The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Douglas Smith By Her Hand, She Draws You Down

By 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 portraits 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.

Cath stirred beside him and then he felt her stare on him. He could always feel her gaze, like a physical touch, like a brush dipping into him, drawing something from him. Is that how you do it, Cath? How you take the thing you take? Capture it in your eyes, then cage it through your fingers onto the page? Have you been feeding on me too?

‘I’m still hungry,’ Cath said. Her voice was small, almost childlike in the dark.

He knew what she meant. ‘We’ll hit town soon,’ he said. But it would be three in the morning when they arrived. No one around. No one to draw. And she had no pictures left. Cath said nothing but looked away. After a while, he figured she was asleep. Then he felt her stare again.

‘I don’t want to hurt people, Joe.’

He swallowed. This was new. She never talked about it, even when Joe did. He should say something now, something smart, something that would lead them out of this. He should but he had nothing left to say. He could only nod. ‘I know, babe.’

‘It just gets so hungry. I get so hungry.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t stop it. It keeps pulling me, making me. ’

Joe could feel her pain in those words. And his fear.

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘So tired I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up. Ever been that tired, Joe?’

Joe swallowed again. All the time, he thought, but he just nodded. Cath looked away and he took a breath as if he was coming up for air.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said again.

‘I know.’

Her stare settled on him again like a beast on his chest.

‘I could draw you, Joe.’

Joe’s hands tightened on the wheel. Cath had said it the way a kid told you she could ride a bike or tie her shoe. The lines flashed by in the headlights. White on black, no red.

‘Don’t even need to see you,’ she said. ‘Know you so well.’

Joe stared at the road. Don’t look, he thought.

‘Know your face like I know my own,’ she said.

The burden of her gaze lifted. He looked at her.

Her eyes were shut and her hand moved in her lap, mimicking drawing motions. ‘Don’t even need light. Could draw you with my eyes closed.’ Her hand stopped and she leaned her head back. A few minutes later, Joe could hear her breathing slow and deepen.

So there it is, he thought. He always knew it would come to this. This was why he had stayed, even after he learned what Cath did, what she was. Afraid that when he left, when Cath no longer needed him, she would draw him down. Draw him down onto the page from memory, then drink him in like all the others.

The road lines flew at him like white knives out of the night. White knives and blackness. Just the blood red missing. Taking a hand from the wheel, he felt inside the top of his boot, running his fingers over the bone handle of his switchblade.

A few miles down the road, he found a wide shoulder and pulled over, turning off the engine and the lights.

Cath still slept. Hands shaking, Joe pulled the knife from his boot. It’s self-defense, he thought. But he just sat holding the knife. It was for the best. How many more would she kill? But he still loved her. Could he do it? He was tired, so tired. He leaned back. He only slept now when Cath did, when he didn’t feel her stare. He closed his eyes. Her breathing brushed his ears, soft and deep, soft and deep, soft.

Joe awoke to the sound of scratching on paper. He looked over. Framed against the moonlight, Cath sat hunched over her sketch pad, her hand moving in short, sure strokes.

‘Kind of late for drawing, isn’t it, Cath?’ Joe asked. His throat was dry. He fumbled in his lap for the knife.

‘Hungry,’ she said, her voice barely audible.

‘Dark, too,’ he said, blood pounding in his ears.

‘Don’t need light. Drawin’ from memory,’ she whispered.

Drawing from memory. Drawing him. He knew she was drawing him. ‘Don’t, Cath.’ His thumb found the blade’s button.

‘Tired of being hungry.’ She sat back, her gaze on the sketch.

Joe couldn’t see the picture, but he saw the red crayon in her hand. She’d finished the mouth. ‘Please, don’t do it,’ Joe said. His cheeks felt cool and wet. Joe realized he was crying.

Cath lifted the paper to her face. She was crying too.

‘Don’t!’ Joe screamed. The knife blade clicked open.

‘Bye, Joe. Sorry.’ Cath breathed in through her lips.

Joe saw a pale wisp rise from the paper and move toward her mouth. Saw his hand gripping the knife flash forward. Saw the blade slice her white T-shirt and slide between her ribs.

Saw the red, the blood red, flow over the white of her shirt to blend with the black of the night and the shadows.

Cath spasmed and fell sideways onto him. Surprise mixed with peace in her face. ‘Thanks. Joe,’ she whispered. Her eyes closed and her head slumped back. A wisp of mist escaped her lips. That’s me, Joe thought. Sobbing, he pressed his lips to hers, sucking in the breath and the grey mist from her mouth.

Bitter and sour, the thing burned his throat as he breathed it in. Something was wrong. Joe felt a presence of something dark, something. hungry.

His head spinning, Joe flicked on the dome light. Blood soaked into his shirt where Cath slumped against him, the picture still clenched in her hand. Joe stared at the sketch, a scream forming in his mind.

A familiar face stared back at him from the page, a face that Cath knew from memory. The face she knew best of all.

Not Joe’s face.

It was Cath.

She hadn’t been drawing him. She’d been feeding herself to the thing that had lived in her. Cath had been killing herself.

The emptiness that was the mouth in Cath’s pictures gaped beneath him and Joe felt himself being drawn down.

Lost to you, what might have been.

A February evening, St. Pete’s Beach. Joe sat on his stool, his back to the beauty of a Gulf sunset. His portraits lay strewn on the sand around him like the dead on a battlefield. A woman and man looked them over while Joe waited. The woman held the hands of a little girl and a boy. Twins, Joe guessed. Kids couldn’t be much more than seven, he thought. He remembered when that would have meant something to him, before Cath died, before.

The little girl tugged on the mother’s hand. ‘They all look so sad, Mommy.’ The mother hushed the child while the father haggled with Joe over the price. The day had been slow, so Joe agreed to do both kids for the price of one.

Joe started sketching. His hand leapt over the paper, and the images of the children grew around the emptiness where their mouths should have been. A tear ran down his cheek, but he kept drawing.

He had to. He was hungry.