New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

THE SKETCH Alison Moore

Ailsa moved into the light. She held the drawing close to the bedroom window and studied it. She had found it inside her old portfolio case, which she had opened today for the first time since her youth. The rest of the work—a collection of self-portraits and still lifes—was familiar, recognisable as her own, but this piece—she would swear on the Bible—she had never seen before, not until just a minute ago when she had turned over an unfinished head and found this strange thing underneath.

As a girl, she’d had her heart set on art school, on nothing less than the Slade; she had hoped to become an artist, perhaps an illustrator. In the event, further education had not been a possibility, due to her mother’s illness. “You can get that idea out of your head,” her father had told her. The portfolio had been put away then and had not been opened again while her father was alive, although Ailsa had taken it with her when she married Peter, and again when they moved out of their first house and into this flat. She was supposed to have thrown things out before the move, but she had been finding it hard. In the end, she had brought much of it with her, promising Peter that she would, when she’d had a chance to think about it, keep only what was absolutely necessary; she would be brutal.

Now the portfolio lay unzipped and wide open on the unmade bed. The drawing’s heavy pencil lines captured the likeness of some kind of troll or sprite, some devilish-looking creature. This was not something she had drawn, surely. Her own work had been much more conventional. She did not remember making this picture; it did not look like her work. She touched it, as if she might be able to feel those textures suggested by the pencil lines: the roughness, the hairiness. When she looked very closely, at details rather than at the whole thing in one go, perhaps there was something familiar about it; and whether or not it had come out of her, it did speak to her in some way.

The graphite had come away on her fingers; her fingerprints made an ellipsis at the edge of the paper.

Her father’s funeral took place on a Wednesday. Peter could not be there as he had to be at work, and it was necessary for Ailsa to take the baby with her to the crematorium. Peter needed the car, and anyway, he did not like her to drive it: she had once scraped a wing, scratched the paintwork, and she had a bad habit of letting the windscreen washer reservoir run dry. He accused her of not looking after it properly. Ailsa thought he was being unfair. In recent years, she had taken a car maintenance class for beginners, and she had been a good student—she had paid attention and made careful notes, which she kept in order in a ring binder. On the other hand, it was true that she was sometimes careless with that old car of his.

She caught the bus to the crematorium, with the baby strapped to her chest. It was a cold midwinter day, but fresh and rather lovely, and as she walked through the gates of the crematorium the sun emerged briefly.

She sat at the front, and as the curtains closed around the coffin a distant relative leaned close, laid a hand on Ailsa’s and said, as if to soothe her, though she was not crying, “That’s just his body going. He doesn’t want it any more. He’s free now.” Ailsa looked at the relative’s hand pressing down on her own; it looked like her father’s.

“Out,” said Peter. He reached back into the cardboard box. “Out.” The discard pile in the flat’s narrow hallway reminded Ailsa of the bonfires they used to have in their back garden when she was little. She always made a Guy to put on top of it, with an old pillowcase for a face and her mother’s tights for limbs, all stuffed with her father’s newspaper. Her father, approaching the bonfire with a box of matches, said that if any hedgehogs were hibernating in there they’d better get out now, and then he lit the twists of paper he’d screwed into the gaps, and Ailsa watched the Guy. She imagined, as the flames rose higher, the Guy’s felt-tipped face turning towards her, seeking her out in the dark, in the firelight, his overlong limbs twitching and shifting away from the heat. Then the nylon and the paper would catch and the Guy would flare and—so soon, so quickly, considering the time and care that had been put into making him—be gone, apart from the fragments that, still burning, blew towards her, and she had to step back so that she would not get holes in her winter coat.

“Keep,” said Peter, putting aside the canvas of tiny handprints and footprints, done when Bella was only a few weeks old.

“Out,” said Peter. He was holding Ailsa’s portfolio. It had not sounded like a question, but Ailsa said, as she came forward and took the portfolio from his hands, “I’m not sure.”

“You can’t hang on to all this stuff,” he said. “We don’t have space for it here.”

“I don’t see how we’re going to manage in this little flat,” said Ailsa. “Not with the baby.”

“We have no choice,” said Peter. “You know that. We have to downsize.”

“All my drawings are in here,” she said.

“But what would you need to keep them for?” asked Peter.

“I might want to look at them,” said Ailsa.

Peter, delving back into the box, adding sheaves of old paperwork to the pile, said, “You haven’t looked at them in twenty years.”

“I looked at them yesterday,” said Ailsa. “There was one drawing in there that I don’t even remember doing. It’s nothing like the others. It’s peculiar, rather horrid, but I think in a way it’s better—more vivid and realistic and affecting— than anything else I’ve done. It looked like if I touched it, I’d be able to feel the textures—dirty hair and stubble and ragged nails. And its eyes look right back at you, I swear they do. I’m going to show you.” She went to the kitchen table, moving the baby’s things to make space for her portfolio. She opened it up. “It’s here,” she said, “in amongst the self-portraits, just under these heads.”

Peter came and stood at her shoulder, waiting.

“It’s here,” she said again, “somewhere…”

“Ailsa,” said Peter.

She rummaged through the sheets of paper, going all the way down to the bottom of the pile. “It was…”

“Ailsa,” said Peter. “We’re all having to make sacrifices. Even Bella is having to make sacrifices. She’ll have to manage with less stuff, less space, no garden.”

Ailsa looked at Bella, who everyone said had her eyes, but the baby’s eyes were blue while Ailsa’s were dark. Perhaps the baby’s eyes would change; Ailsa expected that they would, in due course. Bella was still so young—too young, Ailsa thought, to even see her across a room, to see anything more than a murky blur where Ailsa was standing.

The picture of the troll, the sprite—the devilish-looking whatever-it-was—was not there. She would swear that she had put it back inside the portfolio, but now it was gone. In between the heads and the fruit, she found a sheet of paper that was blank except for the fingerprints at the edge, one so clear that you could see the pattern, like ripples in water. She tried to match it to her own. The others were just smudges.

Ailsa saw Peter’s face contort; she watched him spit his tea back into his mug. Holding it at a distance, he said, “Is there salt in this?”

“There shouldn’t be,” she said.

“I know there shouldn’t be,” he said, “but is there?”

“Mine’s fine,” said Ailsa, but she did not take sugar anyway; she drank her tea black, with lemon. “Perhaps the sugar and salt got mixed up during the move.”

“And the mug’s dirty,” complained Peter, putting it down heavily and pushing himself away from the kitchen table. Ailsa looked and saw that the mug was indeed dirty: there was a smudge on the side, just where it said BEST DAD. She wondered who had bought that mug. She had not bought it for him, and of course the baby had not; had he bought it for himself? As a joke, perhaps.

When she had cleared the breakfast table and given Bella her milk, she went to look for her portfolio. She had to make some decisions today; she had to decide which of her belongings to keep and which to discard. She called to Peter, “Where’s my portfolio?”

“I put it out,” said Peter.

Ailsa looked at the pile that remained in the hallway. “Out where?”

“I put it out for the dustmen,” said Peter.

Still in her dressing gown, Ailsa hurried out of the flat and down the stairs. At the bottom, she pushed open the front door. The world was bitterly cold.

The bins had been emptied. Ailsa heard the distant screech of the bin lorry.

There was a lot of work to be done on the flat, to make it habitable. The kitchen in particular was disgusting. Ailsa remembered her mother saying that the kitchen was the most important room in a home; the kitchen was its heart.

Ailsa sat the baby in a rocker in the doorway and set to tearing up the old lino, which she despised—it looked like a vast and foul chessboard. She was halfway through the task before it struck her that the tiles revealed beneath were just the same as they’d had at home when she was young. For a moment, looking at these childhood tiles, it was as if it might be possible to go back and start over again, make a fresh start, have another go. Then she saw the dirty marks on the doorframe, and she thought of her father, home from the workshop, slouching in the doorway, a small man with grime on his hands, in the whorls of his skin, oil under his fingernails.

When Peter came home from work, he stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. Looking back at him with red-rimmed eyes, she told him, “I don’t want to live here,” but her voice seemed thin, whispery, and she was not sure he heard her.

“You’re a state,” he said. “Some women are like this after having a baby.” He reached down and lifted Bella out of the rocker. “Sssh…” he said to her. “Sssh…” To Ailsa, he said, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”

Ailsa was often woken at night by Peter’s snoring. When it reached a crescendo, his breathing seemed to stop altogether, before starting again. But this was different. Ailsa had woken to find Peter lying there with his hands around his own throat; she had been woken by the choking noises he was making. His eyes—she saw, as she got herself up onto her elbows to see what was going on—were very wide. As she turned on the bedside lamp, he finally managed to draw in a breath, a desperate, shallow gulp of air, and then another. When he could speak again, he whispered, “I couldn’t breathe.”

“I expect it’s this flat,” she said. “All the old dirt and dust has got into your lungs.”

“It felt like something was sitting on my chest,” he said.

In the lamplight, Ailsa looked at his chest, but the T-shirt that he wore in bed was black—there was no evidence that anything had been there; she could see no tell-tale marks.

When it happened again, she said to him, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”

The doctor found nothing wrong. “He says I’m in good shape,” said Peter.

Ailsa washed the T-shirt. She spring-cleaned the flat, with the windows wide open, even though it was winter. When she found grimy streaks low down on walls that she knew she had cleaned, she supposed that they might just be scuff marks from Peter’s polished shoes. When she found the same marks down near the bottom of the baby’s bedroom door, she began to get up in the night whether or not she could hear Bella crying; a silence was more worrying. Every few hours she was out in the hallway, going into Bella’s room, turning on the overhead light to look for grubby prints on the bedding or on the babygro or on Panda, who had been Ailsa’s own favourite cuddly toy when she was small.

“I’ve been moving the furniture,” said Ailsa.

“I can see that,” said Peter. He stood in the doorway of the baby’s room, blocking the light from the hallway, the toes of his shoes on Bella’s carpet. “But—” He looked at the thigh-high wall of furniture that Ailsa had built around the cot, inside which the baby lay prone. “But whatever for?” said Peter. “Bella can’t even sit up yet, let alone climb out of her cot.”

“It’s not to keep Bella in,” said Ailsa.

“Then what?” said Peter, but Ailsa did not reply; she was busy lashing the piano stool to the fireguard. These were both things that were not supposed to have come with them to the flat: they had no fireplace here, and no space for the piano, and even if there had been space they would not have been able to get it up all the stairs. The piano had belonged to Ailsa’s mother, whose repertoire of fey little tunes had never seemed to make use of the lower notes. For equilibrium, Ailsa had made a point of only ever playing the lower notes, until her mother complained, after which Ailsa was forbidden to touch the piano at all. Nonetheless, the piano had come to her when her father went into the home, and then Peter had got rid of it because it would not fit into the flat.

When Peter had arrived home from the bank with the news that they would have to move out of their house and into this flat, the piano had been Ailsa’s first concern. She objected to its loss. She told him that when she was a child she had loved the piano; she had longed to touch its forbidden keys. Peter agreed that it was good for a child to learn a musical instrument, but said that Bella would just have to learn something smaller, like the flute. “It doesn’t really matter,” said Peter. “It just has to be something small.”

Peter stepped into the baby’s room now, coming closer to the wall that Ailsa had built around the cot. “How are we supposed to get to Bella?” he asked.

Ailsa straightened up. “I can climb over it,” she said. “I’m tall enough.”

Peter made an appointment at the surgery for Ailsa, and dropped her off on his way to work. When the mid-afternoon bus brought her back, she saw—as she made her way from the bus stop on the corner, with the baby in a sling—the furniture out on the street, and Peter opening the boot of his car. He picked up the piano stool and put it in. As Ailsa walked past him, he picked up the fireguard.

Still in her coat, still bearing the baby, she stood looking into Bella’s room. She went back out to where Peter was busy fitting everything into the back of his car. As he slammed the boot down, Ailsa said to him, “What have you done?”

“I’ve taken all that crap out of Bella’s room,” said Peter.

“I can see that,” said Ailsa. “But whatever for?”

“I’m taking it to the tip,” said Peter. He checked that the boot was secure and moved towards the front of the car. “What did the doctor say?” he asked.

“I need more fresh air and exercise,” said Ailsa. “And a hobby.”

“A hobby?” said Peter.

“A hobby,” said Ailsa. “You know, like drawing. I might find a class to go to, pick up the still life again. Or perhaps not still life. I’m tempted to experiment, to try for that texture again. That hair was so realistic.”

“Are you still going on about that bloody sketch?” said Peter.

Sketch. She disliked the word. Sketch, like scratch, like retch, like etch. Would you like to come and see my etchings? A man—a friend of her father’s—had actually said this to her once, a long time ago, and she had gone with him, this man she had known only slightly; she had actually gone with him to see his etchings, sketchings, scratchings, retchings, and she should not have done. Her father, when she got home, shaking and tearful, and told him, had looked at her, looked her up and down. “Well, what did you expect,” he said, “going home with him, and dressed like that?” And then, within the week, this friend of her father’s was at their door, coming into the kitchen and joining them at their table as if nothing had happened, as if his being there—at their kitchen table with his fingers on their crockery—were in no way extraordinary.

“Why don’t you decorate the baby’s bedroom?” suggested Peter. “It could do with brightening up. There’s plenty for you to do here. You don’t need to go out to a class. Find a hobby you can do at home.”

She had also liked reading, but since the baby had come along she had not so much as picked up a book, with the exception of baby books. Bella’s books had no words in them, just stark black-and-white patterns.

At some point during her mother’s illness, her father’s friend—whose name Ailsa could barely recall now, whose name she had no desire to bring to mind—came to live with them for a while. When he sat with the family in their living room, Ailsa made sure always to have a book in front of her, one that was many hundreds of pages thick, the thickness of a door, or a thousand pages thick, the thickness of a wall. She learnt how to be in his company for hours at a time, day after day, and hardly see him. But at the same time, he had learnt how to get around her, for example by challenging her to a game—he would go to the games cupboard and make a show of choosing something, and her father would insist that their guest be indulged. When Ailsa went up to bed and closed her door, she wedged a chair under the handle before turning out the light. One morning, she threw out his shoes. Now she saw that this had been topsy-turvy thinking, as if throwing out his shoes could make him leave. Anyway, by the end of the day, the shoes were back in their place on the shoe rack and nothing was said, and she began to wonder if she had really done it at all or only thought about it.

Peter got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, and Ailsa stood and watched as he struggled with the engine. When he finally got it started, he pulled away angrily, leaving filthy exhaust fumes clouding the air. The car looked like a wreck but it could still get up speed on an open road, especially when Peter was cross and put his foot down too hard.

By the time he returned, Ailsa was sweeping the hallway with a dustpan and brush.

“What’s that?” asked Peter, pointing at the baby’s bedroom door.

“It’s a padlock,” said Ailsa.

Peter opened his mouth; he shook his head. He followed Ailsa into the kitchen, watched her as she emptied the dustpan into the bin beneath the sink and put the dustpan and brush away in the cupboard. She undid the locket around her neck, with her mother in one half and her father in the other, both of them in black and white; she threaded the padlock key onto the chain and returned the locket to its place around her neck.

“This has to stop,” said Peter.

“Yes,” said Ailsa, looking up at the ceiling, at the grubby marks around the light fitting.

When Ailsa had put the baby to bed and locked the bedroom door, she ran herself a bubble bath and then went to bed herself. She felt terribly tired and yet found it difficult to settle and slept lightly until she was woken by an eerie quiet.

She got out of bed and went into the hallway. At the baby’s door, she had to bend down so that the key on the chain around her neck could reach the lock. As she entered Bella’s room, she snapped on the overhead light, so that nothing could hide in the dark; nothing, she thought, could sneak unseen beneath the furniture.

She approached the sleeping baby, and saw—in spite of the lock—filth on the bars of the cot. She carried the baby to the chair in the corner of the room and sat awake all night while Bella slept in her arms.

Peter found her there in the morning, with the bulb still burning. “What are you doing there?” he asked. “How long have you been sitting there? You look awful, Ailsa, absolutely awful.”

“This is your fault,” she whispered. The baby stirred on her chest. “He’s out and I can’t put him back—there’s nowhere for him to go back to.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Peter.

“The portfolio,” said Ailsa. “I needed that portfolio but you threw it out.”

“I haven’t got time for this,” said Peter. “I’ve got work.” He went into the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal standing up in front of the fridge. It was still dark outside when he left. The door slammed behind him.

Every morning Peter drove north for twenty miles, and every evening he drove south again. Ailsa thought he drove too fast, always a little bit faster than the road allowed, overtaking everyone else as if he had more of a right to the road than they did. He would arrive home in a temper, fuming over some bad driver, some cyclist, always something, something that wasn’t his fault, fuming at Ailsa as if it were her fault, as if she had cut him up, as if she had overlooked his right of way.

Ailsa washed the dishes and wiped the table, scrubbing at a stubborn stain that had got into the grain of the wood. She looked for the place mats. Peter disliked them—he thought them feminine—but they protected the table. She found them in the pile in the hallway; and right at the bottom, in the middle, just where she imagined the hedgehogs used to hide in the bonfire, Ailsa found the grey ring binder that she had used for evening classes in the years between her father going into the home and the baby being born. She sat and leafed through it, singing a tune that she’d learnt to play on the piano a long time ago.

“It’s not too late,” said Ailsa. “We can explain to the people in the house that we want it back, that the flat is too small for us, that we miss our garden. We can’t possibly be happy here.”

Peter, taking off his shoes, said, “But we can’t afford the house any more.”

“There might be some money, though,” said Ailsa. “He might have left me something in his will.”

“And he might not have done,” said Peter. “There might have been nothing left to leave. The home might have sucked him dry.”

Ailsa looked at Bella playing with her toys in the narrow hallway. “But the flat is just too small,” she said, “for the two of us and a baby.”

“Bella hardly counts,” said Peter. “She’s only little.”

“For now,” said Ailsa. “But she’s going to grow. She’ll grow big. She’ll be a young woman with size six feet and a will of her own.”

Peter looked down at Bella. He said to her, “Is my baby going to have size six feet? Is she? Is she? I don’t think so! No, I don’t think so! Daddy loves her little feet! Little itsy bitsy feet! Yes, he does!”

“He keeps interfering with things,” said Ailsa.

“Who does?” asked Peter.

Ailsa did not know what to call him, and she’d rather avoid naming him anyway, for fear it would somehow make him more real. But he was real enough: he’d been tampering, so that things that had worked when they’d first moved in had become temperamental or had broken down altogether. First the boiler had gone, and then the television: while Peter was down at the pub, getting to know the locals, Ailsa sat down to watch something and the screen went black. He tampered with the electrics, so that sometimes the lights did not work and she had to make do with what little daylight came in through the mean windows. And she kept finding—down at knee-height and underneath things and in tight corners that she had to peer at with a torch—those sooty streaks, those grey-black smears. The thought got into her head that if those dirty marks appeared on Panda’s black limbs, she would not be able to see them. She put Panda into the wash, just to be sure that all the baby’s things were clean.

He was just concerned about her, he said; she could do with a little rest, a few days without Bella to take care of. His mum would have her for the weekend; it was all arranged. In the morning, she should pack a bag of baby things, and when he got back from work he would drive Bella over to his mother’s.

“But your mother’s flat is even smaller than this one,” said Ailsa. “She only has one bedroom.”

“Mum will manage just fine,” said Peter.

“But Bella needs more space,” said Ailsa.

“Perhaps,” said Peter, “while Bella’s at Mum’s, you could go and see the doctor again.”

At night, while Ailsa slept ever more lightly and woke ever more frequently, Peter slept soundly, unless his own snoring or struggling to breathe woke him up. Only Ailsa was ever up and about in the night, in the baby’s room, or sometimes out at the front of the flats, in between the flats and the road, looking at the moon or at a moonless sky, or at one of the very few people walking by, or at the cars that zipped past, and at their own car parked by the kerb. She stood there smoking the roll-ups that she was not supposed to have any more because of the baby, but which she liked because they cleared her head, they helped her to think.

She did not like to think of Bella going to Peter’s mother’s cramped and painfully quiet little flat. She did not want Peter taking Bella out in that crappy old car, driving so fast. With Bella here, in her own room, Ailsa could keep checking for smudgy marks on Bella’s clothes or on her bedding. She considered the car, thinking of the engine, the underside, the parts that were already grimy, oily; how would one ever notice some small smudgy fingerprints on a vital part, such as a brake cable? If something were to happen, it might be impossible to say exactly how it had occurred.

In the morning, at breakfast, Peter commented on the dark smudges under Ailsa’s eyes. “Did you sleep?” he asked.

“A bit,” said Ailsa. Although she had been up for most of the night, she had slept quite well in the final few hours.

Peter finished his cereal, put his bowl down near the sink and said, “I’ll be back after lunch to take Bella to Mum’s. Get her bag ready. Remember to put in her formula.”

Ailsa nodded. She listened to Peter closing the door behind him. She stood and went to the window and looked down at him getting into his car and driving away. She watched him accelerating into the gloom, heading for the bypass.

She did not hurry to pack up the baby’s things. Instead, while Bella sat in her high chair playing with her first solid food, Ailsa sat down and lit a roll-up. The charcoal-grey ring binder was still on the kitchen table. The pages of careful notes and neat diagrams from the car maintenance class were dirty at the edges. It could go out for the dustmen now.

When her roll-up had almost burnt down to her grubby fingertips, she used the smouldering end to light another one. She might have all day now to sit and think about what to do next.