March morn
ing, it was easy to feel smugly self-satisfied, that I had finally dismissed the idea of marooning myself in Hartland as the madness it was.

  It was just after six, not quite light. Ben was still sleeping—one of my main reasons for leaving the house was to give him the chance to wake up and get out of my room before I returned. Not that I regretted what had happened—I was past that by then—but I had no intention of repeating the incident and I wanted things back to what passed for normal as soon as possible. There was no one about, I mean no one, and as I made my way along the darkened street I felt spooked by my solitude and on a high at the same time. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so alone. Not lonely, but by myself.

  The entrance to the path was pitch black, tunnel black, and as I stepped into its coagulated nothingness I remember thinking this is the moment in the horror film when you’d be thinking don’t go down there, don’t be such a dick, and then willing the character to do it anyway, because of course you wanted to know what was lurking in the woods and there would be no film otherwise.

  Real life is usually more prosaic. I smelled damp earth, wet leaves, and as light crept into the sky the massed tree trunks and the peculiar, dipping shape of the valley they stood in began to take on the bleached, curiously flattened aspect of an over-exposed photograph. It was chilly out, but I barely registered it. I was too busy thinking about Beck, wondering if she had ever come down the path in the dark, if she had ever seen the wood willing itself into existence in the strange dawn light.

  Do you ever believe you are dying, even as it happens?

  I reached the valley floor, a whitish tube of light now snaking out behind me. The bushes directly ahead of me seemed to glow, exuding a soft, greyish luminescence, the same as the light in the sky only more intense. Then I saw that the glow was actually spiders’ webs, an intricately woven blanket of them, glinting with dewdrops, like threads of tinsel.