Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,96

so scared someone would come home and find us in my bed. “What do you want?” I asked.

He took the photograph out of my hand and put it back on the table with the others.

“Futures can change. They’re like the lines on our hands. Fate is a negotiable thing. I’m here to negotiate with you.”

“What do I have that you want?”

“Your talent. Remember the drawing you did the other night of the child under the tree? I want it. Bring me the picture and your son’ll be saved.”

“That’s all? It was only a sketch! It took ten minutes. I did it while watching television!”

“Bring it to me here tomorrow at exactly this time.”

“How can I believe you?”

He picked up a photograph that had been covered by the others. He held it in front of my eyes: my old bedroom. Leon Bell and me.

“I don’t even know you. Why are you doing this to me?”

He slid the pictures together as if they were cards he was about to shuffle. “Go home and find that drawing.”

I was pretty good once. Went to art school on a full scholarship and some of my teachers said I had the makings to be a real painter. But you know how I reacted to that? Got scared. I painted because I liked it. When people started looking carefully at my work and with their hands on their checkbooks, I ran away and got married. Marriage (and its responsibilities) is a perfect rock to hide behind when an enemy (parents, maturity, success) is out gunning for you. Squeeze down into a ball behind it and virtually nothing can touch you. For me, being happy didn’t mean being a successful artist. I saw success as stress and demands I’d never be able to fulfill, thus disappointing people who thought I was better than I really was.

Just recently, now that the children were old enough to get their own snacks, I’d bought some expensive English oil paints and two stretched canvases. But I’ve been almost too embarrassed to bring them out because the only “art” I’ve done in the last years has been funny sketches for the kids or a little scribble at the bottom of a letter to a good friend.

Plus the sketchbook, my oldest friend. I’d always wanted to keep a diary but never had the kind of persistence that’s needed to save something in writing about every day you live. My sketchbook is different because the day I began it, when I was seventeen, I promised myself to make drawings in there only when I wanted or when an event was so important (the birth of the kids, the day I discovered Willy was having an affair) that I had to “say” something about it. As an old woman I’d give it to my children and say, “These are things you didn’t know. They aren’t important now except to tell you more about me, if that interests you.” Or maybe I’ll only look at it, then sigh and throw it away.

I go through the book sometimes, but it generally depresses me, even the good parts, the nice memories. Because there is so much sadness in the details. How current and glamorous I thought I was, wearing striped bellbottom pants to a big party just after we were married. Or one of Willy at his desk, smoking a cigar, so happy to be finishing the article on Fischer von Erlach that he had thought would make his career but which was never even published. I drew these things carefully and in great detail, but all I see now are the silly pants or the spread of his excited fingers on the typewriter. But if it depresses me, why do I continue drawing in the book? Because it is the only life I have and I am not pretentious enough to think I know answers now that might come to me when I’m older. I keep hoping thirty or forty years from now when I look at those drawings, I’ll have some kind of revelation that will make parts of my life clearer to me.

I couldn’t find the drawing he wanted. I went through everything: wastebaskets, drawers, the kids’ old homework papers. How brutally panic can build when you can’t find something needed! Whatever you are looking for becomes the most important object in the world, however trivial—a suitcase key, a year-old receipt from the gas company. Your apartment becomes an enemy—hiding the thing you need, indifferent to