The Collected Short Fiction

by Ramsey Campbell

  I clambered scrabbling up the path. My sobbing gasps filled my mouth with sand. My wild flight was from nothing that I'd seen. I was fleeing the knowledge, deep-rooted and undeniable, that what I perceived blotting out the sky was nothing but an acceptable metaphor. Appalling though the presence was, it was only my mind's version of what was there—a way of letting me glimpse it without going mad at once.

  I have not seen Neal since—at least, not in a form that anyone else would recognise.

  Next day, after a night during which I drank all the liquor I could find to douse my appalled thoughts and insights, I discovered that I couldn't leave. I pretended to myself that I was going to the beach to search for Neal. But the movements began at once; the patterns stirred. As I gazed, dully entranced, I felt something grow less dormant in my head, as though my skull had turned into a shell.

  Perhaps I stood engrossed by the beach for hours. Movement distracted me: the skimming of a windblown patch of sand. As I glanced at it I saw that it resembled a giant mask, its features ragged and crumbling. Though its eyes and mouth couldn't keep their shape, it kept trying to resemble Neal's face. As it slithered whispering towards me I fled towards the path, moaning.

  That night he came into the bungalow. I hadn't dared go to bed; I dozed in a chair, and frequently woke trembling. Was I awake when I saw his huge face squirming and transforming as it crawled out of the wall? Certainly I could hear his words, though his voice was the inhuman chorus I'd experienced on the beach. Worse, when I opened my eyes to glimpse what might have been only a shadow, not a large unstable form fading back into the substance of the wall, for a few seconds I could still hear that voice.

  Each night, once the face had sunk back into the wall as into quicksand, the voice remained longer—and each night, struggling to break loose from the prison of my chair, I understood more of its revelations. I tried to believe all this was my imagination, and so, in a sense, it was. The glimpses of Neal were nothing more than acceptable metaphors for what Neal had become, and what I was becoming. My mind refused to perceive the truth more directly, yet I was possessed by a temptation, vertiginous and sickening, to learn what that truth might be.

  For a while I struggled. I couldn't leave, but perhaps I could write. When I found that however bitterly I fought I could think of nothing but the beach, I wrote this. I hoped that writing about it might release me, but of course the more one thinks of the beach, the stronger its hold becomes.

  Now I spend most of my time on the beach. It has taken me months to write this. Sometimes I see people staring at me from the bungalows. Do they wonder what I'm doing? They will find out when their time comes— everyone will. Neal must have satisfied it for a while; for the moment it is slower. But that means little. Its time is not like ours.

  Each day the pattern is clearer. My pacing helps. Once you have glimpsed the pattern you must go back to read it, over and over. I can feel it growing in my mind. The sense of expectancy is overwhelming. Of course that sense was never mine. It was the hunger of the beach.

  My time is near. The large moist prints that surround mine are more pronounced—the prints of what I am becoming. Its substance is everywhere, stealthy and insidious. Today, as I looked at the bungalows, I saw them change; they grew like fossils of themselves. They looked like dreams of the beach, and that is what they will become.

  The voice is always with me now. Sometimes the congealing haze seems to mouth at me. At twilight the dunes edge forward to guard the beach. When the beach is dimmest I see other figures pacing out the pattern. Only those whom the beach has touched would see them; their outlines are unstable—some look more like coral than flesh. The quicksands make us trace the pattern, and he stoops from the depths beyond the sky to watch. The sea feeds me. Often now I have what may be a dream. I glimpse what Neal has become, and how that is merely a fragment of the imprint which it will use to return to our world. Each time I come closer to recalling the insight when I wake. As my mind changes, it tries to prepare me for the end. Soon I shall be what Neal is. I tremble uncontrollably, I feel deathly sick, my mind struggles desperately not to know. Yet in a way I am resigned. After all, even if I managed to flee the beach, I could never escape the growth. I have understood enough to know that it would absorb me in time, when it becomes the world.

  Jack In The Box (1983)

  When you awake they've turned out the lights in your cell. It feels as if the padded walls have closed in; if you moved you'd touch them. They want you to scream and plead, but you won't. You'll lie there until they have to turn the lights on.

  You're glad and proud of what you did. You remember the red spilling from the nurse's throat. You never liked his eyes; they were always watching and ready to tell you that he knew what you were. The others pretended it was their job not to be shocked by what you did before they brought you here, but he never pretended. You can see the red streaming down his shirt and glueing it to his skin. You relax into memory. It's been so long.

  You can go back as far as you like, but you can't remember a time when you didn't kill. Although you can't remember much before you were a soldier, and even that period seems to consist of explosive flashes of dead faces and twisted metal and limbs — until you reach the point where a pattern begins.

  It was at the edge of the jungle. You were stumbling along, following the tracks of a tank. You'd been shot in the head, but your legs were still plodding. There was a luminous crimson sky and against it trees stood splintered and charred. Suddenly, among the ruts, you thought you saw a red reflection of the sky. You stood swaying, trying to make it out, and eventually, mixed with the churned earth and muddy stubble of grass, you saw enough of an outline to realize it was a man. The pattern of the tank-tracks was etched on him in red. You leaned closer, reaching toward the red, and maybe that's when it began.

  You wonder why you can't hear any sounds outside your cell, not even the savage murmur of the tropical night that always filters in. Your head turns a little, searching, but your memory has regained its hold. When the army discharged you and paid your meager wage you returned to the city. The city doctor did his best for your wound, so he said, but shook his head and recommended you to see someone else who knew more about the effects. In the end you didn't. You were too confused by how the city and the people looked to you.

  It was the red that confused you. The city was full of red; it was everywhere you looked. But it wasn't real red, not the red that trickled tantalizingly on the very edge of your mind. And the people were wrong; they looked unreal, like zombies. You knew that if zombies were real; they never came into the city by day, they stayed in the jungle. That wasn't what was wrong with the people. You felt as if the most important part of them was hidden.

  One evening as you came into your room you caught sight of a red glint within the wall. It was a fragment of the sunset trapped for a moment in a crack. At once you knew how to satisfy the yawning frustration you'd felt ever since your return to the city, knew how to complete the sunset: you must answer it in red. You cut your forearm with a razor. The red responded, but it hurt, and that was wrong. It hadn't hurt before.

  You knew what to do, but you had to make yourself. Each evening when the sky was crimson you went out, the razor folded in your pocket. The tropical evening settled heavily about you, and the shadows in which you hid were warm, but each time you soothed yourself into courage and surged forth from ambush you heard witnesses approaching. It was worse than a jungle ambush, because here your people wouldn't praise you if you succeeded, they'd arrest you.

  You went farther from home, into the poorest areas. There was so much death here you had the cunning notion that what you did might almost pass unremarked. At last, one evening when the crimson light was just about to drain away into the ground, you saw a young girl hurrying toward you down an alley. Her eyes were specks of reflected red, making her shadowy face into a mask, which you didn't need to see as human. It was as if she were a receptacle for the last drops of red. She
was almost upon you when you swooped, your hands grubbing in your pockets for the razor. You'd left it at home. But now you were pressing her face into your chest to stifle her cries, and even without the razor you managed to make the red come.

  After that it was easier. You knew now why you'd been confused when you looked at people: because all the time you had been seeing them as pipes full of red, and you couldn't think why. You could look at them without wanting to tap them except when the sky was calling, and then you made sure you were in the slums. During the day you stayed in your room with the curtains drawn, because outside you might have been stopped for questioning. When you went out you didn't take the razor, which might have betrayed you if you had ever been searched. You never were, although the slum people were complaining that a monster was preying on them. Most of what they said wasn't believed. They admitted believing in zombies, which city people never did.

  You can't remember most of the people you caught. They were only shadows making stifled noises, moans, squeaks, and the final desperate gargle. The older ones often seemed dry, children were surprisingly full. You do remember the last one, an old man who giggled and squirmed as he drained. You were still watching the glistening stream when men came at you from both ends of the alley. When you tried to get up they battered you down and dragged you away.

  That was how you came here. You're becoming restless, and your mind is nagging, nagging: they would never turn out the light in your cell, because then they couldn't watch you. But your frustration is urging you on; it wants you to see the most recent and most vivid red, the nurse's.

  He was from the slums. You could tell that by the way he talked. Perhaps you'd caught one of his relatives, and mat was why he tried to kill you. You never saw that in his eyes, only a horror of what you were. But just at dawn you saw him tiptoe into your cell, carrying a straightjacket. No doubt he expected you to be asleep. You were tired, and he managed to restrain you before you saw the sharply pointed bulge beneath his jacket. But you still remembered how to bite, and you tore his neck. As he fumbled gurgling into the corridor the sunlight through the window beyond your door streamed around his body, and two spikes of light pierced your eyes. There your memory ends.

  You're half satisfied, half excited, and frustrated by the weight of the dark. You feel penned. Then you realize that you can't feel the straightjacket. They may have left you in darkness but at least they've freed you of that. Roused by your memories, you stretch before getting up to stalk around your cell, and your hand touches a wall. You recoil, and then you snarl at yourself and move your other arm. It touches a wall, too.

  All of a sudden you're roaring with rage and fear and arching your body as if it can burst you out of your prison, because you know that what has been pressing down on your face isn't only darkness. You aren't in your cell at all. You're in a coffin.

  At last you manage to calm yourself, and lie throbbing. You try to think clearly, as you had to in the jungle and afterward in the slums. You're sure the nurse has done this to you. The gap in your memory feels like a blackout. Perhaps he succeeded in poisoning you. He must have persuaded the others that you were dead. In this climate you'd be buried quickly.

  You throw yourself against the lid of the coffin, inches above your face. You hear earth trickling faintly by outside for a moment, and then there's nothing but the padded silence. You tear at the cheap padding until you feel it rip. A nail breaks and pain flares like a distant beacon. It gives you a sense of yourself again, and you try to plan.

  You manage to force your arms back until the palms of your hands are pressed against the lid almost above your shoulders. Already your forearms are beginning to ache, and your upper arms crush your ribs. Your face feels as if it's trapped in a dwindling pocket of air by your limbs. Before panic can reach you, you're thinking of how the nurse's face will look when you reach him. You begin to push against the lid.

  The first time there's the merest stirring of earth outside the coffin. You rest your cramped arms for a moment and push again. There's nothing. You don't know how many coffin nails nor what weight of earth you're trying to shift. You thrust your elbows against the sides of the coffin and heave. Nothing except the silent pendulous darkness. If the lid rather than the nails gives way, the whole weight of earth above will pour in on top of you. Pain kindles your arms, and you lever while they shudder with the effort.

  Then the worst thing you could have imagined happens. The weight above you increases. You feel it at the height of your effort, and you're sure it isn't the weakening of your arms. For a moment you think it's the nurse, standing on your grave in case you try to escape. Then another idea occurs to you. It may be a delirious hope, but you force yourself to rest your arms on your chest, crossed and pulsing. You listen.

  For a long time you can't hear anything. You resist the urge to test the weight on the lid again, because by now you've forgotten how it felt before. You don't even know whether you would be able to hear what you're listening for.

  The darkness thumbs your eyes, and false light swirls on them.

  Then you think you heard it. You strain all your nerves, and after a stretched time during which you seem to hang poised on darkness it comes again: a faint distant scraping in the earth above you. You have a last nightmare glimpse of the nurse digging down to make sure you're dead. But you know who are the only people who dig up fresh corpses. They've come to make you into a zombie. You lie waiting, massaging your cramped arms and tensing yourself. Will they be surprised enough not to use their spades as weapons?

  When you hear metal strike the lid you're ready. But when the first nails pull free and the lid creaks up, light pours in with a sifting of earth. For a second you freeze, trapped. But it isn't torchlight, only daylight. The gap in your memory was daylight, or perhaps it was death. To you they've become the same. You realize that one sound you haven't been hearing is the sound of your own breath.

  You leap up and pull one of the startled men into the coffin until you're ready for him. Then you clasp the other to you, unlipping your fangs, thinking: red.

  Bait (1983)

  “That light is all that is left of your life,” Lord Robert said, gesturing negligently toward the torch set in its niche in the wall opposite that to which Thomas was chained. “Though perhaps I should not be so niggardly. You would scarcely have time to savour the attentions of your new companion. Perhaps when you have had a taste of the dark, I may return to discover whether your thoughts are of your wife or of what will visit you.”

  He turned away. Then, as if inspired, he swung back and slit Thomas’s forearm with his sword. A minute later Thomas heard the door slam stoutly, amid the new stone which walled off this extremity of the cellars. The torch-flame streamed away from the gust, dragging its niche and part of the wall by their shadows.

  Thomas slid down to squat on the damp stone floor. The short chains gyved to his ankles collected in a heap beneath his thighs, cutting dully into them, but he squatted unmoving. The wall before him panted with the flame.

  The light reached out along the grey stone and fell back, unable to maintain its grip. At its farthest reach it snatched forward what Thomas had taken to be part of the darkness: a fissure in the grey wall, moist-edged as a wound. From its apex plopped a slow deliberate drip, mud-thick. Within the fissure, muffled and distant, Thomas heard an awakening scrape of claws.

  Rats, he told himself. They must be the companions he had been promised. He hoped they would find him dead. He hoped death would come to him softly as sleep, and as quickly. He closed his eyes and let the plump drip pace his breathing, slow his thoughts. But the flame tyrannized his eyelids, demanding that he watch the light plucking nervously at the fissure.

  Already the light was fading, unless a clinging shadow of sleep was gathering on his eyes. Deep in the fissure the claws scraped, growing bolder. He stared into the unsteady cleft of darkness and tried to coax its depths to draw him into sleep. The depths only filled with his memories, the hut a
t the edge of the forest, Marie.

  Marie was crying. “Don’t let him take me, I couldn’t bear it. If he takes me I won’t be yours.” Thomas’s friends were nodding their heads angrily. “He has no right,” they said. “Someone must stand against him. We would have if we’d known. It only needs someone to tell him we know there is no such right, and he will never dare claim it again. We’ll stand by you.”

  Marie was screaming, for Lord Robert had thrown open the door of their hut. Behind him at a distance, blurred and surreptitious in the twilight, Thomas’s friends peered. Thomas stood before Marie, warding off Lord Robert. “There is no lord’s right, no other lord claims it. You cannot have her. The other lords will come to our aid if you try.”

  Lord Robert did not speak. His sword, infamous for its sharpness that clove men as a scythe mows grass, trembled a fingernail’s breadth from Thomas’s eye. Through the doorway Thomas saw that his friends had retreated behind then-barred doors. Lord Robert gazed at Marie and held his sword carelessly at Thomas’s face until Thomas fell back. Marie was screaming, no longer in terror of her husband’s fate but of her own. She was hugging her breasts and pressing her legs together closely as Lord Robert’s lips. Lord Robert threat-ened her with the sword, prodding her gently with it here and there, each time drawing blood. Abruptly he seemed to tire of trying to persuade her. In a moment he had deflowered her expertly with the sword. After a while he silenced her cries with the blade.