‘Yeah, like the folk singer,’ Phil says.
‘Or a car crash,’ Emmet says, ‘like the one that killed Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg in Mexico. It’s a cruel world out there, Phil, and even though you’re washed-up as a writer, be thankful that you have me to look after your interests.’
‘Because you want to make sure I don’t count for anything,’ Phil says, and finally opens the loop of the tie wide enough to be able to drag it over his head. He winds down the window and drops the tie into the cold gritty wind.
‘You stupid bastard,’ Emmet says, quite without anger. ‘That cost six bucks fifty. Pure silk, a work of art.’
‘I feel sick,’ Phil says, and he does feel sick, but that’s not why he says it.
‘Not in the car,’ Emmet says sharply, and pulls over to the kerb. Phil opens the door, and then he’s running and Emmet is shouting after him. But Phil runs on, head down in the cold wind, and doesn’t once look back.
He has to slow to a walk after a couple of blocks, out of breath, his heart pounding, his legs aching. The cold, steely air scrapes the bottoms of his lungs. But he’s given Emmet the slip. Or perhaps Emmet doesn’t really care. After all, Phil’s been ruined as a writer, his gift dribbled away on dead books until nothing is left.
Phil thinks, Except for that one book, The Man in the High Castle. The book Emmet conspired to suppress, the book he made me hate so much because it was the kind of thing I was meant to write all along. Because I would have counted for something, in the end. I would have made a difference.
He walks on, with no clear plan except to keep moving. It’s a poor neighbourhood, even though it’s only a few blocks from the White House. Despite the cold, people are sitting on the steps of the shabby apartment houses, talking to each other, sharing bottles in brown paper bags. An old man with a terrific head of white hair and a tremendously bushy white moustache sits straight-backed on a kitchen chair, smoking a cheap cigar with all the relish of the king of the world. Kids in knitted caps and plaid jackets bounce a basketball against a wall, calling to each other in clear, high voices. There are Christmas decorations at most windows, and the odours of cooking in the air. A good odour, Phil thinks, a homely, human odour. A radio tuned to a country station is playing one of the old-time ballads, a slow, achingly sad song about a rose and a brier twining together above a grave.
It’s getting dark, and flakes of snow begin to flutter down, seeming to condense out of the darkening air, falling in a slanting rush. Phil feels the pinpoint kiss of every flake that touches his face.
I’m still a writer, he thinks, as he walks through the falling snow. I still have a name. I still have a voice. I can still tell the truth. Maybe that journalist who interviewed me last month, the one who works for the Washington Post, maybe he’ll listen to me if I tell him about the conspiracy in the White House.
A bum is standing on the corner outside the steamed up window of a diner. An old, fat woman with a mottled, flushed face, grey hair cut as short as a soldier’s. Wearing a stained and torn man’s raincoat that’s too small for her, so that the newspapers she’s wrapped around her body to keep out the cold peep from between the straining buttons. Her blue eyes are bright, watching each passer-by with undiminished hope as she rattles a few pennies in a paper cup.
Phil pushes into the diner’s steamy warmth and uses the payphone, and then orders coffee to go. And returns to the street, and presses the warm container into his sister’s hand.
<
* * * *
DOUGLAS SMITH
By Her Hand, She Draws You Down
Douglas Smith is a technology executive for an international consulting firm. He lives just north of Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two sons. His stories have appeared in more than thirty professional magazines and anthologies in eleven countries and nine languages, including Amazing Stories, Cicada, Interzone, The Third Alternative and On Spec.
In 2001, he was a John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new writer, and won an Aurora Award for best SF&F short fiction by a Canadian. Like the rest of humanity, he is working on a novel.
‘This is the first horror story I ever wrote,’ admits the author, ‘and given that you’re reading it here, I just may try another sometime. The inspiration for the tale resulted from the hard work in which you can often find writers engaged: staring out a window. Actually, it was the window of a bus. I wanted to write a story about some form of creativity other than writing. Perhaps the constant flow of visual images flashing by the window led to the idea of a visual artist. From there, I thought of the portrait artists that I’d often see during visits to Ontario Place, a lake-front tourist attraction in Toronto, and Cath and her situation was born.’
* * * *
By her hand, she draws you down.
With her mouth, she breathes you in.
Hope and dreams and soul devoured.
Lost to you, what might have been.
B
y her hand, she draws you down . . .
Joe swore when he saw Cath doing a kid. He had left her for just a minute, to get a beer from the booth on the pier before it closed for the night. Walking back now, he could see Cath on her stool, sketch pad on a knee, ocean breeze blowing her pale hair. A small girl sat on another stool facing her, a man and a woman, parents he guessed, beside the child.
Kid’s not more than seven, he thought. Cath promised me no kids. She promised.
The sun was long set and the air had turned cool, but people still filled the boardwalk. Joe wove through the crowd as fast as he could without attracting attention. Cath had set up farther from the beach tonight, at the bottom of a grassy slope that ran up to the highway where their old grey Ford waited.
‘Last night tonight,’ Cath had said when they had parked the car earlier. ‘It wants to move on. I can feel the change.’
Joe had swallowed and turned off the ignition. He was never comfortable talking about it. ‘Where’s it headed?’
Cath had just shaken her head, grinning. ‘Dunno. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Not knowing where we’re going next? That’s fun, isn’t it Joe?’
Yeah, loads of fun, he thought now as he approached Cath and her customers. It had been fun once, when they’d met, before he learned what Cath did, what she had to do. When his love for her wasn’t all mixed up with fear of what she would do to someone.
Or to him.
The child’s parents looked up as Joe came to stand beside Cath. The father frowned. Joe smiled, trying to hide the dread digging like cold fingers into his gut. Turning his back to them, he bent to whisper in Cath’s ear. That flowery scent she had switched to recently rose warm and sweet in his face. Funeral parlors, he thought. She smells like a goddamned funeral parlor.
‘Cath, she’s just a kid,’ he rasped in her ear.
Cath shook her head. Her eyes flitted from the girl to her pad. ‘Bad night. I’m hungry,’ she muttered, ignoring Joe.
Joe looked at the drawing. It was good. But they were always good. Cath had real talent, more than Joe ever had. She would set up each night where people strolled, her sketches beside her like trophies from a hunt. People would stop to look, sometimes moving on, sometimes sitting for a portrait.
Eventually Joe and Cath would move on too. When the town was empty, Cath said. When the thing inside her wanted to move on. They had spent this week at a little New England vacation spot. At least they were heading south lately, he thought. Summer was dying and Joe longed to winter in the sun. Sleep for Joe was rare enough since he’d met Cath. Winters up north meant long nights in bars. Things closed in then, closed in around him. On those nights, he would lie awake in their motel bed, feeling Cath’s stare on him, feeling her hunger.
He looked at the sketch, at the child captured there, perfect except for the emptiness that spoke from the eyes, from any eyes that Cath drew. And the mouth.
Where the mouth should have been, empty paper gaped. Cath left the mouth until the end. The portr
aits always bothered Joe when they looked like that. To him, the pictures weren’t waiting to be completed, waiting for a last piece to be added. To Joe, something vital had been ripped from what had once been whole, leaving behind a void that threatened to suck in the world around it. An empty thing but insatiable. Waiting to suck him in too.
‘Cath,’ he whispered. ‘You promised.’
She ignored him again. Joe wrapped his fingers around the thin wrist of her hand that held the sketch pad. ‘You promised.’
Cath snapped her head around to glare up at him. Joe caught his breath as anger met hunger in her grey eyes, becoming something alive, something that leapt for him.
The father cleared his throat and the thing in Cath’s eyes retreated. Cath turned to the parents. ‘Sorry, can’t get her right. You can have this.’ Tearing the sketch from her pad, she shoved it at the mother. ‘We gotta go.’ Cath stood and folded her stool as the child ran to peek from behind the father’s legs. Joe grabbed the other stool and the canvas bag that held Cath’s supplies. He put an arm around Cath’s waist, leading her away.
The father started to protest. ‘But you’re almost done. You just need to draw in the mouth.’
Cath stopped and Joe swore. He just wanted to get her out of there. She walked back to the man who exchanged glances with his wife. Cath touched a finger to her lips. ‘Mouths are the hardest part. The most important part,’ she said. ‘Everyone -they say “the eyes are the windows of the soul.” They say “Oh, you got the eyes just right.” They don’t know. They don’t know it’s the mouth you gotta get just right. That’s what makes a picture come alive. Like it’s gonna just start . . . breathing.’
The father cleared his throat, but the mother tugged at his shirt. Joe grabbed Cath’s arm and pulled her away. The man muttered something, but Joe didn’t care.
He led Cath to a gravel path that switched back and forth up the steep hill to the highway above. Halfway up, an observation area looked down on the pier and the beach and the boardwalk. Cath twisted away from him there. A low stone wall ran around the area’s edge and two lampposts stood at either end. Putting her stool down under the nearest light, she began setting out her sketches against the wall.
Joe dropped the other stool and sat down. The fatigue that lived with him always now rose to engulf him. He felt dead inside, all used up, like the way Cath’s pictures made him feel, waiting to be sucked into the void. ‘We had a deal,’ he said.
Cath sat, looking up and down the path. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘No kids, remember?’ Joe said. ‘And nobody with a family depending on them.’ He tried to make his voice sound strong, but his hands were shaking.
She opened her pad. ‘Kind of cuts down the field, Joe.’
‘Use one of the sketches you’ve got put away.’
Cath laughed. A bitter, empty sound. Joe imagined the mouths she drew making that kind of sound. Cath looked at him finally. ‘All gone. Used ‘em all.’
Joe felt the emptiness again, a void gaping below, drawing him down. He leaned forward, head between his hands, fingers pressing hard on his temples, trying to make his fear go away. ‘Jeez, Cath. All of them?’ He searched her face for some hope.
Cath shrugged. ‘Girl’s gotta eat.’ She stared past him and he heard gravel crunching underfoot. Joe turned, his hand slipping by reflex to touch the switchblade inside his boot top.
A fat man in black pants, white shirt, and paisley tie loosened at the neck was struggling down the steep path from the highway, a beach chair in each arm. He walked over to the stone wall and put down the chairs to rest. Nodding at Joe and Cath, he glanced at her sketches. He began to turn away but then looked back. His gaze ran over the portraits lined against the low wall like prisoners before a firing squad. The man whistled.
Joe sighed, from regret and relief. Cath would eat tonight.
* * * *
With her mouth, she breathes you in . . .
The man’s name was Harry. He haggled with Cath over the price, then he sat down, and Cath started sketching. Joe glanced at the two chairs that Harry had carried but he couldn’t see a wedding ring so he kept silent.
Cath worked quickly, her hand slashing at the page, pausing only to switch the color of her pencil. When only the mouth remained unfinished, she put the pad down on her lap.
Harry looked down at the sketch. ‘There’s no mouth.’
‘Mouths are special, Har,’ Cath said. She puckered at him and Harry laughed, a nervous squeaky sound. Cath touched a finger of her drawing hand to Harry’s lips. He gave that little laugh again but didn’t pull away. Cath ran her fingertips slowly over his lips, tracing each curve and contour. Sitting on the stone wall, Joe thought of her fingers on his own skin at night in bed, tracing the lines of his body. Love and fear and lust - with Cath, they all mixed together, colors in a picture flowing into each other, until you couldn’t separate one from another.
She lowered her hand to the paper, her eyes still on Harry’s mouth. Picking up a red pencil and dropping her gaze, her hand began to stab at the paper in short urgent strokes. The mouth grew under her fingers as Joe watched. She finished in seconds. Removing the sketch sheet, Cath handed it to Harry. He regarded it for a moment, grunted his approval and paid her. Portrait under his arm, he picked up his chairs and nodded a goodbye.
After watching Harry labor down the path toward the boardwalk below, Joe walked to where Cath sat cross-legged on the ground, her sketch pad on her lap. She carefully lifted a sheet of carbon paper from the top of the pad. A copy of the sketch of Harry she had just rendered stared up at Joe in black and white. No color, thought Joe. As if all the life’s been sucked out of it. No, he thought. Not all of it. Not yet.
From her canvas bag, Cath removed a small rosewood box, its hinged cover carved with letters in a script that Joe thought was Arabic. He’d never checked, wanting to know as little as possible about the thing. Cath opened the lid and withdrew what looked like a child’s crayon but without any paper covering.
The crayon was as long as Joe’s middle finger but thicker, and a red so dark it was almost black. Joe remembered drawing as a kid, the crayons, the names of the colors. Midnight blue, leaf green, sunshine yellow. He knew the name that this one would have carried - blood red. It glinted in the overhead light as if it would be sticky to the touch, but Joe had never touched it so he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t want to know.
Hunched over the portrait copy, Cath began to retrace the lines of the mouth with the red crayon, adding color and shading. She worked with almost painful slowness. Joe remembered how once, when she had made a mistake at this stage, the fury had burst from her like a wild thing caged too long.
At last, Cath straightened. She gave the mouth one last appraising look, then returned the crayon to the rosewood box. Joe walked back to the low stone wall. He knew he would turn back to watch her. He always did.
Below, Harry had reached the boardwalk. The big man put down one chair to wave to someone on the beach. Joe’s stomach tightened. A woman waved back at Harry, and a small boy and girl ran to hug him. Jesus, no, thought Joe.
He turned back. Cath sat hunched over the portrait of Harry on her lap. Joe rushed to her, praying that it wasn’t too late, a prayer that died when he saw the picture. It had started.
The portrait’s mouth was moving, fat lips squirming like slick red worms on the paper. A pale vapor rose thin and wispy from those lips. Cath bent her head over the mouth and sucked in that misty thing that Joe never wanted to name.
A scream rose from the beach. A woman’s cry, a thing of pain and fear. Between her sobs, Joe could hear children crying.
He walked back to the low stone wall and looked down at the crowd gathered where Harry had fallen. Joe stood there, stare locked on Harry’s still form, feeling the void opening below him again. ‘Cath, we have to get out of here.’
Cath didn’t answer him. Joe tore his gaze from the scene below and turned back to her. She was standing now, looking
south, down the coastline. ‘It wants to move on,’ she said.
* * * *
Hope and dreams and soul devoured . . .
Joe drove, staring at the white lane markers slicing the dark two-lane one after another, like brush strokes by God on a long black canvas. White on black, he thought. The negative image of Cath’s secret portraits. Black on white, white on black, just the red missing. Just that blood red.
How long before some cop put it together? A string of deaths, all the victims drawn by a young woman with a male companion. Christ, Harry had died with a sketch in his hand.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 21