The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Although I thought Helen had every right to do what she wanted with what remained of her life – even if it hastened her death – I felt a terrible sad empathy for Clarissa. I thought we both had guessed the real reason for Helen’s determination to visit the little death-island again, and I wondered how we would manage if the old woman simply refused to leave it.

  Something like that must have been going through Clarissa’s mind when she broke the stalemate with her mother and asked me, “Will I be able to get a signal on my mobile phone out here?”

  I shrugged. “You can try. I’ve got a short-wave radio on board for emergencies.”

  The tension left her shoulders. “That’s good to know. Shall we go?”

  There were a few minor hair-raising moments still ahead, helping Helen into the dinghy, but we finally managed to make land-fall on Achlan, and I was the only one who got even slightly wet.

  “Shall we have our picnic on that big flat rock over there?” asked Clarissa. “It looks like a nice spot.”

  “We can rest and eat at the shrine,” said Helen. “I’m not stopping now.” She turned to me. “You can take my picture there, nowhere else.”

  “Do you remember how to get there? Is it far?” I looked at the thin, blue-veined, old woman’s ankles above the sensible sturdy shoes, and recalled Willy Logan’s description of the long, slow, torturous descent over rough, rocky ground, leaning heavily on his lover and suffering many stumbles and painful encounters with brambles, nettles and rabbit holes which he was unable to avoid in his blindness.

  “How far can it be?” Helen replied unhelpfully. “Anyway, we’ll follow the water-course; that will take us to the source.”

  I followed the direction of her gaze and realized when I glimpsed the fresh water tumbling over rocks to spill into the bay that I had been hearing its roar, subtly different from the rumble of the waves, ever since we’d landed.

  Following the stream might have been sensible, but it wasn’t easy. Even so early in spring there was a riot of vegetation to slow our progress, wicked blackberry vines which snatched at our clothing and scored our flesh, roots and unseen rocks and hollows to trip us up. Clarissa and I led fairly sedentary lives and were not as fit as we might have been, but we were still relatively supple and capable of putting on the occasional burst of speed.

  Helen, so much older, had fewer reserves. It must have been many years since she had walked for more than ten minutes at a stretch, or over anything more taxing than a roughly-pebbled drive. Within minutes, her breathing was sounding tortured, and I knew she must be in pain, pushing herself to her limit. Yet, no matter what we said, she would not consider giving up or turning back. A little rest was all she needed, she said, and then we could go on. And so, every three or four minutes, she would give a gasp and stop walking, her shoulders rising up and down as, for a full minute, she marshalled her resources to continue.

  Of course we stayed with her, standing in harsh sunlight or in buzzing, leafy shade, during her frequent rest-stops, and then continuing to creep up the gentle slope of the island, plodding along like weary tortoises.

  I recalled Helen Ralston’s comment as a young woman that in this island she had seen her death, and Willy Logan’s conviction that “death” meant something else. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe death was just death, and Helen, now so near to the end of life, had finally come to meet it.

  We crept along in silence except for the whine and tortured pant of Helen’s breathing and the laughing bubbling rush of the stream, and the background sough of wind and sea. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, mostly, on the look-out for hazards. The sounds, our unnaturally slow pace, my worries about what was going to happen all combined to affect my brain, and after awhile it seemed to me that the earth beneath my feet had become flesh, that I was treading upon a gigantic female body. This was bad enough, but there was something stranger to come, as it seemed I felt the footsteps upon my own, naked, supine body: that I was the land, and it was me. My body began to ache, but it seemed there was nothing to be done. I lost track of time, and my sense of myself as an individual became tenuous.

  “Is that it?”

  Clarissa’s voice cut through the feverish dream or self-hypnosis, or whatever it was that had possessed me, and I raised my head with a gasp, like someone who had been swimming for too long underwater, and looked around.

  The stream had become a little, bubbling rill between two rocks. Nearby I saw a large tumble of stones, partly overgrown by brambles and weeds. Impossible to say now what it might once have been – a tomb, a sheep-fank, or a tumble-down cottage – but clearly they had been piled up deliberately by someone sometime in the past.

  “Look at me. Now.”

  It was Helen’s voice, but so different that I thought maybe I’d heard it only in my head. Yet at the same time I knew that she was speaking to me. I looked around and met her eyes. What happened then I can’t describe, can barely remember. I think I saw something that I shouldn’t have seen. But maybe it was nothing to do with sight, was purely a brain event. I flail around for an explanation, or at least a metaphor. It was like a lightning bolt, fairy-stroke, the touch of the goddess, death itself, birth.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, naked beneath the high, cloudy sky. I heard water sounds, and the noise of someone weeping.

  There was an awful, dull ache in my back. I opened my eyes and sat up slowly, painfully, wondering what had happened. I smelled sweat and blood and sex and crushed vegetation. I remembered looking at Helen, but if that had been seconds ago, or hours, or even longer, I had no idea. The other two women were gone. I was alone with a man – a naked man huddled a few feet away from me, beside the cairn he’d named a shrine, and weeping. I recognized him as Willy Logan.

  Then I understood who I was.

  I was Helen Ralston.

  XI

  Now, more than a year later, I am still Helen, as I will be, I suppose, until I die.

  I avoid mirrors. It gives me a sickening, horrific jolt to see those alien, deep-set eyes glaring back at me out of another woman’s face, even if the terror I feel is reflected in hers.

  Of course I keep what I know to myself – I certainly have no desire to be locked up in an early twentieth century loony bin – and, as time goes by, it has become somewhat easier. Memories of my other life and of that other world which I suppose to be the future are growing dimmer, harder to recall and to believe. That’s why I decided to write this, before it is forever too late. The words in this book, which I intend to keep safe, will ensure that what happened once doesn’t have to go on happening into an infinity of futures – unless I want it to. I will show it to myself when the time is right, seventy-three years from now.

  The feeling of dislocation, of alienation and fear, which I had at first, has eased with the passage of time. The strangeness has faded like my impossible, disturbing memories, and the sense of being embarked upon a great adventure – a new life! – has become more powerful. After all, this is not such a bad time or place to be young and alive.

  —Helen Elizabeth Ralston

  Paris

  22 September 1930

  That was all she wrote. Although there were two more pages left in the notebook, she’d left them blank, her testimony complete.

  XII

  The interview – my one and only interview with Helen – had not gone exactly as she described. For one thing, she’d been more disabled by her stroke than the story indicated, and the conversation between us had been painfully repetitious, slow and circular. She did mention a few famous names, people she had known in Paris and London in the 1930s, but her anecdotes had a way of petering out rather than coming to a point, and one story would frequently blend into another, so that an incident which took place in pre-war Paris would segue abruptly into something that had happened to her in post-war London. I felt sorry for her, and rather frustrated, as I realized that I was unlikely to get much first-hand information from her for my book.
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br />   After about an hour, Clarissa took her mother upstairs to bed. When she came back down, she gave me the notebook.

  “Mum wants you to have this,” she said. “She wants you to read it.”

  I took the old, hardbound notebook with a feeling of great privilege and excitement. “What is it? Did she say?”

  “She said it has the deepest, most important truth about her life.”

  “Wow.”

  We smiled at each other – the charge of sympathetic, affectionate sympathy between us was very real – and she invited me to stay and have a bite to eat. We spent maybe an hour over coffee and cake, talking, getting to know each other. I left, then, and after a detour to do some shopping at Braehead, drove home.

  I remember the details of my arrival home – putting away the groceries, looking through the mail, heating up a Marks and Spencer Indian meal and then eating it while listening to Front Row on Radio 4 – as if they were incidents from a lost Eden of innocence. Afterwards, I brewed a pot of herbal tea and took it upstairs to my office. There, at my desk, I pushed the keyboard aside, set Helen Ralston’s book where it had been and pulled the reading light forward and angled it down to cast a strong cone of light directly onto the page. I began to read, and fell into the abyss.

  It was after midnight when I finished reading, my neck and spine aching from the tense crouch I’d maintained for hours at my desk as I struggled to decipher her cramped, narrow writing. I was trembling with exhaustion, terror and bewilderment.

  How was this possible? Could her story be true?

  If it wasn’t, how did she know so much about me? How was she able to write in my voice, including so many accurate details about my life, and everything that had happened starting with the chain of events which had caused me to decide to write a biography of Helen Ralston up to our first meeting?

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, so blank, cold and numb that I could have said I was feeling nothing at all, I telephoned Clarissa Breen and asked to speak to Helen.

  In a voice that wavered slightly, she told me her mother was dead.

  “It happened not long after you left. Or maybe . . . maybe before.” She took a deep breath. “She was sleeping when I left her to come downstairs to you. Normally, she’ll sleep for about two hours. At lunchtime, I went upstairs to check on her. As soon as I went into her bedroom I knew. She was gone.”

  All my questions seemed suddenly insignificant, and the terror which had gripped me loosed its hold. I rushed to sympathize, uttering all the usual, insufficient phrases of sorrow and respect.

  “Thank you. I was going to call you, later today. I wanted to thank you – for coming when you did, and making Mum’s last day so special. She was happy, you know, really thrilled to be meeting you. Not just because of the biography – of course it was great for her to know she hadn’t been forgotten – but because it was you. She loved your work, you know. She’d been reading your stories since you were first published – she always felt there was a special connection between you.”

  I shivered convulsively and gripped the phone hard. “Did she say that?”

  “Oh – it was obvious how she felt. Didn’t I tell you, that’s why I read that book of yours, because you were obviously so important to her. Anyway, I wanted you to know how much your coming meant to her. It was the first time I’d seen her happy and excited in – well, the last seven months were very hard for her. Since the stroke, and having to leave London, no longer able to live on her own. I – I really thought this was going to be the start of a new phase for her, I can’t quite – I’m sorry . . .” she stumbled, then recovered herself. “I can’t quite believe she’s gone. But it was the best way, to go like that, suddenly and all at once, it’s what she wanted – she hated the idea of another, even more crippling, stroke – so did I – of dwindling away in a hospital bed, dying by inches.”

  We talked for a few more minutes. Clarissa had a lot to do, and promised she’d let me know about the funeral.

  I went to Glasgow for it the following week, and took the notebook and the painting to give back. I found my chance after the cremation when we few mourners – most of them Clarissa’s own friends and extended family – gathered in her house to eat the traditional cold food. I took the notebook out of my bag, but she shook her head and told me it was mine.

  “Mum wanted you to have it. No, I mean it; she couldn’t have been more clear about her wishes; she left instructions in her will. In fact, not just the notebook, but a painting as well. It’s called ‘My Death’, she said it’s a watercolour, but I’ve never seen it – I’m sure Mum didn’t keep any of her early works, she never mentioned it before, and in the will she didn’t explain where it was or anything.”

  I launched into a rushed, stumbling explanation of how I’d come into possession of “My Death” until she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right. That’s fine. I’m glad you’ve got it. It was what she wanted.”

  “I’ve got it in the car – I was going to give it back to you—”

  “No, you must keep it.”

  “Well – would you like to see it? Just before I go. It’s in the car.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes I would. Thank you. I know Mum was an artist before she was a writer, but I’ve never seen anything she painted.”

  We left the house and walked down to the street where my car was parked. My heart began to pound unpleasantly as I took the wrapped parcel out of the boot, and I wondered if I should try to warn her, to prepare her in some way. But the words would not come, and so I unwrapped it in silence and laid it down, face up, inside the open boot of the car and we looked down upon “My Death” in silence.

  A watercolour landscape in tones of blue and brown and grey and green and pink, a rocky island in the sea. Tears blurred my vision and I looked away in time to see Clarissa dash her hand across her eyes and give a soft, shuddering sigh.

  She turned away, and I put my arms around her.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, returning my hug.

  I kissed her cheek. “Let’s stay in touch.”

  NEIL GAIMAN

  The Problem of Susan

  ALONGSIDE HIS ADULT FICTION and comics work, Neil Gaiman has also produced a number of books aimed at the young adult market. His short horror novel Coraline won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Bram Stoker Award and is being filmed by Henry Selick, while The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls are two graphic children’s books produced with artist Dave McKean.

  More recently, Gaiman has scripted McKean’s debut feature film MirrorMask for the Jim Henson Company/Columbia TriStar. It is accompanied by a large-size tie-in book featuring art, observations and the complete script; a 12,000-word “graphic novella”, and The Alchemy of MirrorMask, which focuses on McKean’s artwork.

  “When I was a boy I loved the ‘Narnia’ stories,” Gaiman recalls. “As a parent, I’ve read them aloud twice, ten years apart, and I found more to like; but also found some things I disliked and one, the treatment of Susan, that I found extremely problematical.

  “Over the last few years I’ve accumulated a second career as a children’s author, and have been fascinated by the shapes and effects of children’s literature – the differences in the way children’s books affect adults and children; the part they play in our lives.

  “I wanted to write a story that would talk about that. Since it’s been published, ‘The Problem of Susan’ has been, I think, the most contentious short story I’ve ever written: people have spent a great deal of time online discussing it, arguing about it, refuting it and so on. I read a review of it recently by someone who said that they might have enjoyed it, but found it impossible to get past the blasphemy.”

  SHE HAS THE DREAM again that night.

  In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade o
f green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse-half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut-throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.

  Flies buzz about the corpses.

  The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday for the first time in, how long? A hundred years? A thousand? A hundred thousand? She does not know.

  All this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield.

  Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas.

  Her sister tugs her hand, and points. On the brow of the green hill they stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his hands folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now she is shouting at the lion, who is simply listening. The children cannot make out any of their words, not her cold anger, nor the lion’s thrum-deep replies. The witch’s hair is black and shiny, her lips are red.

  In her dream she notices these things.

  They will finish their conversation soon, the lion and the witch . . .

  There are things about herself that the professor despises. Her smell, for example. She smells like her grandmother smelled, like old women smell, and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking she bathes in scented water, and, naked and towel-dried, dabs several drops of Chanel toilet water beneath her arms, and on her neck. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.