The Collected Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell Part 92

He was determined to win her a present. Eventually rolling several pounds' worth of b.a.l.l.s down a chute towards holes intermittently exposed by a perforated strip of wood gained him an owl of s.h.a.ggy orange cloth. He would have felt more triumphant if he hadn't realized he'd betrayed that he wouldn't have needed to go to the bank. He was just in time to see Helen leave the Plunge of Peril She glanced about but didn't notice him behind a bunch of teddy bears pegged by their cauliflower ears. As he watched through the tangle of legs she shared a swift kiss with her companion, the red-faced boy crowned with grey skin, and tugged him in the direction of a virtually vertical roller coaster. Lionel didn't intervene., not even when they staggered off the ride, though he was unsure whether he was being discreet or spying on them or at a loss how to approach them. He was pursuing them through the crowds when their way was blocked by two figures with the night gaping where their faces ought to be.

They were life-size cartoons of a man and a woman sufficiently ill-dressed to be homeless, painted on a flat with their faces cut out for the public to insert their own. Lionel saw Helen scamper to poke hers out above the woman's body. Her grimace was meant to be funny-she was protruding at the boy the tongue she'd recently shared with him-but Lionel realized that too late to keep quiet. "Don't," he cried.

For a moment Helen's face looked trapped by the oval. Perhaps her eyes were lolling leftward to send the boy that way, since that was the direction in which he absented himself. She emerged so innocently it angered Lionel. "I think it's time we went back to your mother," he said, and thrust the owl at Helen as she mooched after him. "This was for you."

"Thanks." On the promenade she lowered a mournful gaze to the dwarfish b.u.t.ton-eyed rag-beaked soft-clawed orange lump, and then she risked saying, "Are you going to tell Mum?"

"Can you offer me any reason why I shouldn't?"

"Because she'd never let me see Brandon again."

"I thought that was already supposed to be the arrangement."

"But I love him," Helen protested, and began to weep.

"Good heavens now, no need for that. You can't be in love at your age." The trouble was that he had no idea when it was meant to start; it never had for him. "Do stop it, there's a good girl," he pleaded as couples bound for the amus.e.m.e.nt park began to frown more at him than Helen, and applied himself to taking some control. "I really don't like being used when I haven't even been consulted."

"I won't ever again, I promise."

"I'll hold you to it. Now can we make that the end of the tears? I shouldn't think you'd like your mother wondering what the tragedy is."

"I'll stop if you promise not to tell."

"We'll see."

He was ashamed to recognize that he might have undertaken more if she hadn't dabbed her eyes dry with the owl, leaving a wet patch suggesting that the bird had disgraced itself; should Carol learn of Helen's subterfuge she would also know he'd neglected to supervise her. Carol proved to be so intent on her business accounts that she simply transferred her glance of surprise from the clock to him. "I've a job for you as long as you're here," she told Helen, and Lionel took his sudden weariness to his room.

As he fumbled for the light switch he heard a scream. It sounded m.u.f.fled., presumably by gla.s.s-by the window. He couldn't tell whether it signified delight or dismay or a confusion of both, but he would have preferred not to be greeted by it. A memory was waiting to claim him once he huddled under the quilt in the dark.

Yet had he done anything so dreadful? Days after the incident at the Imperial, her mother had taken him and Dorothy to the amus.e.m.e.nt park. On the Ghost Train his cousin had sat as far from him as the bench would allow, though when the skull-faced car had blundered into the daylight they'd pretended to be chums for her mother's camera. For her benefit they'd lent their faces to the painted couple, ancestors of the pair behind which Helen had posed. Lionel had been growing impatient with the pretense and with Dorothy's covert hostility when he'd seen all six dwarfs, dapper in suits and disproportionately generous ties, strutting towards them.

He must have been too young to imagine how she might feel, otherwise he would surely have restrained himself. He'd grabbed her shoulders, wedging her head in the oval. "Look, Dorothy," he'd whispered hotly in her ear, "they're coming for you." In what had seemed to him mere seconds he'd released her, though not before her struggles had caused her dress to ride up, exposing more of her thighs than he'd glimpsed in her room. As she'd dashed into the darkness behind the cartoon he'd heard her mother calling "Where's Lionel? Where are you going, Dorothy? What's up now?"

In time nothing much was, Lionel rea.s.sured himself: otherwise Dorothy wouldn't have invited him to spend summers at the boarding-house after she'd inherited it. Or was it quite so straight-forward? He'd always thought that, having forgotten their contentious summer, she had both taken pity on his solitariness and looked to him for company once Carol had married and Dorothy's husband had succ.u.mbed to an early heart attack, but now it occurred to him that she had kept him away from her daughter. He withdrew beneath the covers as if they could hide him from his undefined guilt, and eventually sleep joined him.

He thought walking by the sea might clear his head of whatever was troubling him. There was just one family on the beach. He a.s.sumed they were quite distant until he noticed the parents were dwarfs and the children pocket versions of them. They must work in a circus, for all of their faces were painted with grins wider than their mouths, even the face of the baby that was knocking down sandcastles as it crawled about. Lionel had to toil closer., dragging his inflated toy, before he understood that the family was laughing at him. When he followed their gazes he found he was clutching by one breast the life-size naked rubber woman he'd brought to the beach.

He writhed himself awake, feeling that his mind had only started to reveal its depths. As he tried to rediscover sleep he heard a scratching at the window. It must be a bird, though it sounded like fingernails on gla.s.s, not even in that part of the room. When it wasn't repeated he managed to find his way back to sleep.

He felt he hadn't by breakfast time. Being glanced at by more people than bade him good morning left him with the impression that he looked guilty of his dream. There wasn't much more of a welcome in the kitchen, where a disagreement had evidently occurred. When Carol met his eyes while Helen didn't, he said "She'll be all right for this evening, won't she?"

"Quite a few things aren't all right. I'm afraid. Torn serviettes, for a start, and tablecloths not clean that should be." She was aiming her voice upwards as if to have it fall more heavily on Helen. "We've standards to keep up," she said.

"I think they're as high as your mother's ever were, so don't drive yourself so hard. You deserve a night or two off. Is the show at the Imperial your kind of diversion?"

"More like my idea of h.e.l.l."

"Then you won't be jealous if I take Helen tonight? I've got tickets."

"You might have said sooner."

"You were busy."

"Exactly."

"I think you could both benefit from taking it easier. You and your mother managed., didn't you?"

Carol unloaded a tray into the sink with a furious clatter and twisted to face him. "You've no idea what she was like when you weren't here. Used me harder than this one ever is, and my dad as well, poor little man. No wonder he had a heart attack."

Lionel had forgotten how diminutive Dorothy's husband had been, and hadn't time to brood about it now. "Let me hold the fort while you two have an evening out," he said.

"Thanks for the offer, but this place is our responsibility. Make that mine." Carol sighed at this or as a preamble to muttering "Take her as long as you've bought tickets. As you say, I'll just have to manage."

He thought it best to respond to that with no more than a sympathetic grimace and to keep clear of her and Helen for a while. He stayed in his room no longer than was necessary to determine he had nothing to wear that would establish a holiday mood. He bought a defiantly luxuriant s.h.i.+rt from a shop in a narrow back street to which the town seemed reluctant to own up, and wandered with the package to the park, where he found a bench well away from the bandstand in case any of the musicians identified him as yesterday's eructating spectator. The eventual concert repeated its predecessor, which might have allowed him to catch up on his sleep if he hadn't been nervous of dreaming-of learning what his mind required unconsciousness to acknowledge it contained.

It was close to dinnertime when he ventured back to his room. Rather than examine his appearance, he left the mirror with its back to him. His new s.h.i.+rt raised eyebrows and lowered voices in the dining room. At least Carol said "You're looking bright." which would have heartened him more if she hadn't rebuked Helen: "I hope you'll be dressing for the occasion as well."

Perhaps Helen had changed her black T-s.h.i.+rt and denim overalls and chubby shoes when he found her waiting on the pavement outside; he couldn't judge. He told her she looked a picture, and thought she was responding when she mumbled "Uncle Lionel?"

"At your service."

She peered sideways at him. "Will you be sad if I don't come with you?"

"I would indeed."

"I told Brandon last night I'd meet him. I wouldn't have if you'd said you'd got tickets."

"But you've known all day."

"I couldn't call him. Mum might have heard."

"You mustn't expect me to keep covering up for you." Lionel supposed he sounded unreasonable, having previously complained of not being let into the secret. "Very well, just this once," he said to forestall the moisture that had gathered in her eyes. "You two go and I'll meet you at the end of the performance."

"No, you. You like it."

It was clear she no longer did. "Where will you be?" he said, and immediately "Never mind. I don't want to know. Just make certain you're waiting at the end."

"I will."

She might have kissed him, but instead ran across the promenade to her boyfriend. Lionel watched them clasp hands and hurry down a ramp to the beach. He stayed on the far side of the road so as not to glimpse them as he made for the Imperial.

The stout girl in the booth seemed even more suspicious of his returning a ticket than she had been of the purchase. At last she allowed him to leave it in case it could be resold. In the auditorium he had to sidle past a family with three daughters, loud in inverse proportion to their size. He was flattening a hand beside his cheek to ward off some of the clamor of his neighbor, the youngest, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Seated behind him were two of Carol's guests: a woman with a small face drawn tight and pale by her sharp nose, her husband whose droopy empurpled features had yet more skin to spare underneath. "Will you be stopping this show too?" the woman said.

Could she have seen Dorothy chased by the dwarfs? "I don't," Lionel said warily, "ah..."

"We saw you at the concert yesterday."

"Heard me. you mean." When that fell short of earning him even a hint of a grin, Lionel said "I expect I'll be able to contain myself."

The man jabbed a stubby finger at the empty seat. "On your own?"

"Like yourselves."

"Our granddaughter's one of Miss Merritt's Moppets."

His tone was more accusing than Lionel cared to understand. "Good luck to her," he said, indifferent to whether he sounded sarcastic., and turned his back.

As the curtains parted, the child beside him turned her volume up. He put the empty seat between them, only to hear the sharp-nosed woman cough with displeasure and change seats with her husband. Before long Lionel's head began to ache with trying not to wonder how Helen and her boyfriend were behaving, and he couldn't enjoy the show. He squirmed in his seat as the moppets in their white tutus pranced onstage. At least they weren't dwarfs, he thought and squirmed again, growing red-faced as another cough was aimed at him.

He had no wish to face the couple at the end of the show. He remained seated until he realized they might see Helen outside and mention it to Carol. He struggled up the packed aisle and succeeded in leaving the theater before they did. Helen was waiting on the chipped marble steps. She half turned, and he saw she was in tears. "Oh dear," he murmured, "what now?"

"We had a fight."

"An argument, I trust you mean." When she nodded or her head slumped, he said "I'm sure it'll turn out to be just a hiccup." She only turned away, leaving him to whisper "Shall we hurry home? We don't want anybody knowing you were meant to be with me."

They were opposite the ramp down which she'd vanished with her boyfriend when she began to sob. Lionel urged her over to the far corner of her street while Carol's guests pa.s.sed by. Once they'd had ample time to reach their room and Helen's sobs had faltered into silence he said "Will you be up to going in now, do you think?"

"I'll have to be, won't I?"

Her maturity both impressed and disconcerted him. Each of them pulled out a key, and he would have made a joke of it if he'd been sure she would respond. He let her open the front door and followed her in, only to flinch from b.u.mping into her. Carol and the couple from the theater were talking in the hall.

They fell silent and gazed at the newcomers. As Lionel struggled to decide whether he should hurry upstairs or think of a comment it would be crucial for him to make, the sharp-nosed woman said "I see you found yourself a young companion after all."

Her husband cleared his throat. Presumably he thought it helpful to tell Carol "My wife means he was on his own at the show."

Carol stared at Helen and then s.h.i.+fted her disapproval to Lionel. Her face grew blank before she told them "I think you should both go to bed. I'll have plenty to say in the morning."

"Mummy..."

"Don't," Carol said, even more harshly when Lionel tried to intervene.

"I think we'd better do as we're told," he advised Helen, and trudged upstairs ahead of her. Just now his room offered more asylum than anywhere else in the house., and he attempted to hide in his bed and the dark. His guilt was lying in wait for him-his realization that rather than make up for anything he might have done to Dorothy, he'd let down both Carol and Helen. He heard Helen shut her door with a dull suppressed thud and listened apprehensively for her mother's footfall on the stairs. He'd heard nothing further when exhaustion allowed sleep to overtake him.

A m.u.f.fled cry roused him. Heat and darkness made him feel afloat in a stagnant bath. As he strained his ears for a repet.i.tion of the cry he was afraid that it might have been Helen's-that he'd caused her mother to mistreat her in some way he winced from imagining. When he heard another sound he had to raise his shaky head before he could identify it. Some object was b.u.mping rhythmically against gla.s.s.

He kicked off the quilt and stumbled to drag the curtains apart. There was nothing at the window, nothing to be seen through it except guest-houses slumbering beyond a streetlamp. He hauled the sash all the way up and leaned across the sill, but the street was deserted. He was peering along it when the m.u.f.fled thumping recommenced behind him.

As he stalked towards it he refused to believe where it was coming from. He took hold of the mirror by its bunch of wrists, which not only felt unhealthily warm but also seemed to be vibrating slightly in time with the sound. He gripped them with both hands and turned the gla.s.s towards him. It was full of Dorothy's outraged face, glaring straight at him.

She was so intensely present that he could have thought there was no mirror, just her young woman's face balanced on the doubly paralyzed hands. More and worse than shock made his arms tremble, but he was unable to drop the mirror. In a moment Dorothy's forehead ceased thudding against the gla.s.s and shrank into it as though she was being hauled backwards. The ankle-length white dress she wore-the kind of garment in which he imagined she'd been buried-" bulging vigorously in several places. He knew why before a dwarf's head poked up through the collar, ripping the fabric, to fasten on Dorothy's mouth. His outline made it clear that he'd s.h.i.+nnied up by holding onto her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her left sleeve tore, revealing the squarish foot of a dwarf who was inverted somewhere under the dress. Then she was borne away into darkness so complete she oughtn't to be visible, even for Lionel's benefit. He saw a confusion of feet scurrying beneath the hem. One pair vanished up the dress, and her body set about jerking in the rhythm of the dwarf who had clambered her back.

The worst thing was that Lionel recognized it all. It had lived in his mind for however many years, too deep for thought and so yet more powerful, and now Dorothy had become the puppet of his fantasy. He supposed that to be at his mercy the dwarfs were dead too. He didn't know if he was desperate to repudiate the spectacle or release the partic.i.p.ants as he flung the mirror away from him.

It was toppling over the windowsill when he tried to s.n.a.t.c.h it back. He saw Dorothy's face plummeting out of reach as though he'd doubled her helplessness. As he craned over the sill, the b.u.t.ton at the waist of his pyjamas snapped its thread. The mirror struck the roof of his Mini, which responded like a ba.s.s drum. One marble finger split off and skittered across the dent the impact had produced. The mirror tottered on the metal roof, and Lionel dashed out of the room.

He was scrabbling at the front-door latch while he clutched his trousers shut when he heard the mirror slide off the car and shatter. The chill of the concrete seized his bare feet like a premonition of how cold they would end up. The marble hands had been smashed into elegant slivers surrounded by fragments of gla.s.s, but the oval that had contained the mirror was intact. He hardly knew why he stooped to collect the gla.s.s in it. When his trousers sagged around his ankles he had no means of holding them up. Not until lights blazed between curtains above him did he realize that several of Carol's guests were gazing down at him.

In the morning Carol said very little to him beyond "I'm sorry you're leaving, but I won't have anyone in my house going behind my back."

This reminded him of his last glimpse of Dorothy, and he had to repress a hysterical laugh. He b.u.mped his suitcase all the way downstairs in the hope that would bring Helen out of her room, but to no avail. "Shall I just go up and say goodbye?" he almost pleaded.

"Madam isn't receiving visitors at the moment."

He couldn't tell if that was Helen's decision or her mother's. He lugged the suitcase to the Mini and dumped it in the boot. "You're sure you don't mind if I take the mirror," he said.

"If you want to try and mend it, be my guest. I've never had any use for it," Carol said, doling him a token wave to speed him on his way before she shut herself in the house.

As the Mini backed onto the street he muttered "Here you go, old bones," crouching his lanky frame lower so that the dent in the roof didn't touch his scalp. On the seat beside him shards of gla.s.s stirred in the marble frame, but he could see nothing other than the underside of the roof in even the largest piece of mirror. He scarcely knew why he was taking the mirror with him; could it somehow help him gain control of the depths of his mind and let Dorothy go? The boarding-house swung away behind him, and he wondered what the people in it might be thinking about him-worse, what they might be storing up about him unexamined in their minds. For the first time in all his years he dreaded living after death.

The Retrospective (2002)

Trent had no idea how long he was unable to think for rage. The guard kept out of sight while she announced the unscheduled stop, and didn't reappear until the trainload of pa.s.sengers had crowded onto the narrow platform. As the train dragged itself away into a tunnel simulated by elderly trees and the low March afternoon sky that was plastered with layers of darkness, she poked her head out of the rearmost window to announce that the next train should be due in an hour. The resentful mutters of the crowd only aggravated Trent's frustration. He needed a leisurely evening and, if he could manage it for a change, a night's sleep in preparation for a working breakfast. If he'd known the journey would be broken, he could have reread his paperwork instead of contemplating scenery he couldn't even remember. No doubt the next train would already be laden with commuters - he doubted it would give him s.p.a.ce to work. His skull was beginning to feel shrivelled and hollow when it occurred to him that if he caught a later train he would both ensure himself a seat and have time to drop in on his parents. When had he last been home to see them? All at once he felt so guilty that he preferred not to look anyone in the face as he excused his slow way to the ticket office.

It was closed - a board lent it the appearance of a frame divested of a photograph - but flanked by a timetable. Stoneby to London, Stoneby to London . . . There were trains on the hour, like the striking of a clock. He emerged from the short wooden pa.s.sage into the somewhat less gloomy street, only to falter. Where was the sweet shop whose window used to exhibit dozens of gla.s.s-stoppered jars full of colours he could taste? Where was the toyshop fronted by a headlong model train that had never stopped for the travellers paralysed on the platform? What had happened to the bakery displaying tiered white cakes elaborate as Gothic steeples, and the bridal shop next door, where the headless figures in their pale dresses had made him think of Anne Boleyn? Now the street was overrun with the same fast-food eateries and immature clothes shops that surrounded him whenever he left his present apartment, and he couldn't recall how much change he'd seen on his last visit, whenever that had been. He felt suddenly so desperate to be somewhere more like home that he almost didn't wait for twin green men to pipe up and usher him across the road.

The short cut was still there, in a sense. Instead of separating the toyshop from the wedding dresses, it squeezed between a window occupied by a regiment of boots and a hamburger outlet dogged by plastic cartons. Once he was in the alley the clamour of traffic relented, but the narrow pa.s.sage through featureless discoloured concrete made him feel walled in by the unfamiliar. Then the concrete gave way to russet bricks and released him into a street he knew.

At least, it conformed to his memory until he looked closer. The building opposite, which had begun life as a music hall, had ceased to be a cinema. A pair of letters clung to the whitish border of the rusty iron marquee, two letters N so insecure they were on the way to being Zs. He was striving to remember if the cinema had been shut last time he'd seen it when he noticed that the boards on either side of the lobby contained posters too small for the frames. The neighbouring buildings were boarded up. As he crossed the deserted street, the posters grew legible. MEMORIES OF STONEBY, the amateurish printing said.

The two wide steps beneath the marquee were cracked and chipped and stained. The gla.s.s of the ticket booth in the middle of the marble door was too blackened to see through. Behind the booth the doors into the auditorium stood ajar. Uncertain what the gap was showing him, he ventured to peer in.

At first the dimness yielded up no more than a strip of carpet framed by floorboards just as grubby, and then he thought someone absolutely motionless was watching him from the dark. The watcher was roped off from him - the several indistinct figures were. He a.s.sumed they represented elements of local history: there was certainly something familiar about them. That impression, and the blurred faces with their dully glinting eyes, might have transfixed him if he hadn't remembered that he was supposed to be seeing his parents. He left the echo of his footsteps dwindling in the lobby and hurried around the side of the museum.

Where the alley crossed another he turned left along the rear of the building. In the high wall to his right a series of solid wooden gates led to back yards, the third of which belonged to his old house. As a child he'd used the gate as a short cut to the cinema, clutching a coin in his fist, which had smelled of metal whenever he'd raised it to his face in the crowded restless dark. His parents had never bolted the gate until he was home again, but now the only effect of his trying the latch was to rouse a clatter of claws and the snarling of a neighbour's dog that sounded either muzzled or gagged with food, and so he made for the street his old house faced.

The sunless sky was bringing on a twilight murky as an unlit room. He could have taken the street for an aisle between two blocks of dimness so lacking in features they might have been identical. Presumably any children who lived in the terrace were home from school by now, though he couldn't see the flicker of a single television in the windows draped with dusk, while the breadwinners had yet to return. Trent picked his way over the broken upheaved slabs of the pavement, supporting himself on the roof of a lone parked car until it s.h.i.+fted rustily under his hand, to his parents' front gate.

The small plot of a garden was a ma.s.s of weeds that had spilled across the short path. He couldn't feel it underfoot as he tramped to the door, which was the colour of the oncoming dark. He was fumbling in his pocket and then with the catches of his briefcase when he realised he would hardly have brought his old keys with him. He rang the doorbell, or at least pressed the askew pallid b.u.t.ton that set off a m.u.f.fled rattle somewhere in the house.

For the duration of more breaths than he could recall taking, there was no response. He was about to revive the noise, though he found it somehow distressing, when he heard footsteps shuffling down the hall. Their slowness made it sound as long as it had seemed in his childhood, so that he had the odd notion that whoever opened the door would tower over him.

It was his mother, and smaller than ever - wrinkled and whitish as a figure composed of dough that had been left to collect dust, a wad of it on top of and behind her head. She wore a tweed coat over a garment he took to be a nightdress, which exposed only her prominent ankles above a pair of unmatched slippers. Her head wavered upwards as the corners of her lips did. Once all these had steadied she murmured 'Is it you, Nigel? Are you back again?'

'I thought it was past time I was.'

'It's always too long.' She shuffled in a tight circle to present her stooped back to him before calling 'Guess who it is, Walter.'

'Hess looking for a place to hide,' Trent's father responded from some depth of the house.