The Widow Ravens

by F. R. Jameson

  Her voice seemed to crack towards the end and he thought he might – for the flash of a second – have seen the buds of tears in her eyes. But no, her face was utterly calm.

  The moment was intense and it felt like he was intruding on something so private and painful, it embarrassed him. He clearly wasn’t the kind of journalist who poked and prodded, who was prepared to do anything for the scoop. Maybe that meant the career wasn’t really for him. He didn’t care right then though, he just wanted to be out of there.

  As delicately as he could, he placed the cap on his fountain pen. He’d tell his editor that he was very sorry but he couldn’t find her, or that she adamantly refused to speak. Whatever reason he gave, it was the case that this venture was a flop and it was best to wash their hands of it.

  But her gaze, and the flatly no nonsense tone of her voice, stopped him from getting up and just politely making his excuses on his way to the door.

  “Don’t you want to know?” she asked, “Aren’t you curious what dreadful thing your blessed hero did to me to make me hate him so?”

  “I, um…” He stared at her, suddenly and horribly afraid.

  Her voice rose, a challenge in her tone. “Don’t you want to understand the awful goddamn truth about your beloved Jacob Ravens?”

  Hargreaves and the widow Ravens stared at each other. Little more than three feet apart in that Athens hotel room, they may as well have been on different continents. They might have been different species of being. The look on her face managed to be so cruel and outraged and challenging at once. He could only imagine his own nervous gaze of fear and trepidation. Surely though, there was a kind of dreadful curiosity in his eyes as well. His conscience wanted him to leave, his sense of self-preservation also – but a large part of him desperately wanted to stay.

  Four

  “What did he do?” Hargreaves asked finally.

  Emilia Ravens gave him a nod of satisfaction and then drained the remains of her glass in one satisfied gulp. Having raised his curiosity, despite all his fears, she still kept him waiting. A full minute must have passed before she spoke again.

  “It won’t surprise you to know,” she told him, “in fact it will probably thrill you to your adolescent core, that Jacob Ravens spent most of his life wallowing in darkness. That he wrote about it, but he lived it too.”

  Her sculptured left eyebrow raised into an almost perfectly formed right angle. “Do you think I’m being melodramatic, Mr Hargreaves? Do you imagine I’m being Orson Welles as ‘The Shadow’? I assure you that I am not. Perhaps you’re a happy and well-adjusted enough young man to have consumed all of Jacob’s words and seen them all as fiction. If so, I congratulate you – you’d be the first one I’ve ever met.

  “But no, let’s be honest, I know your sort well. Too well by now, in fact. I can recognise by sight those who have truly dedicated themselves to my late husband’s memory. Those who treat his various writings as if they’re a blood-soaked bible. Convince themselves that somehow – even though they can’t quite explain their reasoning to themselves – that there’s a grain of truth in each and every one of his stories. That Jacob Ravens tapped into a whole other world and as such had a greater sense of authentic reality. There are even those wide-eyed disciples who believe that it’s more than a grain. That it’s a whole rock of salt, in fact a bloody great slab. They believe that what Jacob was writing wasn’t fiction, it was reportage.

  “You’ve sat perusing his works in the night-time darkness at home, haven’t you? Devouring his tales about captured spirits, about the life and loves of demons. In more than one story he writes about how a breath of young life can fuel an old soul for years. And even though you don’t quite know what it means, it speaks to you and you assume that there’s something real and strange and magical to it. You’ve found yourself turned on by the sex and revolted by the blood – or vice versa – and you’ve imagined yourself having a similar life to these characters. A similar life to the one you imagine the mystery man, Jacob Ravens himself, may have lived.

  “Well,” she paused and smiled with her lips so thin, “the most wide-eyed of his adherents are correct. Those stories aren’t fiction. What you read in pages of his stories is exactly the kind of life Jacob Ravens lived.”

  Tension in every muscle of his body, Hargreaves was too still and transfixed to even gasp. Not that she gave him much time for a reaction.

  “He told me that it all came to him when he was young. That he would sit in his bedroom and perform blood rituals on himself. Can you imagine that? Six years old, he said he was. Can you believe that he’d be allowed to sit there in the dark of his nursery, with a sharp implement, and be able to wound himself again and again? Can you credit that no one seemed to even notice? His parents were good, starched collar Edwardians, it wasn’t like they were regularly consulting Doctor Spock’s book. But still there was a nanny. There were others relatives – aunts and uncles – who were around. Jacob insisted it was true though: that even as a small child he would place a sharpened kitchen blade to his arm and slowly pull it across and through his skin. And that the feeling of blood pouring from the wound was heaven sent.

  “He was proud of it. All those strange and distressing stories he told of his youth weren’t confessions, they were boasts! Even after we were together, he had the capacity to make me shudder. I never knew whether to believe him or not, but he claimed he purloined some of his late grandfather’s skin. That when the old man was lying in grace, he snuck into the room and slipped down the trousers he was to be buried in and sliced off a long piece of epidermis from his unfortunate relative’s thigh. He said he would experiment on it. That he would combine his young and virginal – apparently he already knew that word – blood with the experience inherent in his grandfather’s skin. Bringing them together in the most unholy of ways. He would try to summon spirits, he said. To bring forth actual demons.

  “It didn’t work though. I could see the frustration and bitterness of Jacob’s childhood laid bare when he told me that. The incredible disappointment he still felt that he was in near adulthood before he could fulfil his destiny. He concluded it was because his grandfather had just been far too virtuous a man. That no matter how much Jacob wanted it, the old man’s near saintliness stopped him. And as such he cursed his grandfather’s memory right until his dying day.

  “No, he was sixteen before he found the key. The corpse of a man who was so vile and so debased, he could give Jacob exactly what he needed. This was a man named Drasma.”

  Hargreaves felt a gasp rattle his chest. “Drasma’s corpse,” he muttered under his breath,

  “Well done.” Her voice was completely flat. He hadn’t impressed her. “That really is an obscure reference. You truly are a devotee if you can remember that off the top of your head. The real Drasma was a Russian merchant seaman and a pederast and, so Jacob thought, a murderer. In short, the perfect candidate for Jacob’s dark rituals. Drasma’s bodily fluids – which Jacob described as already deliciously rotting – when combined with Jacob’s own vigorous blood, was enough to open up the gateway into the darkness he needed.”

  She shuddered. With every word, it seemed as if the world around them became noticeably colder. Incredible, given how swelteringly hot it had been outside and how slowly that ceiling fan was turning. He tried to be as surreptitious as possible, but he shifted and pulled his jacket tighter around himself. Even though it was too thin to make much difference.

  The empty glass cradled in her hands, she shook her head and stared in the direction of the window. “What he did those next few years, I don’t really know. He told me some tales, I’m sure a lot of it ended up in his writings – but what was real and what was imagined, I have no idea. At my most optimistic, I like to believe that he made some of it up. That his vision of the world, and the order of things, isn’t actually how it is. But when I’m down and cynical and – let’s face it – at my most realistic, I concede that nearly all of it is true.

&n
bsp; “As it turned out, he had a prose style and he could write. Well enough it provided him with a steady income. Gave him enough money that he could pursue the life he wanted to live. Horror periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic started off wary of him – because he was so strange and so different to all the haunted house, ghost stories out there. He didn’t concern himself with vampires under the virgins’ beds, after all. Bela Lugosi really wasn’t his style.” She smirked. “However, they all ended up pursuing him with larger and larger cheques when it became clear he had an audience. His name on the front of any magazine, a new story promised, could shift an extra ten thousand copies. Twenty thousand copies even.

  “The life he led though, the darkness he courted – whatever truly debased activities he pursued – took their toll on him. He drank too much, indulged in cocaine and opium. Other substances as well. All to keep up his stamina and as a release to hold his sanity in place. But there was the life he lived and the deadlines he had to meet to make money. Undoubtedly it all added up to a huge amount of pressure. At the age of thirty, he looked decidedly closer to fifty. He was alone and lived an existence that he thought would always keep him alone. That is until he met the woman.”

  Suddenly she met his gaze full again, the smile on her face could only be described as lascivious. “Until he met me.”

  Sweat was heavy on his brow, but he made no effort to wipe it.

  “The girl I was back then, well – I’m sure you can imagine. She was vain and bitchy and horribly promiscuous. About two thirds of what she’d done she had managed to keep under wraps, but still she had a terrible reputation. The beautiful young jezebel who would steal a husband as soon as look at him. Steal a wife too if the mood took her.

  She sighed. “I met Jacob at a party at the Algonquin. One of those colourful affairs New York specialised in after the war. There was an immediate attraction between us. Not that that was a surprise, I’d long got used to nearly everyone being attracted to me. What surprised me, was how attracted I was to him. There was something so different about him. A darkness that was exciting. A tangible evil that was scary. I was used to my life being far from clear white, but he felt far too full of sin even for me.

  “Jacob pursued me though. He chased me in a way I’d never been chased before. When I moved to Paris for the season, he followed me. Persistent. Stalking, you could say. The same with London; the same with Rome. In short, he wore me down. He broke down my defences and took me. Told me that I was lovely and if I listened to him and stayed with him and did what he asked, that I could remain forever lovely.”

  He sat completely still. Taking in her flawless complexion and wishing that – no matter how beautiful she obviously was – he could be somewhere else looking at anything else.

  It was almost as if he could see her breath as she laughed out loud – an utterly mirthless sound. “I’m sure you can’t contemplate being so vain, Mr Hargreaves. Being so spoiled and in love with one’s self that the mere promise of being able to stay youthful and beautiful forever was enough to turn my head. To make me accept things that no woman should ever agree to.

  “I should have known there’d be a cost. Yet Jacob was such a good salesman he made me forget about any small print. It was only later that I realised quite how horrendous this bargain would be.”

  A silence hung sharp and awkward between them. The ceiling fan continued to slowly turn, but cold as the room was, it gave off no breeze.

  “Do you want to know what he did to me?” she asked. “Do you want to know the curse Jacob Ravens put on my life? Will that be exclusive enough for you?”

  Five

  It was like he couldn’t breathe. As she stared at him – remorselessly and unapologetically appraising him – it felt as if all air had been sucked from his lungs.

  Her fingers reached slow and deliberately to the ruby nestled tight against her throat.

  “Do you?” she demanded. “Do you really want to know what that bastard Ravens did to me?”

  Even though her voice was coated with cruelty, it was still so utterly delicious. So impossibly tempting.

  He didn’t want to know. A loud voice in his mind screamed for him to stand up and walk away. More than that – instead he should run away, scarper to the nearest Athens bar and forget everything about her. Whatever it was could not be good. The air was freezing, her gaze was relentless. Obviously what she was offering must only be horrible. Yet he couldn’t stop himself. He may have wanted to leave, but he knew if he turned away now there would be part of him that would hate himself for the rest of his days.

  His mind slipped to the pretty Greek girl in the tight white t-shirt and no bra he’d seen in a nearby park earlier. She’d turned her head and gazed over her shoulder at him, her long straight hair so smooth and silky. For just a moment, he thought she’d winked at him. But surely a girl as attractive as that would never have winked at him. He was too large and ungainly for that. And yet, he didn’t think he’d ever forget the smile she’d sent in his general direction.

  Much more realistic was Felicity. A nice girl who was a friend of a friend and who he thought liked him just as much as he liked her. She’d be far better girlfriend material than a strange, yet beautiful Greek girl; or the incredible looking – but absolutely terrifying – Mrs Ravens. The thought of home flashed through his mind. What you’d laughably call his bachelor pad. Which in fact had very little action going on within its walls, but had all his books and records and creature comforts. The place where he lay down his head.

  All of it seemed a long way away from now. A far distance from that cold and still moment, when Emilia Ravens stared at him with such a challenging gaze.

  It all felt so remote to him as he finally – with his mouth absolutely dry – nodded his head once in assent.

  She offered him a smile crueller than any he’d ever witnessed before as her red painted nails turned that ruby on her neck a full ninety degrees.

  A phenomenal, all-consuming darkness hit him in an instant. It was like gallons of impossibly black ink were spilled into his world from nowhere. Filling his whole vision and flooding his lungs. Viscous ink, living ink – a thick, moving tar which formed itself into tentacles and squeezed him tight.

  Possibly he screamed, but it was as if all sound had been sucked from him. Surely he must have cried out though. Such was his fear, such was the burning sensation of all that blackness latching onto him.

  He tried to wriggle in his chair, to throw himself down and away from this formless assailant. But he couldn’t move at all. That blackness covered his whole body, burnt away his skin, ate him up so that every part of him became one with the blackness. It poured through his mouth and his eyes and his nostrils and his ears – wrapping itself around his organs and devouring him entire.

  It was as if he was nothing.

  That, even though he still had some kind of consciousness, he had no body and no soul anymore.

  The world as he’d experienced it, seemed to slip away from him. All that was left was the void of space. An impossible-to-penetrate blankness, where any stars were unattainably distant and no longer twinkled. The darkness was everything. It was him now.

  Millions of years went by, where all he knew and understood was that blackness. Where the only creature in existence was himself. There was him and the blackness and nothing else. Aeons passed in which he lost the sense of himself as a man, all hints of what it had felt like to be a person. He was part of the blackness and the blackness was all of him.

  Until one dreadful moment – suddenly, unbearably – pain racked once again through his body and he spasmed in shock and utter confusion. He didn’t know who he was or what he was. The agonies of the flesh were burning and intense. But then he couldn’t recall feeling anything at all before.

  His now grey and misty eyes blinked, petrified at seeing light as opposed to endless darkness. He stared up, unable to focus, but finally made out a young creature in front of him.

  Terrifyingly
she was sucking up all the blackness. Taking all the wonderful and consuming darkness away from him. Something glittered in the light, too bright for him to look at. It was pulling everything of him away as she turned it.

  Suddenly she was making sounds – which, right then, seemed like screams in his mind. He couldn’t understand them, but they echoed around his skull.

  “I always feel less guilty when I do this to one of Jacob Ravens’ little followers. If you are going to worship blindly at the bastard’s shrine, it’s probably the very least you deserve.”

  She moved away and he didn’t know where she went. His eyes couldn’t follow her.

  There were other noises in his head now. Sad sounds, desperate sounds, lost sounds. They came feebly from him. The blackness was gone, and all that was left was ghastly light.

  Six

  It was the following morning that the old man was found.

  He was gibbering on the floor of room 316, totally unintelligible. The authorities asked him in Greek, English, French, Russian, Spanish and even Serbo-Croat what his name was, but he couldn’t seem to answer them. It was as if he didn’t understand the question, no matter how patiently or in how many different ways it was asked.

  The papers he had in his pocket belonged to a much younger man. A British man in his twenties who, curiously, had disappeared. Enquiries in both England and Greece found no trace of him.

  As for Frau Kurten, the lady in whose room he was found, there was no trace of her either. The hotel had no record of her checking out. Indeed she had paid for the room for another three nights.

  The young man whose papers now sat on a curious embassy attaché’s desk had come to Athens to interview a particular woman. But this woman, from all that was known about her, was obviously much older than Frau Kurten. The receptionist said that this Frau Kurten was no older than thirty-five. The bell-hop, who seemed to be the last member of staff to lay eyes on her, went further and said that he thought she was no more than twenty-five. And quite lovely with it, so he said. “Breath-taking”, was the word he used.