Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  He was an illustrator. He worked mostly for magazines; now and then he did a book jacket.

  The only thing that bothered him was a mild but persistent pain in his back, which may have resulted from the excessively low furniture. There was a large black bearskin in front of the fireplace, and sometimes he wanted to lie on it with outstretched arms and legs, bury his face in the fur and roll around like a dog to rest his back. But he never did. The walls were glass, and there were no doors between the rooms.

  The large table by the fireplace was also of glass. He was in the habit of laying out his drawings on it in order to show them to Stella before sending them on to the client. These moments meant a great deal to him.

  Stella came and looked at his work. “It’s good,” she said. “Your use of line is perfect. All I’m missing is a dominant element.”

  “You mean it’s too gray?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It needs more white, more light.”

  They stood at the low table and he saw his drawings from a distance. They really were very gray.

  “I think what it needs is black,” he said. “But you need to look at them up close.”

  Afterward he thought for a long time about black as a focus. He was uneasy, and his back was worse.

  The commission came in November. He went in to his wife and said, “Stella, I’ve been given a job that really intrigues me.” He was happy, almost excited. Stella put down her pen and looked at him. She was always able to interrupt her work without annoyance.

  “It’s a terror anthology,” he said. “Fifteen stories, with black-and-white illustrations and vignettes. I know I can do it. It suits me. It’s my kind of thing, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” said his wife. “Are they in a rush?”

  “Rush!” he burst out, and laughed. “This isn’t some two-bit assignment, this is a serious piece of work. Full pages. They’re giving me a couple of months.” He rested his hands on her worktable and leaned forward. “Stella,” he said gravely, “I’m going to use black as a dominant element. I’m going to do darkness. Gray, well, I’ll only use gray when it’s like holding your breath, like when you’re waiting to be afraid.”

  She smiled. “It’s so nice you’ve got something you find interesting.”

  The text arrived, and he lay down on his bed and read the first three stories, no more. He wanted to begin work believing that the best material would come further on and so retain his expectations as long as possible. The third story gave him an idea, and he sat down at the table and cut himself a piece of thick, chalk-white rag paper with an embossed maker’s mark in the corner.

  The house was quiet and they weren’t expecting guests.

  It had been very hard for him to get used to this paper because he couldn’t forget how much it cost. Drawings on less expensive paper tended to be freer and better. But this time it was different. He loved the feel of the pen as it ran across the elegant surface in clean lines and at the same time he relished the barely discernible resistance that brought the lines to life.

  It was midday. He closed the drapes, turned on the lamp, and began to work.

  *

  They ate dinner together, and he was very quiet. Stella asked no questions. Finally he said, “It’s no good. There’s too much light.”

  “But can’t you close the drapes?”

  “I did,” he said. “But somehow it’s still too light. It only gets gray, it doesn’t get black!” He waited until the cook had finished serving and gone away. “There aren’t any doors in this house,” he burst out. “I can’t close myself in!”

  Stella stopped eating and looked at him. “You mean it’s just not working,” she said.

  “No. All I get is gray.”

  “Then I think you should find another studio,” said his wife. They went on eating, the tension gone. Over coffee she said, “My aunt’s old house is standing empty. But I think there’s still furniture in the little attic apartment. You could give it a try.”

  She called Jansson and asked him to put a heater in the attic room. Mrs. Jansson promised to leave food on the steps every day and to make sure the room was clean. Otherwise he’d have to keep house for himself and take a hot plate with him. It took only a few minutes to make all the arrangements.

  *

  When the bus appeared around the bend in the road, he turned earnestly to his wife. “Stella,” he said. “It will only be for a couple of weeks, then I can finish up at home. I’m going to concentrate while I’m there. I won’t be writing any letters, just working.”

  “Of course,” said his wife. “Now take care of yourself. And call me from the general store if there’s anything you need.”

  They kissed, and he climbed onto the bus. It was afternoon, and sleeting. Stella didn’t wave, but she stood and watched until the bus was hidden by the trees. Then she closed the gate and walked back up to her house.

  *

  He recognized the bus stop and the evergreen hedge, but it had grown higher and grayer. He was also surprised that the hill was so steep. The road went straight up, bordered by a confused mass of withered undergrowth and cut by deep furrows where the rain had washed sand and gravel down the slope. The house clung tightly to the hill at an impossible angle just below the crown, and the house, the fence, the outbuildings, the fir trees, all of them seemed to be holding themselves upright with a terrible effort. He stopped at the steps and looked up at the façade. The house was very tall and narrow, and the windows looked like loopholes. The snow was melting, and in the silence he could hear nothing but water dripping in among the firs. He walked around to the back. At the rear of the house was a one-story kitchen that merged with the hill in a messy, ill-defined rampart of rubbish. Here in the shadow of the firs lay everything the old house had spit out in the course of its life, everything worn out and unnecessary, everything not to be seen. In the darkening winter evening, this landscape was utterly abandoned, a territory that had no meaning for anyone but him. He found it beautiful. Unhurriedly, he went into the house and up to the attic. He closed the door behind him. Jansson had been there with the heater, a glowing red rectangle over by the bed. He walked to the window and looked down the hill. It seemed to him that the house leaned outward, tired of clinging tightly to the slope. With great love and admiration, he thought of his wife, who had made it so easy for him to leave. He felt his darkness drawing closer.

  *

  After a long night without dreams, he set to work. He dipped his pen in the India ink and drew calmly – small, tight, skillful lines. But now he knew that gray is only the patient dusk that makes preparation for the night. He could wait. He was no longer working to make a picture but only in order to draw.

  In the dusk he walked to the window and saw that the house was leaning outward. He wrote a letter.

  Beloved Stella, the first full page is finished and I think it’s good. It’s warm here and very quiet. The Janssons had cleaned, and this afternoon they left a canister of food on the steps – lamb wrapped in cabbage, and milk. I make coffee on the hot plate. Don’t worry about me, I’m getting along fine. I’ve been thinking about leaving the margins ragged – maybe I’ve been too conventional. Anyway, I was right that the dominant needs to be black. Thinking of you, a great deal.

  He walked down to the general store and posted the letter after dark. The wind had come up a bit and the fir trees sighed as he walked home. The weather was still warm, snow was melting and running down the hill in furrows of sand and gravel. He had meant to write a longer, different letter.

  The days passed quietly, and he worked steadily. The margins had grown fluid, and his pictures began in a vague and shadowy gray that felt its way inward, seeking darkness.

  He had read the whole anthology and found it banal. There was only one story that was truly frightening. It placed its terror in full daylight in an ordinary room. But all the others gave him the opportunity to draw night or dusk. His vignettes were workmanlike depictions of the
people and places the author and the reader would want to see. But they were uninteresting. Again and again he returned to his dark full pages. His back no longer ached.

  It’s the unexpressed that interests me, he thought. I’ve been drawing too explicitly; it’s a mistake to clarify everything. He wrote to Stella.

  You know, I begin to think I’ve been depicting things for much too long. Now I’m trying to do something new that’s all my own. It’s much more important to suggest than to portray. I see my work as pieces of reality or unreality carved at random from a long and ineluctable course of events – the darkness I draw continues on endlessly. I cut across it with narrow and dangerous shafts of light… Stella, I’m not illustrating any longer. I’m making my own pictures, and they follow no text. Some day someone will explain them. Every time I finish a drawing, I go to the window and think about you.

  Your loving husband

  He walked down to the general store and posted the letter. On his way home he ran into Jansson, who asked if there was a lot of water in the cellar.

  “I haven’t been in the cellar,” he said.

  “Maybe you could have a look,” Jansson said. “What with all the rain we’ve had this year.”

  He unlocked the cellar and turned on the light. The bulb was mirrored in a motionless expanse of water, as shiny and black as oil. The cellar stairs descended into the water and vanished. He stood still and stared. The walls lay in deep shadow, hollowed out where pieces of the wall had collapsed, and the fallen pieces – lumps of stone and cement – lay half hidden under the water like swimming animals. It seemed to him that they swam backward, toward the angle where the cellar hallway turned and went farther in under the house. I must draw this house, he thought. Quickly. I need to hurry, while it lasts.

  He drew the cellar. He drew the backyard, a chaos of carelessly discarded fragments, useless, coal black, and entirely anonymous in the snow. It was a picture of quiet, gloomy confusion. He drew the sitting room, he drew the veranda. Never before had he been so fully awake. His sleep was deep and easy, the way it had been as a boy. He woke instantaneously, without that half-conscious, uneasy borderland that breaks up sleep and poisons it. Sometimes he slept during the day and worked at night. He lived in a state of furious expectation. He finished one drawing after another. There were more than fifteen, many times more. He no longer bothered with the vignettes.

  Stella, I’m drawing the sitting room. It’s such a tired old room, completely empty. I draw nothing but the walls and floor, a worn plush carpet, and a wall panel with a repeating pattern. It’s a picture of the footsteps that passed through the room, of the shadows that fell on the wall, of the words that still hang in the air – or maybe of the silence. All of that is still here, you see, and that’s what I’m drawing. Every time I finish a drawing, I go to the window and think of you.

  Stella, have you ever thought about the way wallpaper loosens and opens? It happens according to strict rules. No one can depict desolation who hasn’t inhabited desolation and observed it very closely. Things condemned have a terrible beauty.

  Stella, do you know what it feels like to see everything gray and cautious all your life and to always try to do your best but all you get is tired? And then suddenly you know, you know with absolute certainty. What are you doing right now? Are you working? Are you happy? Are you tired?

  Yes, he thought. She’s been working and she’s a little tired. She’s walking around in her house, getting undressed for the night. She’s walking around turning off the lights, one by one, she’s as white as blank paper, as white as the innocent challenge of the empty surface, and now she alone gives off light, Stella, my star.

  He was almost certain that the house leaned outward. Through the window, he could see four steps but not the top one. He put sticks in the snow in order to measure the change in the house’s angle of inclination. The water in the cellar did not rise. It didn’t matter anyway. He had drawn both the cellar and the façade. He was now working exclusively on the ragged wallpaper in the sitting room. There was no mail. At times he was not certain which letters he had sent to his wife and which he had only imagined. She was farther away now, a picture, a faint pretty picture of a woman. At times, cool and naked, she moved through their large salon of white wood. He found it hard to remember her eyes.

  Days and nights and many weeks went by. He worked the whole time. When a drawing was finished, he set it aside and forgot it, continuing at once with a new one, a new white paper, a blank white surface that offered the same challenge, the same limitless possibilities, and an absolute isolation from outside help. Each time he began to draw, he made sure that all the doors in the house were locked. It had begun to rain, but the rain didn’t concern him. Nothing concerned him except the tenth story in the anthology. More and more, he thought about this one story, in which the author had subjected daylight to his terror and, against all the rules, enclosed it in an ordinary, pleasant room.

  He came closer and closer to the tenth story. It was everywhere, and finally he decided to kill it by drawing. He took a fresh white paper and placed it on the table in front of him. He knew he had to make it visible, the only story in the whole anthology that was genuinely full of horror, and he knew he could illustrate it only one way – it was Stella’s living room, her consummate room, where they lived their lives together. He was amazed but utterly certain. He walked around and lit the low lights, all of them, and the windows opened their eyes out toward the illuminated terrace. Beautiful, strange people moved slowly in groups of two or three, and he drew them all, calmly and surely, with small, gray, skillful lines. He drew the room, a terrifying room without doors, bulging with tension, the white walls shadowed with imperceptibly tiny cracks. He let them run on and widen. He drew them all. He saw that the window-wall’s enormous sheet of glass was on the point of bursting from the pressure from within, and he began drawing it as fast as he could, and at the same time he saw the cleft that opened in the floor and it was black. He worked faster and faster, but before his pen could reach the darkness, the room he was drawing turned and crashed outward to its ruin.

  THE MANGLER

  Stephen King

  Stephen Edwin King (b.1947) was born in Portland, Maine. He gained a BA in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970. King wrote his first novel, Carrie, while teaching English at the public high school in Hampden. The success of the book enabled him to become a full-time writer. He has written over fifty novels, seven non-fiction books and many short stories. His books have sold millions of copies and several have been adapted for television and cinema.

  Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving – slowly, with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed with milling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; the big automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Hunton very wary. The crowd should be at the scene of the accident, not in the office. It was the way things worked – the human animal had a built-in urge to view the remains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always did when the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there.

  A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked towards him reluctantly. He was a buffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeks vein-broken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with the brown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut him off briskly:

  “Are you the owner? Mr Gartley?”

  “No… no. I’m Stanner. The foreman. God, this –…”

  Hunton got out his notebook. “Please show me the scene of the accident, Mr Stanner, and tell me what happened.”

  Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeks stood out like birthm
arks. “D-do I have to?”

  Hunton raised his eyebrows. “I’m afraid you do. The call I got said it was serious.”

  “Serious –…” Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment his Adam’s apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. “Mrs Frawley is dead. Jesus, I wish Bill Garley was here.”

  “What happened?”

  Stanner said, “You better come over here.”

  He led Hunton past a row of hand presses, a shirt-folding unit, and then stopped by a laundry-marking machine. He passed a shaky hand across his forehead. “You’ll have to go over by yourself, Officer. I can’t look at it again. It makes me… I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-welded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. Then they can’t look. They can’t –

  Hunton saw it.

  The machine was still running. No one had shut it off. The machine he later came to know intimately: the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder. A long and clumsy name. The people who worked here in the steam and the wet had a better name for it. The mangler.

  Hunton took a long, frozen look, and then he performed a first in his fourteen years as a law-enforcement officer: he turned around, put a convulsive hand to his mouth, and threw up.

  *

  “You didn’t eat much,” Jackson said.

  The women were inside, doing dishes and talking babies while John Hunton and Mark Jackson sat in lawn chairs near the aromatic barbecue. Hunton smiled slightly at the understatement. He had eaten nothing.

  “There was a bad one today,” he said. “The worst.”

  “Car crash?”

  “No. Industrial.”

  “Messy?”

  Hunton did not reply immediately, but his face made an involuntary, writhing grimace. He got a beer out of the cooler between them, opened it, and emptied half of it. “I suppose you college profs don’t know anything about industrial laundries?”