Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

  He didn't notice the coffin at first. Sandy felt her lungs tightening as she waited for his leap of panic. He peered up the chimney, he picked up the glass in which the teeth bobbed and opened his mouth to take a gulp without looking. Several old ladies shrieked with mirth and shock, a reaction that seemed to disconcert him more than it should, for the glass rattled sharply against the wooden mantelpiece as he put it back. He paced to the footlights and stared over them, eyes bulging. "What's to do?" he inquired, just as the lid of the coffin began to rise.

  Children squealed and pointed, and he leaned forward and cupped his ear. "Behind you," a little girl called uneasily, but he pretended not to hear. When other children took up the cry, he only stared harder-not at Sandy, of course, though he was looking in her direction. "Remind me of what?" he said in an odd flat voice, as if he had performed the script so often that he was repeating it automatically. "Behind you!" the audience shouted, and he seemed to freeze.

  He wasn't staring at Sandy, his eyes widening until a little boy near her covered his own, gasping, "They're going to pop." He was staring past her at the exit. "Behind you!" the audience yelled, laughing loudly at last, and she found herself joining in. The shouts didn't move him, but only Sandy turned to look where he was staring.

  Just beyond the glass doors, where it had grown almost dark, a man was standing. She couldn't see his face or any other details, except that his silhouette seemed exceptionally thin, yet she had the immediate impression that he was waiting there for one of the performers in the show. He must be carrying a bouquet to present to someone, she thought: that was why she could see a glimmer of flowers about his face. The audience laughed louder still, and she turned to see Tommy Hoddle race offstage, so clumsily he almost toppled across the footlights.

  The laughter died down, and there was silence. In the midst of the laughter Sandy thought she heard a clank and thump backstage, as if a door had been flung open. The vampire mother and her son appeared from the wings, and were so obviously bewildered to find nobody for her to give the glass of red liquid to that the audience roared approval. The small comedian made several puns and jokes before saying rather desperately, "Let's go and see what's keeping my dad." They hurried into the wings, and the stage stayed deserted for so long that the audience grew restless. Their murmurs invoked a figure in black, not a vampire but the manager. "I'm very much afraid to have to announce that Tommy Hoddle will not be able to continue," he said.

  The audience seemed not to miss him, nor did the plot of the show. During the interval Sandy looked for the manager to ask what was wrong, but couldn't find him or the thin man with the flowers. She squirmed throughout the third act, and thought the cast would never finish singing "Flittery Flappery Floo" at the end. She willed Tommy Hoddle to appear at the curtain call, but there was still no sign of him when the audience left amid an upheaval of folding seats.

  The manager was waiting by the doors to apologize for the hiatus. Sandy hung back until she would be able to talk uninterrupted. As she approached he brushed his fingertips hard across his forehead, pulling his eyebrows momentarily awry. "I'm sorry I didn't come back to you," he said, "but you'll have realized we had problems."

  "I couldn't have thrown him by just being here, could I?"

  "Did he know you?"

  "No."

  "Then no, you couldn't have, because he wasn't aware you were after him. I didn't get a chance to tell him."

  All the same, she felt somehow responsible. "Do you think I might be able to talk to him now, at least say hello to him?"

  The manager gazed unreadably at her. "I'm afraid that's impossible," he said, and showed her out and locked the door behind her.

  ***

  She was still on the pier when the lights at the front of the pavilion went out, extinguishing her path. The night seemed to take a step forward. For a moment she thought she saw the man with the flowers leaning toward her from the cliff, but it must be a scrawny bush. A breeze crept behind her, bearing an unidentifiable smell that made her think something had died nearby. She hurried to the top of the concrete ramp and back to the hotel.

  Because she felt in need of company, not so much to talk as just to be with, she went into the bar and carried a gin and tonic to a seat by the window. The dark waves appeared to have found a piece of wood: a long thin object lay at the water's edge, glistening as it fidgeted like a dreaming dog. Sandy tried unsuccessfully to distinguish its shape, then glanced around as a couple entered the bar. They were two of the cast from the show: the vampires.

  As soon as they sat down, Sandy went over to them. The man's hair was still combed back in a V from his high forehead; there was a trace of stage makeup in the woman's reddish eyebrows. She looked up first, her wide face tired and wary. "May I sit down?" Sandy said. "I was just at your show."

  The man blinked at her over his shoulder. Without makeup his round face looked porous as a sponge. "How were we?"

  "Good for the children."

  "But not so good for you, eh?"

  "Perhaps I wasn't in the mood."

  "Thank God for a spoonful of honesty. Sometimes meeting one's audience feels like being lowered slowly into treacle. Sit down by all means," he said, and sat back expansively. "Better days are on their way. This winter will see Hattie here in an Agatha Christie, and I'll be making merry with Robin Hood."

  "At least we're working here, Stephen, when it seems half the country is resting," Hattie rebuked him.

  "Resting is more of a task than working," he agreed, and said deadpan to Sandy: "The worst part is not having somebody telling one what to say and do."

  "Though there are lines it's a nightmare to have to repeat at every performance."

  "I heard a few tonight, did I?" Sandy suggested.

  Hattie gave her a sharp look. "I was hoping the strain didn't show."

  "Not on you, but what about the unofficial interval?"

  The actor and actress exchanged glances like a secret sign. "Maybe Tommy's act got the better of him," Stephen said.

  "How do you mean?"

  "Maybe he'd done it so often he forgot he was only pretending to be panicked. Some nights he's been so damned convincing that the producer's had to tell him to tone it down for the sake of the younger members of the audience. That's what one calls living one's role, I suppose."

  "Is he better now?"

  "We trust so. Any particular reason why you ask?"

  "I was hoping to speak to him."

  "Ah, that is who you are. The manager mentioned you'd approached him. Speak about what?"

  "I'm researching a film in which he and his partner appeared."

  The actor gazed at his colleague, who showed him her empty hands. "I don't know when you'll have a chance to speak to him, if at all," the actor said. "None of us knows where he is."

  A wind tried the window and then blundered away into the night. On the beach a piece of the dark stirred and settled itself. "He didn't just run off the stage, he ran off the pier, and nobody saw him stop running," Stephen said. "As we came over here the theater was alerting the police."

  It wasn't her fault, Sandy thought: it couldn't be. She imagined Tommy Hoddle out there in the night, still running, eyes and lungs bursting. "It may just have been stage fright. That never really goes away," Hattie said. "Which film are you researching?"

  "The one he made with Karloff and Lugosi."

  The actress opened her mouth, and then she fed herself a sip of whiskey before speaking. "Did he know that was what you were after?"

  "He couldn't have."

  "We can't blame you for chasing him away, then." All the same, the actress fixed Sandy with a gaze that would have reached the back of a theater. "If you're feeling kindhearted, you might leave him alone when he does come back."

  "If you think that's advisable."

  "You aren't offended, are you? Meeting you would buck him up, I'm sure it would, if you were wanting to ask him about anything except that film. Chances are it was partly to
blame for how he acted tonight."

  "How could it be?"

  "You'd be surprised. He's often said his nerves were never the same since, and he thinks it's what gave his partner a bad heart, doesn't he, Stephen?"

  "Billy did drink," Stephen said.

  "Did he before they made that film?"

  "Maybe not as much."

  "Then don't make me out to be a liar." She gazed at Sandy with a fierceness that seemed both weary and habitual, and said, "We may as well tell her what he told us. At least then she won't need to go bothering him."

  "Tell her about the film?" When the actress nodded impatiently he said to Sandy, "He told us about it in here one night, over quite a few drinks. As a matter of fact, he was sitting where you're sitting now."

  Sandy suppressed an irrational urge to look behind her, at the stretch of the window that was out of her sight.

  "But when we asked him about it the other day," Hattie interrupted, "he seemed to wish he'd never brought it up."

  "Which is to say, what happened to his partner." Stephen closed his eyes, and Sandy couldn't tell if he was collecting his thoughts or using an actor's trick to build suspense. "We gathered that for most of them the film was simply a job to be done well, but in his way Billy took it as seriously as the director Giles Spence did. Billy had thought it was going to be one of those thrillers where the ghosts are explained away at the end. He said he was afraid that his and Tommy's audience would resent not being told at the end not to worry, but he turned out to be afraid of something else."

  "What was that?" Sandy said, trying to ignore the restlessness on the dark beach.

  "He must have been superstitious, not just in the way of all of us theatricals. The more progress they made on the film the more nervous he became, apparently, until he began to get on Tommy's nerves as well. They'd always shared a room wherever they were working, but now he would hardly allow Tommy to go to the lavatory by himself. Tommy says the worst of it was that Billy refused to admit he didn't want to be left on his own."

  "Tell her what's supposed to have happened on the film."

  "I was about to," he said, and paused to display the rebuke. "Billy was convinced there were people on the set who shouldn't be, for one thing-we assume he meant people. He ruined more than one take because he said someone made a face at him round the scenery, and he got more nervous when the director asked what kind of face. Then there was something about a smell when they were in the last week of filming. They couldn't trace it, they thought it had to do with some plumbing nearby, and so they did their best to forget it, all except Billy. He kept insisting it was something dead."

  "Something someone had hidden in the studio to spoil the film, he meant," Hattie said.

  "I'm not sure if he did or not. Anyway, two incidents nearly finished him. Whether they drove him to drink or vice versa you must judge for yourself, young lady. One day he was checking his makeup in the mirror and he thought he saw Tommy come into the room behind him, only he wasn't sure if it was Tommy because he couldn't see the face. Then he knew it wasn't Tommy or anyone else who ought to have been there, because of what was covering the face, and that was all he'd say. I imagine Tommy didn't try very hard to get more out of him."

  "Two incidents, you said."

  "The other was on almost the last day of filming. They were shooting a scene where Tommy and Billy had to run off in opposite directions, onto other sets, you understand, which weren't lit particularly well just then because they weren't in use. So Tommy and Billy ran off, and the director shouted cut and print or whatever one shouts in those circumstances, and then Billy ran back trying to scream. It wasn't until weeks later that Tommy managed to get him to say what he thought he'd seen. All he would say was that he'd run into something he'd thought was propping up the scenery, because nobody could fit into a corner like that, only it had started to come after him."

  "Tommy says he was never the same after making that film, and it wasn't even released."

  "Does he know why?" Sandy asked.

  "If he does, he isn't telling. He did say to us that once the director died, everyone Tommy knew who'd worked on it was quite glad to see it quietly buried."

  "In Tommy's case that may have been because he hoped it would help Billy sort himself out," Hattie said. "They stayed together for the sake of their act, but offstage Billy nearly drove him crazy, Tommy says. Billy didn't just not leave him on his own, he kept on at him to put on more weight, can you imagine? When Billy had drunk too much he would always start to sing some kind of a song. 'Bony and thin, bony and thin,' he'd sing. And drunk or sober, he would nearly have a fit if Tommy ever stood behind him. Whenever they were walking he'd step back to make sure Tommy stayed in front, especially if they were casting shadows. Tommy got so desperate he suggested they should build it into their act, but Billy wouldn't admit he was doing it. Tommy thought he mightn't even have realized he was."

  "How did he die?" Sandy said, though she wasn't sure that she wanted to hear.

  "They were going out to entertain the troops during the war," Stephen said. "Tommy decided he absolutely had to get away on his own for half an hour before they left-told Billy he'd bring him a bottle of Scotch. So Tommy came back in half an hour and there was Billy at the dressing table, with the doily he'd pulled off it draped over his knee and all the jars of cream smashed around him on the carpet, and him dead and staring back over his shoulder with his eyes nearly springing out of his head."

  "Tommy went out with the troops anyway. At least he had that to keep him going."

  "Nothing like hard work to take your mind off things."

  "Until tonight, in his case," Sandy said.

  "He'll be back. You can't keep an old dog down in this business," Stephen assured her. "Young lady, we must be going before our landlady locks up, but don't you let your sleep be troubled by anything we've said. I've heard stranger tales in a lifetime of treading the boards."

  Sandy didn't quite see why that should be reassuring. When they'd left, Hattie favoring her with a regal wave, she stared out at the wakeful night and then sent herself up to her room. To her surprise, she drifted off to sleep almost as soon as she crawled into bed.

  ***

  The dawn roused her, spreading golden furrows across the sea. She made herself coffee with the kit provided in her room and went out on the balcony to taste the last of the mist. She wouldn't trouble Tommy Hoddle, she promised herself, though perhaps she might call him on her way back south. She put down her cup and leaned over the balcony, and saw that one name on the poster for the show at the end of the pier had been pasted over.

  She showered and dressed hurriedly, and headed for the pavilion. Only a cleaner was there so early, but she told Sandy all that she needed to know, in a booming monotonous voice. The police had found Tommy Hoddle late last night. He couldn't have been looking where he was going. He'd run off the edge of the cliff and was dead of a broken neck.

  ***

  All she could do was drive to Birmingham. She drove southwest across the flat land, past King's Lynn where the market was served by the sea, past the orchards of Wisbech, where apples were glazed with a lingering dew. Soon the sky grew smudged, first with the burning of peat on the Fens and then with the smoke of factories that had ganged up on the cathedral at Peterborough. Further on, amid pastures and spires that gleamed through trees, the steel town of Corby was rusting, as though the ancient landscape were reclaiming its elements. The road began to flourish old names-Marston Trussell, Husbands Bosworth-until it reached the motorway, where the race of cars sent her speeding past Coventry toward Birmingham.

  Her drive had been prolix, but at least it wasn't confusing until she reached Birmingham. She followed the ring road in search of the hotel she'd called from Cromer, until she felt as if she would never stop driving: the road was like a racetrack, with her playing the mechanical hare. At last she checked into a hotel opposite the railway station, and canceled her other reservation as soon as she was in h
er room; then she went out for a stroll before lunch.

  It proved to be almost as easy to lose one's way on foot as it had been while driving. Pedestrian underpasses led under the pavements outside department stores and emerged in front of gloomy offices or at the edge of razed ground where yellow excavators gnawed the earth, When she'd had enough of the snarling of machinery she made for the nearest underpass, which seemed bound to lead back toward the shops she could see but was unable to reach because of the traffic.

  She might have chosen a more appealing route. All the overhead lamps except one were smashed, their multicolored entrails dangling, and the one that still worked was buzzing and fluttering helplessly. Once she had walked beneath the lamp, the half of the passage ahead seemed much darker. The glimmering tiles of the walls were blackened with graffiti like tangles of exposed roots. She trod on scattered fish-and-chip papers and almost lost her footing. She wondered if an excavator was digging close to the underpass, for the smell of stale food was mixed with a smell of earth: indeed, she thought she heard a trickling of soil and a faint sound of clawing. She hurried to the end of the passage and glanced back out of the daylight. It must be litter which lay where the tunnel was darkest and which stirred as if it were about to leap from crouching. She made herself walk slowly up the ramp, into the sudden lunchtime crowd.

  She ate lunch in a bar in the basement of the hotel. A blind man sitting at a nearby table had draped his coat over his guide dog, whether for warmth or concealment she couldn't tell. Every so often the coat would rear up as the dog's head emerged, its gray tongue lolling. Sandy patted the animal as she headed for the multistory car park.

  She couldn't locate the muffled scraping that she heard among the ranks of empty vehicles until it was beside her, and a figure slithered out from beneath a parked car, his hands glistening with oil. She was so angry with herself for flinching that the poor man must have thought she was swearing at him, not herself. She gave him an apologetic grin and took refuge in her car.