The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  “We – I – have a boat. My husband loved to sail. Since he died, I haven’t felt like taking her out on my own.”

  “Oh, my dear, I am so sorry.” His sharp blue eyes were suddenly gentle.

  I looked down at my teacup, into the light gold liquid, and thought of how one might recreate that colour in a watercolour wash. After a moment I could face him again, quite calm.

  “I was looking at your pictures trying to guess which one was by Helen Ralston. But if the watercolours are your mother’s, and the portrait by Logan—”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, that’s not hanging in here! I could hardly have it on display to all and sundry – far too risky!”

  I thought at first he was speaking of risk before I realized he meant the painting itself was risqué – did he mean it was a nude figure? But nudes had been common currency in fine art for a long time and surely were acceptable even in buttoned-down Calvinist Scotland?

  Alistair turned to Selwyn. “Didn’t you explain?”

  “I thought she’d better see for herself.”

  I tried to imagine it. Had Helen Ralston turned the tables on the male-dominated art world and depicted her lover in the altogether? Willy Logan and his little willy? And if it wasn’t so little, or dangling . . .? The erect penis was taboo even today.

  “May I see it?”

  “But of course. Drink up your tea. Sure you won’t have another fancy cake? No? Selwyn? Oh, go on, dear boy, no one cares about your figure now!”

  We went out by the door we had come in, back into the tiny entrance-way, where a steep, narrow staircase rose to the left.

  “Go halfway up the stair,” Alistair instructed. “It’s too narrow for more than one person at a time. You’ll see it hanging on the wall just at the turn of the stair.”

  It certainly was narrow, and steep. Maybe that was the reason for the inclusion of the little half-landing, to give the intrepid climber a space to pause and make a 90° turn before mounting to the floor above.

  The picture hung on the wall that faced the second flight of stairs. It was about 8″ × 10″, or the size of a standard sheet of paper torn from an artist’s pad. I saw a watercolour landscape, not so very different from the pictures hanging in the room downstairs.

  Then there was a click from the hall below, and the shaded bulb above my head blazed, illuminating the picture.

  I gazed at the painted image of an island, a rocky island rendered loosely in shades of brown and green and grey and greyish pink. I remained unimpressed, and baffled by Alistair’s attitude towards this uninspired daub. Risky?

  And then, all at once, as if another light had been switched on, I saw the hidden picture. Within the contours of the island was a woman. A woman, naked, on her back, her knees up and legs splayed open, her face hidden by a forearm flung across it and by the long hair – greenish, greyish – that flowed around her like the sea.

  The centre of the painting, what drew the eye and commanded the attention, was the woman’s vulva: all the life of the painting was concentrated there. A slash of pink, startling against the mossy greens and browns, seemed to touch a nerve in my own groin.

  One immediate, furious thought rose in my mind: How could she expose herself like that?

  Somehow I knew this was a self-portrait, that the artist would not have exploited another woman in this way. Yet she had not flinched from depicting herself as naked, passive, open, sexually receptive – no, sexually voracious, demanding to be looked at, to be taken, explored, used, filled . . .

  Well, why not? I was all in favour of female autonomy, in the freedom of women to act out of their own desires, whatever they were. After all, I still called myself a feminist, and I had come of age during the ’60s, a member of the post-Pill, pre-AIDS, sexually liberated generation who believed in letting it all hang out, and a woman’s right to choose.

  And yet – and yet—

  Whatever theory I held, the sight of this picture made me cringe away in revulsion, even fear. As if this was something I should not have seen, something which should not have been revealed. It was deeper than reason; I simply felt there was something wrong and dangerous in this painting.

  Then, like a cloud passing across the sun, the atmosphere changed again. Outlines blurred, colours became drab, and abruptly the painting was only the depiction of an island in the sea.

  But I knew now what was hidden in those rocky outlines, and I didn’t trust it to stay hidden. I turned away immediately and saw the two men who stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me.

  There was a sudden rush of blood to my head: my cheeks burned. They knew what I’d been looking at; they’d seen it, too. And then, far worse than the embarrassment, came a clutch of fear, because I was a woman, and my only way out was blocked by two men.

  The moment passed. The old man went back into the other room, and I was looking down at Selwyn, whom I’d known for twenty years.

  I hated the fact that I was blushing, but I’d look even more of a fool if I hovered there on the landing waiting for the red to fade, so I went down. Unostentatiously polite as ever, he turned away, allowing me to follow him into the sitting room where Alistair waited for us.

  Selwyn cleared his throat. “Well—”

  “Sit down,” said the old man. “You’ll want to hear the story. First, let me fetch down the picture. There’s something written on the back that you should see.”

  In uneasy silence, we sat down. The silence was uneasy on my part, anyway, as I struggled to understand my own reaction. I was not a prude, and although hardcore porn made me uncomfortable, mere nudity didn’t. I had no problem, usually, with images of healthy female bodies and I’d seen beaver shots before, far more graphic than Helen Ralston’s trompe-l’œil depiction.

  In the nineteenth century Gustave Courbet had painted a detailed, close-up, highly realistic view of a woman’s pubic area, calling it “The Origin of the World”. At the time, this was a deeply shocking thing to have done, and although Courbet was a well-respected artist, the painting could not be shown. Now, of course, it could be seen by anyone who cared to call up a reproduction on the internet, purchased in museum shops all over the world as a postcard or poster, and for all I knew it was available on T-shirts and mouse-mats, too.

  Courbet’s realistic depiction was far more graphic than Ralston’s impressionistic watercolour, and it might be argued that, as a male artist, he was objectifying women, serving her sexual parts up on canvas for the viewing pleasure of his fellow men, whereas Ralston had been exploring her own feelings about herself with, possibly, no intention of ever having it on public display. The question I should be asking myself was why, when Courbet’s picture did not disturb me, hers did.

  Alistair returned, carrying the picture. He handed it to me, face down, and I took it, gingerly, awkwardly, into my lap.

  “I had it mounted with a bit cut away at the back so you can still see what she wrote,” he explained.

  I looked down and had my first sight of Helen Ralston’s bold, clear handwriting:

  My Death

  14 April, 1929

  This, like all I own or produce, is for

  My Beloved Willy

  HER

  I shivered and made to pass it to Selwyn, but he demurred: he’d seen it before. So I went on holding it in my lap, feeling it slowly burning a hole in me, and looked at Alistair.

  “Why ‘My Death’? Did she mean . . . sexuality equates with death?”

  He spread his hands. “Much more than that, I’m sure. The two of them used certain words almost as if they were a special code, and capital-D Death was one of them. And consider the painting: the woman is also an island. A particular island, from your part of the world,” he added with a nod at me. “In fact, I must have sailed past it many times myself on our family holidays, although I don’t think we ever landed there. According to Willy Logan in his memoirs, the moment she set eyes upon the island she declared, ‘I’ve seen my death.’ Whether ‘my death�
� meant the same as capital-D Death to them, I couldn’t say, but clearly it wasn’t perceived as a threat or I’m sure they would have sailed away, rather than dropping anchor and going ashore, full of excitement, to explore.”

  I knew that in the Tarot the Death card did not signify physical demise, but rather meant a sudden, dramatic change of fortune. And sometimes people had to dare death in order to regain their lives. I wondered if Helen Ralston had been a precursor of Sylvia Plath, if she was another Lady Lazarus, making death her life’s art. First, out of a window into the air; the second time, on a rocky island . . .

  “What happened? Did something happen there?”

  “Logan went blind,” Selwyn told me.

  I had known, of course, that Logan had lost his sight – the transformation of a rather dull, society painter into the blind poetic visionary was the most famous thing about him. But I didn’t know how it had happened. “On the island? Some sort of accident?”

  “No accident,” said Alistair crisply. “Haven’t you read Touched by the Goddess? You must read Logan’s memoirs. His explanation . . . well, it’s hardly satisfactory, but it’s all we have. No one will ever know what really happened.”

  Had Logan intervened somehow, I wondered. Had the Death waiting for Helen been made to give her up, but taken Logan’s sight in exchange? It was clear that Alistair wasn’t going to tell – if he knew.

  “How did you come to have the painting?” Selwyn asked.

  “You know I was an art and antiques dealer back in the 1970s and ’80s. Torquil Logan – Willy’s youngest son – was on the fringe of the trade himself, and that was how we knew each other. When the old man died, although his literary agent was the executor of his estate, it was the sons and daughters who did all the donkey work of clearing out his things, and deciding what should be sold, or given away, shipped to the library which was to have the official collection, or whatever. Torquil got in touch with me when he came across ‘My Death’ – it was in an envelope at the back of a file of old letters, and probably had not been seen in fifty years.

  “He knew what it was, straight away. Well, of course: it was described in Touched by the Goddess right down to the inscription on the back, and invested with huge significance as the last work of art he ever looked at, the final gift from his mistress/muse, and even as a sort of premonition of what was about to happen to him, his blinding by the goddess.

  “And Torquil didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t want it; in fact, he told me, he felt a sort of revulsion about the very thought of having it in his house. He couldn’t ask his mother – she was in poor health, and quite devastated by the loss of her husband; he didn’t want to take any risks by even reminding her in any way of the existence of Helen Ralston. He’d considered leaving it in the envelope and slipping it into one of the boxes destined for the library – it would be safe enough in a university collection, he thought, and yet the idea of students looking at it, and writing about it in their theses made him feel queasy, just as did the thought of it going into a public auction, to be numbered and listed and described in a catalogue.”

  Alistair paused and took a deep breath. Then he went on. “I offered to take care of it for him. I promised there’d be no publicity. In fact, I said, if the price was right, I’d be happy to buy it for myself, not to sell on. Torq knew, because we’d talked about it, just how important Willy Logan’s books had been to me. Especially as a young man. That mystical strand of his, the idea that the old gods are still alive in the land and can be brought back to life through us, in us – I can’t quite explain how deeply that affected me, but the idea of owning something which had belonged to him, which had been so deeply, personally meaningful, was irresistible.

  “And Torquil said I could have it. In fact, he said he would like to give it to me. He didn’t want payment; it didn’t seem right to sell it. I protested, but he wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, he mailed it to me that same day, by ordinary post, in a padded envelope, but otherwise unprotected – when I think how easily it could have been lost or damaged . . .”

  We all stared at the thing in my lap. Unable to bear it any longer, I lifted the framed painting like a tray and held it out to Alistair. When he didn’t respond, I glared at him, but still he made no move to take it away.

  “I could never sell it,” he said quietly. “I’ve respected Torquil’s feelings about that. And yet, I’ve never felt right about owning it. It came to me by chance.” He paused. I saw his tongue appear at the corner of his mouth and run quickly around his lips. “I’d like you to have it.”

  “Me!” I felt the same unexpectedly sexual shock I’d had on first recognizing the hidden meaning of the picture I now held. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. It’s not right.”

  “Selwyn tells me you’re writing a biography of Helen Ralston. I’ve felt for some time that the painting should go back to her, but I didn’t know how to approach her. It seemed too difficult, and potentially too disturbing. How would she feel to learn that a male stranger had this very personal thing? Yet she might want it back. And it is hers, by rights, since Willy’s death. It might come more easily from another woman, and, as her biographer, you’ll be in on lots of intimate secrets; she’ll have to accept that . . .”

  “I don’t know that she’ll even accept me as her biographer. I can’t. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” I couldn’t seem to stop shaking my head.

  “Of course she will. Of course she is. And if she doesn’t want it, or you can’t find her, and you don’t feel you can keep it yourself, well, you could always mail it back to me in a plain brown envelope. Please.”

  And although I really didn’t want to do it, in the end I found it impossible not to agree.

  I’d booked a room for the night at Jury’s hotel, which was located just behind the train station. I’d planned, when I’d booked, to take myself out for a nice dinner and to see a movie, but by the time I’d parted from Selwyn, very late in the afternoon, the only thing I wanted was to find out more about Helen Ralston.

  I hit another bookshop, where I determined that In Troy was definitely out of print, and so was that old-fashioned children’s classic Hermine in Cloud-Land. “But you can find loads of second-hand copies on the Internet,” a helpful clerk assured me.

  “Thanks, I’ll do that when I get home,” I said, and paid for a copy of Touched by the Goddess. I bought a selection of interesting-looking gourmet salads from Marks and Spencer – ah, the luxuries of city life! – and settled into my hotel room to read everything in the big fat biography of Willy Logan which had anything to do with Helen Ralston.

  IV

  She was the girl from faraway, the girl from another land, and she swept into the dreich damp grey streets of Glasgow like a warm wind, smelling of exotic spices and a hint of dangerous mystery. She claimed to be half-Greek and half-Irish, with a mother who told fortunes and a father possessed of the second sight. She herself, according to at least one bewildered classmate, was subject to ‘fits’ when she would go rigid and begin to prophesy in a voice manifestly not her own – afterwards, she appeared exhausted, and claimed to remember nothing.

  In appearance, she made a most unlikely femme fatale. She was small and skinny, with sharp features, including a prominent nose, and her eyes, although large and lustrous, were disturbingly deep-set. Logan’s portrait glamorized her; the few photographs taken of Helen Ralston in the late 1920s reveal an odd shrunken figure who appeared prematurely old.

  Helen Elizabeth Ralston was a new student on the rolls of The Glasgow School of Art in September 1927; prior to that she had studied at Syracuse University, New York. Her reasons for departing New York for Glasgow are unknown. She had no Scottish connections whatsoever, and was far from wealthy. Although her tuition fees were paid in advance, she clearly found it a struggle to pay for supplies and other necessities of life. A fellow student, Mabel Scott Smith, recalls buying her dinner more than once, and made it a practice to bring along an extra bun for Helen
at tea time: “She would pretend she’d forgotten, or that she wasn’t hungry, but the truth was, she didn’t have a penny to spare. Everybody knew she was broke, even though you thought Americans must all be rich. She went around with a portfolio of drawings, trying to sell to the papers, but she never had a hope. She was good, but so were plenty others, and times were hard. It was even worse in Glasgow than in other places; you couldn’t make money from pretty pictures there, not then.”

  The budding friendship between Mabel and Helen came to an abrupt end when the American student moved out of her shared lodgings and into a west end flat paid for by W.E. Logan. Mabel Smith: “It wasn’t the sex – we art school girls had quite a liberal attitude towards that! – but that she would let herself be kept and by a married man! I lost my respect for Mr Logan, too.”

  Logan noticed the “young-old” quality of Helen Ralston’s face during his first class with her, and invited her to sit for him on Saturday afternoon. He singled out several students like this every year; there was nothing unusual, or improper, in his attentions. But from her first sitting it was clear that Helen would be different. Fixing her large, hypnotic eyes upon him, she began to speak, and immediately held him spellbound by her stories.

  These were probably mostly a retelling of myths and legends from many different cultures, Russian fairy-tales mingled with Greek myths, and Celtic motifs interwoven with material stolen from the Arabian Nights. To Logan they were pure magic, and ignited in him the passion for myth which would dominate his life.

  In his autobiography Logan writes of certain “magical” moments in his early childhood. Apart from that, however, there is no evidence that he experienced any significant mystical or spiritual leanings before meeting Helen Ralston.