The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror

by Ramsey Campbell

  But she found she had been in his. “I’m not surprised you showed it twice,” he was saying to George. “_Bonnie and Clyde_,” he explained to the late-comers. “My favourite movie. The first part, anyway. Before they all start to get killed.”

  “Can we get on now?” Edmund demanded, impatiently laying aside one of several scrapbooks and photo albums.

  “Oh, right. I just thought we should wait for Clare. And Alice.”

  “Thank you, Chris,” Alice said. Clare found herself blushing and was bewildered.

  “All right,” Edmund said, sitting forward sharply. “George says he wants to help.”

  His amusement had faded. Clare was sure he’d wanted to take George aside and persuade him.

  His nose twitched, but behind him the rabbit had won that contest. Clare jammed her handkerchief into her face and glanced hastily away, toward the goldfish hanging from their gulping mouths.

  “You know after the inquest I opened my mouth even wider than usual,” George said. “I didn’t know they were going to quote me. Well, the other day they sent a reporter to get me to say Ted had used me against my will. I won’t repeat what I said to him. But that doesn’t make up for what I said after the inquest.”

  “Still, it did some good,” Clare said. “Otherwise Chris couldn’t have got in touch with us.”

  Edmund made an ambiguous sound. Alice said, “But now he knows you’re after him, the man you’re hunting.”

  “That doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know how,” Edmund said. “He’ll assume we’re following the police. That’s what the police must think themselves; they haven’t been in touch with me. He won’t see us coming from another direction.”

  “If I hadn’t opened my mouth he wouldn’t know anything,” George said.

  The rabbit had been lifting fire-irons off their stand with her teeth, dropping them on the rug. Now she hopped into Chris’s lap and chattered her teeth, shoving her nose under his hand to be stroked. “She makes that sound when she’s happy,” Alice explained. “She’s a funny little thing. Isn’t she, George?” But she couldn’t get hold of the conversation.

  “You could be very useful, George,” Edmund said.

  He and the cat gazed loftily at the rabbit. “You could see what you can get out of Kelly’s doctor, his grandmother’s doctor. If anyone knows what’s behind this, he must. You’re the man to find out.”

  “Why is George the man?” Alice asked.

  “Because he’d be one professional talking to another. Chris is no use, too young. Clare might do it, but what he might have to say could be pretty horrible. As for me, I’d be too busy worrying whether he’d read about me.”

  “Don’t you tell people who you are before you question them?”

  “Certainly I do, Alice. But they haven’t usually been turned against me beforehand.”

  “Then he’ll feel the same about anyone who’s helping you.”

  “Now, Alice,” George said. “I’ve offered to help. I’ll feel better if I do.”

  “I don’t want you to. I wouldn’t feel safe. Suppose this Kelly still has the same doctor? Suppose he hears you’ve been asking about him?”

  “I think he’d stay away from that doctor,” Edmund said.

  “But the doctor might tell his grandmother. Suppose Kelly finds out where we live?”

  “Don’t be silly,” George said. “How could he?”

  Clare felt Alice’s despair. Suddenly she knew why Alice had sent the children to the park: so that the horror couldn’t touch them in any way. Now the horror was threatening to come closer. So long as it didn’t touch Alice’s home, her children, it was bearable; but now she couldn’t be certain of keeping it out.

  “I know how you feel, dear,” George said, “I’ll be careful. I’ll want to be certain the doctor won’t give us away.”

  Alice slumped back, closing her eyes wearily.

  “Now, how do we get you into his surgery?”

  Edmund said. “You wouldn’t know anyone who might be on his list?”

  “I know people in the district. There’s an actress friend of my mother’s, and the fellow who helps me out at the Newsham.”

  “You’d just need to go to the surgery on their behalf, you see. That would be perfect. Let’s see if we can figure you out an approach once you get in.”

  If George borrows someone’s medical card, Clare thought, he can be traced through them. She glimpsed Olivia and Mark in bed, the orange face bobbing at the window, climbing in. Well, tell George he can be traced! she prompted Alice. She glanced round to grimace at her. Exhausted, Alice was asleep in her chair.

  Clare was debating whether to make the point herself when George said, “I think I’ve heard Ruby mention a Dr. Miller. I’ll see. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just ring the Newsham to make sure they’ve no problems.”

  “Don’t be long. You deserve a treat,” Edmund said, producing and brandishing a hip-flask of bourbon. “Wake up, Alice,” he called. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Monday,

  September 15

  A woman was emerging from the doctor’s house as George rode up. “Are there many waiting?” he called.

  “Half a dozen,” she said, and had to take a wheezing breath. “No, one just—went in. There’s—five. No, wait a—moment, there’s a woman—with her—son. They might both be here—for treatment.”

  “Thank you,” George said when he was sure she’d finished. Five or six, either was worth a ride around the side streets. Cycling relaxed him. Ten minutes and he’d be ready for the doctor. He rode away down Boswell Street.

  The houses were Siamese twins. One pair shared a shallow porch supported by a thin stone pillar; the left-hand house was pebble-dashed as far as its half of the pillar, leaving its twin drab with various faded shades of brick. Some neighbourly pairs supported each other with timber struts. Beyond a crew-cut hedge and dusty curtains, George saw a vase of flowers that looked as if they’d sat in an attic for years.

  “Tell the doctor your friend is a friend of Kelly’s grandmother,” Chris had suggested. “Say his grandmother is anxious about him, you don’t know why. Say your friend told you and you promised you’d try to help. That way you don’t have to know anything else, right?”

  It seemed all right. Ruby Roberts had turned out to be a patient of Dr. Miller’s. She had been tearfully glad to see George, had talked about his mother for hours, strengthening his will to help Edmund. She needed more medicine; George had every reason to visit the surgery. He cycled by the old Smithdown Picture Playhouse, a supermarket now; the noses of shopping trolleys nested inside one another. At least Bill Williams’s projection was improving, he thought, gazing at the lost cinema. Ten minutes and he’d go into the waiting room.

  Down Tunnel Road was Fred Robinson’s old cinema, the Avenue, a bingo hall now. Once George had leaned forward to watch a film and the front row of the circle had collapsed beneath him. He rode into the terraced side streets that would take him that way. But there were no side streets. As if the main road were a film set, there was nothing behind except a waste of pale clay and grit and odd bricks, a few scrawled walls, a heap of flame, a cloud of smoke wide as streets resting almost inertly on the orange clay. Specks gathered on the lenses of George’s spectacles. He cycled quickly back toward Lodge Lane. The landscape had made him uneasy, irritable.

  The stopped clock in the Lodge Lane library tower pretended it was 8:24. George glanced angrily at his watch, wobbling. At Boswell Street a clown was sketched on an ice-cream van, wearing the contents of a cornet as a turban. Five minutes. Children ran out of the baths, thumping each other with rolled wet towels. A cat sat on a butcher’s slab, ECONOMY O was books, George gathered from the window display. In the side streets, many houses had tin instead of windows; it was like one of those horror films where people turn to reveal eyes full of white makeup. A baby with a red rubber stopper sat in a pushchair outside a dilapidated house. George swerved around a child’s red b
oot, a pram wheel, a clutter of young black footballers. He felt nervous, out of place.

  One minute. All right, no hurry. Cars were hunting along Lodge Lane, eyes bright in the evening; children ran in front of them, for a dare. Down the side streets to his left, a frieze of clouds curled, sharp against a band of orange. In a window a rabbit hung by its feet from a metal hook, its head wrapped in a bloody plastic bag.

  For some reason, that upset him. He almost scraped the doctor’s gateposts. The house rushed at him, twin windows peering over the downstairs bay, long eyes above a longer snout. He padlocked his bicycle and hurried through the arch of the porch into the hall.

  A woman slammed a filing drawer and turned in the same brisk movement. “Yes, what is it?” she said, her upswept spectacles glinting pointedly at the clock.

  “I’m here on behalf of Ruby Roberts.”

  She nodded once at the medical card; the bits of glass decorating her spectacles blinked.

  “The usual? I’ll ask Doctor to write the prescription,” she said. “Then you needn’t wait.”

  “Ah, no. If you don’t mind,” George stumbled, “I’d like a word with him myself.”

  “What did you want to speak to him about?”

  He’d recovered. “I’ll tell him that myself, thank you,” he said.

  But in the waiting room he found that his chest was pounding. He gazed at his interlocked fingers, forced himself to breathe slowly. Gilbert and Sullivan chattered cheerily behind him. A bell rang. A man shuffled coughing through a side door; the hem of his overcoat trailed after him, dragging toffee-papers. George wished the music would stop babbling, wished that the two small children wouldn’t clatter among the chairs out of reach of their dull-eyed mother. He rummaged in a pile of magazines. Ah, the Beano. Biff! Yow! Oof! The bell rang. “Come on, you little buggers,” the woman said, shoving her children toward the side door. Ruby was a friend of Kelly’s grandmother. Of Mrs. Kelly? No, that mightn’t be her name. Thud! Aargh! The bell rang. The bell rang. George started. He was alone in the waiting room. The bell was ringing for him.

  He strode onstage, as his father had used to describe himself striding—and halted, taken aback. The doctor’s room, his chair and desk and the rest of the furniture were enormous. When he saw the flowers beyond the flowered curtains, George realized that the room was ordinary: it was the doctor who was small. But he’d lost his poise.

  The doctor swung round in his swivel chair: sixty years old, or older. The cords of his neck sprang taut; his bald head shone unwrinkled. “For Ruby Roberts, is it?” he said, already scribbling.

  “That’s it.” All George could do while he tried to regain his poise was speak. “She asked me to—”

  “Yes, all right, all right. Her usual.” He glanced up quickly, frowning, as George sat opposite him. “Isn’t that right?”

  For a moment George wanted to take the prescription and leave. He could feel the man’s impatience; its momentum would carry George away if he didn’t slow it down. “I think so,” he said slowly. “She said she wanted a tonic—”

  “Yes. Yes. Her nerve tonic.” George had made him more impatient. The tendons of his hand stood out, working beneath the almost-translucent skin. He was a framework of cables, exposed by his energy that had burned away the flesh, the superfluity. Even his head looked as if it had dispensed with hair.

  George took a slow deep breath. “Dr. Miller,” he said.

  “Yes?” He snapped his pen into its cap, then glanced up at George’s silence. “Yes?”

  He couldn’t tell his lies. Not while battling the doctor’s impatience, not beneath the scrutiny of his quick pale-blue eyes. In his job the doctor had to read people all the time. George saw from the doctor’s expression that some of his thoughts had spilled onto his face. It didn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  The doctor sighed and sat forward. “Whenever people tell me that,” he said, “it always does.” Beneath the impatience George saw the beginning of concern.

  “Now, what’s the trouble?” Dr. Miller said.

  George teetered on the edge of the doctor’s readiness to listen, and said, “I’m looking for Christopher Kelly.”

  “Are you now?” Emotion flickered unreadably on the doctor’s face. “You’re this writer,” he said.

  “No, I am not.” In a moment he realized: “You read about the inquest.”

  “So I did.”

  “Then you read about me. I’m the son of the lady who was killed.”

  “Ah, the man who didn’t like what the writer was doing.” He peered into George’s eyes. “And why are you looking for Christopher?” he demanded.

  “I want to see him suffer. I want to be there when he’s caught. If I can hurt him I wouldn’t mind going to prison for it. They should bring back torture for him. It wouldn’t bring back my mother, but it would make me feel better. I’d help mutilate him, I can tell you.”

  A bird twittered. For George the silence was full of his own surprise. Until he’d spoken he hadn’t known what he felt. There had been nobody he could tell, not even Alice. He felt weak with relief.

  The doctor gazed at him. George picked up the prescription and stood. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know your patients trust you. I came here to try to make you betray that trust.”

  He was at the door when the doctor said, “Have I refused to talk to you?”

  George turned. A secret emotion was flickering over the doctor’s face. “I gave my word about some things,” he said, his voice as private as his gaze. “But that isn’t the same as a vow of silence. Is it?” he demanded.

  “I suppose not.”

  “Sit down,” the doctor said. His purposeful rapidity had returned. “I can’t tell you where to find Christopher,” he said as a preamble. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d tell me anyway.”

  “No, certainly not. But I’d like you to know a few things about him. About his background.”

  “Does that explain what he did to my mother?”

  “Perhaps.” For a moment George was sure that the doctor’s relief at the chance to talk was as great as his own. “It depends whether you believe in black magic,” the doctor said.

  George thought of Christopher Lee shouting at a skeleton on a horse; he thought of Barbara Steele, the girl from Birkenhead, with her face painted green. “I don’t believe in the supernatural,” he said.

  “Nor did I,” the doctor said, gazing inward. “Nor did I.”

  The woman in the launderette had told Chris and Clare something—”Was Kelly’s mother mixed up in black magic?” George said.

  The doctor nodded. “But I didn’t know until years later that she was involved. I heard about the black magic from someone else.”

  The doctor sat back. He seemed less to relax than to anticipate strain. “Tell me what you would have done,” he said. Hearing the start of a story, George relaxed—realized that Dr. Miller had freely admitted that Kelly was the man they were hunting. He managed not to react visibly.

  “There was a woman, one of my regular patients,” the doctor said. “This was twenty-five years ago, but I won’t tell you her name. A hypochondriac. Every doctor has them. It’s a disease without a cure.” He shook his head rapidly, as if to dislodge something. “The mind can be a terrible thing, you know. The suffering it can cause.

  “This woman, she suffered. Terribly. The joke of it was, she didn’t believe in medicine—not the kind she could get here. She was one for the miracle cures. I had to calm her down when they didn’t work. I had to cure her of them sometimes, some of the things they fooled her into swallowing.

  “She used to catch complaints from the medical dictionaries. I thought the library shouldn’t let her read them, but she’d only have invented something. The trouble was, she wasn’t bright. Once she got an idea in her head, it took ten men and a bulldozer to get it out again. I never really convinced her my medicines weren’t addictive.

  “Now then. Al
l of a sudden she didn’t come in for months. I almost thought she’d found her miracle. Then back she came one day. But she stopped me writing her prescription; she didn’t want that. She wanted to ask me something.

  “She was worried. More than usual, much more. I honestly felt that if I gave her the wrong answer she’d panic. It took her a while to get the question out. Well, she wanted to know if anyone could say in advance that a baby would be born deformed.

  “No, she didn’t say ‘deformed’. She said ‘monstrous’.”

  He nodded sharply. George wondered if he should have heard more meaning than he had. “You say she wasn’t Kelly’s mother?” he said, to say something.

  “Oh no. That was another business entirely.” The doctor wrinkled his brow hard, as if trying to squeeze something out. “I never saw Christopher’s mother at all,” he said, but for a moment an emotion peered from behind his poise; it had gone before George could make it out. The floor-length plastic curtains shuffled, creaking.

  “Well, I wanted to know who’d been telling the woman rubbish like that,” Dr. Miller said. “But she wouldn’t say. I could see she suspected I was ducking her question. Well, I didn’t take the question seriously, but the anxiety behind it was another matter. I told her there was no reason why she should have a deformed child. She was in her early thirties; there were no medical complications. I told her not even her worrying could harm the child. I hoped that was true. I’d seen some bad accidents of birth in my time. Very, very bad.” He pressed his eyes with his fingers. “Then I packed her off home, told her not to listen to any more rubbish.

  “She didn’t come back for a couple of months—which was unusual, of course. When she did, she was nearer to panic, much nearer. I thought she’d been sitting at home, getting herself worked up, but do you know what she told me? Her husband had forbidden her to come, because he said I’d been lying to her. The baby was going to be born monstrous.