The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

THE PREVIOUS TENANT by Ramsey Campbell

HE CLOSED THE CUPBOARD door and crossed to the window. The pane exhibited ghostly strokes of soap, like the paint sketched on the sheet of paper he’d crumpled up last week. In the next room his wife moved a table, which screamed. He stared out. The roofs were a jagged frieze against the colours spilled to mix on the horizon; below, the red streetlamps tasted of raspberry, tinting the trees like attenuated pine-cones separated by the ruler of the pavement. A car passed, hushed as the evening, casting ahead on the road what seemed already a splash of yellow paint. It wasn’t enough for him to express on canvas. He turned back to the flat room, the wallpaper’s pastel leaves whose meaning had been lost through countless prints, the bed he must never touch without having bathed. He had remembered what he’d seen as the cupboard door had closed.

The imprisoned books rebuked him; already, on the Renoir, a coil of dust curled and fidgeted like a centipede. What he’d seen was crushed beneath Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; he hoisted them and slid it out. It was a photograph of the girl who had owned the flat: one leg high on a wall, her skirt taut, her hand arched on her knee, her eyes beneath an arch of lustrous hair smiling at whoever held the camera; how could she have become a scream above the city, a broken figurine beneath the window? His wife coughed. At once he thrust the photograph into his pocket. At the door he turned to check the cupboard. It was closed.

His wife was cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by the glasses from the cabinet, considering the space available. ‘I’ve done the best I can,’ he said.

She dabbed a bead of lacquer from her forehead. ‘It’s not your books I object to, you know that,’ she told him… it’s just that there’s not enough space, that’s all.’

‘I don’t remember you complaining when we looked it over.’

‘Who’d complain at a flatful of furniture?’ Above her stood the antique chairs, the glass-topped tables, the mirrors with which the girl had surrounded herself. ‘But there’s such a thing as being over-generous, you know.’

He was silent; he didn’t want to say ‘we should be grateful.’

‘If we get rid of a few of these things you could have your painting on the wall.’

‘There’s no point.’ Not in one painting and a hundred crumpled scraps of drawing-paper.

‘It might brighten the place up a little.’

‘That’s a profound analysis,’ He watched her stretch her legs, hemmed in by the glasses; it seemed a perfect symbol — he would have transferred it to canvas if he had been able to paint her.

‘I know I don’t have your intellect.’ She picked up a glass; in a club she wouldn’t long have held it empty.

‘I’ve never said so, have I? What you don’t have is sensitivity to this flat. It’s the girl’s life. There’s the chair where she must have sat when she composed the note. Or is that what’s bothering you?’

‘It doesn’t bother me at all, you know that. I’m not the one who lies awake.’ She spread a cloth on the table and filled two glasses. ‘Just a few things of my own, that’s all I ask. I don’t like charity.’

And the men at the ballroom? What did she call the drinks they bought her at their clubs? ‘You’re not in all that much,’ he said.

‘It’s not my fault if you won’t come with me.’

‘Can’t afford to come with you, you mean.’ His words thrust like a tongue toward an aching tooth. His fingers traced his inside pocket, the photograph symmetrical with his heart.

‘Don’t, don’t. You’re hurting yourself.’ She carried a glass to him. As he took it, she laid her hand on his within the concealed rectangle. ‘You can’t be both a civil servant and a painter. Don’t try for so much or you’ll lose everything,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the flat to look after itself for tonight. Our room is ours.’

‘Do hurry,’ she said, ‘I’m so tired.’ Deflated, he lay back. In a minute the moonlit sheet over her breasts was rising and falling like surf. He inched to sit up. His side of the bed was a scribble of shadow like paint scrawled in fury. Perhaps this might be meaningful on canvas. Bedroom Scene, The Marriage Bed—but he couldn’t express their marriage. She had been a civil service typist; as she’d passed him, glanced and smiled, his pen had come erect between his fingers; the next time she passed he had sketched the memory. When she came to look he’d said ‘I’d like to paint you.’ ‘That would be nice,’ she’d replied, ‘but not nude.’ Baulked, for she had destroyed his dream, he’d postponed the offer through months of clumsy dancing in ballrooms where smoke billowed to meet clouds of false stars, of hands across club tables at one in the morning; seeking to possess her, he’d foregone the rushing skies, the stretched clouds, the combed and recombed grass, which met at his easel and poured into his brush, and he’d suffocated. When they emerged from the cramped registrar’s he’d found he couldn’t paint. On the wedding night she’d cried out; briefly he’d possessed her. Yet before the honeymoon was over he’d yearned for something more; he’d gazed from the hotel at rumpled trees, humped hillside walls where the girl from the photograph might have stood and smiled. ‘Don’t forget to give in your notice,’ he’d reminded his wife. ‘I’ll keep you.’ Perhaps thus he could possess her. But his walks possessed the breasts of the hills, the splayed thighs of the valleys. Then one night he’d been whipped home by a storm and had found her gone. An hour later she’d slammed the front door, gasping happily, thrilled by the leaping rain, and had halted at the sight of him sunk deep in a dark chair. She’d stroked his hair; rain coursed down their merged faces like tears. They’d gone upstairs to find the house was cracked; rain dripped somewhere. They couldn’t afford the repairs, and at last they’d agreed before a landlord’s card bulged and distorted by the trembling globes of a new rain: this flat, close to the country as she’d said, closer to the raw red sign of the ballroom round the corner as he’d thought. He slid down the bed to mould himself to her, but she was still asleep. He turned over. The moonlight fell short of the wardrobe, where his suit hid the photograph. The cupboard of books was held within skins of sleep which weighed on his eyes; next to it, his easel was a dusty blackboard. As he drowsed into sleep, he thought the cupboard opened.

‘Wear your nice suit today,’ she said. ‘I like to see you in it.’

‘All right, for you.’ The sunlight slid from cars and coated leaves with light; it might become a painting. He collected pens and wallet from the table by the bed and followed her into the living-room. As he entered she drew the table-cloth across a brilliant sheet of pressed sunlight and pinned it down with bowls of cereal; through the sheet he’d seen its carved legs, shaped as by caresses. ‘If you think we can’t afford furniture,’ she mused, ‘I could always go back to work.’

‘I don’t think that’s called for.’ Shaped as by caresses. His hand stole beneath the cloth and touched the wood. Slowly, exquisitely, his fingers traced the curves. He saw the leg braced on the wall, the taut skirt. His wife picked up her spoon; it blazed at the edge of his eye. Unlacquered, her hair glowed. Suddenly ashamed, he reached out and stroked her knee.

‘Not when you’re eating, please,’ she said. ‘Your hands are greasy.’

At the door he realized that he couldn’t go back for the photograph; if he did his wife would know. Instead, he looked up at the window through the leaves piled like her hair. The pane was white as an empty canvas; within, a figure shielded her eyes and waved.

When he came home that night his mind was covered with sketches, erased lines, sheets half-torn and reassembled with conjecture. He’d imagined the tree-lined street washed by headlamps as the girl had seen it, staring down, perhaps for a last glimpse of whoever had abandoned her — the unknown hand on the camera shutter no longer holding hers. In the lunch-hour he’d sketched on the back of a form, but the sketch had lacked a sight of the reality. ‘Don’t lay the table yet,’ he told his wife as he veered into the kitchen, ‘I have an idea I want to get down.’ The people in the flat below were across the city when the girl had screamed and fallen, but they were sure that she had been abandoned; a drained husk, perhaps she’d thought that she might float toward the empty landscape. He set up his easel before the window. The room seemed more cramped than he remembered; he would have to sit on the bed. He projected the girl on the pane, but she refused to pose; her foot poised on the sill, the weighted falling sun shone through her skirt. That wasn’t what he wanted. Already the street-lamps were raw wounds on the night; a tree shed a leaf like a flake of skin. If he could see her perhaps be would be able to persuade her to pose. He crossed to the wardrobe and felt in the pocket for the photograph. There was no pocket. The suit was gone.

You did that on purpose, said his nails biting into the wood. The sun sank and touched the black horizon. He tramped into the kitchen. ‘So you got rid of my suit,’ he said.

‘You don’t think I wouldn’t ask you first?’ Behind her head a curtain swayed like a skirt. ‘It’s only at the cleaner’s. You’re an artist — I’d have thought you’d care how you looked.’

‘So that I’ll get on, I know. I didn’t think you’d go behind my back.’

‘If there was anything in it you wanted I’m sorry, honestly I am. I couldn’t find anything.’

‘Nothing I haven’t already got.’

‘This table really is too small, you know,’ she said. The cruet came down hard on the clothed glass. She knows! it exclaimed. Or had she fumbled it rather than thumped it down as a protest? No, he was sure she had the photograph. She withdrew herself from him by sleeping, then she stole his souvenir. The carved leg pressed his. ‘I like the flat as it stands,’ he told her. ‘It welcomes me.’

As he stood before the cupboard plates chattered in the kitchen. No doubt the girl had washed up for her lover; perhaps they’d eaten at two in the morning, their hours based on their shared rhythm, not imposed from outside — the sort of life he meant when he yearned to be bohemian. Arms about each other, they’d tire together when at all. He opened the cupboard door; he would find a book which might suggest a detail to extend across his empty canvas. In the shadows the titles were dim. He knew each by its place. He touched the tip of a spine, and a finger flattened beneath his own.

He wasn’t menaced; he didn’t recoil. Instead he reached up and brought the glove to his face. It glimmered white on his palm. The fingers were stiff, perhaps starched. He held it by the knuckles and let the fingers rest arched on his hand.

In the kitchen a knife scraped. His wife had finished. Carefully be laid the glove over the books, where it posed lightly, coquettishly. He closed the door softly, as if apologetic, and returned to the easel. In a moment the girl in the photograph might move as desired and stare from the window. But the sun’s last shards were blunted; at a crossroads in the centre of the landscape, traffic-lights tripped up and down their scale. Two glasses chimed. He cursed his wife; jealous, she’d driven away his model. He strode out of the bedroom. ‘Are you going out?’ he demanded.

She arranged the first ring of glasses, encircling the table-leg. ‘I want to do as much as I can tonight,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I thought you might like me to stay in.’

‘When I’m painting?’ She turned to him: surely he could have left that unsaid. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’ he shouted, but too late; kneeling, she overbalanced and her hand, flinching away from the glasses, caught the table-leg. The table reared. The glass top came down on the arm of a chair, and a star flew out between them.

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she cried, on the edge of tears. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ But he’d rushed to the table and grasped a carved leg. The ruined top ground and splintered and he whirled, brandishing the leg, topped with a head of jagged glass like an axe.

‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I wouldn’t have done that.’ She tried to catch hold of his hand as it drooped. ‘We’d better get rid of it before someone gets hurt,’ she said.

‘Throw away the glass but leave the legs. I may be able to use them sometime. In a carving,’ he added bitterly.

In the night he sat up. His wife’s face lay upward on the pillow, helpless. The black sun was hot beneath the horizon, like a coal about to set fire to the air. He plodded through the flat and turned on the kitchen light. The carved legs were piled in a corner; above them an edge of the curtain swayed. He thought he heard his wife call out. He would fight her; he would complete a painting to express the flat. If only he could see the girl, find the photograph. Behind him the door banged and sprang back. Someone moved silently to stand behind him, her hands almost touching his shoulders. She didn’t tint the white tiles of the kitchen. He swung about. Only the restless door moved. ‘I wouldn’t have left you,’ he said almost to himself.

His wife was propped up by the pillows, waiting. ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.

‘There was something I wanted from the kitchen. I didn’t expect to find you awake.’

‘There’s a rat in your cupboard,’ she said.

‘Nonsense. What would a rat want in there?’

‘I heard something scratching at the door. If you’re not going to look, I will.’

She slid out and was round the bed before he could move. Aghast, he slapped the light-switch. Electric light thrust out the moonbeams. She pulled open the door and craning on tiptoe, leaned her head inside. At last she decided: ‘It must be in the wall.’

As she returned to bed he extinguished the light. ‘You haven’t closed the cupboard properly,’ he said. He opened the door as if to shut it with a slam. A moonbeam partitioned him off from the bed. He laid his hand on the rim of the cupboard, waiting, and the glove fell on his fingers like a caress.

Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your letter—On the back he sketched the glove. At once his pencil traced her poised arm and ranged over her curves, the lead point sensitive as his fingertips. It smoothed her hair and formed the framed oval. But her face eluded him. The shutter of his mind had jammed. Was she facing him or smiling secretly in profile? He drove the point into the paper close to her hair, and the pencil snapped.

‘We’ll have to eat in here tonight,’ said his wife from the kitchen. ‘I know it’s crowded.’

He threw his overcoat on the bed; he should have an overall to welcome him, a vortex of colour like petrol after rain.

She was wearing a grey sweater; she looked young as a rediscovered photograph. Opened, the oven door exhaled the heavy heat of steak. She encircled the meat with potatoes and smiled. ‘When I was dusting your books—’

His knife froze in the meat. ‘You were dusting my books?’

‘I thought it was the least I could do. I found a glove. I thought at first it was the rat.’

And he’d torn up the sketched hand. ‘What have you done with it?’ The knife gouged; the meat tore.

‘I threw it away, of course. It would have ruined your books. It was covered with — I don’t know, it was all wet.’

‘With tears, perhaps. No, no, it doesn’t matter.’

The pillow gasped as his fist drove in. The bedroom was void. He left his easel in the corner. Already the girl’s presence had attenuated; she’d begun to fray, to be absorbed into the flat like mist. Or to drift out of the window; his wife was systematically driving her out, destroying the expressions of her personality, his tokens of her. Clouds bulged from the lacklustre sky like wet wallpaper. He stared at the unlined sheets, willing even the curve of her leg to form. One sight of her face and he would possess her. But he felt sure the photograph was ashes. Suddenly he caught up his easel and bore it toward the window. There would be a suspended silent moment before the easel smashed and scattered on the concrete. He thrust the window high. A breeze breathed into his eyes, and for a second a cloud smiled beneath hair. At once he knew. With gestures sure as sketched lines he set up the easel. Then patiently he lay back on the bed to wait.

He leapt up. His wife was sorting plates and cutlery on the kitchen table. ‘I won’t be in your way,’ she said. ‘I won’t be, will I?’

Without a word he clutched the carved legs and returned to the bedroom. Each leg was wood. Unprepared for the end of a curve, his fingers constantly fell into space. He laid one leg against his; when he moved the edge cut into his flesh. The wood was lifeless. The cupboard was empty. One side of the canvas had slipped low; a corner encroached on the wide dull landscape. The girl was elsewhere. Even the touch of the glove had been too light to suggest so much as the ghost of a hand. Abandoned once, she would never return again if re-buffed. And yet, he thought — and yet his painting might provide her with a hold. She might become the painting.

Light resonated in the glasses like a soundless chime. He stood before the kitchen door; his throat was dry. The kitchen was her last refuge. Surely it contained nothing that his wife might shatter. The girl knew this as surely as he did. Yet he was afraid to enter; it would be their first meeting. And his wife would be alert.

The door swung in his wake. She came to meet him. Yet not quite; her presence was lent a harsh immediacy by the white tiles, compressed by the pendulous sky, but not formed. She was still preparing for him. He must wait. As he whirled, impatient, he glimpsed his wife’s face, flat as a painting against the wall.

He paced the bedroom. The sky was close as the walls, encasing his eyes. He found that he could hear himself breathing, almost suffocated. He wrenched open the cupboard door and dragged out a sketch-pad. A title for his painting. Anything. But the edges of the pencil were insufferable as the angles of a rusty threepence. A book to calm him. The art-paper scraped beneath his nails, agonizing as tin. He dropped the book and rushed into the kitchen.

‘Oh, what is it?’ his wife cried. ‘Don’t keep going away from me!’

At the sound of her voice the girl fled. The kitchen rejected her. He stared slowly at his wife, the neat ranks of cutlery, the handkerchief bulging the arm of her sweater like a muscle. ‘God. God. God,’ he said.

And then he fell silent.

Behind her head, like an embryo born of the breeze, the curtain swelled. A thrust of air created cheekbones from its folds. Above them hollows might harbour whatever expression he called forth. The line which linked the hollows fell away into an arch. As the curtain swayed a wrinkle smiled, but shyly.

His wife followed the line of his gaze. ‘Oh, the curtain,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say it was crumpled?’

She shook it straight. For a moment it was sucked against the window-frame, as if clutched in panic and relinquished. The tips of a tree were veiled, then sprang bright.

The table shook at his clutch. ‘Won’t come back,’ he muttered.

‘Sorry?’ But his face was frozen as a portrait. ‘You look so lost tonight,’ his wife said. ‘Can I give you something?’

The planes of the kitchen were flat as the untinted tiles. He would never know what colour of dress the girl had worn; nor thatonly skulls lack a nose. He peered through a wavering mist at the table. His hand closed on a carving-knife. ‘This’ll do,’ he said.