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

by Ramsey Campbell

  “But did you let the child see you thought of him that way?”

  “Let him see, Miss Teacher? I told him! That was cruel of me, wasn’t it? When he savaged that boy I told him everything. I showed him his mother’s letter.”

  “And that helped him?”

  “Helped him? You don’t help a monster, a devil! Don’t you see,” Mrs. Kelly said triumphantly, “he already knew what he was. I was only showing him I did too.”

  Her blank eyes flashed with triumph; she smiled bitterly. All at once Clare saw that she was imitating Bette Davis. She couldn’t stand either of them.

  “No, I didn’t want to help him. I prayed he’d be saved. But my eyes were getting worse, and I was alone in the world. All I wanted was to be safe from him. As you would have, make no mistake. Would you have liked to see him eating with you at the table, hear him in the next room at night? I used to lie awake praying, thinking he’d crept into my room. I’m sure my crucifix kept him away. I’d told him I always carried it with me.

  “Do you know he was here when I went blind? He’d just left school. He tried to pretend he wanted to stay home and help me. I had to scream the house down before he’d go. My throat was sore for days.”

  “Where is he now, Mrs. Kelly?” Edmund said.

  “I don’t know.” Her tone was flat; she wasn’t lying. “And I don’t want to. I never heard from him again, and that suits me fine.”

  “Have you any idea where he might have gone?”

  “God only knows. He had no job when he left. Gone to the Devil, probably.”

  Edmund shook his head, baffled. Chris said, “What was the name of the guy you called a Satanist?”

  Edmund nodded at Chris, alert. But she said, “Oh, I know that all right. But I’m not telling you. He died before the police could deal with him. Let him stay buried.”

  Clare’s frustration spilled out in a long sigh.

  The bitter smile turned toward her. “Oh, I’m terribly unreasonable. The cruel mother who drove her child to suicide, and made another child into a monster. Just you listen to me, Miss Teacher. I’ll tell you how much of a monster he was. I’ll tell you something I never meant to speak of again. When I collected him from the hospital in Wales, a young nurse took me aside. She told me there was something they’d kept from me. She told me what they’d found in the cave.”

  An orange face nodded forward. Clare recoiled before she recognized Edmund; in the firelight Chris and George were orange too. On the walls the chairs leapt feebly, trembling. The room shifted uneasily; firelight reached for the corners, plucking at them.

  “They had to cut him out of her. Like a tumour,” Mrs. Kelly said. “The doctors told me that. They found the cord was broken. That shows he was no part of her, doesn’t it? Broken, or bitten through.

  “He was born with teeth. Born,” she said, sneering at the word. “And I took him, even after what the nurse told me. Because he was Cissy’s. Because I thought my faith would prevail.

  “They found Cissy in the cave.” Around Clare the orange faces leaned closer. “She was dead, but they thought they saw a movement under her clothes. They looked, a woman looked, and there was something moving under her skin. Do you know what that was?”

  She’s telling this third-hand, Clare reassured herself. The nurse wasn’t even in the cave. And this woman exaggerates. But the orange faces surrounded her, and the voice said, “It was him. The maggot inside her. The Devil’s child.” The voice tore at Mrs. Kelly’s throat as she said, “It was his mouth. He was eating his way out of his mother.”

  She preceded them to the front door, saying, “I’d just like to be sure you all leave.” They heard her voice retreating down the hall. “Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord,” it said.

  Clare rested her forehead against the corner of the house; brick dug into her clutching fingers. The street moved as if the darkness were slow water. She heard Mrs. Kelly’s muffled prayers. She heard George say, “I thought this witchcraft business was just an excuse for him, the way they find excuses for everything these days. But maybe they ought to have let him die quietly in that cave.”

  “I could give the police her address,” Edmund mused. “But then they’d push me out, I’m sure of it. I haven’t come so far just to lose the trail.”

  But he’d lost the trail already, Clare thought. She raised her head. At least she could think straight, now she was out of the orange light. She stared at the darkness on the steps beyond the street, stared toward Granby Street, Mulgrave Street, Princes Avenue. “Mulgrave Street,” she said softly to Chris, who was gazing that way too. He was the only one who might take her sudden intuition seriously. “I’ll bet that’s where the Satanist lived,” she said.

  Sunday,

  September 21

  “Do you know,” Clare said, “I haven’t the faintest idea what we’re looking for.”

  “Maybe we won’t know until we find it,” Chris said.

  “I don’t think there’s anything to find.” She halted the car beside St. Joseph’s and gazed at Mulgrave Street. There were fewer houses than there had been a fortnight ago. “If he did live here,” she said, “they’ve probably pulled his house down by now. And even if it’s still standing—oh, I don’t know. I thought we might be able to sense which one it was, but that was a stupid idea. Even if we found it, what use would it be?”

  “Yeah, well, it sounds useless. But what else can we do? Let’s go along once more, okay?”

  She drove slowly back along Mulgrave Street. Terraces and scraps of terraces stood on the waste; odd single houses were surrounded by rubble and earth. Toward Upper Parliament Street, hundreds of yards were enclosed by a wall of corrugated tin. Side streets crossed Mulgrave Street; trees still sprouted from their pavements, leaves coated with smoke. Above the waste the afternoon sky was deep blue, clear except for a waning moon like the last trace of chalk on a blackboard. At one of the bared crossroads, two learner drivers juddered timidly at each other.

  Clare halted Ringo at Upper Parliament Street. “Shall we call it a day?” she said.

  “Yeah, might as well.” But he was squirming on the seat in frustration. “Let’s get a coffee,” he said abruptly. “The Arts Centre isn’t far.”

  But the building contained a couple of morose artists, annoyed by the interruption; no coffee—it had gone on a picnic. “We’ll go back to my place,” Clare said.

  In Blackburne Terrace, birds fell from trees and swooped back onto branches, like fruit taking back its fall on a reversed film. She was unlocking the flat before she remembered how untidy it was. Perhaps Chris wouldn’t notice.

  He wasn’t even following her. He’d stopped on the last but top stair, looking disconsolate. “Shit, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything today,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. The search had been her idea, though he’d joined her readily enough. “We did our best.” She went to him, put one arm about his shoulders; she could feel how tense he was. “I think this whole business may just peter out as far as we’re concerned,” she said.

  She massaged his shoulders. “At least we’ll have seen the last of Edmund,” she said, as he relaxed a little. “He wanted me to write to the Education Offices on school notepaper. They might know where Kelly went after he left school. But I’m afraid I won’t go that far, even though I said I’d help him. So Edmund and I aren’t friends anymore. Still, I think I’ll get over that. Come on,” for he felt softer now, “I’ll make some coffee.”

  God, it was untidy. Love Has Many Weapons, of which she’d read six slickly written pages, had joined the scattered newspapers and crossword books, the children’s essays, her class record book, the canvas guitar case lying partly folded like a Dali version of George, a mug swarming with tea leaves, a paragraph about Rob that she’d written and rewritten for Edmund. She stood gazing, depressed.

  “What’s wrong?” Chris said, rather irritably.

  “Oh, nothing.” These things generally didn’t
mean so much to men. “I just wanted you to see the place looking nice. Not this mess.”

  “Christ, don’t worry about that. You should see mine.”

  “I hope I shall.” She hadn’t known she was going to say that. Her heart quickened with the shock. When he didn’t answer she fled to the kitchen, saying, “I’ll get the coffee.”

  She felt foolish. Why had she fled? From Chris, of all people! Embarrassment was the last thing she should feel with him; it was the last thing he would feel. She considered her impressions of him: vulnerability, innocence; he needed looking after sometimes. And loyalty—he’d held back the discussion at the Pughs’ for her. “You know,” she called, “you’re a lot like my brother was, in some ways.”

  “Yeah?” But no, she thought, not really. He hadn’t Rob’s aggressive unsureness, his self-pity—the things her disloyal mind had kept presenting when she’d tried to write her memories for Edmund. It was more that her relationship with Chris reminded her of Rob.

  Why? Because she looked after him, because he was loyal to her? That hadn’t been the basis of her relationship with Rob. She had realized that halfway through a sentence for Edmund, as her senile, incontinent Biro had stained her fingers. Rob hadn’t needed her half so much as she had needed him. She’d needed him to fend off other people.

  She’d needed him to blame for spoiling her chances with men. That was why, in her years away from him at teacher-training college, she’d never gone out with men at all. And in fact he’d shielded her from nothing except the fact of her own unsureness, her self-dislike. She had even managed to blame him for her dislike, her jealousy, of poor Dorothy.

  None of these insights had seemed like a revelation. She’d sat calmly, Biro in hand, gazing into herself as they slotted easily into her awareness. Her mind had known all the time, had been waiting for the chance to let her know.

  Chris had given it the chance. She had never felt so much at her ease with anyone, not even with Rob. Chris made all that had happened worthwhile. She mustn’t lose him now the search was ending.

  She loaded the tray, shaking her head at herself. She was so much at ease that she hid from him in the kitchen, as she had from Edmund! All right: she’d prove her ease to herself. She prepared her mind as she prepared the coffee.

  She prepared herself too rigidly. She walked up the hall toward the living room, gracefully. Delicately. Prettily. Tinily. Like a pixie. Like a gnome. Stop that, she demanded, clenching her mind.

  Chris was glancing at her rewritten paragraph. Had he been Edmund, she would have minded. My brother Rob Frayn was a radio personality, well-known locally for … Of all the men I’ve known I was fondest of ‘ Although many people listened to his record show, few people really knew … Maybe it’s because I know all his faults that … “Chris,” she said from the doorway.

  “Yeah,” he said, laying aside the page after a last glance.

  She shouldn’t have made him look up. Now her speech was blocked. She was struggling to think of something else when it spilled out. “There was a bloke I went out with years ago,” she said rapidly. “He used to call me Stumpy-legs. Do I look like that to you?”

  “So that’s where you got that stuff about being deformed. You mean you think I see you that way?”

  “I just wanted to hear whether you did.”

  “Shit, no,” he said impatiently.

  She felt very light as she walked across the room, very natural. She sat down smiling opposite him. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

  She poured coffee. “Listen, when all this business peters out,” she said, “we don’t want to lose touch, do we?” Her instinct told her they’d seen the last of Edmund. Rob and Kelly had retreated to a comfortable distance in her mind. (one terrible hasty thought: Rob’s arm was still somewhere.) “I want you to come to our school,” she said. “With the group, the TTG.”

  “Yeah, I’ll talk to them, see what they say.”

  “You know,” she said, “in a way I’m glad it’s ending like this. I wouldn’t like to think of Edmund getting hold of Kelly. I just don’t like that man. Whatever Kelly did, I don’t think he deserves Edmund. She sucked in her cheek, shaking her head. “I think he’s had enough, what with that teacher and his grandmother. No wonder he went the way he did, with them to contend with. I’m sure it was she who gave him this thing about Mulgrave Street by telling him about it, a psychological thing, a fixation. I mean, of course he’ll have to be caught,” she said. “For his own good as much as anyone’s.”

  That was an awful cliche. But she meant it; she could look at Kelly that way now, in her newfound ease. She could forgive him, because it hadn’t really been his fault. She gazed at Chris, anxious to be sure he didn’t think she was being insincere.

  She was gazing at him. Oh Christ, Chris thought. She knows.

  By the time he reached his flat, Chris was no longer sure of anything. He was even unsure why he’d joined Edmund’s hunt.

  His plan had seemed brilliantly simple. As soon as he’d read the newspaper report about Edmund he had known what to do. When he’d rung the newspaper for Edmund’s address, everything the reporter said had confirmed his plan. By joining Edmund he wouldn’t only be able to divert the hunt, if it came too close; he would be invisible in the last place they’d think to look.

  An empty, blank-faced bus passed on Princes Road. As he reached the house he felt Mulgrave Street plucking restlessly at him. He hurried into the resounding hall. Now he wondered if he’d joined the hunt so as to trace the house in Mulgrave Street.

  The stairs thumped dully beneath him. The sound nagged at his confusion. He hadn’t been so confused since his moment of panic when he’d recognized Edmund. The hotel bedroom door had opened, and there was the boy who had watched him and Cyril. Chris had felt hollow with panic. Then he’d realized that the man didn’t know him. At once he’d felt flattered that Edmund wanted to write a book about him, after all this time. He’d strode into the hotel room, toward the girl’s voice: a star’s entrance. He was going to enjoy himself.

  The girl had been Clare. That had doubled his delight. She was fine, despite the car crash.He need feel no guilt at all. He ground his teeth as he ground the key in the lock of his flat. It was his delight with Clare that had tricked him.

  He’d been dazzled by her gesture of bringing him back into the hunt. He had taken his performance too far in stalking out of Edmund’s room; it had seemed the only way to play the scene, but he’d acted himself out of the hunt. He shouldn’t have let himself react so strongly—Edmund reminded him of nothing so much as an ineffectual Cyril. He’d tried to think of a way to rejoin the hunt, in vain. Then Clare had come to him in Church Street and had handed him the answer. He’d felt overwhelmingly fond of her.

  He had enjoyed that day. He had been spilling his delight. He’d enjoyed the game in the launderette most of all, pretending to be gay so that Mrs. Laird wouldn’t recognize him, pretending not to know she had the same doctor as his grandmother, so that Clare could see him find that out for Edmund. He’d enjoyed himself too much, because he’d betrayed himself to Clare. Then he’d betrayed himself doubly, because he’d thought she hadn’t noticed.

  He slammed the door viciously. Even here in his flat he could feel the plucking, feeble but relentless, like an old man refusing to die. He was sure it had grown stronger since George had told them about the black magic. As soon as George had mentioned the magician’s dolls, Chris had felt he’d always known about them.

  Then Clare had suggested searching Mulgrave Street. Chris had tried alone, later in the week. But he’d been unable to bear the sense of sinking helplessly into himself, into darkness, into the earth; he’d fled. He had almost refused to join Clare, except that a refusal might have seemed suspicious. As it happened, in the car he’d had no sense of the house at all; Clare’s presence had swamped it.

  As their search had run down he had become progressively less sure why he wanted to find the house. She had been confusing him de
liberately, that was why. It was lucky for her they hadn’t found the house and gone in. He bared his teeth: her presence wouldn’t have been able to swamp it then.

  Back at her flat she’d revealed that she knew who he was. She had only pretended not to notice what he’d said outside the launderette. She had noticed that he’d mentioned St. Joseph’s, though she hadn’t named the school.

  For a moment he had wanted to tell her she was right. He had been sure, as she gazed at him, that she was willing him to tell her. Then he’d seen that she had been playing a game with him ever since the launderette. Getting him invited to the Pughs’ house, making sure he was confronted with his grandmother, taking him to Mulgrave Street—everything had been a game, aimed at forcing him to betray himself. Perhaps she had suspected him earlier; perhaps that was why she’d come to him in Church Street. He’d gazed blindly into the coffee; it had scalded his throat, startling him to his feet. “I’ve got to go,” he’d said, and had fled before he attacked her in his mounting fury.

  Nothing was sure now. Everything safe was giving way beneath him. She had done that. He stabbed the kitchen table; the knife stood trembling. Clare, and Maggie, the girl in TTG.

  He didn’t even feel safe in TTG now. Of everything, it was the theatre, acting, that made him feel most secure. He’d learned that at school, the only thing he’d thought worth learning. He had been friendly with a boy in the Vale School Players; they’d masturbated each other a few times. His friend had liked dressing up. He’d invited Chris to rehearsals; perhaps he’d wanted to see him dressed up too, perhaps he wanted them to spend more time together. The master had asked Chris to act a small part. He’d done as he was told, as he generally did at school, indifferently.

  He’d struggled with the part, frustrated. He had become furious with himself, with his ineptness, with the watchers. “Don’t force it,” the master had said. “You’re trying too hard. Let yourself go, just let yourself relax into the part.” Eventually he’d asked if Chris wanted to give up, but by then Chris was furiously determined.