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

by Mark Morris

  The sight was wonderful, miraculous, but at the same time deeply unsettling. I felt a shudder pass through me, and the urge to run, that queasy, stomach-in-free-fall sensation you get when you think you’re alone, then realise someone’s been watching you all along.

  I turned my head, looking back up the path. There was no one there.The bushes stirred and nodded in the breeze.

  Beck’s dead, I thought. That moment when you finally realise the truth of it, that someone you loved and who was part of you is gone forever. That they are out of this world. No further questions, nothing.

  I thought of Doré’s Arachne in her bent-backed agony. Was it better to live on as a monster, or vanish to nothing? The doctors had intimated that Beck would turn into a monster before she died: a creature that pissed and shat and vomited with no awareness of itself, a creature that would no longer remember it had a name. None of that had happened, though. On my way back up to the cottage I remembered how Beck had reacted to her diagnosis.

  “That’s rubbish,” she said. “They’re wrong.” I imagined her shaking her head, then going back to rubbing paint into a canvas with her bare fingertips. She refused even to discuss it after that.

  * * *

  Ben was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

  “I smell bacon,” I said.“Yum.”

  I’d been gone two hours. Ben raised an eyebrow, then smiled.We were OK, it seemed, and if Ben felt any curiosity about where I had been he kept it well hidden.“Who’s Mita Bomberg?” I asked, once he’d dished up.

  “Marco’s sister’s sister-in-law,” he said, just like that.“Why?”

  “Just wondered. Beck mentioned her on the phone once.”

  “She’s an academic. A historian.” He paused. “I think she and Beck had a bit of a thing once.”

  “‘Ask Mita’, she said. Ask Mita what?”

  “No idea.”

  Ask her if she had a thing with Beck the same way Beck had a thing with April Lessore, who turned up at the funeral, by the way, as if the day hadn’t been difficult enough already. I didn’t recall seeing Mita there, though I probably wouldn’t have recognised her even if she were. Ask her if she’d been the cause of Beck’s breakdown? Ask her if she gave any credence whatsoever to the notion that my best friend had turned into a spider?

  “I went for a walk,” I said.“Down the woods’ path.”

  “You must have been freezing.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I was outside at that time in the morning. Really outside, I mean, not just dashing for a train or something.”

  He looked up from his plate.“Beck and I used to sneak out all the time when we were kids. It drove Mum mad—she was worried about us being too tired to concentrate at school—but that didn’t stop us.We’d see the milk float driving around but that was all. We felt like we owned the world.”

  * * *

  Once we’d established that the bulk of Beck’s archive—and it’s amazing what the use of a judiciously chosen word can do to bring a previously chaotic situation under control—would be stored at my place, the job of clearing the house became much easier. I told Ben that if he dealt with the domestic stuff—Beck’s clothes, furniture and other personal effects—I would sort out the rest. Any completed artworks could be shipped direct to Beck’s gallery for evaluation and cataloguing. The notebooks, sketchbooks and diaries would go to mine. I telephoned a removals company in Bideford to order packing crates and arrange transportation.

  I asked Ben if he wanted to cough up for a professional house-clean once we’d finished. He seemed reluctant at first, then agreed. Beck’s lease ran for another five months, but Ben had already decided not to sublet.

  “At least that way you should get Beck’s deposit back,” I said.“Plus we’ll be able to leave here as soon as the packing’s finished.We can leave the keys with the estate agent.”

  Ben wanted shot of the place and who could blame him. As I moved carefully around Beck’s studio, sorting papers into piles and stuffing rubbish into bin bags, I briefly entertained the idea of taking the place myself, just for the summer, just to see how I felt. I could catalogue Beck’s archive properly, in situ, begin drawing up an outline for the monograph, maybe.

  I pushed the thought away like the obstruction it was.

  Gaby turned up mid-morning. I felt uncomfortable seeing her in the flesh. She seemed extraneous to requirements somehow, a character from a novel, her role in my life played out. I watched as she chained her bike to a lamp post and came up the path, looking with dismay on her ruddy cheeks and windblown hair and thinking how much we resent the people who happen to encounter us when we are vulnerable.

  “I won’t stop,” she said. “I can see you’re busy. But I wanted to pass on my condolences. And to give you this.” She held something out—an envelope, a package? I grabbed it without thinking, just for something to hold.“She said you were to have it, that I should give it to you myself. I’ve not opened it,” she said.“About three days before, this was.”

  A brown A4 envelope, fat with papers. “Will you stay for a cup of tea?” I asked. I didn’t see how I couldn’t.

  She shook her head.“I’d best get on. But thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.“For everything you’ve done, I mean.”

  We stared at each other. I felt spoiled and incapable and offensively inadequate. This woman had held my friend’s hand as she lay dying.

  We would not see one another again, Gaby and I, and I was glad.

  Once she was gone I made a pot of tea for myself and returned to the studio. Ben was out, fetching provisions from Bideford. Bald March light streamed in through the skylight and spread in a thin film across the concrete floor. I put my mug down on the bench and opened the envelope, working my finger beneath the flap in an attempt not to tear it and then wondering why I was being so circumspect. It was just an envelope.

  Inside were some letters, sent from Germany and addressed in a handwriting I didn’t recognise but guessed—correctly—must be Mita Bomberg’s. A cellophane folder, containing four drawings. A diary from the year 1980, our first year at college. A sheet of paper folded in half, my name written on the flap in shaky capitals.

  The letter wasn’t dated, but from the state of Beck’s writing I estimated that it had been written sometime in the past three months.

  Isobel—

  It is almost time but I don’t mind now, I want this. I am no longer in your world and I thought that would be terrifying but it’s not, it’s easy.

  I do remember you.

  She had signed the note with a spidery “X”: a kiss, or an acknowledgement that her name was no longer important?

  In the diary I read:

  Went for coffee with Isobel Hampton. She’s reading Art History, like me, but unlike most of the others she actually seems interested in art. She has some wonderful books. She has a birthmark on her face, shaped like a baby’s hand, like a map-mark for sanity. I long to draw her but don’t dare ask. She swears a lot. She makes me feel less of a freak.

  The second week of October, that was, and less than a week before our night-time conversation about Robby and Jennie and Beck’s unlikely heritage. Spider-silk in the womb, for goodness’ sake. I felt my throat fill up with tears. How different things might have been, had I supported Beck’s decision to drop out of uni.

  The row we had. It was still painful to think of, even now she was dead.

  I told her she was a loser, that she’d never make it as an artist, that she was sabotaging her future.

  How would I choose to explain in the official account? Come clean, admit that I was jealous of her talent? Sounds good, doesn’t it? Dramatic and plausible.

  I don’t think it’s the truth though, or not the whole truth. I think I was scared she would meet someone else, someone she would love more than me. And she did, didn’t she? She met April.

  But maybe April was my fault, all along.

  * * *

  That time she called me fr
om Berlin, when she went to find Marco. She was drunk and I was angry. I told her to pull herself together, that Marco was a dick anyway, that she was well rid of him.Then I put down the phone.

  * * *

  Final memories: Beck and I in the garden of the cottage, sitting on stones amidst the ragwort and yarrow, the sour scent of nettles, arms around our knees and the blue sky above. The weather hot like a bastard, like every summer you long for and can never retrieve. Beck seemed well, almost normal. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was ill at all.

  “Sit as still as you can,” she said.“There’s one, look.”

  She raised one finger, very slowly, to indicate the fat brown garden spider that had just that moment emerged from under a leaf. It was spinning itself a support rope, letting itself gently down from the gabled upright of a colossal stand of what I thought was cow parsley, only Beck said it was garden chervil, not cow parsley, that cow parsley was mostly over by the end of June.

  “You never used to know stuff like that,” I said.

  “How do you know I didn’t?” she said absently.“Look at her go.”

  The spider ratcheted back and forth, staking out its mainframe. I found the spectacle fascinating and vaguely repulsive.

  I gazed up into the sky, shading my eyes against the glare.

  What the fuck am I doing here? I thought. Beck and her bloody spiders. I could be back in town having a beer with someone normal.

  4. Saint Joan of Arc, 2012, 2’x2’, oil on canvas. Following the breakdown of her marriage in 2009, Hathaway moved from her long-term residence in Fulham to the isolated village of Hartland, on the North Devon coast. Responding to her new surroundings, Hathaway became increasingly preoccupied with the natural world, choosing as her subject matter the colony of orb-weaving spiders that f lourished in the overgrown back garden of her rented cottage. Hathaway’s observations ran to many hundreds of pencil studies and pen-and-ink drawings, as well as the fifteen major canvases known as the diadem series and first shown in a posthumous exhibition at the Artemis Gallery in Chelsea earlier this year. Spiders have very poor eyesight, and experience the world primarily through touch and through sound vibrations. Saint Joan of Arc is an attempt to convey the textures and sounds of the natural world as they might be experienced by a spider. Pictorial elements such as grass stems, tree bark, drystone walls, spores and seeds have been deconstructed, redacted to an abstract, highly textured surface from out of which individual features appear to alternately dissolve and coalesce as we focus our attention upon them.

  * * *

  Mita’s letters were chaotic and rambling, not what you’d have expected from a scholar of her standing—but then, we’re all different when we’re off-duty. There were pages of reminiscences of their time in Berlin—a period I knew little about, given that Beck and I had not been in contact at the time. Mita kept mentioning a studio Beck had rented while she was living there. It had become vacant again, apparently, and there was an intimation—for the space of two or three letters, anyway—that Beck might move back out there.The move never transpired though, and without Beck’s own letters to refer to it was impossible to work out why.

  If I was serious about writing Beck’s biography I would have to get in touch with Mita at some point, find out whether she still had the letters and if she would grant me access to them. Not a task I relished, I have to say, especially as the parts of the correspondence I did have suggested that Mita might be as difficult to deal with as Beck. It wasn’t just the letters that made me think that, though they were odd enough. What really made my heart sink were the photocopied newspaper clippings that often accompanied them. One related to a medical negligence case in Annecy in south-east France, in which a woman’s family were prosecuting her doctors for failing to diagnose what was later recorded as a rare form of endometriosis.The woman’s reproductive organs and stomach lining had been colonised by fibrous growths of such unusual tenacity that numerous operations failed to eradicate them. The woman later died from complications following a radical hysterectomy.

  Another news clipping was from an American paper, and recounted the story of a college lecturer who contracted a mysterious condition that caused the skin of her arms, legs and lower abdomen to sprout dense masses of ultra-fine, silky hairs. A third piece related to a woman who had lived in Cumbria in the 1660s. Allergic to light and with very little spoken language, the “spider woman of Whitehaven” spent the majority of her life sequestered in a tiny back room, wrapped in numerous shawls to disguise the coarse black hair that, it was rumoured, covered the whole of her body. She made her living from casting fortunes, a gift that ensured her reputation and standing among the townspeople until the bubonic plague swept through the region, at which point the tide of opinion turned against her and she began to suffer persecution for being a witch.

  The woman left Whitehaven in 1670. According to some reports she left town of her own accord, although there was one notable account that stated she had been pursued and captured by a band of local vigilantes and stoned to death.

  How ghastly, I thought. I could not think what had possessed Mita, filling Beck’s head with stuff like that. She was suggestible enough as it was. At the bottom of the third clipping, the one about the so-called spider woman of Whitehaven, Mita had underlined and circled the woman’s surname, which was Chilcot. I puzzled over this for a long time, before remembering that Chilcot had been Jennie Hathaway’s maiden name.

  I had to laugh. There are people—people like Mita Bomberg, apparently—who will take a simple coincidence and dress it up as a grand conspiracy in the space of a heartbeat, but I have never been one of them.

  * * *

  Ben left Hartland on the Friday afternoon. The house clearance people called round in the morning to give us a price for taking Beck’s furniture and then I helped Ben pack some crates with books and knick-knacks that he wanted to drop off at a charity shop on his way home.

  I’d told him I planned to stay on for a bit. I’d reckoned on a fortnight at least and maybe more, but soon changed my mind. With Ben gone, the atmosphere of the cottage seemed to darken, becoming claustrophobic and faintly threatening. It was the memories, I reasoned, the sense of loss, all the usual platitudes.

  Yes and no. I’m sure a part of what I felt was simple regret, that I had not made more effort, more time for her when she was alive. But as one day passed and then the next I found myself dwelling increasingly on the strangeness of it all: Beck’s loneliness, there in that place, the terrible and pitiless nature of her final illness, the confusion that must have overcome her at the end.

  The cottage, now that I was alone there, seemed drenched in these things, wrapped in bindings of fear and hopelessness so thick and dark I frequently found myself having to escape outside to avoid being spooked.

  I’ve come to believe that being haunted is actually just belated understanding.

  In the end I admitted defeat. I told myself the work of cataloguing Beck’s archive would advance more quickly in London anyway, what with all my accustomed resources close to hand. I made arrangements to have the house cleaned, as Ben and I had planned, then spent a hectic two days packing up Beck’s papers and wrapping the canvases in bubble wrap, ready for collection.

  As for what I did immediately before leaving, what can I say? I believe the usual expression for such actions is moment of madness. I guess I’m not as rational as I thought I was.

  * * *

  There had been plenty of spiders before—when I was there with Beck, I mean.This time it took me ages to track down even one. I put it down to the weather, though I had no idea if that was right or not. Did spiders dislike the cold? I didn’t know. The creature I finally found was one of the plump-bodied, brown ones with the striped legs that Beck had called St John spiders.

  “Because of the cross on her back. See? She should be St Joan really.”

  Come along, Joanie, I thought, as I coaxed the thing into a matchbox.Time for a change of address. It en
tered reluctantly, scuttled around in confusion for a couple of seconds then hunched itself in a corner, its legs gathered around its body, a fence of upturned “V”s.The thing was miffed, clearly. I didn’t blame it, to be honest.

  I put the matchbox in my bag and tried to forget about it, though for the whole of the journey home I kept imagining tiny footfalls on the back of my neck. Once, when I went to the buffet car, I thought about leaving the matchbox on the counter in a fake act of absent-mindedness, then realised I would be just as freaked out by losing it as having it with me.

  The moment I arrived home I released her in what I hoped would be a safe place: down the side of the garage, beneath the overhang. She dashed straight up the wall, legs unfolding and flashing like a nest of daggers, then disappeared into a crevice behind the guttering.

  I felt better after that. Stupid, I know.

  * * *

  [This essay first appeared in the anthology The Life and Magical Afterlife of Rebecca Hathaway, Artist, which was published to coincide with the second anniversary of Hathaway’s death following a fall at her home. In the interview that accompanied the essay, its author Isobel Hampton described the piece as an “imaginative memorial”, and stressed that the events it chronicles should not be equated with lived reality, nor should the persons described be confused with the artist’s surviving friends and relatives, or even with the artist herself. Isobel Hampton is an art historian and critic. She is currently at work on a full-length biographical study of Rebecca Hathaway, who was her close friend for more than three decades.]

  SHELTERED IN PLACE

  by Brian Keene

  It didn’t take the cops long to respond. When they arrived on the scene, smoke from both the guns and the bomb still hung thick in the air, curling up to the ventilation panels in the ceiling. The bomb hadn’t been an explosive. It was just a smoke bomb, spewing confusion in an oily white cloud. Shots still echoed throughout the baggage claim area. People were crying and screaming. The smoke was overpowering. It burned my nose and throat, and made my eyes water, but I could barely hear the sounds over the ringing in my ears. You ever see that movie, Saving Private Ryan? Remember at the beginning, when the soldiers are trying to take Omaha Beach, and Tom Hanks is sitting there amidst the chaos, detached from it all, watching the carnage unfold, and his ears are ringing and everything is muted? That’s exactly what I felt like.