The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Despite the stories she told him about her background, Helen Elizabeth Ralston had neither Greek nor Irish blood. Her parents, Ben and Sadie Rudinski, were Polish Jews who arrived in New York around 1890. By the time their last child, Helen, was born, in Brooklyn in 1907, the family fortunes were thriving. Helen’s artistic ambitions were encouraged, and she was both educated and indulged. As America prepared to go to war in 1917, the Rudinskis changed their name to Ralston – around this time, Helen adopted Elizabeth as a middle name and began signing her drawings with the initials HER.

  Helen did well at school, and was accepted into the undergraduate liberal arts programme at Syracuse University. Her grades from her freshman year were good, and she participated in the drama society (painting sets and making costumes rather than acting) and contributed to the student newspaper, and seemed in general to have settled. But instead of returning as expected for a second year, Helen Elizabeth Ralston applied to the Glasgow School of Art, and embarked on a new life in Great Britain.

  Logan wrote later that she made this great change in her life on the prompting of a dream. He also believed that her parents were dead, that she was an only child, and that she had been self-supporting since the age of thirteen. It is impossible to know for certain when the relationship between them altered and they became lovers, as Logan is uncharacteristically reticent about this in his memoirs. But by January 1928 he had begun to paint “Circe”, and by March she was living in the flat for which he paid the rent, and to which he was a frequent visitor.

  After January, although she did not formally withdraw from the School, Helen attended fewer and fewer classes, until, by March, the other students scarcely saw her at all, unless she was in Logan’s company. Their relationship was certainly gossiped about, but Logan’s reputation was such that some thought him above suspicion. He was a respectable family man, with several children and a beautiful, gentle wife from a well-to-do Edinburgh background. The American student was such an odd creature it was hard to credit that the great W.E. Logan was seriously attracted to her.

  He had often taken a paternal interest in his students, male and female, and had even been known to make small financial contributions to help support those who were talented but poor. Helen Ralston clearly fell into that category. Brian Ross, Logan’s biographer, suggested that Logan’s natural innocence combined with generosity and good intentions might have got him into trouble. He thought that Helen had fallen in love with the great man, who had been interested in her only as a model. When “Circe” was finished, and it became clear that he would no longer be spending so much time alone in the studio with her, she had thrown herself out of the window in despair, and only then had he become aware of her true feelings for him.

  I shut Ross’s book in disgust. In the whole history of human relationships, how many men had ever rented an expensive flat for an unrelated female without expecting sexual favours in return? If she’d been one-sidedly in love with him, her suicide attempt would have been his signal to run like hell, not to abandon wife and children to nurse her back to health. Logan’s sacrifice only made sense if he was deeply in love with her, and her leap had shocked him into recognizing his responsibilities.

  I was willing to believe that it had been one-sided – on his part. She might have stopped going to art school to avoid him, even though her poverty had forced her into accepting his financial support, and she might have hoped that, once he no longer needed her to model for “Circe” she would have nothing more to do with him. Only he wouldn’t let her go – maybe he’d turned up that August day not to say goodbye, but to tell her he was going to leave his wife and children to live with her. I imagined her backing away from him, evading his hands, his lips, his unwanted declarations of undying devotion until finally, in a final, desperate squirm out of his arms, she’d fallen out of the window.

  I frowned as I considered this. What sort of window was it? How did a conscious, healthy adult fall out of a window? I found it hard to visualize from Ross’s description – he said she was “sitting on the window ledge”. Sideways, or with her back to the air? It was August, and hot, so naturally enough the windows were open. Did she lean too far back and lose her balance, or did she deliberately swivel around and jump?

  I picked up Touched by the Goddess and paged through it looking for references to Hermine, which was his name for Helen. There was no index. One reference leaped out at me:

  Truth then flying out the window, Hermine went after it. She caught it, although she nearly died in the attempt, and so restored me to the way of truth, and life.

  Well, that was a lot of help. Logan was concerned with myth, as he saw it, a deeper truth than mere facts could provide.

  I turned back to Ross again. It seemed that, however briefly, an attempted murder charge had been considered, on the grounds of Logan’s distraught “confession” to a policeman at the hospital to which Helen had been taken. Undoubtedly, he’d been filled with feelings of guilt, but was it the guilt of a violent seducer, or that of a man who felt torn between two women, or simply what anyone close to an attempted suicide might feel? Even his actual words at the time were unclear. And, as Ross pointed out, suicide was a crime, so Logan might have been trying to save Helen from prosecution and/or deportation for attempted self-murder by suggesting it was really his fault.

  More than one story could be told about what had happened in that room in Glasgow, a room with an open window, four storeys up, on a warm August day in 1928. There had been only two witnesses, who were also the protagonists, or the protagonist and the antagonist, the two people in the room, Willy Logan and Helen Ralston.

  Ross wrote far more clearly and simply than Logan in his attempt to establish the truth, but, as far as I could see, he was no less biased, and no more reliable, because there was only one story he wanted to tell, and that was Willy Logan’s. Helen’s experience, her interpretation, her story, was nowhere in his book.

  I went back to the beginning and made my way carefully through the acknowledgements. This ran to over two pages of names of all the people who had helped him in some way, and Helen Ralston’s name was not included. If she was dead, I thought, he might have quoted from one of her books, or letters – surely she had written about her relationship with Logan at some point, to someone? Some of the passages from In Troy could well have been pertinent. His restraint made me think he must have been refused permission to quote, with possibly the threat of legal action if he said anything about her which could be deemed offensive . . . the libel laws in Britain were pretty fierce, and if the old lady had a taste for litigation that would have tied his hands.

  I read swiftly through the pages that dealt with Logan’s desertion of his family, his devoted vigils beside Helen’s hospital bed, the loss of his job scarcely registering on him, her surgery, the creation of little Hermine and her adventures, then Helen’s convalescence in the west end flat, now their home, until, in the spring of 1929, although she still had to walk with a cane, Helen was deemed well enough to travel, and Logan took her on a sailing holiday up the west coast. In the fresh air away from the city they would rest and sketch and grow strong, Willy wrote in a letter to his son Torquil, adding:

  I hope you know how much I love you, darling boy, and that I don’t stay away out of crossness or dislike or any wrong reason, but only because Helen needs me so much more than the rest of you do. She has been very ill, you know, but finally is getting better. I hope soon she will be well enough to meet you. I have written and drawn a funny little story for her which I think you will like, too. It is to be published as a book in September, and I have told the publishers to be sure to send you your very own copy . . .

  On their first day out, they spotted a small island which caught Helen’s attention. In Logan’s description, Helen went ‘rigid’, her face paled, and her large, shiny eyes seemed to become even larger, a trio of symptoms which had always heralded her prophesying fits. This time all she said was, “I’ve seen my death. My death
is there.”

  Logan never explained why, in that case, he didn’t just sail as far away from the island as he could. To him, it was self-evidently necessary to go where Helen had foreseen her own death. In his novel In Circe’s Snare (1948) Logan has Odysseus declare, “Every man must seek his own death.”

  “And every woman, too,” Circe chimed in quickly. “If, that is, she wishes to be more than just a woman.”

  On the charts the island bears the name of Eilean nan Achlan. At the time, this probably meant nothing to Logan, but later, when he began his study of Gaelic, he would have found that it bears the meaning “the isle of lamentation”.

  Modern archaeologists believe that Achlan was an important funerary site in pre-Christian Scotland. Not only the name points to this conclusion, but the many cairns, including one large chambered tomb, still awaiting serious excavation today, believed to have been in use for a period of several hundred years. There was a tradition for a long time on the west coast of interring the dead on uninhabited islands reserved for that purpose. More often these islands were located in lakes or inland lochs, but Achlan’s position in the straits of Jura, relatively near to the mainland shore, would have made it equally accessible and therefore suitable for this purpose.

  Because it was late in the day, they did not attempt to land just then, but dropped anchor and spent the night on board in view of the little island. While the light was good they both made watercolour sketches of it. What Logan thought of his own painting – the last he would ever produce – or what became of it is not recorded. But, as Logan recalled in Touched by the Goddess, Helen’s swiftly rendered landscape was “technically remarkably assured, and quite surprising; the most remarkable piece of work I ever saw her produce.” He expressed his belief that already “The Goddess was working through her.” On the back of the little sketch she wrote the title “My Death”, the date – 14 April 1929 – and and a dedication to her lover.

  Reading this, I was quite certain that Brian Ross had never set eyes on the painting he seemed to describe. The passage was footnoted; I looked it up and read, “The current whereabouts of this painting is unknown. Personal correspondence with Torquil Logan.”

  I looked across the room where the painting now lay in a plain brown envelope. Alistair would have been happy to give me the frame, but I thought it would be too much to cart around. After all, I didn’t intend to hang it, but just return it to the woman who had painted it.

  The morning of 15 April 1929 dawned calm and fine. The sun was shining, the air warm for April, and quite still: perfect weather for exploring the island. Helen stripped off her clothes, wrapped them in a Sou’wester to make a waterproof bundle she could carry on top of her head, and had slipped over the side of the boat while Willy was still blinking sleep from his eyes. She gave a sudden sharp hiss as the salt water hit her scarred back and legs: the sight of those raw, red wounds against her pale flesh seemed to reproach Willy, and although the water was not very deep he felt obliged to follow her lead and strip completely rather than just removing shoes and trousers as he would have preferred.

  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 which 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” which 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 which 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 rebirth 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 had 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 super-naturally 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 over-ruled. 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 despatch 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 were 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 b
e, 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 which 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 which 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.