“I’m just curious.”
“You are,” rumbled Grandpa, scowling. “Remember that day when that young lady was killed at the rail station? You just walked over and looked at her, blood and all.” He laughed. “Queer duck. Stay that way. Fear nothing, ever in your life. I guess you get it from your father, him being a military man and all, and you so close to him before you came here to live last year.” Grandpa returned to his paper.
A long pause. “Gramps?”
“Yes?”
“What if a man didn’t have a heart or lungs or stomach but still walked around, alive?”
“That,” rumbled Gramps, “would be a miracle.”
“I don’t mean a—a miracle. I mean, what if he was all different inside? Not like me.”
“Well, he wouldn’t be quite human then, would he, boy?”
“Guess not, Gramps. Gramps, you got a heart and lungs?”
Gramps chuckled. “Well, tell the truth, I don’t know. Never seen them. Never had an X-ray, never been to a doctor. Might as well be potato-solid for all I know.”
“Have I got a stomach?”
“You certainly have!” cried Grandma from the parlor entry. “’Cause I feed it! And you’ve lungs, you scream loud enough to wake the crumblees. And you’ve dirty hands, go wash them! Dinner’s ready. Grandpa, come on. Douglas, git!”
In the rush of boarders streaming downstairs, Grandpa, if he intended questioning Douglas further about the weird conversation, lost his opportunity. If dinner delayed an instant more, Grandma and the potatoes would develop simultaneous lumps.
The boarders, laughing and talking at the table—Mr. Koberman silent and sullen among them—were silenced when Grandfather cleared his throat. He talked politics a few minutes and then shifted over into the intriguing topic of the recent peculiar deaths in the town.
“It’s enough to make an old newspaper editor prick up his ears,” he said, eying them all. “That young Miss Larson, lived across the ravine, now. Found her dead three days ago for no reason, just funny kinds of tattoos all over her, and a facial expression that would make Dante cringe. And that other young lady, what was her name? Whitely? She disappeared and never did come back.”
“Them things happen alla time,” said Mr. Britz, the garage mechanic, chewing. “Ever peek inna Missing Peoples Bureau file? It’s that long.” He illustrated. “Can’t tell what happens to most of ’em.”
“Anyone want more dressing?” Grandma ladled liberal portions from the chicken’s interior. Douglas watched, thinking about how that chicken had had two kinds of guts—God-made and Man-made.
Well, how about three kinds of guts?
Eh?
Why not?
Conversation continued about the mysterious death of so-and-so, and, oh, yes, remember a week ago, Marion Barsumian died of heart failure, but maybe that didn’t connect up? or did it? you’re crazy! forget it, why talk about it at the dinner table? So.
“Never can tell,” said Mr. Britz. “Maybe we got a vampire in town.”
Mr. Koberman stopped eating.
“In the year 1927?” said Grandma. “A vampire? Oh go on, now.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Britz. “Kill ’em with silver bullets. Anything silver for that matter. Vampires hate silver. I read it in a book somewhere, once. Sure, I did.”
Douglas looked at Mr. Koberman who ate with wooden knives and forks and carried only new copper pennies in his pocket.
“It’s poor judgment,” said Grandpa, “to call anything by a name. We don’t know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can’t heave them into categories with labels and say they’ll act one way or another. That’d be silly. They’re people. People who do things. Yes, that’s the way to put it: people who do things.”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Koberman, who got up and went out for his evening walk to work.
The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking, and the chiming of the hours into dawn, the sun rising, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr. Koberman coming along the sidewalk from his night’s work. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes.
At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries.
As was his custom every day when Grandma was gone, Douglas yelled outside Mr. Koberman’s door for a full three minutes. As usual, there was no response. The silence was horrible.
He ran downstairs, got the pass-key, a silver fork, and the three pieces of colored glass he had saved from the shattered window. He fitted the key to the lock and swung the door slowly open.
The room was in half light, the shades drawn. Mr. Koberman lay atop his bedcovers, in slumber clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn’t move. His face was motionless.
“Hello, Mr. Koberman!”
The colorless walls echoed the man’s regular breathing.
“Mr. Koberman, hello!”
Bouncing a golf ball, Douglas advanced. He yelled. Still no answer. “Mr. Koberman!”
Bending over Mr. Koberman, Douglas poked the tines of the silver fork in the sleeping man’s face.
Mr. Koberman winced. He twisted. He groaned bitterly.
Response. Good. Swell.
Douglas drew a piece of blue glass from his pocket. Looking through the blue glass fragment he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Blue furniture, blue bed, blue ceiling and walls, blue wooden eating utensils atop the blue bureau, and the sullen dark blue of Mr. Koberman’s face and arms and his blue chest rising, falling. Also . . .
Mr. Koberman’s eyes were wide, staring at him with a hungry darkness.
Douglas fell back, pulled the blue glass from his eyes.
Mr. Koberman’s eyes were shut.
Blue glass again—open. Blue glass away—shut. Blue glass again—open. Away—shut. Funny. Douglas experimented, trembling. Through the glass the eyes seemed to peer hungrily, avidly, through Mr. Koberman’s closed lids. Without the blue glass they seemed tightly shut.
But it was the rest of Mr. Koberman’s body . . .
Mr. Koberman’s bedclothes dissolved off him. The blue glass had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was the clothes themselves, just being on Mr. Koberman. Douglas cried out.
He was looking through the wall of Mr. Koberman’s stomach, right inside him!
Mr. Koberman was solid.
Or, nearly so, anyway.
There were strange shapes and sizes within him.
Douglas must have stood amazed for five minutes, thinking about the blue worlds, the red worlds, the yellow worlds side by side, living together like glass panes around the big white stair window. Side by side, the colored panes, the different worlds; Mr. Koberman had said so himself.
So this was why the colored window had been broken.
“Mr. Koberman, wake up!”
No answer.
“Mr. Koberman, where do you work at night? Mr. Koberman, where do you work?”
A little breeze stirred the blue window shade.
“In a red world or a green world or a yellow one, Mr. Koberman?”
Over everything was a blue glass silence.
“Wait there,” said Douglas.
He walked down to the kitchen, pulled open the great squeaking drawer and picked out the sharpest, biggest knife.
Very calmly he walked into the hall, climbed back up the stairs again, opened the door to Mr. Koberman’s room, went in, and closed it, holding the sharp knife in one hand.
Grandma was busy fingering a piecrust into a pan when Douglas entered the kitchen to place something on the table.
“Grandma, what’s this?”
She glanced up briefly, over her glasses. “I don’t know.”
It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in color. It had four square tubes, colored blue, attached to it. It smelled funny.
“Ever see anything like it, Grandma?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Douglas left it there, went from the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned with something else. “How about this?”
He laid down a bright pink linked chain with a purple triangle at one end.
“Don’t bother me,” said Grandma. “It’s only a chain.”
Next time he returned with two hands full. A ring, a square, a triangle, a pyramid, a rectangle, and—other shapes. All of them were pliable, resilient, and looked as if they were made of gelatin. “This isn’t all,” said Douglas, putting them down. “There’s more where this came from.”
Grandma said, “Yes, yes,” in a far-off tone, very busy.
“You were wrong, Grandma.”
“About what?”
“About all people being the same inside.”
“Stop talking nonsense.”
“Where’s my piggy-bank?”
“On the mantel, where you left it.”
“Thanks.”
He tromped into the parlor, reached up for his piggy-bank.
Grandpa came home from the office at five.
“Grandpa, come upstairs.”
“Sure, son. Why?”
“Something to show you. It’s not nice; but it’s interesting.”
Grandpa chuckled, following his grandson’s feet up to Mr. Koberman’s room.
“Grandma mustn’t know about this; she wouldn’t like it,” said Douglas. He pushed the door wide open. “There.”
Grandfather gasped.
Douglas remembered the next few hours all the rest of his life. Standing over Mr. Koberman’s naked body, the coroner and his assistants. Grandma, downstairs, asking somebody, “What’s going on up there?” and Grandpa saying, shakily, “I’ll take Douglas away on a long vacation so he can forget this whole ghastly affair. Ghastly, ghastly affair!”
Douglas said, “Why should it be bad? I don’t see anything bad. I don’t feel bad.”
The coroner shivered and said, “Koberman’s dead, all right.”
His assistant sweated. “Did you see those things in the pans of water and in the wrapping paper?”
“Oh, my God, my God, yes, I saw them.”
“Christ.”
The coroner bent over Mr. Koberman’s body again. “This better be kept secret, boys. It wasn’t murder. It was a mercy the boy acted. God knows what might have happened if he hadn’t.”
“What was Koberman? A vampire? A monster?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Something—not human.” The coroner moved his hands deftly over the suture.
Douglas was proud of his work. He’d gone to much trouble. He had watched Grandmother carefully and remembered. Needle and thread and all. All in all, Mr. Koberman was as neat a job as any chicken ever popped into hell by Grandma.
“I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those things were taken out of him.” The coroner looked at the triangles and chains and pyramids floating in the pans of water. “Kept on living. God.”
“Did the boy say that?”
“He did.”
“Then, what did kill Koberman?”
The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding.
“This. . . .” he said.
Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove: six dollars and sixty cents’ worth of silver dimes inside Mr. Koberman’s chest.
“I think Douglas made a wise investment,” said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the “dressing” quickly.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
(1946–)
John Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a tax officer and an assistant librarian. He made use of his library experience in the story “Call First,” in which he depicted a librarian whose dark adventure began when he became excessively curious about the telephone calls that an elderly library patron made from his desk before leaving for home. His first published story, “The Church in the High Street” (1962), was soon followed by a collection of tales, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). Among his other story collections are Demons by Daylight (1973), The Height of the Scream (1976), Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death (1987), Waking Nightmares (1991), Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998), and Told by the Dead (2003). Among his novels are The Nameless (1981), Needing Ghosts (1990), The Last Voice They Hear (1998), The Grin of the Dark (2007), Thieving Fear (2008), and The Seven Days of Cain (2010). Campbell has won several Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement Award, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award.
The Brood
(1980)
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 dir
ectly 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 light in 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?”
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