Personal Horror Stories: Written By Miki From Austria
My father's desk came to my flat in June, three months after his funeral, because my mother said she couldn't bear to look at it and I said I would take it. It was a huge, ugly oak thing with a green leather top gone brown at the edges and eight drawers that all smelled of pipe tobacco and pencil shavings, and it took three men and a rented van to get it up the stairs. I put it under the window in the spare room and used it for bills.
Seven of the drawers opened. The bottom one on the right had been stuck for as long as I could remember. As a boy I'd assumed it was locked, and then that it was empty, and then I stopped thinking about it, the way you stop thinking about most things in your father's house.
On a wet Saturday in October I finally took a screwdriver to it.
It gave with a crack like a knuckle. The drawer slid out, weightless, and I saw why it had stuck: the bottom was false. A thin panel sat an inch above the true floor, and in the gap beneath, lying flat and face-up in the dust, was a single photograph.
It was a small square print with a white border and the date stamped along the edge in orange numerals: DEC 90. I knew the room at once. The front room of the house on Marlow Road, the one we'd left when I was eight. The brown sofa, the tree in the corner with its cheap tinsel, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. My mother in her mustard cardigan, smiling with her mouth closed, the way she did when she'd been told to. My father in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, one arm around her. And me, seven years old, in front of them, in a green jumper with a reindeer on it, not smiling.
And behind me, someone else.
She was tall, taller than my father, who was six foot two. She wore a long dark dress with a high collar, and her hair was pinned up severely, and her face was turned a little toward the camera and a little away from it. It was the only part of the picture that wasn't sharp, as though the lens hadn't been able to decide what it was looking at. She wasn't smiling either. She stood a full step behind me. You could see the gap: a yard of brown carpet between her shoes and the backs of my legs. And across that gap her arm stretched out, one long hand resting on my left shoulder.
The arm was too long. I noticed it the way you notice a wrong note in a familiar song: the angle of the shoulder, the reach. It was an arm built for a bigger gap than any person could cross.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the rain to change its rhythm on the glass. I became aware that my left shoulder was aching with cold, a small, precise cold, the size of a hand, as if I'd been sitting beside an open door. I moved to the other side of the desk. It didn't go away.
I told myself all the things you tell yourself. A double exposure. A neighbor, an aunt, someone caught in a doorway. But I have a good memory for that house, and there had never been anyone like her in it. Nobody I'd met. Nobody who stood like that.
I took it to my mother the next afternoon. She'd moved to a small ground-floor flat near the park, with a kitchen the size of a lift and a wall clock that ticked too loudly. She was making tea when I laid the photograph on the counter.
"Found this in Dad's desk," I said. "Do you know who that is?"
She dried her hands first. She always dried her hands first. Then she picked the picture up in both hands and looked at it, and the kitchen went so quiet I could hear the fridge.
She didn't ask where in the desk. She didn't ask me anything. She looked at it for what felt like a full minute, and the color left her face in stages, like a tide going out. When she finally spoke, her voice was very small.
"Burn it."
"Mum—"
"Burn it, Adam."
"Who is she?"
"I don't know who she is." She was still looking at the photograph, not at me. "That's what I'm telling you. I've never known. She wasn't there."
"She's standing right—"
"She wasn't there." Now she looked at me, and her eyes were dry and terrible. "I remember that day. Your father put the camera on the bookcase and set the timer and ran over to stand by me, and it flashed. Three of us. There were three of us in that room, and nobody was standing behind you. And when the prints came back—" She stopped, pressing her lips together. "There were others before that one. Your father and I burned them. I thought we'd burned them all."
"Others?"
"Don't ask me. Please don't ask me." She was already turning the gas ring on. It ticked and caught with a soft whump. She took a pair of metal tongs from the drawer and held the photograph over the flame.
It didn't want to burn. Paper doesn't burn like that. The border browned and curled, but the picture itself resisted, the flame sliding off it, until my mother turned the ring up and held it there with her jaw set. Slowly the colors bubbled and blackened. Our faces went first. Then the room. The woman went last. Her hand was the final thing left on the shoulder of a boy who was already ash, and I watched the long fingers curl in the heat like something alive. I could have sworn, and I still swear, that they closed.
Then it dropped, and my mother ran the tap over it, and the ashes went down the drain in a gray thread.
"There," she said, holding the edge of the sink. "That's done. That's done now."
She hugged me at the door for too long. Her hands were freezing.
I slept badly and woke at six with my left shoulder aching.
The spare room door was open. I remembered closing it. The photograph was lying in the exact center of the leather desktop, squared to the edge, as though someone had set it down with care.
DEC 90. The same white border. The same room, the same three people, the tinsel, my mother's closed smile, my father's arm. But the yard of carpet behind the boy was gone. She had come in. She stood right at my back now, her arm bent the way a person's arm bends, her hand resting on my shoulder the way a mother's would. She had bowed her head until her face was level with my ear, and her pinned hair had come loose and lay across my collar. The face was a little sharper than before. I wished it wasn't. It had no expression at all, and it wasn't looking at the camera. It was looking, closely, at the side of my head.
And the boy wasn't looking at the camera either, not anymore. His eyes had turned toward her. His mouth was slightly open, as if someone had just whispered his name.
I called my mother. It rang and rang. I tried five times, and then I put the phone down, because it had occurred to me that even if she answered, I couldn't think of a single thing she could say.
I went back to the drawer instead. I don't know what I was looking for. More of them, I suppose. I pulled it right out of the desk and lay on the floor with my phone torch, shining it into the cavity, and there, on the back wall, in the corner where no light had ever reached, in pencil, small, in my father's blocky draftsman's capitals:
DON'T BURN IT. I BURNED THE OTHERS. THAT'S HOW SHE GOT THIS CLOSE.
I lay there with the drawer in my arms.
He had kept her. Thirty-six years, in a stuck drawer, he had kept one print, exactly as it was, with a yard of carpet still between her and his son. Somewhere along the way he had learned what burning really did, and he had never been able to tell my mother, who had spent her life doing the one thing that made it worse, and believing it was the one thing that helped. He had just taken the last picture and hidden it and said nothing and died.
And I had burned it, in my mother's kitchen, because I'd been told to.
I didn't destroy the second one. I didn't do anything that day. I made tea I didn't drink. I turned on every light in the flat. I checked the front door twice and stood in the hall, listening, and heard only the pipes. Around nine I went back to the desk and sat down and took the photograph in both hands, because I couldn't stop myself from looking. I told myself I was studying it. Working out how much closer she could possibly come.
It was thicker than it should have been. I felt it in my thumb before I saw it: a slight double stiffness, like a card. I turned it over. The back was blank, yellowed in one corner with old adhesive, and stuck to it, flush, edge to edge so precisely that the two looked like one, was another print.
I got a thumbnail under the corner. It came away with a small dry sound, like a plaster peeling off skin.
The third photograph was not old.
It was glossy and modern, on paper that still smelled faintly of chemicals. No border, no date. It had been taken from behind and above, from the doorway or higher, looking down the length of the spare room at the desk, and the desk lamp, and a man sitting at it in a gray sweatshirt with his head bent, holding a small square photograph in both hands.
I knew the sweatshirt. I knew the mug at his elbow, and the phone lying face-down with its cracked corner. I knew the way the lamplight lay across those hands. It was this room, this desk, this hour. It was me, looking at it. I didn't have to guess the moment. I could feel it in my own neck, in the small forward hunch I'd held since nine.
And behind the man at the desk, directly behind him, so close that her shadow lay across his shoulders, so tall that her head was almost out of the frame, stood the woman in the long dark dress.
She wasn't looking at the camera. She had bowed her head over his, the way you would over the shoulder of someone reading, and she was watching, with quiet, total attention, the photograph in his hands.
One hand rested on his left shoulder.
The cold I'd carried since Saturday was gone. In its place was a weight. Slight, and distinct, and the exact size and shape of a hand, settled onto my shoulder where it had been in every picture.
I did not turn around. I couldn't have if I'd tried. I sat with the third print shaking in my fingers and understood, at last, what the photographs had been. Not a warning. Not even a threat. A route. A yard of carpet, a lean, the length of a room. She had been walking toward me my whole life, one frame at a time, and every time someone looked, every time someone burned, she'd taken another step.
The man in the photograph doesn't turn around. I'm sitting very still, trying to be someone different from him.
Then, beside my ear, something drew a slow breath, the way a person does just before they say a name.
End