After Sundown

by Mark Morris

Millions, Michael mused. The count’s dropped from billions to millions.

  All those years ago he’d been so worried about casualties rising to a number as small as a million, and now that’s all the world had remaining: hundreds of millions.

  The world needed more donors than ever, as 30 per cent of those capable of donating AB positive or AB negative blood had simply stopped donating, their bodies too aged, and those capable of donating A, B, and O were all but extinct. Those like him, who donated AB, had suffered an inevitable decline over the years, 0.09 per cent incapable by age forty, 24 per cent by age fifty, and a whopping 40 per cent by age sixty, and now, at nearly ninety years of age, Michael had become one part of those statistics. Up until a few days ago he had escaped the odds.

  What percentage of those his age were even capable of donating?

  Perhaps he had memorised numbers to avoid becoming one.

  Statistically, he thought, I have 6.4 years left to live, 6.4 years left to help others live.

  “Hello again, Mr. Shoe,” the nurse said, lips pressed into an unemotional line.

  “It’s been two days,” Michael said. “You said I could return in two days to donate platelets. I guess my blood’s not good enough anymore for red.”

  “It has been two days, and yes, you can donate platelets,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with my blood, anyway?”

  “The last few times you’ve tested anaemic, remember, Mr. Shoe?”

  “That’s because of my heart, I know. What do you expect? I’m eighty-seven. My doctor put me on pills to bring up my blood pressure… up, and so my blood’s turned sour. Now he’s put me on pills to bring down my blood pressure, and suddenly it’s too low. Taking aspirin and other meds helps the risk of heart attack, he says, and now my blood’s too thin. And you think I’m too old.”

  “Blood pressure medication does not disqualify you from donating, Mr. Shoe, nor does your age. There is no upper age limit as long as you are well. What disqualifies you is blood pressure lower than 90-over-50, or higher than 180-over-100, or if you are on blood-thinning medication to—”

  “So test me now.”

  Michael rolled up his sleeve and made a fist.

  “I thought you were here to donate platelets.”

  “I am, and I will, but the last three times I’ve come to donate whole blood, I’ve been denied. I want to see if I still can, is all.”

  She tested his blood pressure, which he knew was mostly to amuse him, and it was within range: 174-over-94, higher than he’d liked to see, but within the limits for donating blood. And for the third time in the last eight weeks – the last fifty-six days – he’d not given blood, but had it taken from him… for testing.

  “We both know this will come back as anaemic and we’ll have this entire argument all over again,” she said. “The medication you’re on thins your blood—”

  “So you admit my medication’s to blame!”

  He couldn’t remember having arguments with this woman.

  Stacy, her name badge read.

  “Test me again,” he said, knowing his blood would be better.

  “You can donate platelets today, Mr. Shoe, and if your blood tests well, in eight weeks, you can return to donate whole blood.”

  Perhaps the counts would be higher next time, since he’d stopped the medication, since he went the last fifty-six days not taking the damn pills.

  And so he gave platelets this time around, and would try for blood again, and again, and again, having cut out the very things keeping his heart regulated – his prescriptions – and he’d continue giving until he gave it all. But would there be anyone left to take?

  Wherever You Look

  Ramsey Campbell

  “Aren’t you going to tell everybody about Bretherton, Mr Lavater?”

  Maurice is about to read a sample of his latest novel to the Friends of Cheshire Libraries when the voice from the back of the audience accosts him. “Forgive me,” he says, “about what?”

  “Don’t say what, say whom. Simeon Bretherton.”

  “I’m afraid I’m still not getting you.”

  “The writer you put in your book you have there.”

  “They must have crept in when I wasn’t looking. I’ve never heard of them.”

  “You put their character in.”

  Maurice has started to feel as bemused as most of the audience look. “Which character?”

  “The one you see looking out from behind things.” The speaker demonstrates to the extent of an eye, having been concealed by an extravagantly burly man in the row next to the back of the ranks of folding chairs. “And you don’t know who they are,” he says, “until it’s too late.”

  “I certainly don’t know anything about them. Has anybody here heard of Simeon Bretherton?” When this prompts a general shaking of heads Maurice demands “What am I meant to have written?”

  “The slanted wide-brimmed hat appeared to have tilted all his features, which might still have been slipping into place. His left eyebrow was lined up with the hat, and his pale blue left eye was higher than its whitish twin. Violence or birth had skewed his long thin nose leftwards. Even his slim black moustache was less than level, canted perhaps by the permanent sneer his pallid lips presented to the world.”

  All this is spoken in a neutral tone presumably designed to signify quotation. Maurice finds the sentences disconcertingly familiar, which provokes him to retort “Where’s that from?”

  “Your thirteenth chapter.”

  Maurice turns the pages of Bell’s Told so fiercely he almost tears several. It’s the scene where Victorian psychic investigator Solomon Bell views portraits of his haunted client’s ancestors. Perhaps the subject of the painting is behind the spectral trouble, since he summoned spirits while he was alive, but Maurice never brings him onstage in the novel. Just the same, he’s disconcerted not to have recognised the paragraph. “Fair enough, it’s here,” he has to admit. “It’s mine.”

  “It’s Simeon Bretherton, Mr Lavater, and is your hero’s name a little tribute too?”

  “I’d hardly have done that for somebody I’ve never heard of. What do you mean, it’s him?”

  “It’s from his story, word for word.”

  Is the speaker about to claim that he wrote it – perhaps that conspirators blocked its publication? “Which story?” Maurice is less than eager to learn.

  “The only one of his they ever published.”

  “And where can we find it?”

  “Wherever you look.” Presumably this refers to whichever method Maurice may use to search, since the speaker says “It went out of print before you were born.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “I’ve just brought myself.”

  “I think we’ll have to call any similarity a coincidence, however much of one it is.” Maurice is angered to think this could sound more like an admission than scepticism. “Would anybody like to hear a less contentious section?” he hopes aloud.

  As he finds the passage he planned to read he’s aware that a member of the audience has stood up. A glance shows him a figure in black vanishing around a library bookcase. It’s his accuser, who is carrying some item, not a book. “Is that all he came for?” Maurice mutters, not entirely to himself.

  He reads the scene where Bell plays bridge with his client and her family and sees faces of her ancestors peering from behind cards as they’re laid on the baize. Just now it feels unnecessarily and of course coincidentally like a reference to the tale his interrogator cited. More than one library user eavesdrops on his performance, unless it’s the same person who leans around a bookcase and is gone whenever Maurice glances up. He’s presenting copies of his novels to the library when the secretary of the Friends brings him an apologetic look. “I’ve no idea who that person at the back was,” she says. “He c
ertainly wasn’t with us.”

  “Maybe just someone else who cares about books.”

  “So long as we don’t get too immersed in them like him.”

  As Maurice drives home he can’t outrun the notion that whatever he told his audience, the passage the intruder quoted seems familiar, not just from Maurice’s own work. He hasn’t identified it by the time he reaches New Ferry, the Wirral district he has taken to calling No Ferry, not least because he lives so far from the river where there used to be one. Eventually he succeeds in manoeuvring into a space between cars parked half on the pavement in the cul-de-sac shaped like a noose at the end of the rope of a side road, an image he’s repeated in so many interviews it feels as though it has tightened on his brain. As he makes for his pebbledashed house, which is no smaller than the other dinky dwellings, front rooms flicker with the light from screens, and he wonders how many of his neighbours ever read a book.

  He falls asleep still struggling to disinter the memory he’s sure is buried in his brain. In the morning he makes himself ignore the impression while he tries to work on his next novel. Soon he’s reduced to gazing at the distant scrap of river that glints between the houses opposite, beneath a feeble sun brought low by October. At least he can swear as loud and as furiously as he likes, since he no longer has the girlfriend who might have been his partner if she hadn’t objected to the language his frustration with a first draft always provokes and her rebukes exacerbated. His parents wouldn’t approve, and no doubt theirs would have even less. The thought of them reminds him how early he began reading, and then he recalls the first adult book he ever read.

  Was he even as old as seven? He and his parents were spending half his summer holidays with his father’s parents, whose house Maurice had thought was no more ancient than them, though of course it would have been. In its musty library, where he was allowed to browse unsupervised, he’d found a book of ghostly fiction with a skull embossed on the faded blackish spine. He remembers tales about a sheet that came to life on a bed, and someone who was given a guest room they’d had nightmares about before they’d ever seen it, and two friends who vowed that whoever died first would appear to the other. He can name them and their authors, but might he have forgotten reading a contribution by what was the writer called, Simeon Bretherton?

  If he ever knew the title of the book, he doesn’t now. An online search for Simeon Bretherton brings just one reference to anybody of that name, the sexton of St Aloysius Parish Church, a position the man held over a century ago. The church is in New Ferry, and the online map places it about a mile away. A glance in that direction shows Maurice the admonitory fingertip of a church spire above a roof across the road.

  The information only leaves him feeling more dissatisfied. Even if the sexton wrote the ghostly tale, what help is that? Maurice needs to dismiss all the coincidences so as to work, but they’ve settled in his mind. Could rereading the passage he’s meant to have copied give him back some control? He’s searching for it, having put in the description of the hat, when he realises how confused he is. He’s looking for the paragraph in the book he’s working on.

  Of course it can’t be in there, and he brings up the file of Bell’s Told. He pores over the paragraph until the sentences begin to disintegrate into phrases and then into separate words in his skull. He has to reread the paragraph yet again to put its sense together, a process unsettlingly suggestive of reconstructing a presence. Perhaps he did indeed encounter something similar that lodged unnoticed in his head – and then he starts to feel he came upon some form of it more recently than childhood. A more disquieting possibility feels unlikely as a dream, one he wouldn’t want to have. Since disbelief fails to shift it, he opens more files onscreen to search for phrases that are lying low in his mind. Soon he makes a sound that can’t find a word for his feelings, and before long he releases another. Each of his books contains an image he finds altogether too familiar.

  In Bell, Book and Candle a sinister punter at a racetrack wears a hat skewed in line with his features, unless it’s the other way around. In Clear as a Bell the coquettish wearer of an equally wide-brimmed item keeps one eyebrow raised in alignment with it while she describes an apparently spectral encounter. In Bell Towers the driver of a hansom cab who takes Bell unbidden into a maze of fogbound London streets looks down at him through the trap with one eye higher than its paler twin. By now Maurice feels as though an unnoticed tenant of his head has been making surreptitious bids for freedom. He very much wants to regard his depiction of the fake medium in Give Them a Bell as coincidental – surely many characters in fiction have a dislocated nose – except that Bell can’t decide whether birth or violence is responsible for the deformity. Maurice is desperate to find no likeness in Sound as a Bell, but then he remembers the pimp who organises vigilantes to protect women of the street from Jack the Ripper – the pimp whose slim black moustache is canted in parallel with his permanent sneer.

  Maurice is distracted by a sight across the road. Sunlight between his house and its neighbour lends a streetlamp a reduced shadow like the silhouette of a thin man sporting a hat, a sketch waiting for details to be added. He closes all the files apart from the novel in progress, only to find he can’t write another word. His efforts feel like struggling not to repeat any more of the tale his childhood reading buried in his mind, but how will he know if he fails? He has to read the tale.

  A new search for Simeon Bretherton only revives the sketchy facts about the sexton. Adding ‘story’ brings no extra information, and ‘ghost story’ is unproductive too. Maurice tries patching the entire paragraph from Bell’s Told into the search box, just as uselessly. He needs to consult someone who might help. In moments he has a list of second-hand booksellers, and he phones the topmost at once. “Boon of Books,” a woman says as though she’s naming herself.

  “I’m hoping you can help me find a book by an author.”

  “They’re mostly by them, aren’t they?” When Maurice fails to find much of a sound to make in response she says “Are you looking for romance?”

  “Not presently, thank you.” Has he somehow contacted quite the wrong kind of service? “Just a book,” he says. “I thought that was what you deal in.”

  “Plenty of romance in those.” Rather too much in a counsellor’s tone she says “Tell me what you need.”

  “A book with a story by Simeon Bretherton.”

  “That doesn’t sound like one of ours. We don’t do books with stories in.”

  “Then what do they contain?”

  “Love.” As Maurice tries not to feel personally addressed by the word, she says “Just one story each.”

  Maurice does his best to laugh at himself. “Romance novels, you mean.”

  “That’s what Boon’s all about. What did you think we were?”

  “More than that,” Maurice says and feels unreasonable at once.

  The shadow on the pavement has grown human in its stature, if less so in its shape, by the time a man answers his next call. “Just For Your Shelf.”

  “I’m trying to track down a book I once read.”

  “If it’s any good we’ve got it or we’ll get it.” He sounds not far from tired of saying so, but adds “What’s the name?”

  “Mine? Maurice Lavater.”

  “Not yours. The one you think I ought to know.”

  “I think perhaps you might know mine. I’m a writer.”

  “Really.” With no increase of enthusiasm the bookseller says “Published?”

  “Six novels and a seventh on the way.”

  “Maurice Lavater.” As if he’s solved that problem the bookseller says “May I ask your field?”

  “My publishers call them supernatural thrillers.” In case this sounds defensive Maurice says “So do I.”

  “That explains my lack of recognition. We wouldn’t have you in the shop.” Before Maurice can react the boo
kseller says “Must I assume the book you’re seeking is your kind?”

  “I believe you could say so.”

  “I wouldn’t, no.” More dismissively still the bookseller says “You should consult a specialist.”

  When he grasps that this is all the help the man intends to offer, Maurice can’t resist asking “Do you sell many books?”

  “Enough.” Although this sounds like a bid to end the conversation, the man says “And yourself?”

  “Plenty.”

  “No doubt you’re bound to.”

  Maurice is in no danger of mistaking this for praise. He terminates the call and searches furiously for names related to his field. Terrific Tomes appears to be, and he calls the number. The supine shadow has vanished. The houses are blocking the sunlight, of course; the silhouette hasn’t dodged behind the streetlamp. Just the same, he’s squinting at the outline of the metal post to confirm nothing else is there when a woman says “Tomes.”

  “Terrific, would that be?”

  “That’s our first name. What can we do for you today?”

  “I wonder if you could find me a story by Simeon Bretherton.”

  “In the wings of the world.”

  Does this mean she can’t? “If that’s where you have to look,” Maurice tries to hope.

  “No,” the bookseller says with a delicate giggle. “That’s what his only story’s called.”

  “Has it been reprinted, do you know?”

  “It was only ever in Tales of the Ghostly and the Grim.”

  As the title goes some way towards rousing a memory Maurice says “Have you any idea where I should look for that?”

  “I can see it now across the shop.”

  “I’ll buy it,” Maurice says almost before he finds the breath to speak. “How soon can you get it to me?”

  “As soon as you’ve paid. You’re looking at fifty-five including postage.” When Maurice undertakes to pay at once she says “Let me fetch your book.”

  As he takes out his credit card he hears sounds suggestive of a distant struggle. The returning footsteps are slower than the ones that went away, and the bookseller says “You’d think it didn’t want you reading it.”