He knew.
I frowned. That didn’t make sense. That didn’t work. Unless this was all some flashback, and I was putting words into his mouth. Which meant that it was really tomorrow. Didn’t it? Then why couldn’t I remember what was going to happen?
I turned back towards Rita-May, and it finally occurred to me to ask her about what was going on. If she didn’t know what I was talking about, I could pass it off as a joke. If the same thing was happening to her, then we might have had a spiked joint. Either way I would have learned something. Galvanized by this plan, I tried to hurry back through the crowd. Unfortunately I didn’t see a large drunken guy in a check shirt lurching into my path.
“Hey! Watch it,” he said, but fairly good-humouredly. I grinned to show that I was harmless and then stepped back away from the kerb. The woman I’d thought was Rita-May hadn’t been. Just some tourist walking quickly in the sunshine. I looked at my watch and saw that I’d been waiting opposite the store for only twenty minutes. It felt like I’d been there for ever. She had to come back soon. She had to.
Then:
Christ, back here again, I thought. The switches seemed to be coming on quicker as time wore on, assuming that was what it was doing. Eating the food hadn’t worked.
By the time I reached the hotel I’d started to forget, but I’d had enough sense left in me to take Rita-May’s rose from my pocket and slip it into one of my shoes. Then I buried the shoes as deeply in the suitcase as I could. ‘That’ll fuck you up,’ I muttered to myself. “That’ll make you remember”. I seemed to know what I meant. It was six in the morning by then, and I took a random selection of my clothes off and fell onto the bed. My head was a mess, and my neck hurt. Neither stopped me from falling asleep instantly, to find myself on Decatur, still waiting opposite the N’awlins Pantry.
That one took me by surprise, I have to admit. I was beginning to get the hang of the back-and-forth thing, even if it was making me increasingly terrified. I couldn’t stop it, or understand it, but at least it was following a pattern. But to flick back to being at the hotel earlier that morning, and find that I’d hidden the shoes myself, was unexpected.
It was all getting jumbled up, as if the order didn’t really matter, only the sense.
The people at the po-boy counter were beginning to look at me strangely, so I crossed back over to stand outside the N’awlins Pantry itself. It felt like I had been going back and forth over the road for most of my life. There was a lamp-post directly outside the store and I grabbed hold of it with both hands, as if I believed that holding something solid and physical would keep me where I was. All I wanted in the whole wide world was for Rita-May to get back.
When she did, she walked right up to the table, straddled my knees and sat down on my lap facing me. She did this calmly, without flamboyance, and no one at the nearby tables seemed to feel that it was in any way worthy of note. I did, though. As I reached out to pull her closer to me, I felt like I was experiencing sexual attraction for the very first time. Every cell in my body shifted nervously against its neighbour, as if aware that something rather unusual and profound was afoot. The band was still pumping out twelve-bar at stadium-concert volume, which normally blasts all physical sensation out of me: I can’t, to put it bluntly, usually do it to music. That didn’t appear to be the case on this occasion. I nuzzled into Rita-May’s face and kissed her ear. She wriggled a little closer to me, her hand around the back of my head, gently twisting in the roots of my hair. My entire skin felt as if it had been upgraded to some much more sensitive organ, and had I stood up too quickly, in those jeans, I suspect something in my trousers would have just snapped.
“Let’s go,” she said suddenly. I stood up, and we went.
It was about three a.m. by then, and Bourbon Street was much quieter. We went up it a little way, and then took a turn to head back down towards Jackson Square. We walked slowly, wrapped up in each other, watching with interest the things our hands seemed to want to do. I don’t know what Rita-May was thinking, but I was hoping with all of my heart that we could stay this way for a while. I was also still girding myself up to asking her if she was having any problems keeping track of time.
We got to the corner of the Square, and she stopped. It looked very welcoming in the darkness, empty of people and noise. I found myself thinking that leaving New Orleans was going to be more difficult than I’d expected. I’d spent a lot of my life leaving places, taking a quick look and then moving on. Wasn’t going to be so easy this time.
Rita-May turned to me, and took my hands. Then she nodded down Decatur, at a row of stores. “That’s where I work,” she said. I drew her closer. “Pay attention.” She smiled. “It’s going to be important.”
I shook my head slightly, to clear it. It was going to be, I knew. I was going to need to know where she worked. I stared at the N’awlins Pantry for a moment, memorizing its location. I would always forget, as it turned out, but perhaps that was part of the deal.
Rita-May seemed satisfied that I’d done my best, and reached up with her hand to pull my face towards hers.
“It’s not going to be easy,” she said, when we’d kissed. “For you, I mean. But please stick with it. I want you to catch up with me some day.”
“I will,” I said, and I meant it. Slowly, I was beginning to understand. I let go of the lamp-post with my left hand, and looked at my watch. Only another minute had passed. There was still no sign of Rita-May, just the slowly swarming mass of tourists, their bright colours warm in the sun. From a little way down the road I could hear the peal of one long trumpet note, and it didn’t sound so bad to me. I glanced down Decatur towards the sound, wondering how far away she was, how many times I would have to wait. I decided to ask.
“As long as it takes,” she said. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
In a minute Rita-May would give me the rose, and I’d go back to the bar to pass out as I had so many times before. But for now I was still here, in the silent square, where the only sign of life was a couple of tired people sipping café au lait in darkness at the Café du Monde. The air was cool, and soft somehow, like the skin of the woman I held in my arms. I thought of my house, and London. I would remember them with affection, but not miss them very much. My sister would look after the cat. One day I would catch up with Rita-May, and when I did, I would hold on tight.
In the meantime the coffee was good, the beignets were excellent, and there would always be a muffeletta just around the corner. Sometimes it would be night, sometimes day, but I would be travelling in the right direction. I would be at home, one of the regulars, in the corner of all the photographs which showed what a fine place it was to stay. And always there would be Rita-May, and me inching ever closer every day.
“I’m sure,” I said. She looked very happy, and that sealed my decision for ever. She kissed me once on the forehead, once on the lips, and then angled her head.
“I’ll be waiting,” she said, and then she bit me softly on the neck.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Brood
RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS RECEIVED more awards for horror fiction than any other writer. He has been named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.
Latest projects include a film of his novel Pact of the Fathers, which was filmed in Spain as El Segundo Nombre (Second Name); Told by the Dead is his new collection of short stories; The Overnight is his latest novel, and he is currently working on another, Secret Stories.
The author’s M.R. Jamesian anthology Meddling With Ghosts is published by The British Library, and he recently co-edited the anthology Gathering the Bones with Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison. S.T. Joshi’s study Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction is available from Liverpool University Press, while Ramsey Campbell, Probably is a multiple award-winning non-fiction collection from PS Publishing.
Campbell reveals that “‘The Brood’ had its origins in the view o
f street lamps on Princes Avenue from the window of Jenny’s and my first flat, which we later lent to the protagonists of The Face That Must Die. When my biographer David Mathew recently attempted to photograph me in front of the building, a tenant demanded what we were up to. This was one of the rare instances where I found myself assuaging someone’s paranoia.”
Although the following story uses all the traditional trappings of vampire fiction, it remains firmly rooted in the author’s unique world-view of mental and urban disintegration.
HE’D HAD AN ALMOST unbearable day. As he walked home his self-control still oppressed him, like rusty armour. Climbing the stairs, he tore open his mail: a glossy pamphlet from a binoculars firm, a humbler folder from the Wild Life Preservation Society. Irritably he threw them on the bed and sat by the window, to relax.
It was autumn. Night had begun to cramp the days. Beneath golden trees, a procession of cars advanced along Princes Avenue, as though to a funeral; crowds hurried home. The incessant anonymous parade, dwarfed by three stories depressed him. Faces like these vague twilit miniatures – selfishly ingrown, convinced that nothing was their fault – brought their pets to his office.
But where were all the local characters? He enjoyed watching them, they fascinated him. Where was the man who ran about the avenue, chasing butterflies of litter and stuffing them into his satchel? Or the man who strode violently, head down in no gale, shouting at the air? Or the Rainbow Man, who appeared on the hottest days obese with sweaters, each of a different garish colour? Blackband hadn’t seen any of these people for weeks.
The crowds thinned; cars straggled. Groups of streetlamps lit, tinting leaves sodium, unnaturally gold. Often that lighting had meant – Why, there she was, emerging from the side street almost on cue: the Lady of the Lamp.
Her gait was elderly. Her face was withered as an old blanched apple; the rest of her head was wrapped in a tattered grey scarf. Her voluminous ankle-length coat, patched with remnants of colour, swayed as she walked. She reached the central reservation of the avenue, and stood beneath a lamp.
Though there was a pedestrian crossing beside her, people deliberately crossed elsewhere. They would, Blackband thought sourly: just as they ignored the packs of stray dogs that were always someone else’s responsibility – ignored them, or hoped someone would put them to sleep. Perhaps they felt the human strays should be put to sleep, perhaps that was where the Rainbow Man and the rest had gone!
The woman was pacing restlessly. She circled the lamp, as though the blurred disc of light at its foot were a stage. Her shadow resembled the elaborate hand of a clock.
Surely she was too old to be a prostitute. Might she have been one, who was now compelled to enact her memories? His binoculars drew her face closer: intent as a sleepwalker’s, introverted as a foetus. Her head bobbed against gravel, foreshortened by the false perspective of the lenses. She moved offscreen.
Three months ago, when he’d moved to this flat, there had been two old women. One night he had seen them, circling adjacent lamps. The other woman had been slower, more sleepy. At last the Lady of the Lamp had led her home; they’d moved slowly as exhausted sleepers. For days he’d thought of the two women in their long faded coats, trudging around the lamps in the deserted avenue, as though afraid to go home in the growing dark.
The sight of the lone woman still unnerved him, a little. Darkness was crowding his flat. He drew the curtains, which the lamps stained orange. Watching had relaxed him somewhat. Time to make a salad.
The kitchen overlooked the old women’s house. See The World from the Attics of Princes Avenue. All Human Life Is Here. Backyards penned in rubble and crumbling toilet sheds; on the far side of the back street, houses were lidless boxes of smoke. The house directly beneath his window was dark, as always. How could the two women – if both were still alive – survive in there? But at least they could look after themselves, or call for aid; they were human, after all. It was their pets that bothered him.
He had never seen the torpid woman again. Since she had vanished, her companion had begun to take animals home; he’d seen her coaxing them toward the house. No doubt they were company for her friend; but what life could animals enjoy in the lightless, probably condemnable house? And why so many? Did they escape to their homes, or stray again? He shook his head: the women’s loneliness was no excuse. They cared as little for their pets as did those owners who came, whining like their dogs, to his office.
Perhaps the woman was waiting beneath the lamps for cats to drop from the trees, like fruit. He meant the thought as a joke. But when he’d finished preparing dinner, the idea troubled him sufficiently that he switched off the lightin the main room and peered through the curtains.
The bright gravel was bare. Parting the curtains, he saw the woman hurrying unsteadily toward her street. She was carrying a kitten: her head bowed over the fur cradled in her arms; her whole body seemed to enfold it. As he emerged from the kitchen again, carrying plates, he heard her door creak open and shut. Another one, he thought uneasily.
By the end of the week she’d taken in a stray dog, and Blackband was wondering what should be done.
The women would have to move eventually. The houses adjoining theirs were empty, the windows shattered targets. But how could they take their menagerie with them? They’d set them loose to roam or, weeping, take them to be put to sleep.
Something ought to be done, but not by him. He came home to rest. He was used to removing chicken bones from throats; it was suffering the excuses that exhausted him – Fido always had his bit of chicken, it had never happened before, they couldn’t understand. He would nod curtly, with a slight pained smile. “Oh yes?” he would repeat tonelessly “Oh yes?”
Not that that would work with the Lady of the Lamp. But then, he didn’t intend to confront her: what on earth could he have said? That he’d take all the animals off her hands? Hardly. Besides, the thought of confronting her made him uncomfortable.
She was growing more eccentric. Each day she appeared a little earlier. Often she would move away into the dark, then hurry back into the flat bright pool. It was as though light were her drug.
People stared at her, and fled. They disliked her because she was odd. All she had to do to please them, Blackband thought, was be normal: overfeed her pets until their stomachs scraped the ground, lock them in cars to suffocate in the heat, leave them alone in the house all day then beat them for chewing. Compared to most of the owners he met, she was Saint Francis.
He watched television. Insects were courting and mating. Their ritual dances engrossed and moved him: the play of colours, the elaborate racial patterns of the life-force which they instinctively decoded and enacted. Microphotography presented them to him. If only people were as beautiful and fascinating!
Even his fascination with the Lady of the Lamp was no longer unalloyed; he resented that. Was she falling ill? She walked painfully slowly, stooped over, and looked shrunken. Nevertheless, each night she kept her vigil, wandering sluggishly in the pools of light like a sleepwalker.
How could she cope with her animals now? How might she be treating them? Surely there were social workers in some of the cars nosing home, someone must notice how much she needed help. Once he made for the door to the stairs, but already his throat was parched of words. The thought of speaking to her wound him tight inside. It wasn’t his job, he had enough to confront. The spring in his guts coiled tighter, until he moved away from the door.
One night an early policeman appeared. Usually the police emerged near midnight, disarming people of knives and broken glass, forcing them into the vans. Blackband watched eagerly. Surely the man must escort her home, see what the house hid. Blackband glanced back to the splash of light beneath the lamp. It was deserted.
How could she had moved so fast? He stared, baffled. A dim shape lurked at the corner of his eyes. Glancing nervously, he saw the woman standing on the bright disc several lamps away, considerably farther from the policeman than he
’d thought. Why should he have been so mistaken?
Before he could ponder, sound distracted him: a loud fluttering, as though a bird were trapped and frantic in the kitchen. But the room was empty. Any bird must have escaped through the open window. Was that a flicker of movement below, in the dark house? Perhaps the bird had flown in there.
The policeman had moved on. The woman was trudging her island of light; her coat’s hem dragged over the gravel. For a while Blackband watched, musing uneasily, trying to think what the fluttering had resembled more than the sound of a bird’s wings.
Perhaps that was why, in the early hours, he saw a man stumbling through the derelict back streets. Jagged hurdles of rubble blocked the way; the man clambered, panting dryly, gulping dust as well as breath. He seemed only exhausted and uneasy, but Blackband could see what was pursuing him: a great wide shadow-colored stain, creeping vaguely over the rooftops. The stain was alive, for its face mouthed – though at first, from its color and texture, he thought the head was the moon. Its eyes gleamed hungrily. As the fluttering made the man turn and scream, the face sailed down on its stain toward him.
Next day was unusually trying: a dog with a broken leg and a suffering owner, you’ll hurt his leg, can’t you be more gentle, oh come here, baby, what did the nasty man do to you; a senile cat and its protector, isn’t the usual vet here today, he never used to do that, are you sure you know what you’re doing. But later, as he watched the woman’s obsessive trudging, the dream of the stain returned to him. Suddenly he realized he had never seen her during daylight.
So that was it! he thought, sniggering. She’d been a vampire all the time! A difficult job to keep when you hadn’t a tooth in your head. He reeled in her face with the focusing-screw. Yes, she was toothless. Perhaps she used false fangs, or sucked through her gums. But he couldn’t sustain his joke for long. Her face peered out of the frame of her grey scarf, as though from a web. As she circled she was muttering incessantly. Her tongue worked as though her mouth were too small for it. Her eyes were fixed as the heads of grey nails impaling her skull.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 14
