The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Naked as Adam and Eve they emerged from the sea to set foot on their new Eden. As they travelled inland, the two noticed signs of ancient human activity everywhere: burial mounds, standing stones, and slabs covered with the obsessively repeated cup and ring markings that appear throughout the west of Scotland and Ireland, their ancient significance long forgotten. Eventually they came upon the ruins of some old building, and a well. Although it was more likely to have been either an enclosure for sheep, or an early Christian hermit’s cell, Logan decided their find was a “shrine” or “temple”, and proclaimed this the omphalos of the island where they would rest, and drink the good fresh water, and give thanks to the Goddess.

  In later years, Willy Logan would connect the Gaelic Achlan with the ancient Greek Aeaea “wailing”, the name of the “typical death island” that was the home of the enchantress Circe.

  After their pagan prayers, they made love within the boundaries of the shrine. According to his much later account, this act was at Helen’s urging and was the first sexual intercourse they’d had since her fall. Yet all did not go as planned. Reading between the lines, it appears that Willy was unable to sustain an erection. Determined to please his mistress, he had to use “other means”. Oral sex is fairly obviously implied. He brought his lover to orgasm – his surprise suggests that this, too, may have been a first – and almost immediately after that, darkness fell. His lover’s transformed, contorted face was the last thing he ever saw.

  An annihilating blow, for an artist to lose his sight, and this event became the centre of the myth that Willy Logan was to create of his life. Although it was a moment of terror, in his writing he would describe it in terms more of awe than of fear, and of discovery and re-birth rather than of death and loss.

  “The Goddess is come!” he cried (or so he claims, in his autobiography). “Oh, how she dazzles!” Then: “Where is She? Where is the sun? Is it night?” So suddenly, orgasmically, W. E. Logan had been plunged into perpetual night, yet spiritually, he might have said “I was blind, but now can see.”

  With Touched by the Goddess open beside Second Chance at Life, it was easy to see how closely Ross followed Logan’s own account. Yet although he did not accept every detail uncritically, he did no more than provide a slightly ironic commentary as counterpoint to Logan’s “facts”. No matter how I struggled and searched, I could find no other voice, no other view, but Logan’s. Helen’s absence was glaring. In Logan’s own autobiography, Helen was less an individual than an idea, and in Ross’s book she was scarcely even that.

  Yet she had certainly been there on the island; and if Logan wanted to blame her for his blindness (I was shocked by his choosing to quote, without irony, a sixteenth-century Arabian scholar who declared that any man who looked into a woman’s vagina would go blind), he had also to recognize that she had saved him.

  While Willy wept and raved about the Goddess, Helen managed to get him back onto the boat, which she then sailed, single-handed, into Crinan Harbour. (And where, I wondered, had the girl from New York learned to sail?)

  Fortunately for them, a doctor from Glasgow was staying with his wife in the Crinan Hotel – and the wife turned out to be some sort of second-cousin to Logan’s mother. They immediately offered to cut short their holiday and drive Logan and Helen to Glasgow, where he could be seen by specialists.

  By the time they reached Glasgow, Logan was almost supernaturally calm. He had accepted his blindness, he was convinced it was permanent and that nothing could be done about it. But his wish to go home with Helen was overruled. A bed was found for him at the Western Infirmary and arrangements were made for a battery of tests and examinations by a variety of specialists as soon as possible.

  In the meantime, all were agreed, he must rest. Once she’d seen him settled in, Helen Ralston went to the nearest post office to dispatch a telegram to Mrs William Logan, whom she knew to be staying with the children and her parents in Edinburgh.

  WILLY BLIND PLEASE COME AT ONCE

  GLASGOW WESTERN INFIRMARY

  She did not sign the telegram. As soon as it was sent, she went to the flat she’d shared with Willy and packed her bags. She left Glasgow that night, on a train bound for London, and never saw or directly communicated with Willy Logan again.

  What would make someone who had painted a sexually explicit portrait of herself, dedicating it to her beloved, abandon that same man, blind and helpless, only twenty-four hours later? Brian Ross did not speculate or comment. I wondered who she went to in London.

  I checked the index for further references to Helen Ralston. There were only a few, and every one of them concerned something Logan had written later about their brief time together (most of them clustered in the chapter about the writing of Touched by the Goddess in 1956). You’d never know from this book that Helen Ralston had ever done or been anything of the slightest importance in the world except to be, for a little while, Logan’s chief muse and model. None of her books were listed in the “Selected Bibliography” at the end, not even In Troy.

  I became all the more determined to tell Helen Ralston’s story.

  V

  I didn’t sleep well that night – I rarely do, away from home. I had brief, disturbing dreams. The one that frightened me most, making me wake with a gasp and a pounding heart, was about “My Death”. I dreamed that when I got home and took the picture out to look at it, I found it was just an ordinary watercolour sketch of island, sea and sky, no more unusual or accomplished than one of my own.

  I don’t know why that should have been so terrifying – especially considering how upsetting I’d found the hidden picture – but when I woke, heart pounding like a drum, it was impossible to put it out of my mind. I had to get up and look at the picture again to be sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

  At first sight it was an island, but as I waited, staring through sleep-blurred eyes, the outlines underwent the same, subtle shift I’d seen before, and I was looking down at a woman lying with her legs splayed open. This time the sight was not so disturbing, maybe because I’d been expecting it, maybe because this time I was alone, half-asleep, naked myself, and feeling a certain amount of indignant sisterly support for a fellow writer who’d practically been written out of history.

  I put the picture away, oddly comforted, and went back to bed, reflecting on the oddness of dreams.

  In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one that might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old – I don’t think I’d started school yet – when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing that had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red- and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream. As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I’d bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn’t seen it for a year or more – I don’t think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake.

  When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled.

  “But what’s scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.”

  I shook my head, meaning that the doll I’d owned – and barely remembered – had never scared me. “But it was very scary,” I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying.

  My mother looked at me, baffled. “But it’s not scary,” she said gently. I’m sure she was trying to make me feel better and thought this reasonable statement would help. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears.

  Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn’t explain. Now I think – and of course I could be wrong – that what upset me was that I�
�d just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn’t share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming.

  VI

  As soon as I was home and through the back door, sorrow was on me like an untrained, wet and smelly dog.

  My kitchen smelled of untreated damp and ancient cooking – an unappetising combination of mould, old vegetables and fried onions. The creeping patch of black mould had returned to the ceiling in the corner nearest the back door, and the pile of newspapers meant for recycling was weeks old. There were crumbs on the table along with a pile of unanswered mail and three dirty cups, a bath-towel draped across one of the chairs, and an odd sock on the floor. When I’d left, the general dirt and untidiness had been invisibly familiar, but now I saw it as a stranger might, and was dismayed. The very thought of all that needed to be done made me tired.

  I couldn’t cope with it now. Without even pausing to make a cup of tea, I dumped my bag in the bedroom and escaped upstairs to the loft-conversion that was my office. There it was untidy, but not noticeably unclean, and the air was filled with the friendly familiar smell of old books. I picked my way through the stacks on the floor to my desk, where I switched on the computer and went straight to my e-mail inbox.

  Selwyn, bless him, was already on the case, but along with the rousing words of his faith in my ability to write a “splendid, uniquely insightful biography” of Helen Ralston, his e-mail carried disquieting news. He’d found an article – “Masks and Identity in Three American Novels” – published three years earlier in an academic journal. The author, Lilith Fischler, Tulane University, was said to be working on a book about Helen Elizabeth Ralston.

  This should certainly be taken with a grain of salt (he wrote) – academics are required to be always working on some project or other, and very few of these putative books ever appear in print. And if it does exist it is more likely to be a critical study than a biography. But why don’t you ask her and find out?

  The prospect scared me right out of the office and back downstairs, where I began to clean the kitchen. As I scrubbed and washed and tidied, I brooded about what to do.

  I must write to her, of course. But what should I say? How much should I tell her? How could I get her on my side?

  My usual inclination when writing to strangers is to keep the letter short and formal, but I knew that this could backfire. I could come across as cold when I only meant to be unobtrusive, and, in an e-mail, particularly, it was treacherously easy to be misunderstood. What if Lilith Fischler read my formality as arrogance? I didn’t want to alienate her; with a little effort maybe she’d be glad to help. Writing this letter required almost as much care as composing a book proposal to send to an unknown editor.

  I considered my approach very carefully, balancing and polishing phrases as I scrubbed the kitchen surfaces. By the time I had the room spruced up, the letter was ready in my head. I ate a sandwich, and went upstairs to write to the address Selwyn had provided.

  Next I went looking for my copy of In Troy. It wasn’t on the shelf where I’d remembered it, so I searched all the bookcases, and then, very carefully, investigated every stack and corner of my office. I didn’t remember lending it to anyone, so it was probably in one of the boxes in the loft, where the only way to find a particular book was to crouch down with a flashlight in the dark, and dig.

  Instead, I went online to see what I could find out about Helen Ralston.

  My first trawl didn’t net much, but I was able to find copies of her second and fifth novels, as well as one of the many reprints of Hermine in Cloud-Land available to order. Two first editions of In Troy were listed: the dealer in London was asking $452.82 while one in San Francisco offered a lovingly-described “very fine” copy for a mere $320.00. There were also lots of the Virago edition about, with the cheapest offered at $2.00. On a whim, I added that to my order.

  Before I logged off I checked my e-mail again and found that Lilith Fischler had already replied.

  My efforts had paid off. Her reply was as transparently open and friendly as I had struggled to make mine seem, and she told me exactly what I had been hoping to hear. She was not writing a biography, only a critical study of In Troy. Her essay would be appearing in an anthology to be published by Wesleyan University Press next year – she’d be happy to send me a copy as a file attachment. More importantly, she knew how to get in touch with Helen Ralston:

  She was happy to talk about her writing, but not so much about her early life, and especially not about the relationship with W. E. Logan. But she sent very clear and interesting answers to everything else. I don’t know if she will be quite as energetic and coherent now, since she had a stroke last year. Her daughter, Clarissa Breen, wrote to me that she was recovering well, but couldn’t live on her own any more. They sold the flat in London, and Helen is now living with Clarissa in Glasgow. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me giving you the phone number . . .

  At nine o’clock the next morning, I rang the number Lilith Fischler had given me and asked the woman who answered if I could speak to Helen Ralston.

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  I gave my name, adding quickly, “She doesn’t know me; I’m a writer. I wanted to talk to her about her work.”

  “Hold on a minute, I’ll just get her.”

  Much more than a minute passed before the phone was picked up again, and I heard the same woman’s voice saying, “I’m sorry, she doesn’t want to speak on the phone; can you come here?”

  I was so startled I could hardly speak at first. I’d assumed that this invitation would come much later, if at all. I finally managed to say, “Of course. If you’ll give me directions. But I’m quite a distance away – in Argyll, on the west coast. It’ll take me a couple of hours to drive to Glasgow.”

  “Ah. Well, tomorrow would be better, then. She’s at her best in the mornings; she flags a bit around midday.”

  “I could come tomorrow. Whatever time suits you.”

  “Nine o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you,” she said warmly, surprising me. “I know mother is looking forward to meeting you. She doesn’t have much excitement in her life these days – it was a real blow to her to have to leave London. The mention of your name perked her right up.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, surprised that my name should mean anything to Helen Ralston. “Can you tell me how to get to your house?”

  “Do you know Glasgow at all? Well, it’s not difficult, if you come in on the Great Western Road . . .”

  VII

  Helen Ralston lived with her daughter in an ordinary two-storey, semi-detached house in a quiet neighbourhood on the north-western edge of the city. The drive through Argyll, along the narrow, loch-hugging road, switching back upon itself again and again as it crossed a land divided and defined by water, up into the mountains and then down again, went more swiftly than I’d dared to hope, without any of the delays that could be caused by log-lorries, farm vehicles, and road works, and I was parking on the street in front of the house at five minutes after nine o’clock the following morning. I got out of the car stiffly, feeling numb and a little dazed by the speed of it all. That so soon after I decided I wanted to write about Helen Ralston I should be meeting her seemed little short of miraculous.

  Her picture “My Death” was in the boot of the car, well wrapped, ready to be handed back to its rightful owner, yet now that I was here in front of her house, I hesitated. Remembering my first, visceral reaction to it, I could not expect that the artist’s reaction would be the ordinary one of someone to whom a piece of lost property has been returned. What if she was angry that I’d seen it? I decided to wait and see, try to find out her likely response before admitting that I had it.

  That settled, I opened the side door to take out
my bag and hesitated again at the sight of my new tape recorder, bought yesterday in the Woolworth’s in Oban.

  I was unprepared for this interview in more ways than one.

  Yesterday, I had discovered that my cassette recorder, which had seen me through more than ten years of occasional interviewing, was no longer working. I’d driven off to Oban immediately to buy one, only to find that the electronics shop I’d remembered had closed down – driven out of business, I guessed, by the stacks of cut-price VCRs, DVD players, printers, personal stereos, and telephones on sale in the aisles of Tesco. Alas for me, Tesco did not sell cassette recorders – players, yes, but nothing with a recording function. The closest equivalent I’d been able to find after searching every store in town was a toy for young children. It was the size of a school lunch-box and made of bright red and yellow plastic, with a bright blue microphone attached to it by a curly yellow cord. But it worked, and so I’d bought it.

  Now, though, I knew I couldn’t possibly arrive for my first meeting with Helen Elizabeth Ralston clutching this children’s toy. In any case, she hadn’t agreed to an interview; I hadn’t even spoken to her yet. I couldn’t remember if I’d told her daughter that I was planning to write a biography, but I was pretty sure I’d said only that I admired her mother’s work and wanted to talk to her about it. Best if this first meeting should be informal, relaxed, a friendly conversation. Questions “for the record” could come later.