The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  With some relief, I left the childish machine in the car and locked the door behind me. Now my dissatisfaction with the few questions I’d been able to formulate no longer mattered, no more than the fact that I could barely remember anything about In Troy (I’d spent a fruitless hour searching the loft for it) and hadn’t yet even seen any of her other books. We were just going to talk.

  From the first moment I saw her, I knew I would like Clarissa Breen. Sometimes it happens like that: you seem to recognize someone you’ve never set eyes on before and feel drawn to them, as if you’re both members of the same, far-flung family. I don’t know why it should be, but those instantaneous feelings are nearly always right.

  I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and from the warmth and interest in her grey eyes I knew she felt the same about me.

  She was a slight, trim woman who appeared to be about my own age, her light brown hair in a short, feathery cut. The only faintly whispered echo of Circe’s features were in her deep-set, luminous eyes; her own face was softer, wider, friendlier, her chin and nose less prominent, and she had a lovely, long smiling mouth.

  As I liked her, so I also felt immediately at home in her house. I liked the dramatic mauve colour of the entrance hall, the atmospheric black and white photographs hanging on the wall opposite the stairs, the scent of fresh coffee and something baking that wafted through from the back of the house.

  The room to which she led me was a combination of kitchen and living room. At one end, a wicker couch was set into a window recess, grouped together with a glass-topped table and a couple of arm chairs. My eyes were briefly distracted by the green of the garden beyond the window, where birds hopped and hovered around a bird-table, and then I caught sight of the shrivelled, white-haired figure hunched in a chair, and my heart gave a great, frightened leap.

  “Mum, here’s someone come to see you.”

  Feeling horribly self-conscious, more awkward than I had since the first few interviews I’d done for a student newspaper, I went forward on legs that felt like sticks of wood. Bending down to her, speaking in a voice that struck my own ears as harsh and unnatural, I introduced myself and began to explain my interest. I hadn’t got very far before she interrupted.

  “I know who you are,” she said sharply, blinking watery blue eyes. “I was wondering when you’d finally get here.”

  Although I felt intimidated, I said, “I left home before seven. I think I made pretty good time.”

  The old lady made an impatient, huffing sound and stretched out an arm. “That’s not what I meant. Never mind. I suppose we should say how do you do.”

  Awkward still, and wishing that my heart would stop racing, I took her skinny, age-spotted hand gently in mine. “I’m very pleased to meet you. Thank you so much for letting me come.”

  “You’re younger than I thought you’d be. I suppose you think you’re old.”

  I smiled uncertainly. “I think I’m middle-aged, although that’s right only if I live to a hundred.”

  She made a little sound, half-sniff, half-grunt. “Well, sit down,” she said. “I suppose you’ll want to ask me questions about my life?”

  Clarissa came over with a tray. “Coffee all right for you? Mum, do you want anything else?” She turned to me. “I’ll be in my office, down the hall, first door on the right – just come and knock if you need anything, but I’m sure Mum will look after you.”

  I felt sorry to see her go.

  “Like her?”

  Helen’s question startled me. “She seems very nice.”

  “She is. She’s a wonderful daughter, but, more than that, I think we’d be friends even if we weren’t related.”

  “That must be nice, to feel like that. To have that sort of relationship.” I waited tensely for the inevitable next question, but it didn’t come.

  “Yes. It is.”

  I took a sip of coffee, then put the cup down and rummaged in my bag for notepad and pen. “I thought . . . do you mind if I take a few notes? Or, or would you rather we just talked, and I could record a more formal interview later?”

  “It’s up to you. Why ask me? Surely you’ve done this sort of thing before.” She sounded disapproving, and I didn’t blame her. I didn’t understand myself what had thrown me into such a flutter, as if I were a kid again, the novice reporter speechless before her first visiting celebrity. I’d interviewed more than a hundred people, most of them more famous than Helen Elizabeth Ralston. But this was different, not only because this wasn’t an assignment – there was no newspaper behind me, I didn’t even have a contract for a book – but because it was her. She mattered so much; I wanted her to like me; I wanted to be friends with the author of In Troy.

  And I knew that if I wanted to prove myself to her, I was going about it in exactly the wrong way.

  “I want you to be comfortable,” I said, as firmly as I could. “I did think that we might start by chatting – I’ll bring a recorder next time – and if there’s anything you don’t want to talk about . . .”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay, then.” I took a deep breath and took the plunge. “What made you, an American, decide to come to Glasgow to study art?”

  She peered at me. “Right to the heart of it? All right, let’s get this over with. It was for W. E. Logan.”

  “You knew his work?”

  “I had seen one painting, a landscape. One of my teachers, the head of the art department at Syracuse, owned it. He had met Logan and some other Scottish painters on a visit to the South of France a few years earlier, and been very impressed by his work . . . although not, I think, quite as greatly impressed by it as I was. I don’t know, young people, they’re so wild, so ready to fly off at the slightest encouragement, don’t you think?” She shot me a little, conspiratorial smile. “Well, I was, anyway. I must have been searching for a mentor, as young people often do. At any rate, soon after seeing this picture, which I convinced myself was a masterpiece, I wrote off to the artist, Mr Logan, in far-away Scotland, and I sent him some of my sketches, and I asked for his comments and advice.

  “And his advice – now, you may find this hard to believe, but I still have the letter; I’ve kept it all these years, and I’ll let you see it later – his response was to praise my work to the skies and tell me that the next step was to find the right teacher and embark on a proper course of study. Despite my living so far away – had he even noticed where the letter came from? – the school that he recommended was his own, where he could be my teacher. At that age, and in my impressionable state of mind, a suggestion from W. E. Logan had the force of a command.”

  She paused to pick up a glass of water from the table and take a small sip.

  I was astonished. How was it that Logan’s biographer hadn’t known this? And why had Logan himself tried to cover it up, with his little fantasy about Helen’s prophetic dreams? “I’d love to see your sketches from that time.”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Oh, no! What happened?”

  She lifted her narrow shoulders. “I don’t know what became of them. They’re long gone. I didn’t take them with me when I left Glasgow. I suppose Willy – or his wife – might have destroyed them.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the painting in the car. “Maybe not all of them.”

  She shrugged. “They’re nothing to me now. And they weren’t then, or I would have kept them, wouldn’t I.”

  “Like you kept W. E. Logan’s letter to you.”

  “Letters. There were several, tucked inside my diary. I took that with me to Paris.”

  “Paris? You left Glasgow for Paris? Why?”

  Her smile this time included her eyes, which narrowed so much they nearly disappeared. “Why Paris?” she repeated slowly. “My dear, it was 1929. I was an artist, I was an American, cut loose, without much money but free – where would you have gone?”

  I met her eyes and smiled back. “Paris,” I agreed. “Of all the places a
nd times I wish I could see for myself – Paris, in the ’20s.”

  “Well, then. You understand.”

  “Tell me – what was it like? What did you do there? Did you know anyone?”

  She raised her eyebrows and looked away. “So many questions! My, my. Where to begin?” She reached with a hand that trembled slightly for her water glass. I waited until she had taken another tiny sip and put the glass back down before I repeated, “Did you know anyone in Paris when you arrived?”

  “No. Not personally. But I knew a few names, and it was not hard, then, to fall in with the expatriate crowd. There were certain cafes and hotels where they gathered. And, as a young woman, unaccompanied, reasonably attractive, it was easy to make new friends.”

  VIII

  For the next hour Helen Ralston kept me entranced and fascinated with anecdotes from her years in Paris. She name-dropped without restraint. I could hardly believe my luck, to be sitting in the same room, talking to someone who had actually attended some of Gertrude Stein’s famous salons. Picasso and Hemingway were both, by then, much too grand to be known – she said – she’d seen them around, though. And she’d been friendly with Djuna Barnes and Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp and Brancusi, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and she’d taken tea with Sylvia Beach and James Joyce and his Norah . . . so many evocative names.

  At one point I remember thinking She’s a living time machine and at another I could have cursed myself for not having brought in the tape recorder, however idiotic it looked. How could I remember all the details? Would she be willing to relate all these stories again another day? It occurred to me that maybe there wouldn’t be another interview – not that she’d be unwilling to talk to me again, but simply because she could drop dead at any minute. At her age, especially, you couldn’t count on anything.

  I wanted her to go on talking forever, to soak up as much of her remembered experiences as I possibly could, but after a couple of hours it was clear she was running out of energy. The pauses for tiny sips of water became more frequent, and her face seemed to sag, and she stumbled often over simple words. Even aware of this, I was too selfish to let her stop; it was only when Clarissa came in and exclaimed at the sight of her mother’s obvious exhaustion that Helen finally fell silent.

  “Time for a break,” said Clarissa.

  I jumped up guiltily. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been so fascinated—”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right,” Helen said, flapping a hand at her daughter. “Don’t fuss.”

  “You’re tired—”

  “Yes, of course I’m tired – what’s wrong with that? It means I’ll sleep. I’ll have my rest now, and eat later.”

  I chewed my lip, watching as Clarissa helped her mother rise from the chair.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, don’t fuss me.”

  “I’ll just come upstairs and see you into bed. Excuse us,” Clarissa said as she and her mother moved slowly across the room.

  When they had gone out, I wandered aimlessly around the room, gazing out the window at the birds and then looking around at the pictures on the walls – they were highly detailed drawings of plants, like illustrations from an old-fashioned botany book. I had noticed a bookcase in one corner, and now gravitated towards it. A few familiar spines caught my attention immediately – Nightwood, The Rings of Saturn, Hallucinating Foucault, Possession – all dear friends which I had at home – and then the breath caught in my throat at the sight of a familiar pink and blue spine, the letters of my own name written there above the title. I had to put my hand on it and draw it out, and yes, it was one of my own short story collections.

  I was still holding it, bemused and pleased, when Clarissa came back in.

  “Out like a light,” she said.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Oh, that’s all right, she loved it! But she can’t take much excitement, that’s all. Sad when talking about the past is the most excitement you can know.” She noticed the book in my hands then and gave me a different sort of smile. “I liked your stories. I didn’t think I would – I don’t read sci-fior fantasy – but yours aren’t really sci-fi, are they? They’re more like myths. I especially liked that one where the mother is born again – what’s it called? – where she becomes a little baby, and her son has to look after her.”

  “Thank you.” Always nice to meet a reader, but I couldn’t help the quick stab of disappointment. “I thought maybe this belonged to Helen.”

  “Of course it does. She has all your books. That’s just the only one I’ve read – but now I’ll be sure to read the others,” she said quickly.

  “Helen Ralston has read all my books?” This was better than winning an award.

  “Of course. Why do you suppose she was so excited to meet you? Didn’t she tell you?”

  “The conversation didn’t go in that direction.”

  Clarissa shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Well. Would you like another coffee? There’s a pastry in the oven. Mum has a sweet tooth, and normally I take a break and join her about now.” As she spoke, we had been drifting together towards the kitchen area, where she now took a cinnamon plait from the oven.

  “What sort of work do you do?” I asked.

  “Writing – but not like yours or Mum’s. It’s mostly catalogue copy and travel brochures. I used to work in marketing. This is handy because I can do it from home.”

  We settled in against the counter, sipping coffee and nibbling the warm, sweet soft pastry while we traded information about our lives, laying the foundations for a friendship. After about a quarter of an hour, her eyes strayed to the clock on the stove, and although I wanted nothing more than to go on talking to Clarissa, I knew I was interrupting her work, so I said, “I should be going.”

  “You’re welcome to stay,” she said, hesitating slightly. “If you wanted to wait and say goodbye to Mum when she wakes up . . . only I don’t think she’ll have the energy for much more than that.”

  “No, that’s all right, as long as I can come back – how about the day after tomorrow? If that’s not too soon?”

  “That should be fine. I’ll call you if there’s any problem. I’ve got your number.”

  As soon as I got back to the car, I remembered “My Death” still in the boot. I thought of taking it up to the house and handing it over to Clarissa, just to get the problem off my hands, but then decided that wasn’t fair. I’d make a point of mentioning it to Helen next time. I felt I could count on getting a fairly rational response, although whether she’d be happy to have this strange painting back in her possession again, I didn’t know.

  Before starting on the long drive home, I went shopping. I bought myself a neat, unobtrusive mini-cassette recorder and spent some more time in the bookshops of Glasgow, this time concentrating on memoirs and histories of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, searching for and finding Helen Ralston’s name in index after index.

  The next day, two of the books I had ordered – Hermine in Cloud-Land and The Second Wife – arrived in the post, so the time passed pleasurably in reading. I was not very impressed by Willy Logan’s first book. The pictures were charming, but by comparison the text strained after charm and achieved only a kind of dated, fey whimsicality. I didn’t care for it and, having met the original of Hermine, I didn’t think that she would have either.

  The Second Wife, Helen Ralston’s fifth novel, was a revelation: understated, subtle, psychologically complex, ambiguous, and faintly sinister . . . it was just the sort of novel I aspired to write myself, and reading it now, at this fallow period of my life, stirred a creative envy in me. For the first time in ages I wished I was at work on a novel and, although I knew I wasn’t anywhere near ready to start one, I could believe that one day I would be, that the roads of fiction weren’t forever closed to me. Maybe, after I’d finished with Helen Ralston, I’d be inspired by her example to write fiction again.

  That night, the unseasonably dry, mild weather broke, and a gale began t
o blow. I lay awake listening to the keening wind, the rain flung like shot against the windows, and worried. I hated driving in bad weather; I was nervous enough about the narrow, twisting roads in this country when they were dry and the visibility was good – had it been anyone else I was going to meet, I would have phoned to suggest rescheduling. But at Helen Ralston’s age, any day might be her last. I felt I had to go.

  By six o’clock in the morning the winds had died; but the rain had settled in, falling heavily and relentlessly from the laden sky. A few hours of that, and the road I lived on would be flooded, impassable. I made a thermos of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich to take in the car along with my heavy-weather gear, a flashlight, and the shoulder bag holding The Second Wife, notebook, new tape recorder, extra batteries and tapes, and drove off without giving myself time to reconsider. “My Death” was still in its wrappings in the boot, awaiting delivery.

  I was tense and cautious, and although the rain had scarcely lessened by the time I reached the outskirts of Glasgow and the traffic reports on Radio Scotland warned of problems on other roads, my way was clear. Drawing up in front of Clarissa Breen’s house I felt the happy relief of the traveller who has, against all odds, battled safely home again.

  “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” I murmured to myself as I hurried up the walkway. Clarissa, opening the door to my knock, looked surprised and pleased.

  “I thought we’d be getting a call from you to say you weren’t going to risk it – this rain is dreadful!” she exclaimed, letting me in.

  There was the same smell of coffee and something sweet baking, and the black and white photographs displayed against the mauve walls of the entrance hall looked as familiar as if I’d been coming in through that front door for months. I sighed happily. “Oh, the roads weren’t bad, really. How are you? How’s Helen?”

  I had not spoken loudly, but my voice must have carried to the back of the house, because the old woman shouted, “Waiting for you so we can get started!”

  “Very bright today,” said Clarissa, behind me, and murmured closer to my ear, “A little over-excited.”