Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His Web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
Story Notes
When first published, Mr. Campbell wrote of “Respects” that it “owes its existence to the present trend of treating young criminals as folk heroes. Not long before I wrote it a young car thief was eulogised in the obituary pages of the local free newspaper at least as sentimentally as the miscreant in my tale. As far as I can see, there’s one less thief to bother the rest of us. Since I wrote the story, shopkeepers in an entire suburb were terrorized into shutting their premises out of a show of respect for a gang member who was gunned down. It seems as if the kind of family I wrote about in The One Safe Place has begun to rule our streets. Time for another novel, perhaps, if I don’t get stomped to death first for remonstrating with their kind.”
We can only hope Mr. Campbell is not stomped and does write the novel.
DIAMOND SHELL
DEBORAH BIANCOTTI
People without walls learn to avert their eyes.
1. Last Day: Shel
The phone was ringing and that wasn’t right. She squinted at the clock. It seemed to say 0280, and that couldn’t be right either.
She fumbled for the handset, for the light, for the edge of the bedside table so she could navigate her way around the glass of water to where the phone—
She had it.
“Hello?” she croaked.
“Shel?” said the voice. “Did I wake you?”
It sounded querulous, uncertain, more a whisper than a full noise. She hadn’t been able to make out the caller ID.
“Of course you fucking woke me,” she said. “It’s . . . ” She checked the clock again. “After two.”
There was a pause and then the tone went flat. Had they hung up?
Christ.
They’d hung up.
She fumbled for the lamp. The weak blue light of the phone screen wasn’t enough in the middle of the night. Too blurry for her eyes to make out. Seriously, the middle of the night—she should just ignore it. Probably a wrong number anyhow.
She flipped over to the received calls and read the most recent one. It said Mish.
“Shit,” she said.
She hit the call button. Engaged. She flipped the phone closed, opened it, hit the call button again. Engaged. Well, who the hell was Mish calling now? Two o’clock in the morning, for god’s sake. It took eight minutes to get through. By then she was awake.
“Yeah?”
“Mish, shit, did you just call? Are you okay? You sound terrible. What’s up?”
Her voice was still thick with sleep. So was her head. Something wasn’t adding up, and it wasn’t just that Mish wasn’t the kind of person to call—
“It’s not Mish,” said the voice. A tremulous catch on the last syllable. “It’s Ace.”
Oh, great.
“Ace? Fuck,” she said. “What are you doing with Mishi’s phone? Where is she?”
Ace took a breath, or gave a sigh, or did whatever deadbeat junkie losers did when they didn’t have a good answer.
“She’s gone,” he said. “She’s . . . gone.”
Shel was already cold, sitting up out of the bedsheets, back against the bedhead, free hand rubbing at her scalp, trying to force some wakefulness out of her skull, or into it. She was already cold, but that made her shiver.
What the hell Mish had ever seen in this no-good—
“Gone,” she said carefully, “where?”
“Just gone. All her stuff’s here, but—”
“Where’s here? Where are you?”
“Mishi’s place.”
“Stay the fuck there,” she said, “I’m coming over.”
The cabbie knew dick about Pyrmont. Not a surprise. Pyrmont only figured on a cabbie’s radar when there was a casino pick-up to be had. Nowadays Pyrmont was a backwater. Boatloads of migrants had passed through here in the fifties, arriving in Sydney with hope and glad hearts. Now hope was limited to what you could afford to drop into a slot machine. Or couldn’t.
An anachronistic village on the arse of Sydney’s only casino. A shag on a rock.
She gave the cabbie directions to Mish’s apartment complex and handed him a twenty.
“Keep the change.”
To his credit, he could at least follow instructions.
They pulled up on the corner opposite the cluster of high-rise apartments. On the street was an old man in a three-piece, skin pink all over his head, no discernible hair anywhere else on his body. Casino refuse, Shel figured. It took her a moment to realize he was urinating unselfconsciously into the gutter, the stub of his pink penis wrapped in both hands.
“You right?” she said, allowing a sneer into her voice.
His suit shone at knees and elbows. A dribble of piss escaped him and he turned to Shel, his lower lip sagging and his eyes like uncooked egg whites.
He nodded dumbly.
“Then stop pissing in the street,” she suggested.
He muttered something that was lost in a thick accent and a drunken mumble. But he accompanied the noise by releasing one of his hands to give her the finger.
“Charming!”
She buzzed the number for Mish’s apartment, buzzed and buzzed and muttered “C’mon Ace” under her breath until the door finally clicked open. She shoved through into the too-bright, tiled foyer, and out the other side into a dark courtyard. There were five high rises in this complex. Mish’s was the next one on the right.
2. Two Days Earlier: Mishi
Mish had moved to Sydney to be anonymous. Moved from a small sugar-farming town in North Queensland. Moved because in Halifax—her home town—there was no such thing as your business and my business. Everything was everyone’s business.
Here the city’s noise and bustle kept everyone else preoccupied. There were more people, but there was more privacy too. She could lie down in the middle of the road and no one would do anything except politely look away.
She liked it like that.
“I’m sorry,” said Mishi, “what?”
“I was talking about being invisible,” said Shel.
“Right.”
They were outside eating lunch in the gray of a city weekday, concrete and cement bookending the space where they sat with their salads on wide white plates.
Mishi wondered how anything could retain its whiteness in the leaden city air. She’d been starving before. Now she toyed with her food, smearing it around the plate. She hated eating here, outside with the thoroughfares on two sides, but it was one of the few places left where Shel could smoke. Another thing Mishi didn’t like.
Shel was hard-edged, lost inside herself, calloused from hard living. But calloused in a good way, so she said. Calloused like a musician’s hands. Toughened enough that she could produce something beautiful. That was Shel’s spin on things.
“It’s one of the drawbacks of a growing population,” Shel said. “So many people wind up feeling, you know. Invisible.”
She punctuated the statement with a plume of gray smoke and a wave of her cigarette.
“I like it,” said Mishi.
Shel laughed. “Only you would like being invisible!”
Mishi didn’t reply, so Shel added, “Do you know the percentage of women in the population of Sydney? Fifty-eight! Fifty-eight percent of all inhabitants are women. And single women outnumber married ones. So our odds are—”
“By how much?”
Shel hesitated. “Which bit?”
“Single to married. How much?”
“Oh,” she waved her cigarette again. “I can’t recall. What’s it matter? The outcome’s the same. Our odds are bad, Mish baby.”
Mishi pushed salad around her plate with an oversized fork. There was no point arguing with Shel. It wasn’t about the statistics or the difficulty or the inevitability of everyone else’s failure. For Shel it was about the pr
eciousness of her own imminent success.
“You’re never short of a date, anyhow,” Mishi said, supplying exactly the phrase she knew Shel was looking for.
Shel rewarded her with a smile. “Ha! Thanks, doll.”
Mishi left most of her lunch uneaten, so afterwards she paused to pick up a sandwich in a convenience store. The label on the egg-and-lettuce promised “made daily,” and then noted an expiry date. She took it to the checkout and raised it towards the smiling man behind the security screen.
“This expired yesterday,” she said. “Do you give a discount?”
Steel security wires separated the man from his customers. Wide enough to let convenience products through, but not so wide that crazies could launch themselves at the till. She passed the sandwich through the wires so he could check the date.
“I can’t sell you this,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
He kept smiling while he said it, inserting the sandwich into some hidden space under the bench.
“I don’t mind,” said Mish. “I’ll pay full price.”
“Dan will fetch you another,” said the man.
“There weren’t any other egg sandwiches,” she explained.
“I’m so sorry.”
Dan was a skinny teenager with long arms, his elbows the widest part of his body. He returned holding a new Made Daily. Mishi took it without looking at it, paid full price, and carried it home still snug in its plastic skin.
Only when she was home, cross-legged on the floorboards did she pull the sandwich out. Chicken marinated in sweet chili. She didn’t like chili.
She took a few bites anyway and stared out the French doors to the city beyond.
She liked the city best this way. Under glass.
Shel called her an anathema. She lived in the inner city, but so high up she felt out of reach of it. She could be anywhere in the world, hanging high above the accents. There was a sameness to cities like this one, but you had to be inside them to find it.
The casino squatted to the right of her field of vision like a black beetle on the water, its vibrant neon lights describing a wave along its roof. Part of the developers’ plan to fit the casino into its environs. Symbolic of the harbor or some other cliché. That’s how it’d been sold to the local residents anyway.
Mishi didn’t mind the building. It was this kind of incongruity that gave the city its character.
She liked everything about the city. Liked its walls and its protective layer of noise.
3. Last Day: Shel
Upstairs on the twelfth floor, Ace was crying. Shel fought the urge to tell him to snap out of it. She was always fighting that urge.
One day she’d lose the fight and start shouting snap out of it until the world exploded.
He was sitting on the floor by the French doors of Mish’s apartment, caught in a pool of pale glow from the city outside. The apartment was small, like a bunker, the view from the balcony its only selling point.
Shel crossed to where Ace sat. Beside him were Mish’s phone, handbag, keys.
“What’s going on, Ace?”
He lay against the wall like a crumpled doll, one knee up, hands loose in his lap. He whimpered but didn’t answer in any verbal way she understood.
Shel backtracked, checked the bedroom, checked the bathroom. Both rooms empty, both painted in neutral white and beige. Both barely big enough for the furniture in them.
She swore for several seconds, then rounded on Ace again.
“What’s going on?”
He turned to look out to the sky.
“She’s not coming back, not this time.”
She fought that urge again.
“You gotta help me, Ace. Help Mish.”
She put one hand on the wall to steady herself, or stop herself from hitting him clean across the face. The wall was warm.
“How long since you seen her?” Ace asked.
“Uh,” said Shel, “three days, maybe. We had lunch.”
She brushed her palm along the wall, looking for the source of the heat. There wasn’t anything that could heat an apartment from the walls. She knew that. She was a fan of architecture. Just like she was a fan of art and innovation and financial management and survival. Modern living made her a fan of all these things. She had to be, just to keep up. Just to get by.
“What about you?” she asked. “When did you last see her?”
“Not for weeks.” He looked up at her. In the light from the casino she could see his eyes were puffy and pink.
She should probably feel sorry for him.
Ace was a weedy, overgrown kid who still dressed in skateboarding gear and hadn’t yet acknowledged his receding hairline. He moved through jobs faster than Shel moved through men, and—just like Shel—he liked a certain type. He liked jobs in the entertainment industry. What most surprised Shel was that he kept getting them.
“Why are you here tonight, Ace?” she asked.
He shrugged, head lolling against the wall.
“How’d you get in?” she snapped.
“I never gave her keys back,” he said.
Shel hesitated.
“Can you feel how warm it is in here?”
“Sure,” he choked.
He pressed a palm to his eyes and sobbed. Crying for himself, Shel decided. Crying because he was too useless to know what to do except call someone who’d never liked him in the middle of the night to sob to about his missing ex-girlfriend.
“I’m calling the police,” she said. “You got anything you want to tell me first?”
Behind his hand, he shook his head and sobbed.
The cops, when they arrived, were detached. Kind, but unpanicked. They’d seen stranger things, they assured her, and would be more than willing to list Mish as one of the city’s missing. But beyond that they had nothing to offer. There was, after all, no evidence of a crime. No theft, no marks of violence, no goodbye note and most importantly, no body.
“You could take him in for questioning,” Shel suggested.
She indicated Ace with a jerk of her chin. He was sitting on the lounge beside the other officer, torso almost concave in the soft upholstery.
“We could do that,” the cop confirmed, “if we had reason.”
“You could check security footage, right? See if she left any time recently, without her purse.”
The cop was patient. “We could,” he said. “If we had cause.”
Shel, for once, had nothing to say. She was tired, confused, and the sun was still a couple hours off.
“Some people,” said the cop sotto voce, “fake their own disappearance.” He paused to let that sink in. “She maybe have something going on in her life that would cause her to consider that?”
Who doesn’t? Shel thought. The deadbeat ex-boyfriend, the married man she was sleeping with, the no-hope job, the inflated mortgage for the apartment with no ventilation and the expensive view outside its French doors.
“No,” said Shel. “I can’t imagine.”
4. Two Days Earlier: Mishi
Mishi had a set of cards. Long, narrow cards with meditative reminders on them. “Harmony” said one card. “Peace.” “Worth.” “Light.” She shuffled them and drew out three to meditate on. Three was a random number. Meditation allowed room for the random.
This day she drew out “Adventure.” “Surrender.” “Serenity.”
She lined the cards up on the floor and stared until her vision blurred to gray grit. She tried to find the way to inner peace. The escape, the surrender. The serenity.
5. Last Day: Shel
“I’ll keep the keys, then,” Shel said.
The cops looked to Ace, and she looked to Ace, and Ace looked back between them and shrugged.
“I’ll need your name,” one of the cops said.
They let her scour the apartment for a suicide note, searching all the drawers and the bedroom cupboard where most of Mish’s stuff was crammed in fragile towers.
“Let me know if sh
e comes back,” Ace said as they ushered him out.
If. Not when.
They caught the lift together, uncomfortably cramped in a space that only just met building regulations.
“You need a lift someplace?” one cop asked.
“No,” said Shel. “But he does.”
Ace gave her a nonplussed look.
“Thanks,” he said.
She waved goodbye outside the building and pretended to walk away. Once they’d left she crept back to the apartment complex, pacing it out, looking down sidestreets and going so far as to walk to the corners, scouring the spaces beside the parked cars and the insides of the cars themselves.
She didn’t know what she was looking for. Mish, of course. Or some sign of her. A shoe, a bracelet, a hairpin, for god’s sake. Anything.
There was nothing to be found, or if there was, she couldn’t tell who it belonged to anyhow.
She circled back to the front of the apartment complex.
“Got any change, love?”
Shel was so intent on the ground she nearly walked right past him. It was his feet she saw first. They were bare but so covered in grime she figured at first he was wearing brown socks. He was homeless, she realized. Coat ripped at every seam, trousers so full of muck they could stand upright on their own.
“No,” she said out of habit. “Wait, sorry.”
She fished some coins from her pocket.
The man held out a hand. His palm, like the rest of him, was dirty.
“Thanks,” he said. “Decent of you.”
His voice was too loud, and he punctuated his polite statements with a bob of his shoulders. Like he was reciting something he’d learned a long time ago. He had a wiry beard and hair that stood up on end. He looked fifty but probably wasn’t.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 63
